Chapter 28 It #2
I turned to Shanti where we were sitting at the bar and watched her smile into her glass before she sucked back the last sip.
She seemed okay. Back to Shanti.
Things had even been chill between her and Titus the last time we hit the man cave.
Still there was no hug at the end, but you had to give Shanti that play.
After crashing and burning with a hot guy?
Maybe she’d get that play forever.
But I had the honored role of being her sister of the heart, so I couldn’t fall down on keeping my finger on the pulse of well, where her heart was at (as well as everything else about her, sister duties were steep, but the effort was worth it).
I felt Gabe’s hand on my hip and looked to him.
“Wanna join us for one last drink?” Shanti asked him.
“Had a beer at home,” he replied. “So…thanks, but no.”
At home.
He’d been at my place.
Le sigh.
“Though, I’ll hang if you two aren’t done,” Gabe offered.
God, he was so freaking great.
Thus, le repeat.
Le sigh.
“No, we’re good,” Shanti said as she slid off her stool.
I sucked back the dregs of my drink before I did the same, which earned me an amused mini smile from my man.
Gabe took us home and Shanti and I hugged outside her door.
“You need to stop worrying,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m fine.” She pulled away and smiled at me. “But I’m not giving up besties dates.”
“Never,” I replied.
We hugged again.
Gabe waited patiently.
It was both of us waiting as she let herself in, and only after we heard her coo to her cats, “Hello, my babies,” did Gabe take my hand to guide me to our place (or, one of the two of them, I was seeing why Eric and Jessie, Harlow and Javi were all in on this two-shared-spaces gig—once you’d doubled up on toiletries and split your wardrobe accordingly, it was all kinds of fun for all kinds of reasons to have options).
Gabe let us in.
I flicked off my heels precisely two steps into the apartment.
“Another drink, cupcake, or hit the sack?” Gabe asked.
It was late-ish.
I was tipsy-ish.
What I was not was running on empty.
My life was full. It was busy.
It was no longer overfull or overwhelmingly busy.
And Real Logic hadn’t had to rear her head in weeks.
Winning!
Still, I said, “Hit the sack.”
Gabe moved to me.
I told him. “You don’t have to carry me every time…eyeeeee!”
That last bit was because he tossed me over his shoulder.
When I bounced on the bed because he threw me there, and when I became mesmerized after he took off his shirt, he said, “There’ll come a time when I can’t carry you, so might as well do it now.”
I dragged my eyes from his chest to his face. “What time will that be?”
He shrugged a broad shoulder. “Forty, fifty years from now.”
Forty or fifty years.
Of him and me.
I smiled.
He grinned.
Then he pounced.
So my man was going to carry me to bed every time he intended to fuck me there, and that was going to last forty or fifty years.
I wasn’t going to complain.
No way.
Not ever.
Parents Part One happened in the Arizona mountains.
It was mid-afternoon.
Mom and I were in cardies, wool socks, with throw blankets over our legs and hot cocoa cocooned in our hands. Robbie and Mom’s mut, aptly but not creatively named Mutt, was snoozing on the deck by Mom’s chair.
We were all cozied up, enjoying a breathtaking show.
Then it got even better.
It was cold, but Gabe was getting hot, I knew, when he pulled off his shirt before he went back to chopping the wood at the end of the yard (if you could call it a yard, it was mostly a vast space cleared of trees so Robbie could do things like chop wood in it, drive his ATV through it, or start a fire safely in their massive, rock-edged firepit in it).
“Oh my,” Mom whispered when Gabe bared his chest.
“Mm-hmm,” I hummed.
We sipped cocoa.
“It’s good Robbie is all in to promote fire safety by dragging all the downed trees on your property here so he can chop them up,” I observed.
Robbie and Gabe chopped.
“Oh yeah. It sure is good my man does that,” Mom agreed.
We sipped more cocoa.
Robbie said something that made Gabe smile.
Robbie returned his smile.
“Oh my,” I whispered.
“Mm-hmm,” Mom hummed.
We took another sip.
The men chopped wood.
A soft wind swayed the pines.
Mutt snorted in his sleep.
And two women who had been put through it by men, sat watching two men chop wood who would die before putting a woman through it.
The tuition to pay for life’s lessons didn’t come cheap.
But let me tell you, that was a bill worth paying.
Absolutely.
Parents Part Two happened that evening.
It was after dinner, I was curled on their couch, and Robbie was folding in next to me.
He did the man spread with his legs, reached both his arms along the back of the couch, which put in him into position to catch my shoulder and tuck me to his side.
I put my head on his shoulder.
Seriously, my dad of the heart was the greatest.
Gabe had gone out to keep an eye on Mutt while he did his evening’s business so he didn’t have an unsuspecting and unwanted visit with a coyote, mountain lion or javelina.
Mom was in the kitchen, futzing for no reason.
“Build you two a cabin,” Robbie muttered to the fire in the fireplace. “Not close to this one, but an easy walk.”
I froze then, due to what he said being so important, and so beautiful, but I forced my way through the ice to lift my head and look at him.
“Got fifteen acres,” he stated, turning to me. “Plenty of space to build on. Make a family compound.”
My heart warmed so much, I thought it would melt.
But my mouth said, “You’re not envisioning enlisting Gabe in creating a militia or something, are you?”
Robbie laughed (and I loved making him do that too).
“Would that be so wrong?” he teased.
“I have a life goal of never being interviewed for a true crime documentary,” I replied.
He busted out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Mom came in with a cup of tea for her, and one she passed to me, just as the front door opened and Gabe and Mutt joined the party.
Mutt raced directly to sniff and lick my hand before he got between his daddy’s legs, sat, leaned against Robbie’s calf and put his head on Robbie’s knee.
As a reward, Robbie buried his fingers in his dog’s ruff.
Hmm…
My thoughts were on the fact that Gabe needed a dog.
But my mouth said, “Robbie’s thinking about building a compound and forming a militia using Gabe’s and my offspring.”
Gabe’s brows went up, and so did the edges of his lips, but his ass went down in an armchair.
“They’d be badass,” Robbie said.
God, I loved how much he approved of Gabe.
“We’re not forming a militia, Robert,” Mom, in another armchair, said with such conviction, I wondered briefly if Robbie was actually joking.
Robbie ignored her and did not set my mind at ease when he asked Gabe, “Wanna go out target shooting tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Gabe replied, also not setting my mind at ease.
“You ever heard the one where—?” Robbie began, an intro Mom and I had heard frequently over the years, this meaning it was an intro to Robbie telling what was probably going to be an absurdly filthy joke.
This was why Mom snapped, “Robert! Don’t you dare!”
Robbie grinned roguishly.
He was totally going to tell a filthy joke.
But Mom didn’t want him to, so he didn’t (though, I figured he’d tell it during target practice, for sure).
I snuggled closer to him.
Gabe watched me do this with a gentle, contented look in his eyes.
The men got into a discussion about guns and ammo.
So, obviously, Mom and I ignored this discussion and talked about how she was getting tired of her stoneware, there were a lot of chips in her current set, and it was messing with her eating-pleasure mojo.
So we decided, while the men shot the next day, we were going to go to some commission resale and antique stores in town to look for a new set for her.
She and I drank tea.
Robbie let go of me to get him and Gabe a bourbon.
A little later, Gabe and I had sex that night “real quiet.”
I wasn’t going to think about it, but with the looks Mom and Robbie were exchanging before we all went to bed, and the lovey way they woke up, I suspected they did too.
Gabe and Robbie shot the next day.
Mom and I found a great set of stoneware at the third shop we visited.
On the way back to Phoenix that evening, Gabe told me he would be totally down to help Robbie build us a cabin on their land because, “They got a sweet setup, cupcake.”
He was not wrong.
Two days later, Mom called to tell me we needed to come back up because Robbie was clearing trees, and he needed Gabe’s help.
I sensed why he was clearing trees, and I adored what I sensed.
Then I talked to Gabe about when we could go up again.
We went up the next weekend.
Parents and Family Part Three happened very near the Colorado Monument.
This was because Gabe and I went up to Grand Junction for Thanksgiving, meeting Kacie and Wyatt, Luke and Ava, their girls, and Gabe’s Aunt Josie there.
For your information, Ava was a hoot.
She was gorgeous, sure, but I knew with the way she had no qualms going head-to-head with her uber masculine, openly dominant hot guy, that was why she’d won Luke’s heart.
I’d learned real men didn’t want a woman who they could walk all over, nor a woman who would roll over for them.
They wanted women who knew their own mind, would fight their own corner, and would call their men on their shit.
Shades of what Noah found in Jinx, for sure.
During our visit, I took pages and pages of mental notes about this.
Aunt Josie, on the other hand, was so prissily feminine, if she showed the next morning in a hoop skirt carrying a parasol, I wouldn’t blink.
Case in point, the perfectly creased slacks she was wearing with low heeled, smudge-free pumps along with a fussy blouse, her pretty hair in an understated updo and a string of pearls around her neck.
She looked like she was attending church on Easter, not like she was at a cazj restaurant eating a tostada.
The idea of her birthing a man like Luke was hilarious.