I grabbed a mug from the cabinet. My mug. Black. Chipped handle. Nobody else touched it anymore after I’d threatened Bullet with dish duty for life. “Saint behavior.”
She snorted. “Don’t spread that around.”
I poured coffee, black and mean, the only way coffee had any business being. None of that hazelnut dessert nonsense. No whipped cream. No oat milk. Coffee was supposed to taste like a warning.
Emily looked over, and I caught the way her gaze slid over me before she tried to make it casual. Interested. Curious. Testing the edges of her power because she was young and pretty and figuring out what that did to men.
I shut it down before the thought finished crossing her face.
Nope.
Not happening.
Not in this life, not in the next, not if the world ended and we were the last two people with functioning lungs.
She caught my expression and laughed. “What?”
I lifted the mug. “You’re too young.”
Her eyebrows climbed. “I’m almost sixteen.”
I looked at Regan. “Still too young.”
Emily folded her arms. “When I wanted to come here and get to know my father, nobody mentioned joining this family meant prison time.”
Regan slid eggs onto a plate. “This is hardly prison.”
“No man even looks at me.”
I took the plate Regan shoved into my hands and muttered into my coffee, “Because everybody here enjoys breathing.”
Emily shot me a glare.
Regan laughed hard enough to shake the spatula in her hand. “He’s not wrong.”
Edge walked in shirtless, half awake, scratching his stomach and looking like a man who’d been dragged from sleep by bacon and fatherhood. He kissed Regan’s cheek, stole a piece from the pile, then ruffled Emily’s hair. She swatted him away, but not before he looked down at the drawing on the table and declared his youngest daughter’s art better than Picasso.
“Picasso,” Regan corrected.
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you said Picasso, like a pasta dish.”
“Still famous.”
Domestic as hell.
Weird seeing Edge like that. Not bad weird. Just strange. I remembered him meaner, harder, less anchored. Now he stood in the kitchen eating bacon with a kid’s purple crayon stuck to the bottom of his foot and didn’t even notice.
He caught me looking. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Usually.”
Regan poured more coffee and leaned against the counter, studying me over the rim of her mug. That woman saw too much. Always had. “What’s on your schedule?”
