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Christian’s dog was a huge German Shepherd named Boomer, so we weren’t exactly on the same page as pet parents, but whatever. Dog dads were the one commonality we had at the station. My brother had two dogs, Pancake and Daisy, and Chief Brooks had a dog getting used to her new name. Hell, we were all getting used to Lola since his little girl somehow couldn’t pronounce her original name of Sadie. Lola won for the sake of peace and then some.
The dog didn’t seem to care. I was pretty sure I could call Francie Bufort and she’d still respond as long as she got her regular meals.
Dogs were easy. Women were not.
Babies were definitelynoteasy. And in this town, dating and sex led to babies at a frighteningly high rate if you were in the right age bracket. I hadn’t heard of the town lore breaking biological records yet, but I suspected that would happen anytime now.
Which was why Brady had undergone a vasectomy. Then he’d knocked up Tabitha, something that occurred very rarely after getting snipped.
But medical science hadn’t run up against Crescent Cove—and its baby water—before.
Added to that, if one trusted genetics, that meant McNeill men were shooting at a high rate of accuracy. It was just pure luck I didn’t have a brood trailing after me around town. I’d had my indiscriminate days like any single man with “piercing” brown eyes (said by an ex-girlfriend, not something I wrote in my nonexistent diary.)
So getting naked with a girl was something I thought about a little more carefully these days. No one had made the cut for a good long while. My mid-twenties was too young to be a dad to anything but an adorable Yorkie.
Which reminded me—dammit—I needed to get more of heroldfood since the new kind produced monster…leavings.
Lucky me, my night was full of more of the same kinds of thoughts, increasingly jumbled the closer it got to dawn. But I didn’t doze off for more than an hour at a stretch.
The next day was a fog of exhaustion, then the next, and the next. I kept staying up all night against my will. What the heck was going on with me? I normally slept like a…well, not a baby. But like a man with no troubles.
Untilshe’dmoved in next door.
It wasn’t like she even came over to bother me. Unless you counted those super short cutoffs she’d been wearing every day to make me insane. We’d been enjoying a stretch of warm September days, and I was pretty sure she had a color for every day. The red ones had about killed me.
She wanted to break my no sex streak, I could feel it. Her plan included weakening me by plaguing my thoughts so I couldn’t sleep. Then I would be completely at her witchy mercy.
Like hell.
I was on shift at the station on a typically busy Friday when my brother dropped a bomb on my weekend of, hopefully, sleep. Worse, it was all so he could screw his fiancée.
As if he hadn’t done that enough.
Then again, I supposed when she was already knocked up was the best time. What did it feel like without a rubber?
Lucky bastard. I’d probably never know.
I rubbed my itchy eye, dry from days of no decent rest. And I wasn’t going to dwell on rubber-less sex when I was already a man on the edge due to Brady’s soon-to-be-wife’s damn twin.
Twins were always sexy as hell. It was a known fact. Many adult films had been built on that very premise.
Even if Vanessa and Tab weren’t identical. Didn’t matter. They had similarly attractive attributes, though Van just had something…more.
Something making me insane.
Brady dropped a hip on the edge of my desk, his face open and friendly in a way that indicated I was in very deep shit. Then he picked up the framed family picture our sister Honey had given me at the start of the summer.
Everyone else had family photos on their desk and I’d had a baseball bobblehead doll. Honey, being the only sentimental one in the McNeill family tree, felt sorry for me and made everyone pose outside at a barbecue. The next day she’d plunked the candid shot of our family on my desk with one of Tab’s famous cream puffs.
Even Christian had a collage of Boomer photos that looked like the dog was trying out for a military magazine. I used to roll my eyes at the display, but a few weeks after that, I’d found Francie.
Though I carried my picture of her in my wallet. I had a rep to maintain.
“You’re scowling in this picture,” Brady commented, tapping his thumb over my face in the photo. “We’ll have to take a better family shot at the wedding.”
“Like I’m going to be smiling when my delirious older brother is getting fit with a ball and chain? Even if she’s smokin’ hot.”
“Watch it.” His tone was mild as he set down the frame. “So do you have plans this weekend?”
