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“We’re really looking forward to seeing her again,” Parker said. “How is she?”
“Still living life at sixty miles an hour,” Jackson said.
The woman has to be in her nineties! Dale could only marvel at that.
“To make a long story short, what happened was a tornado formed and then immediately hit the foreman’s house. We had about ten seconds warning, if that. We’d been playing poker, shooting the shit, when our cell phone alerts went off. We all dove under the two large tables we were using—all twenty of us—and that was what saved our lives. Ricoh had made them out of very strong hickory, and they held up when the house fell on top of them and us.”
“I recalled telling the man when he was showing me those tables in progress that they were going to be heavy as hell to move,” Mike Jones said. Then he grinned. “Ricoh said that once they were in his house, he didn’t expect to be moving them around much.”
Dale was intrigued. “So how did the women save your bacon?”
“Yeah, you have to tell us that part!” Parker grinned and looked at the women.
Jesse and Barry’s wife, Charlotta, gave him a huge smile. “I like these cousins!”
“Well, I heard the explosion of the house collapsing. I’d been in our house several hundred feet from the foreman’s house. I was supposed to be at that shower at the other end of town, but as I said, morning sickness, morning, noon, and night. As soon as I made my way outside and saw the damage, I hauled myself to the Big House.”
“Where the rest of us were,” Laci said. “Including Brittany Phillips, soon to be Kendall. She’s a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.”
“Brit just started giving orders, got us moving, and stopped us from diving in first thing to dig the guys out,” Charlotta said. “She understood enough to know, just from what we could all see of how the house came down, that someone had to make sure we wouldn’t do more harm than good trying to rescue our trapped loved ones.”
“The whole house had come down, and there were only minor injuries?” Parker’s eyes were wide as he looked around the table. “That’s a miracle!”
“It is, isn’t it?” Addison nodded. “We arrived home the next day but had already been texted by the women here. So, we drove to the ranch…” She closed her eyes briefly. “I started to shake when I saw what was left of Ricoh’s house. I knew Veronica had already heard about the incident, so I sent her a picture of what was left of the place. We both agreed the only word for the outcome was miracle.”
“Ricoh had a sprained ankle, his best friend, Julián, a broken wrist,” Trace said. “There were cuts and bruises and abrasions—and one ass injury.”
Dale raised one eyebrow. “An ass injury?”
All the men were smiling, and the women just shook their heads.
“One of our two ranch hands, Duncan Moore, had just slammed down a natural royal flush.” Cord grinned. “He somehow ended up with a shard of glass in his butt.”
“Doctor Robert said the odds were probably greater on the shard of glass than the royal flush.” Jackson chuckled. “Which made Duncan an awesomely lucky man that night.”
The men were laughing out loud, and Dale just shook his head.
“Addison isn’t the only Benedict with a sick sense of humor,” Dale said. Of course, he was smiling, so he knew his cousins understood there was no offence intended.
“The family runs in it,” Chase said. “Montanan, Texan, hell, even New York, there’s no difference that I’ve ever seen.”
“And since there is no difference,” Lucas said, “we were wondering.”
“Wondering what?” Parker asked.
“If the two of you would like to stay here permanently and work with us.”
Dale looked at Parker. They both set their forks down. He gave his brother a slight nod. He always preferred it if Parker did the talking for the both of them.
“We were looking for work, but…we’re not sure we want to work with family ever again,” Parker said.
Dale didn’t think they’d really have to explain that to their cousins. But one thought entered his mind. If it’s hell working with family, how come they all seem to have a really tight relationship? Dale nearly chuckled. That wasn’t the first time in recent memory his good angel had spoken up. One of the benefits of leaving the family home.
