Chapter 13
Bodie
Gibson Sibling Group Chat [Minus Bodie]
Everly:
Okay, somebody explain to me why my phone is blowing up with thirty variations of “HOLY SHIT.”
Hutton:
Because our oldest brother just went and got himself MARRIED.
Everly:
…to who?
Dean:
Emmaline.
Everly:
EMMALINE MADDOX?!
Fletcher:
Courthouse. Today. Mom’s rings on her hand right now. Saw it at dinner.
Gunner:
Grandma cried. Dad shook her hand like a diplomat. I ate four rolls.
Alia:
For the record: yes, I was there. No, I didn’t tell y’all. I was sworn to twin secrecy.
Everly:
I want DETAILS. Like… what was the vibe? Was this “oops, Vegas” or “strategic strike”?
Dean:
Strategic. Protective. Bodie laid it out plain at dinner—her mama and aunt weren’t getting another swing at her.
Gunner:
Translation: “She’s ours now, and I dare anyone to say otherwise.”
Hutton:
I’m writing a song called “Narrative Control.” Working title.
Everly:
Somebody better have pictures.
Alia:
No courthouse photos. It wasn’t that kind of day. But I’ll get you one when she’s ready.
Everly:
Fine, but when I come home, I expect a reception. With lighting.
Blair:
Working on it. Already in the Sasspatch group chat. Think sequins and sweet tea.
Everly:
Obviously.
Hutton:
Tour’s on break after New Year’s. If there’s not karaoke, I’m boycotting.
Colter:
We’ll set up a stage in the barn. Done.
Everly:
This family. I swear.
Alia:
This family.
The sofa was a torture device in disguise. Somewhere between a medieval rack and a bed of nails. I was too tall for it, which meant my feet had dangled half the night, and every time I shifted to relieve the ache, I managed to wedge another coil deeper into my back.
It surprised the hell out of me that I’d slept at all.
“Slept” was generous. I’d drifted in and out, and when I was under, it was restless and crowded with dreams I couldn’t let myself want.
Dreams where that kiss at the courthouse hadn’t stopped when it did.
Where the careful brush of Emmaline’s mouth had opened into something else entirely—something that curled hot in my gut even now, hours later.
I woke half a dozen times with her flavor still on my tongue and an ache in my balls.
And to add insult to injury? My supposedly loyal dog had abandoned me.
Rubble had taken one look at Emmaline’s room last night and defected without hesitation, leaving me alone on the couch with springs and regret.
I was half jealous of the bed and half jealous of the dog who got to sleep next to the woman in it, which was a level of pathetic I didn’t want to dwell on.
I cracked an eye at the brightness seeping through the blinds. Too late for the gray predawn I was used to, too early for the sun to be fully up over the ridge. And staring at me from six inches away, head cocked and eyes intent, was Rubble.
I jerked. “Jesus, girl. You trying to scare me to death?”
She just huffed, unbothered, and thumped her tail once against the floorboards. Translation: It’s morning, human. Get your shit together.
I scrubbed a hand over my face, groaning. Every muscle in my back screamed in protest as I sat up. “Em?” I called, voice rough.
Nothing.
I hauled myself upright, shuffled to the kitchen, and found a note propped against the coffeepot in her tidy, slanted handwriting.
Had to go in early. Bakers’ hours, remember? —E.
I picked the note up, thumb brushing the edge of her script, and felt that punch in the chest all over again.
“You’re a traitor,” I told Rubble, who had planted herself expectantly by my side. “Running off to sleep with her and then expecting me to feed you.”
Her tail wagged furiously. No shame. None at all.
I shook my head, retrieved the kibble and bowl I’d packed for this morning. Then I poured myself coffee and watched her inhale it like a shop vac.
The house felt strange with only me in it.
Too quiet. Too bare. I’d grown up in Gibson chaos—noise and elbows and laughter.
Emmaline’s house was nothing like that. Just…
empty. Lonelier than I liked to think about her living with, day in and day out.
Though I expected she’d say that was a hell of a lot better than the chaos of living with her mother.
I shoved my things back in the duffel, locked up behind me, and made a quick detour by my place to shower and change, promising myself real coffee from The Commissary later, because the sludge at work barely avoided qualifying as a crime in and of itself.
By the time I pulled into the lot, my head was pounding from lack of sleep and too many thoughts I didn’t need. I sent up a prayer for a quiet day—paperwork, possibly some traffic tickets, nothing worse.
Naturally, the universe laughed in my face.
The front desk looked like it had sprouted chaos overnight, transforming our usually quiet station into something resembling a three-ring circus.
Officer Clark was juggling the phone receiver, a clipboard thick with incident reports, and a woman in a floral housecoat who was waving her arms like she was conducting an entire symphony orchestra through Wagner’s most dramatic crescendo.
“Chief.” Pure relief dripped from his voice the second he caught sight of me stepping inside.
He shoved the phone against his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark and frantically flipped through his notes like they held the secrets of the universe.
“We’ve got, uh, what you might call a situation.
Mrs. Grady here says her neighbor’s goats got loose again—you know, the Henderson goats—only this time they’ve somehow managed to climb onto her Buick.
And, uh, apparently they won’t come down. At all. They’re just… up there.”
“Goats,” I repeated flatly, my voice carrying all the enthusiasm of a man facing a root canal without anesthesia.
“Yes, sir. Three of them, according to Mrs. Grady.”
Mrs. Grady launched into her own passionate tirade, complete with vivid hand gestures that painted a picture of hoof prints, scratches, and what sounded like a full-scale goat invasion of her pristine vehicle that I suspected was almost as old as she was.
Her voice rose and fell with the rhythm of someone who’d been practicing this speech in her head for the better part of an hour.
“Alright.” I pinched the bridge of my nose hard enough to leave marks. The headache I’d been nursing since dawn was already threatening to bloom into something spectacular. “I’ll handle it.”
“See that you do,” Mrs. Grady sniffed.
“I’ll meet you back at your place,” I promised.
But first, I needed coffee. Even the station’s legendary sludge would do at this point. Desperate times.
As Mrs. Grady left the station, I wandered over to the ancient coffeepot that was perched in what we optimistically referred to as “the break room,” even though it wasn’t actually a room at all—just a corner with a folding table, a microwave older than Clark, and a coffeepot that had seen better decades.
I poured myself a steaming cup and tried not to inhale the scent too hard.
Experience had taught me that ignorance was bliss when it came to station coffee.
Clark’s voice followed me across the small space, rattling off more details about the goats with the dedication of a court reporter.
Something about animal control being unreachable—probably out on another call involving the Henderson livestock—and Mrs. Grady’s neighbor threatening to shoot the damn things if they left so much as another scratch on her car.
That made no sense to me until Clark explained he was talking about her other neighbor, Eddie O’Neal, who was sweet on the widowed Mrs. Grady and thought he was defending her honor.
“And then there’s the matter of insurance coverage for livestock damage to personal property, and Mrs. Grady wants to know if she should file a report, and—” Clark stopped mid-sentence, his voice cutting off so abruptly it was like someone had hit a switch.
I turned, coffee mug halfway to my mouth, steam curling up between us. “And?”
But Clark wasn’t looking at his notes anymore. He was looking at me. More specifically, at my left hand, where my fingers were wrapped around the handle of my coffee mug.
At the ring.
The gold wedding band that caught the fluorescent light and threw it back like a beacon.
Shit.
I froze completely, every muscle in my body locking up as realization hit me like a freight train at full speed. My stomach dropped straight through the floor, through the foundation, probably all the way to China.
I hadn’t planned for this. In all the chaos of getting through the wedding, making sure the legalities were taken care of so Emmaline was protected, and telling my family, we hadn’t once discussed how we were going to break the news to the public in general.
I’d been so worried about controlling the narrative, yet in all the exhaustion and stumbling around this morning—getting dressed, grabbing my gear, thinking about Emmaline’s soft mouth and whether I’d get another taste of it—I hadn’t even considered the fact that I’d need to tell my officers something.
“Chief,” Clark said slowly, his voice pitched low with wonder, eyes wide as dinner plates. “Did you… get married?”
Double shit with a cherry on top.
For one wild, desperate second, I considered lying.
Saying it was my dad’s ring, or some family heirloom I wore for luck, or claiming it was evidence from a case I was working.
But Clark wasn’t an idiot—far from it—and even if he had been, there was no way in hell I could keep the lid on this with the whole town already primed for gossip like a powder keg waiting for a spark.
Of course, for this whole marriage of convenience to actually work, people would have to know about it.
“Yeah.” The word dragged out of me like I was confessing to a crime.
The older officer at the nearby desk—Sykes, who’d been quietly writing reports and pretending not to listen to our conversation—didn’t bother with Clark’s wide-eyed caution or diplomatic approach.
He just leaned back in his creaky chair until it protested, a slow smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth like he’d just discovered buried treasure.
“Well, I’ll be damned. Who’s the lucky lady, Chief? ”
My brain spun like a hamster wheel, panic making my thoughts scatter in every direction.
Emmaline’s name was right there, waiting to be spoken, but I couldn’t—wouldn’t—throw it out here like this.
Not in front of half the station, and not before I’d even had a chance to warn her that our marriage was about to become front-page news in the town gossip mill.
So I defaulted to what was probably the lamest answer in the history of deflection. “Right now, that’s for me to know and y’all to find out. And I’d appreciate it if you kept it under your hats for the time being. We weren’t quite ready to make the public announcement yet.”
Lame as explanations went, but I was doing the best I could.
Clark’s mouth fell open so wide I could probably have tossed a quarter in there and made a wish. Sykes outright laughed, the sound echoing off the walls of the small station like he’d just heard the funniest joke of his career.
“Sure thing, Chief,” Sykes said, still chuckling as he shook his head. “But you know how fast this place runs on word of mouth. Hell, by lunchtime, half the town’s gonna know you tied the knot. By dinner, they’ll probably have the bride picked out and the wedding details invented.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, my voice heavy with the weight of impending doom. “I know.”
I grabbed my hat from the hook by the door, clapped it onto my head with more force than necessary, and strode toward the exit before anyone else could get a word in or ask another question I wasn’t prepared to answer. “I’ll deal with the goats.”
The second I was back in the relative safety of my SUV, I let my forehead thunk against the steering wheel hard enough to rattle my teeth. The leather was already warm from the morning sun, and I could feel a headache building behind my eyes like storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
Brilliant, Gibson. Real brilliant. So much for controlling the narrative. So much for having a plan. I’d just blown the damn thing wide open myself, handed the biggest piece of gossip this town had seen since my sister’s involvement with Ramsey to my own officers on a silver platter.
Now I had to figure out how the hell to break the news to Emmaline that the entire town was gonna know about us by sundown. All because I was too tired and too distracted by the memory of her soft mouth to remember the damn ring on my finger.