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the refrigerator door close and walked back the way that she came, contemplating her choices. She could go next door and see what Andrew had, but something told her that her brothers and cousins had most likely spent the night over there, staking out the house, waiting for a chance to get their hands on Connor and finish what they’d started and had probably already eaten everything that they could get their hands on.
That left her with a couple of choices, she could go pick up donuts, drag Connor out of bed and make him take her out for breakfast or go back upstairs, crawl back in bed and have her wicked way with her husband again.
Decisions…..decisions…..
“I’m going back to bed. Make sure to lock up on your way out, boys,” she said, heading for the kitchen door that she’d already decided to replace with her own design when all five of her brothers stepped in front of her and blocked her way.
“Not just yet,” Bryce said, folding his large arms over his chest as he did his best to glare down at her.
“Not until we have the ‘talk’,” Johnny added, mimicking Bryce as the rest of her brothers followed suit.
“Oh my God, you can’t be serious,” she said, rubbing her hands down her face, because if they were seriously trying to have the sex talk with her, she was going to have to-
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Connor drawled as he strolled into the kitchen behind her brothers, tossing the set of handcuffs to one of the twins, and startling the hell out of all of them and making them jump out of the way as Connor, wearing only a pair of jeans and a devilish glint in his eyes that she knew only too well, walked past her brothers, who practically scrambled across the room to get away from him.
“Sick bastard!” Bryce hissed as he grabbed one of the kitchen table chairs and pulled it in front of himself as though that would somehow protect him from the man that only seemed to have eyes for her and seriously making her wonder what he’d done to them, because she’d never seen any of her cousins or brothers this freaked out before.
Then again, this was Connor they were talking about here…
“Good morning, Rory,” he whispered, oblivious to the fact that he had every single man in the room plastered against the wall and shooting desperate glances at all the exits. He leaned down and kissed her, ignoring the gags and groans of protest coming from her brothers, he gave her the sweetest kiss, laying claim to her and letting her brothers know with that one kiss that he would not be intimated by them.
“Good morning,” she said, smiling back as she returned his kiss, pleased beyond words that she’d found the one man in the world that wasn’t afraid of her family.
“You got up too early,” he said softly, wrapping his arms around her and pulled her close so that he could press a kiss to her forehead as he savored the feel of having her in his arms.
“Look,” Jason said, reminding them that they weren’t alone, “as much as we’d all love to be mentally scarred for life, we came here for a reason.”
Connor pressed one last kiss against her forehead before he let her go. “You mean besides eating everything that wasn’t nailed down?” Connor asked with a weary sigh as he leaned back against the kitchen island, which for whatever reason seemed to startle every single man in the room.
She shot Craig a questioning glance only to find him shooting Connor a nervous glare even as he shifted ever so slightly to the right and further away from her husband. Frowning, she looked around the room to find all of her brothers and cousins doing the same thing. When Reese and Darrin, two very large and highly trained police officers who never backed down from a fight, noticeably swallowed as they shifted away, she decided right then and there that it was probably for the best if she never found out what happened in the woods.
“Sick bastard,” Trevor mumbled, looking panicked as he moved even further away from Connor.
Yeah…
There were definitely some things that she didn’t want to know about, she decided as she hopped up on the counter and sat next to him, loving the way that he placed his hand on her knee with a look that pretty much dared any of her brothers and cousins to bitch. She tensed up and opened her mouth, ready to remind her brothers that she was a married woman now and to back off when the most amazing thing happened.
None of them said anything about it, which meant that they’d accepted Connor. More importantly, it meant that they trusted him to take care of her and put her first, which was something that didn’t come easily to the men in their family. They always had a hard time trusting that someone outside the family was going to do right by the women in their family. Whatever happened during the last week, and she’d already decided that she really didn’t need to know the details, it had changed their minds about Connor. He was one of them now, whether he wanted to be or not and something told her that most days he probably wouldn’t want to be, but that was a problem for another day. Right now, she had to figure out how to get rid of her brothers and cousins so that she could climb back in bed with Connor.
“We came to warn you,” Jason bit out, folding his large arms over his chest.
“Not that you deserve it, you sick son of a bitch!” Trevor muttered with a pout and a glare that had her rolling her eyes as she waited for the men to get on with it so that she could tell them that the “talk” wasn’t necessary when something in Jason’s expression made her stomach twist with fear.
That look…
She’d seen it before, but she just couldn’t for the life of her remember when. That is, until she shifted her gaze to Trevor and saw the same expression on his face, the same one that she remembered seeing on Uncle Alex’s face when she was five years old, sitting around the campfire with her brothers and cousins as he explained for the first time about the Bradford curse.
“Warn us about what?” Connor asked, sounding bored as she sat there, trying not to panic and failing miserably.
She needed to get them out of there before they could say something to clue Connor into the fact that he’d married into a crazy fam-
“The curse,” Jason said, sighing heavily as he reached up and rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly looking exhausted and like he’d rather be anywhere but here, probably because he knew that she had no choice but to kill him now.
“Jason,” she said in warning, leveling a glare all her own on the large bastard that was about to give Connor enough reason to file for a divorce based on insanity, because really, there was no other way to explain the bullshit that the Bradfords bought into and like it or not, she was a Bradford.
Speaking of her Bradford roots…
Shooting Jason an additional glare to warn him to keep his big mouth shut, she hopped off the counter and walked around the kitchen island to the cabinet near the sink, the same one that she’d claimed as her own last week when she’d moved in, and opened the cabinet, silently promising to kick every last one of her brothers and cousins’ asses if they so much as-
She released a pleased little sigh when she saw that her hot cocoa supply cabinet was just as she’d left it last night. Deciding that offering them a cup of hot cocoa would only encourage them to stay, and since that was not in her best interest, she grabbed two of her favorite mugs and set them down on the counter. Connor walked past her, barely pausing long enough to press a kiss against the top of her head and brush his hand down her back in a slow caress as he made his way past her and filled a kettle with fresh water.
“Rory,” Jason said with a touch of annoyance, “we have to have this talk.”
“No,” she said, focusing her attention on making two cups of hot cocoa, “we really don’t.”
“He knows what he’s talking about,” Johnny said, not really surprising her since all of her brothers, like most of their cousins, had always bought into the bullshit Bradford traditions and dire warnings of doom.
“No, he really doesn’t,” she said, adding an extra spoonsful of cocoa to her mug, because she knew that she was going to need it.
“Then explain Dad,” Bryce said, sounding a touch too smug for her liking and for that alone, she decided to argue just to shut the large bastards up and get them out of the house.
