Chapter 2
“I’m raising your rent,” Trevor announced as he passed one of the large bowls of mashed potatoes to him.
“And why is that?” Danny asked, picking up the wooden spoon stabbed in the center of the thick white goo and scooped up a large amount onto his plate.
“It’s either raise your rent or let your future wife move out,” Trevor explained as he squirted ketchup on his meatloaf. At least, Danny thought it was meatloaf, but since Zoe had cooked this meal, he really couldn’t be sure of anything.
“She’s not my future wife,” Danny said, sighing heavily as he placed the bowl of mashed potatoes down. “You really need to quit that shit.”
“Then what is she?” Jason, another one of his cousins, asked as he gestured towards the bowl of mashed potatoes. “Pass the scalloped potatoes.”
Frowning, Danny looked around the table, but he didn’t see anything that even remotely resembled scalloped potatoes.
“That’s rice,” Trevor said tightly, shooting them a glare with the silent message to shut their mouths and not question the food, something that he badly wanted to do. But since it would just end with answers that he probably really didn’t want, he let it go.
“She’s just the woman that rents the apartment across from me and that I torment for my own entertainment when I’m bored, or I’m just in the mood to piss her off,” which was every day, but he didn’t bother to point that out since it would just encourage his cousin’s bullshit.
“I see,” Jason said, sounding amused.
“I’m glad that you do,” Danny said, glad that this bullshit was over and-
“She’s definitely your future wife,” Jason said, chuckling and pissing him off more.
“We could have the wedding in our backyard,” Haley, Jason’s wife, said, looking hopeful as she pushed her glasses back up her nose.
Zoe sighed, shaking her head as she picked up the bowl of what appeared to be gravy and said, “Bradfords don’t have weddings.
Weddings imply that some planning went into it and the bride was asked when what it really comes down to is a kidnapping, a terrified Justice of the Peace, a quick ceremony and a race across town to have the marriage consummated before the bride comes to her senses and gets the marriage annulled. ”
Trevor gasped in outrage. “You said that it was the most romantic night of your life!”
“Oh,” Zoe said, blinking before she added, “It was,” in a placating tone as she reached over and gave her husband’s hand a reassuring squeeze.
“Keep your lies, woman!” Trevor snapped, sounding pissed, but when Zoe sighed and tried to move her hand away, he quickly snatched it back and entwined their fingers together even as he continued to glare accusingly at her.
“Just because we didn’t have a wedding doesn’t mean that no Bradford has ever had a wedding,” Haley pointed out, picking up a bowl of…well, Danny was at a loss at what the chunky, clear pink gunk was.
“Yes, it does, my little grasshopper,” Jason said as he took the bowl from Haley and, with a discreet shake of his head, warned her away from the stuff that not even a Bradford would take a chance on.
“There have only been three weddings in the Bradford family in the last two hundred years,” Trevor said, picking up the bowl of pink goop and scooped some onto his plate.
“See!” Haley said, sounding triumphant as she moved to pick up what Danny thought was gravy, but another discreet shake of Jason’s head had Haley quickly passing on that to take a sip of water.
“And all three of those marriages ended with divorce in less than a month,” Jason added, receiving a nod of agreement from both Trevor and Danny because every Bradford knew the family history, traditions, and counties that they were still banned from by heart.
Bradford men didn’t propose because a proposal meant that he wasn’t out of his mind in love.
It was the same reason that they didn’t buy rings or plan weddings, because if a Bradford male was thinking rationally enough to do any of that shit, then he wasn’t really in love.
A Bradford might realize early on that he’d found the woman of his dreams, but until he was at the point that he was willing to risk a kidnapping charge, he wasn’t ready for marriage.
“No worries,” Trevor said, scooping some “rice” onto his plate. “After the wedding, Aunt Mary will throw a big party.”
“My mother isn’t throwing a party because there’s not going to be a wedding,” Danny pointed out, doing his best not to let his cousins know how much they were pissing him off since it would only encourage them to keep this bullshit up.
“Well, if he drags her off to Vegas and we get wind of it in time, we can-” Zoe said, sounding hopeful while the rest of them were trying not to cringe.
“We’re still banned from Vegas, sweetheart,” Trevor said, cutting off his wife, who looked more confused than ever.
“Wait,” Zoe said, frowning. “I thought the ban was lifted,” she said, looking around the table and undoubtedly making a note of the fact that none of the men at the table could quite meet her gaze.
“There, um,” Danny said, clearing his throat, “was a small incident there a year or two ago that may have resulted in the ban being reinstated for another ten or fifty years.”
“Wait a minute,” Haley said, her eyes narrowing accusingly on her husband. “Didn’t you have a layover last year in Nevada on your way to that convention in Texas for your father’s construction company?”
“I-I might have,” Jason said, swallowing nervously as he threw a panicked look Danny’s way, but Danny was a Bradford and knew a thing or two about saving his own ass even if it meant that he had to shovel questionable food into his mouth to give himself the excuse that he needed to keep his mouth shut.
Trevor apparently had the same idea because he suddenly couldn’t seem to get enough of his wife’s cooking.
“And when I asked you about the breaking news alerts that kept flashing across the bottom of the television screen about the emergency shutdown in Vegas, you swore to me that you had nothing to do with that,” Haley said, her murderous glare cute, but a clear warning that Jason and anyone dumb enough to open his mouth was in deep shit.
“Wait a minute,” Zoe said, and just like that, Danny knew that Trevor was truly fucked, “you went on that trip, too!”
Every Bradford male who worked for Uncle Jared went, but Danny didn’t bother to point that out since he was home free.
It was times like this that he was actually glad that he wasn’t married, one of the few times, he had to admit.
Unlike his cousins, who fought going to the altar with everything that they had, Danny was more than ready to settle down and start a family.
In a few months, he was going to be thirty-two years old and he was still alone.
He’d always thought that he’d be settled by this point in his life with at least one kid on the way, but apparently, life didn’t always turn out the way that you expected.
He certainly hadn’t expected to do half the shit that he’d done with his life so far.
When he was a kid, he’d always thought that he’d follow in his father’s footsteps and go to medical school, join his father’s practice, and get married, but at seventeen, all his plans changed when he’d fucked up.
He’d been a cocky kid, too damn cocky. Not only had he decided that he didn’t need to study for the SATs, but he’d also decided that a pre-victory celebration the night before was in order and stole all the beer out of his father’s refrigerator in the garage and proceeded to get drunk.
If his father hadn’t found him passed out on the bathroom floor, he probably would have died of alcohol poisoning.
After he was rushed to the hospital and had his stomach pumped, his father, angrier than he’d ever seen him before, dragged him to school and forced him to take the SAT exam when all he wanted to do was to curl up next to a toilet and die.
One month later, he’d received his SAT score and learned that he scored a total of 490.
He could have taken the test over again, but that would have meant a delayed acceptance to college and starting school in the spring instead of in the fall with all his friends.
His pride had taken a hit with that score.
Unable to handle the embarrassment of that fuck up, he’d begged his father to sign a release so that he could join the Marines, but his father refused to let him join.
His father didn’t believe in fixing one mistake with another.
Pissed that things weren’t going his way, he’d stopped trying in school.
He no longer cared about his grades, his family, friends, or any of that bullshit and started focusing on getting the hell away from his father.
The morning that he was supposed to graduate, he grabbed a duffle bag, filled it with his clothes, emptied his savings account, and hitched a ride out of town.
A week later, he walked into a Marine recruitment center with a fake ID and enlisted.
It had taken the Marines less than a month to knock him on his arrogant ass and strip away every cocky assumption that he’d ever had about himself.
They tore him down and kept him there until he was ready to grow up and be a man.
Joining the Marines had been the most foolish decision of his life, but it had also turned out to be the best thing for him.
Once he’d managed to pull his head out of his ass, he’d worked hard to become the soldier that the Marines wanted him to be.
He’d worked hard, earning rank after rank until he found himself leading a Special Forces team.
He would still be there if he hadn’t caught a bullet a little too close to his spine and one through his right palm, destroying his ability to pull the trigger quick enough to make him anything more than a liability.
So after ten years of serving his country, twelve surgeries to save his life and to make sure that he wouldn’t end up in a wheelchair for the rest of it, he came home to a father that wanted nothing to do with him.
If it hadn’t been for the rest of his family, he would have been truly good and fucked.
His mother, brothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins had pulled together and made sure that he had whatever he needed to get through the last of the surgeries.
They’d brought him to physical therapy, made sure that he never missed a doctor’s appointment, fed him, took care of him, and held his hand when the pain became too much.
They’d been there for him every step of the way, making the transition from damaged soldier to civilian easier for him and for that alone, he was eternally grateful.
He always had an invitation to dinner, someone willing to drop everything to help him out and the reminder that he wasn’t alone. It made things a hell of a lot more tolerable for him, but some days…
It wasn’t enough.
Some days, he longed for a home of his own and not just an apartment that his cousin rented to him for practically nothing.
He wanted a wife that looked at him the way that Haley and Zoe looked at his cousins.
He wanted children that ate him out of house and home and made him smile even when they were going out of their way to piss him off.
He should be happy that he was alive and had a good job, and he was.
He just wished that there was more to his life than work, his books, eating dinner every other night at one of his uncle’s or cousin’s homes and looking forward to pissing off his cute little neighbor every day.
He needed to get off his ass and start dating again, but he just couldn’t seem to force himself to get interested in any woman long enough to ask her out.
Like most Bradfords, he’d never had a problem finding a woman to warm his bed. Sex was easy, uncomplicated and could be used to scratch an itch. Finding a woman that he genuinely liked and wanted to spend time with outside the bedroom was a problem for him. He just wished-
“I think we should focus back on Danny and his wife,” Trevor announced, completely screwing him over.
Bastard!
“She’s not my wife,” Danny bit out evenly, forcing himself to eat another bite of the mushy rice.
“Not yet,” Jason pointed out.
“For Christ’s sake, she’s not even my type!” he snapped, not bothering to point out that he liked taller women with a hell of a lot more curves than Tinkerbelle had.
Tinkerbelle was pretty, he’d give her that, but she was also short, probably five-one if that.
She was petite, even smaller than Haley.
She had blonde hair when he preferred black.
Her breasts were small, probably C cups when he preferred large breasts that he could spend hours devoting his attention to, and to be honest, she had this kid-sister aura about her that just made him want to torment her.
“Doesn’t matter if she’s your type or not. You know how this works,” Trevor said, taking a bite of meatloaf and noticeably trying not to cringe.
“Because she’s my neighbor?” Danny asked, not bothering to hide his snort of disgust. When his cousins sent him “duh” looks, he explained, “I’ve had plenty of neighbors that I enjoyed pissing off and I didn’t marry any of them, so clearly Great Grandpa’s theory on Bradford men is bullshit.”
“You’ve had neighbors before,” Jason agreed before he added, “but you’ve never gone out of your way to make any of their lives a living hell.”
“That makes her special,” Trevor added with a wink before Zoe said something that terrified him down to his soul.
“That’s not rice,” Zoe said, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “That was baked macaroni and cheese.”