What are you doing on my porch?
“Maddox said you were moving. We have a no man moves alone policy,” Nick answered my silent question as he walked inside.
“I don’t think I’m going to be doing a lot of moving. The place is in worse condition than I thought. It needs a serious deep clean and repairs. I’m probably just going to get an Airbnb.”
Alex started walking around. “I think we can make this livable.”
I watched as the men went through the kitchen and Alex walked into the bathroom. “You guys want to deep clean my house? And repair it?”
“We can still get our hands dirty,” Alex claimed.
“Or hire people who can.” Nick smiled.
“You guys don’t have to do this.”
“Any brother of Maddox is a brother of ours.” Nick slapped me on my shoulder as he headed upstairs.
Maddox smiled and followed Alex and Nick.
I felt like I was living in the Twilight Zone, or maybe this was a dream. How else could I explain that I had twin daughters, I’d just seen Billie Bliss, and three billionaires had offered to do an Extreme Makeover on my house?
7
BILLIE
“I can’t believeAdam’s back.” Bailey shook her head as she stared over the fence at the back of Adam’s house. “Are you going to go over and talk to him?”
Since coming downstairs from my hiding spot in my old room, I hadn’t said a word about the return of our prodigal son, and so far, neither had my sisters, but of course, leave it to Bailey to bring it up.
“Finally, fuck,” Birdie cursed beneath her breath in an exasperated tone that I had never heard from my baby sister, the Zen Queen. Both Bailey and I spun to see what could have provoked our saint-like angel of a sister to cuss.
It wasn’t that she never used bad language, she did, butneverwith a negative connotation. It was always positive. You fucking did it! Fuck yeah. Abso-fucking-lutely. Birdie didn’t have a negative bone in her body.
“Carly!” Birdie called out.
Carly was huddled with her cheer team, the last of her partygoers, the rest had gone home. The girls’ heads all turned at the same time.
“Check your TikTok notifications.”
“My notifications?” Carly looked down at her phone and screamed which set off a domino effect of all of her friends circling her phone and screaming.
“What’s that about?” I asked my baby sister.
“I asked Dylan to post a TikTok for her on his stories with the band. He wassupposedto do it this morning. One thing, I asked him forone thing.”
Bailey and I exchanged a “trouble-in-paradise?”look. If it were anyone else, Birdie’s reaction would be a simple annoyance, for Birdie, it was burn-the-house-down. That was practically her cursing him out and calling him a piece of shit.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Birdie closed her eyes, inhaled slowly through her nose, and exhaled through her mouth.
Whoa. Two fucks in under five minutes.
“What?” Bailey and I chorused.
“He didn’t even sing Happy Birthday. That’sallI asked him to do.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.” I couldn’t believe I was actually sticking up for Dylan the Douchebag. “Did he say her name? That’s all she’ll care about.”
Birdie handed me her phone.
