Page 11 of Her Defiant Warrior

“Nothing,” she said as she swiftly glanced up at her mother.

“Lachlan, did you know what you were doing was wrong?”

“Uhmmm.”

“Think carefully,” Bonnie warned.

Bonnie stopped talking. Silence always killed her son.

“Uhmmm, not wrong, exactly? I mean, Punk was happy. That part was good, right? I mean, so if part was right, and part was wrong, then everything’s okay, right?”

Malik sounded like he needed the Heimlich maneuver. He was choking so badly. She needed to get this under control. Now!

“Lachlan Kenneth Larkin, is that your final answer? And Amber Megan Larkin, you think carefully too. Did you think this was wrong?”

Bonnie started to count to sixty in her head. She watched her children squirm.

She got to forty-five.

The two of them sounded like auctioneers as they talked over one another.

“I’m sorry. I knew it was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it. I just wanted to play with Punk, and I wanted to give him a treat,” Lachlan whimpered.

“It wasn’t all him. I wanted to play with him too, but I told him we should give him only a piece of cake.”

“What are you going to do about this?” Bonnie asked in her best stern-mother voice.

“We’ll clean up the mess,” Amber promised.

“Clean?” Lachlan asked. He was obviously appalled.

“Yes,” Bonnie answered. “Clean.”

“But there’s throw-up,” Lachlan whined. “Punk throwed-up all over Maryanne’s room.”

“That’s because dogs shouldn’t eat pie. Let’s ask Mr. Drakos if he has cleaning supplies for us to clean with, shall we?”

She turned to look at Malik and saw that she’d drawn a crowd.

Great. One of them has to be the brother that Farah wants me to meet. Well, at least this will stop that bullshit in its tracks.

She turned back to her hellions. Luckily, they were too absorbed at the thought of throw-up to notice Farah giggling. “Okay, you two think about how you’re going to clean the mess upstairs.”

She left the two of them to think, then turned to talk to Farah and Malik. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this.” Bonnie closed her eyes for a moment. “I wish I could say this is a onetime occurrence, but this type of thing keeps happening, and it’s always something new. So, once I tell them, ‘You can’t do that’, they come up with something entirely different.”

Bonnie bit her bottom lip.

“It’s fine, honey,” Farah assured her. “You should have seen our three girls at that age. They were hell on wheels.”

“Thanks for saying that.” Bonnie smiled at both Malik and Farah. “Is there any way you can give us some cleaning supplies? I want the kids to work on this themselves. In the meantime, I’ll call a carpet cleaning service who can come in and work on your stairs and the carpet in Maryanne’s room. That way, the cherry stains and vomit scent should be taken care of.”

The big man behind Malik shook his head. “Don’t pay for a service. I can just go over to the store and pick up one of those carpet steamers. I can get this stuff cleaned up in no time.”

Bonnie frowned. “That’s very kind of you…I’m sorry, I don’t even know your name.”

“Jase. My name is Jase Drakos. Malik is my brother. And it’s not all that kind. It’s kind of payback for all the times that Bruno, Malik, Renzo, and I got in similar situations.”

Malik grinned. “Isn’t that the truth? I’d do it, but I have a teenage boy to scare when he picks up my daughter for her first date. Don’t worry about this, Bonnie. It’s not the end of the world.”