AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I did, yes. Madison, this is my niece, April.”
“April and August. Ruby kept the themed name tradition going.”
“She did.” He picks up April, who wraps her sweet, chubby legs around his waist and stares at me with avid interest.
“Were you scared?” she asks. Before I can answer, she says, “Uncle Brick was scared, that’s why he was yelling.”
“Mm. She’s outing me,” he grumbles, and I’m warmed to my toes.
Hewasscared for me, wasn’t he?
“I'm sorry for yelling, A,” he tells the child.
“Should I get her a trophy too?”
“You do that. Two apologies in one day is a first, for sure.”
Eagle strolls over, a glass of whiskey in his hand. Brick’s mother steals glances at us from the couch where it looks like she was playing magnet tiles with the kids.
“Madi, glad you’re all right. You did give us quite a scare,” Eagle says.
“Yeah. It turns out it’s a little harder to find your way out in the Berkshires than it is in the city.”
“First time in the Berkshires?”
I tense. I know he’s just making chit chat, but to a girl from Jersey whose single mother never made more than fifty thousand a year, the question lands like a shortcoming.Of course it’s my first time in the Berkshires, bro. I wasn’t raised with a silver spoon in my mouth like all of you.
Blackthroat saves me from answering. “Don’t make her perform, she just came back from the almost-dead.”
“Right, right. Sorry, Madi.” Eagle holds up a hand to forestall any more conversation.
I twist to look up over my shoulder. “Eagle knows my name.”
“I know your name, too, Windows, I just choose not to call you by it.” Blackthroat delivers this with his usual deep, forbidding tone. It’s one I’m used to ignoring, but now I see through it completely. It means nothing–at least not when he speaks to me.
The man just admitted he’d been gruff when I arrived because he’d been afraid for my safety in the helicopter. Even his tiny niece sees through it. She said he was yelling because he was scared for me.
My heart picks up speed at this tit for tat–our own special form of flirtation. One that turns us both on.
Brick was right about our appearance making dinner materialize. Within ten minutes, everyone I’d seen since I’d arrived had gathered in the living room–all of the executive team, plus John Acker, the pilot, and Blackthroat’s family.
“You guys don’t see enough of each other at work, you choose to spend your holidays together, too?” I quip when Vance greets me with a cool nod.
“We’refamily,” Billy cuts in with a frown that seems to imply that I clearly am not.
I notice Brick hasn’t spoken to his mother, but she keeps sending hopeful looks his way. I’m not sure what it says about us that I’m not comfortable asking a man who just made me come why he’s not speaking to his mother.
Dane, the older man who brought blankets to my room, appears in the doorway. “Are you ready for dinner?” He looks to Blackthroat, not Ruby or their mother. Apparently Brick rules in his family, as well. It’s odd and also perfectly natural, knowing the man.
Blackthroat nods, and the assembly moves into the dining room, which has been set with china and crystal but no silver silverware. He guides me to the seat beside him at the head of the table. The children go on his other side, with Ruby and Eagle next.
Dane starts pouring white wine in everyone’s glasses while Liz, who I gather is his wife, transfers platters and steaming dishes from a serving cart onto the table.
Brick’s mother sits down beside me. Brick’s nostrils flare, but he doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t make eye contact with him, just ducks her head, which is elegantly coiffed with a French twist.
“Hi, I’m Madi,” I say. “You’ve seen me naked, but we weren’t formally introduced.”
Billy chokes on his wine.
