She raised her eyebrows at him.
“Someone better be dead,” he mumbled, and, resigned, he snagged his phone from his pocket.
His expression went chalky. He held the screen up to her, a text from his sister:Babushka. Emergency. Now. Not a drill.
10
Chapter Ten
“You called me here because Babushka’s got a boyfriend?” Jase could’ve shaken his sister. Brother. Mother. Father.
He’d had sex in a lot of places, but he’d never done it on a kitchen chair before. It was official, he’d just been cock-blocked by his grandmother.
Didn’t they know he had a life? Of course they didn’t. This was how his family worked—they had to have a meeting of the minds over everyone else’s business. He’d been the subject of plenty of these powwows. They’d wanted him to take his cousin Amanda to the prom in high school, and they had a family meeting to discuss it. They hadn’t been thrilled when he enlisted, and they had a meeting to tell him so. The meeting after he told them he’d decided to be an EOD tech had been…explosive, to say the least. And after his divorce, they made it a point to have semiannual meetings to check in on his dating life.
Hell, he practically got hives every time he set foot in his mother’s special sitting room. They only utilized the space for important guests and family meetings—their mother deemed the furniture too nice for everyday use. Especially when it came to her children who were “hellions on fine leather.”
Though, apparently, fancy furniture was the perfect backdrop for dissecting everyone else’s personal shit.
His brother Zach sat on the couch across from Babushka, arms dangling over his knees. “She’s got a boyfriend and she gave him half a million dollars.”
Every muscle in Jase’s body tensed. “Say again?”
“You heard me.” Zach shifted and sprawled across the sofa earning a stern look from their mother.
She never talked much at these meetings. Oh, she called them, but then she’d sit back and let everyone else hash out details. Mama was the kind of woman who bottled her feelings up and then let them explode all over an unsuspecting child later.
“Babushka, tell me you didn’t do this.” Jase sat next to his grandmother on the love seat.
She didn’t respond.
She had dumped the contents of her purse on the coffee table and did her best to ignore everyone while she sorted her things into piles. This wasn’t his first rodeo.
“I know you’re listening, the jig is up,” he whispered close to her ear.
“It vas loan,” she huffed.
“Mamochka, you cannot hand out money this way.” His father was in his let’s-try-to-reason-this mode. That wouldn’t last long. It never did when he wasn’t getting his way. “This man, he only wants you for your bank account. He does not have feelings for you.”
“Not true.” Babushka continued sorting. “He vants me for things I do not discuss vith my son.”
She didn’t mean. No, she couldn’t mean…
“Does she mean—?” Anna started to ask.
“Sex,” the nearly one-hundred-year-old woman said as though it were her order at Olive Garden.
Jase’s stomach flipped right over, threatening to empty on his mother’s favorite Persian rug. His father paled. Mama’s cheeks burned pink and Anna snort-coughed into her hand.
Zach groaned and held a sofa pillow over his face. “Someone suffocate me.”
“It vasbusinessloan. Morty vill pay back. He promise me.” Apparently, satisfied with her piles, Babushka scooped them back into the gigantic Louis Vuitton she hauled around.
The doorbell chimed a loudbrrrong.
“I got it.” Zach bounded off the couch, the bastard taking the escape the rest of them wished they could.
“Zat is my car.” Already on her feet, Babushka slung her purse over her shoulder.
