Chapter 3
TRAVIS
Travis preferred to live in the realm of fact. Hey, don’t judge him by his past. This was true now. He’d learned things were easier with data backed up by indisputable evidence. He’d just taken the long way coming into that knowledge.
Now, he understood there was fact and there was opinion.
For example, it was a fact that the boys won their baseball game the evening before, after the uncomfortable squeezing conversation. No one, not even Rachel when she was on a tear, could dispute their win.
It was, however, Travis’s opinion that his brother, Gavin, was the favorite of their parents. He based this on years of observation.
Another fact was that Gavin didn’t regularly make his children a priority.
The evidence? He flew to Boston for the summer instead of bringing his kids on the family summer sabbatical—the one that always took place during two full months at the Puffle Yum Twin Lakes retreat.
The summer residence was a twelve-thousand square foot lakefront monstrosity with nine bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a pool, a buttload of open space, and a private dock for a couple of boats.
The entire Frank family held a two-month family vacation together there every year. It made them appreciate any time they spent apart the rest of the year.
“Do you think he told Rachel he’s skipping out?” Dane, his other brother, asked.
Gavin should’ve talked to Rachel. But Gavin was Gavin and he didn’t do the hard things. The evidence pointing to Gavin’s asshattery was as vast and wide as the Puffle Yum brand’s popularity.
Travis’s stomach wound around itself like a twist tie for bakery bread. He shook his head.
“Nope.” He did not believe Gavin had told her.
“That’s what my money says, too.” Dane kept his gaze forward, but the little tick happening in his jaw belied his outward calm.
Travis’s gut tightened further. If this continued, he’d need a whole bucket of intravenous antacid. This is how it went when he was around Rachel—he wound himself up in knots, especially when there was not-so-great news to share.
Usually, this resulted in him teasing her or matching her sarcasm bite for bite. Even when he tried not to.
“I’ll let her know.” Travis steeled the words and gripped and ungripped his fists. “If Gavin didn’t.”
Dane pulled into Rachel’s driveway, right behind the SUV she’d gotten in the divorce. “It’ll go better if I do it.”
Travis didn’t disagree, but Dane sometimes took the back roads during a conversation when there was a highway right freaking there and the highway version took half the time and half the effort.
Travis opened the car door and stepped out into the sunny day on the quiet street in front of Rachel’s house.
His heart did the plummeting thing that it did when he knew Rachel was facing disappointment.
Usually, he ignored it. Today felt…different.
Scratchy. So he turned his attention from his feelings to the well-kept pots of flowers around her front steps and the wreath on the door he knew she made herself by somehow weaving twigs together.
She’d given one to each of them last year for Christmas.
“I’m going to shove him in the lake,” Dane said as he headed toward Rachel’s front door.
“Kinda hard to do when he’s not going to be there,” Travis said under his breath.
Rachel’s house looked like it came from one of the Country Chic and Charm magazines—whatever the fuck that meant. They were magazines at the checkout line of The Home Depot, and he’d noticed them because they reminded him of Rachel’s digs.
Her home had been a cookie-cutter house when first built, but she’d repainted it light blue with white trim and added a porch swing next to the all-weather storage bins for the boys’ shit.
The fancy kind that didn’t look like storage bins, but looked like benches instead.
Bins that were not of the bargain variety.
“My money says Gavin will show up at some point because without him, how would any of us know the exact correct way to grill a burger?” Dane paused on the front step, turning back to face Travis.
“Or drive the boat,” Travis added.
“Or do the backstroke in the pool.”
“Or make Saturday morning toaster tarts.”
Dane chuckled. “Like there aren’t instructions he personally wrote on every single package.”
Gavin had it in his head that he could do anything better than the rest of them, and he took a lot of pride in showing them exactly how to manage it.
“Three seconds in the fucking microwave.” Travis grinned a wry smile. “Takes longer to pull them out of the wrapper than to cook them.”
“Which is why God invented the pop-up toaster,” Dane said, the mood finally light.
Travis smirked. “Not thinking that was God.”
“Can’t tell me He didn’t have a hand in it, so we didn’t have to use the microwave for three fucking seconds.”
Travis’s foot stalled midair as he considered the possibility that he and Dane could roll Gavin in the mud pit that was the east side of the lake, instead of pushing him in the lake.
Mud would be harder to get out of his pants. It’d take longer than three seconds to pretreat all those stains, and that thought had Travis grinning like a kid.
Yeah, Travis and Dane could pull that off.
Travis reached to press the doorbell, careful not to bump Rachel’s wreath or the handmade wooden sign that announced, Welcome! Did you bring margaritas?
He didn’t get invites to the house unless it was for a birthday party or something for the boys, so he’d never brought her booze.
Once, he’d tried to bring Gavin beer when they’d lived at their old house.
Turned out, according to his mother, it was inappropriate to bring alcohol to children’s birthday parties.
The door flew open and Kellan gave a whoop.
“It’s the uncles,” he shouted, flinging himself at Dane.
Kellan’s twin, Brady, took in the scene, a grin on his face but the slightest bit of concern etched around his eyes. The kid seemed seriously older than his years.
“It’s the nephews,” Dane replied, ruffling the kid’s hair even as Kellan released him and bolted past, checked the street, and ran back inside.
“It’s not here yet,” Kellan yelled, still on a flat run through the entryway back up the stairs. “Uncle Dane and Travis are, though.” He yelled the last part loud enough that Travis assumed he was alerting his mom to their presence.
“Hey, Uncle Trav.” Brady grabbed Travis’s hand, hanging on tight. “What do you think it is?”
“What what is?” Travis kneeled so he was eye to eye with his nephew. He didn’t have a favorite, but if he did, it’d probably be Brady. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he and Brady? They just understood each other.
“The birthday present from Dad.” Brady didn’t let go of Travis’s hand. “He couldn’t bring it today. He had to go to Boston again.”
“I’m sure whatever is in Boston is important,” Travis said, instead of what he wanted to say. Which was that Gavin should show the fuck up for once.
“He’s having it delivered. Do you know what it is?”
Brady’s hand was getting sweaty in Travis’s, but he didn’t make a move to take it away.
“No idea, kid.” Travis shrugged. “Hope it’s good, though.”
Knowing Gavin, the odds of it being spendy were 100 percent, but the odds of it being good? Well, those were more fifty-fifty.
“Hey.” Rachel emerged from the office she kept near the dining room. Her office was mostly a desk she’d set up in the alcove under the staircase so she could hear upstairs and downstairs at the same time. “I got a two-for-one deal on the uncles this time.”
Rachel pulled the elastic from her hair and the long, blond waves fell around her shoulders.
Travis loved her hair. The way she pushed it behind her ear, flicked it over her shoulder.
And why the hell was he thinking about her hair? He shook his head.
It’s not like he didn’t like her. He did. Except her uncertainty about him.
He didn’t care for that part.
She smiled a genuine grin at Dane before turning a quizzical stare to Travis. That quizzical stare made him swallow harder and turn on what he hoped was charming sizzle. The smile, the extended eye contact—it worked on most women.
Not on Rachel.
She rolled her eyes at him. Legit, she rolled her eyes like he was an eight-year-old friend of the boys—and not one she particularly liked.
“We need to talk to you about this summer,” Travis said, using the smooth tone that sounded like a good takeoff felt in a small aircraft.
“It’s important,” Dane confirmed.
“If it’s about your family’s summer pep rally, the answer is—”
“Don’t say no right away this time,” Dane said before she could continue.
“Evelyn sent you.” She observed Dane and crossed her arms under her breasts. The movement lifted them a little and—Eyes are up there, buddy.
Rachel didn’t catch his wandering gaze because she was all eyes on Dane.
“Of course she sent us,” Dane replied, the answer not nearly as smooth as what Travis would’ve delivered. “She knew you’d say no to her, so she sent us.”
“She sent you?” Arms still crossed. Not a good sign.
“Yes, she asked us to formally request that you join us on the family summer sabbatical.” Dane sounded so much like their mother when he gave the formal request, Travis nearly broke a stitch in his side trying to keep from laughing.
“That’s why you’re here, too?” Rachel turned her attention to Travis, using that look of hers that could make him spill any secrets he’d ever thought of keeping.
She’d perfected it with the boys but wielded it like a sword.
The slight tilt of her head, eyes turned to slits, and the raised eyebrows that made his collar itch.
The principal at his elementary school used to have a similar expression when he’d gotten hauled in there on playground candy-trafficking charges.
She cleared her throat.
Right. What was the question again? He nodded because he probably would’ve nodded to anything that she said right then.