Chapter 2
Two
That wasn’t very Cash Money of you.
—Calliope’s secret thoughts
CALLIOPE
Present day
“Listen,” my sister urged. “There’s no reason you can’t go with me.”
She had a point.
I could, technically, go with her.
The real thing was, I just didn’t want to.
“I don’t want to go to the farmers’ market, Searcy,” I pointed out for, like, the twelfth time.
I wasn’t winning this argument, though.
She was adamant.
“Pane Bowen Hicks, get your ass off that counter, right now, before I bust it,” Searcy snapped.
Her son, Pane, slithered down the counter in the boneless way only a three-year-old could.
Her other son, Cassidy, hurried into the room, his eyes wide.
I blinked at the boy. “Cassidy, did you, per chance, eat any of my powdered donuts that I brought with me for my breakfast?”
“No.” He shook his head adamantly.
“No?” I studied the powdered sugar on his face, chest, and fingers. “Are you sure?”
Searcy made a noise in her throat.
“No,” he continued to shake his head.
“Okay, well, I was going to share those with you. Why don’t you go get them and we can share now?”
Cassidy ran away, but not without a guilty look thrown at me over his shoulder.
“He totally ate them all, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Probably.” Searcy paused. “Sorry.”
She wasn’t sorry.
The bitch.
“I can’t go to the farmers’ market because I have to go home and wait for a package,” I told her.
“Oh, come on.” She rolled her eyes. “They can deliver it on the porch and it’ll be fine.”
“They can’t, because it’s a computer. If they leave it on the porch like they did last time, it’ll be stolen like it was last time,” I pointed out.
“Ask your neighbor to watch for it.”
I gave her a pointed look, and she had the nerve to wince apologetically.
I had a neighbor.
A Truth Teller neighbor.
One that I didn’t know was there until I’d already signed on the dotted line of my new mortgage and moved in.
Kent, my younger but no longer smaller brother, came into the room then and said, “I’ll go over there and wait for it.”
I eyed him curiously. “What’s in it for you?”
“Was going to see if Hush wanted to help me work on my bike again.”
Hush.
Even the name sent a stupid pang of thrills sweeping through my body.
Jasper “Hush” Madden was the bane of my existence.
He hated my guts—most people did—and didn’t hide the fact that he couldn’t stand me.
That was why I couldn’t believe that my sister and brother-in-law—who was just now pulling into the driveway from his overnight shift at the fire station—had let me move into a house knowing that we’d be neighbors.
I’d wondered why that stupid house had gone on the market and not sold so fast.
Now, I knew that the Truth Tellers MC crew had something to do with it.
They had enough power and influence to make a lot of things happen in Dallas, Texas. Making sure that a house didn’t sell in a good neighborhood was child’s play to them.
“There’s my man,” Searcy said as she detached the child from her boob and handed him off to me.
Searcy had three kids.
She’d had them back to back to back.
The age difference between their oldest, Pane, and their youngest, Dalton, was twenty-nine months.
There was a reason she was adamant about me going to the farmers’ market with her.
“I guess I’ll take you up on that,” I said to Kent. “Do you need a ride over there?”
Kent nodded. “You don’t mind?”
“Nah,” I said. “Why don’t you get Posy to help you load that into the back of my truck.”
“Thanks.” Kent smiled. “You’re the best.”
I hadn’t always been the best.
I’d been a selfish asshole kid when I was younger.
I hated everyone and everything.
My father had died, and my mother had spiraled into a depression so deep that she’d forgotten that she had children—five of them, in fact.
The eldest was Searcy. Then there was Koda, who was in the military and succeeding his ass off. Koda was followed by me. I was followed by Kent, who was a boy genius and kicking ass at anything he did in life. The baby was Anders, our most perfect baby sister.
Our perfect baby sister that was currently in Washington DC with her school visiting the freakin’ White House as a reward for being so smart.
Kent walked up to Posy and started talking.
Posy nodded, and the two of them loaded Kent’s bike into the back of my truck.
My truck.
I’d just finished paying it off yesterday, actually.
Now, only twenty years to go on my mortgage.
The baby in my arms burped, and I looked down at the sweetest little five-week-old in the world.
“You’re just so cute,” I said to the youngest Hicks boy. “Too bad you weren’t a girl.”
“Amen,” Searcy walked past me into the house. “Be right back. I have to see what the kids are destroying.”
She disappeared long enough that Posy came up the length of his walk and stopped in front of me.
He looked down at me holding his kid and said, “You think you could hold down the fort for like, five minutes?”
I knew what he was asking.
“Five minutes? That’s all you have in you, Doc?”
Doc was Posy’s road name with the Truth Tellers MC. The names were interchangeable for him, and he answered to both.
He also knew what I was insinuating and flipped me off.
I got up and walked into the kitchen to find Searcy being carted off over Posy’s shoulder with a laugh on her face.
I eyed the two little boys, but focused on the one holding the empty bag of powdered donuts. “Hey, what the fuck, kid?”
He hid the bag behind his back.
“I’ll remember this,” I said. “Let’s go get dressed.”
Both boys followed me, and we pretended not to hear the sounds that their parents were making as we continued into the kids’ room at the back of the hallway.
“What are you wearing today, Pane?”
He walked to the closet and eyed his selection.
Cassidy came back with pajamas, and I went with it.
Laying the baby on the floor, who woke up almost immediately to start looking around, I got Cassidy dressed in Easter footed pajamas that used to be Pane’s. Once he had those on, I grabbed a sweatshirt and tugged it over his head.
“Find some shoes, kid.”
He did, coming back with some rain boots.
I helped him get those on, too, before helping Pane with his jeans and Carhartt sweatshirt.
He slipped his own boots on, and then I got started on the littlest mister.
I dressed him in what I wanted—a Christmas onesie, a fluffy hat, and pants that covered those fat, chubby little legs.
I also got him into his car seat and then got started on all the dishes.
Kent helped me toward the end, and we put everything away just as Searcy was coming out of her room fully dressed.
Posy didn’t follow her, likely about to catch a few hours of sleep after working.
“Feel better?” I asked.
She smiled. “Yep.”
“Do you even care that it hasn’t been six weeks yet since you had Dalton?”
“Nope.”
I rolled my eyes and placed the last dish in the cabinet before saying, “I’m dropping Kent’s bike off at my place. You can pick me up there and we’ll go.”
She clapped. “I love you.”
The drive to my place took all of ten minutes—that’d been one of the selling points, it being so close to Searcy.
I pulled up in my drive and glared at my neighbor’s house.
“I swear to God,” Kent said as he eyed both of our houses in disgust. “Y’all have so many Christmas decorations up that it’s gaudy.”
“It’s his fault,” I grumbled. “I just wanted to win the neighborhood contest. But he saw me doing it, and then tried to one-up me. At this point, I’ve run out of space for blow ups in my yard. I could always move to the roof, though.”
It was two weeks until Christmas, and I was going into debt buying Christmas decorations for my place. Oh, and let’s not mention the fact that I had absolutely nowhere to put these decorations once I was done with them.
I’d have to rent a storage locker or something.
All of it was because Jasper had decided to put his hat in the ring for best holiday decorations once he’d seen me enter.
It’d all started as good fun, but now it was getting to the point where I was buying a damn computer so I could build a light show that would far exceed anything that Jasper could provide.
There was a reason I’d graduated with my associate’s degree when I’d graduated high school. Then graduated with my mechanical engineering degree at twenty and a half. I never gave up.
I would win this ‘friendly’ competition, even if it killed me.
“Whatever you say,” Kent got out and went to the back of my truck to get the ramps out. “Can you help me?”
“I guess,” I said as I grabbed another ramp and started to drag it out of the back of the truck.
“He only needs one, Callie. Bikes technically only have one wheel since they are in alignment.”
I gritted my teeth, both at the nickname and the condescension, and said, “I know that.”
I did.
I just hadn’t been thinking.
“Sure,” Jasper drawled. “Move. I’ll help.”
I moved.
I wasn’t too prideful to admit when a man’s strength was superior in certain situations.