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“Have fun with Justin and Emily today,” I said.
“I will,” he said again.
“And make sure to clean Snot’s litter box every day.”
“I will.”
“And no riding your bike past the sign in the driveway.”
“I will.”
I frowned at him and he smiled. “Oops. I mean, I won’t.”
“Go say goodbye to Maddox,” I said.
Newt hurried around the car and I wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear spitting sounds. I shook my head as I went up the walkway to say my goodbyes to Nolan and Dallas. The couple had only recently gotten engaged and were planning to marry once Maddox and I got back from Oklahoma.
The call had come in the previous day that Jett’s grandmother had taken a turn for the worse and wasn’t expected to last more than a week. It’d been the woman herself who’d called Maddox a couple of weeks earlier and begged him to look out for Jett once she was gone. The man had continued his decline over the months and both Maddox and Jett’s grandmother feared what he’d do after his last reason for living was gone. Maddox had told me I didn’t need to go with him, especially since I’d only recently started up with some online college courses, but I’d quickly disabused him of the notion by yelling a couple of non-Newt-friendly words at him for the ridiculous suggestion. Fortunately, Newt hadn’t been around to hear me and buying Maddox’s silence had been incredibly easy… and pleasurable. I was seriously considering tossing the occasional swear word out there now and again when only Maddox was within hearing range to see what it could get me.
Neither Maddox nor I expected Jett to come easily, but he also wasn’t going to get much of a choice in the matter. Between his grandmother making it her dying wish that he return to Pelican Bay with us and Maddox planning to blackmail the man by threatening to have him declared unfit to make his own decisions, we were sure we’d manage to get Jett to agree. However, once we got him here, it was a different ballgame.
The plan was to have him stay with us in the house we’d only just finished building on some of the vacant land that bordered Dallas and Nolan’s property. Our houses were so close that Maddox and I were fine with Newt walking the short path between the two homes on his own. We’d made sure to build a house that was wheelchair accessible on the off chance Jett would be coming to stay with us at some point in the future. Dallas and Maddox had also started paving some of the trails around the sanctuary so it would be easier for Jett to use his wheelchair, since the man hadn’t made use of the prosthetics the military had offered to fit him for. That was on our to-do list too, but our biggest concern was just getting him somewhere that he could hopefully start the healing process.
We’d ended up living in the apartment above the garage while our house was being built because Maddox had sold the house his parents had once owned to my grandfather. Newt and I had taken things with Aaron slowly. It’d been almost two months before I’d even told Newt that the man was our mother’s father. He’d been confused at first, and had had a lot of questions, but he’d eventually gotten excited about the idea that he had even a bigger family than before. Aaron had initially gone back to Texas, but he’d been coming up to see us every other weekend in the beginning, then every weekend. After a while, he just hadn’t gone home again. He’d retired a few years before Gary had found him, so there’d been nothing tying him to Houston. His company was run by other people and Aaron just collected the substantial profits.
Profits he’d tried to share with Newt and me on numerous occasions. It had taken him a while to accept that we really just wanted him and not his money. After Gary had been arrested and prosecuted for assaulting Newt and me, I’d been named the trustee for the money our mother had left Newt. But Maddox and I had decided to leave it all in the trust for Newt when he was old enough to decide what he wanted to do with it. Maddox hadn’t been kidding when he’d said he had more money than he knew what to do with. I hadn’t liked the idea of him supporting us, but since we were both still helping out at the sanctuary, he didn’t see it that way. In fact, we’d bought into the business with Nolan and Dallas so we could split the costs with the other couple, since there were no actual profits to be made. It had literally become a family business that made no money whatsoever, but that brought us so much more than dividends.
