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“What? She's hot. I'm hot. Together, we were very, very hot.” A smirk curls his lips as he pumps his brows. “All night.”
“And on that note,” Amelia shivers before practically throwing herself down the stairs, “I’m leaving.”
Nick follows, giving Cass a shove and a smug smile on his way past. “I fucked your sister, you fucked Luna's sister. Funny how the world works, huh?”
Cass gags. “Ew, Nick.”
“Sorry, my bad.” His smile widens. “Ifuckyour sister.”
“Nick!” Amelia screeches from somewhere downstairs. “Stop antagonizing him!”
Nick just laughs, unfazed by the anger in his tiny redhead's voice, or the steam practically pouring out of Cass' ears. Mischief written all over his face, he leans forward and pats Cass on the cheek. “But it's so easy.”
* * *
It feels like old days again, my house destroyed from a party and filled with my hungover friends.
Breakfast was kind of hilarious. It involved a lot of Luna glaring at Cass over her coffee cup and him avoiding her gaze, looking downright terrified. Honestly, I don't think Lu has to worry about them living together being weird; Pen and Cass get along ridiculously well. There's none of that lingering awkwardness that happens sometimes after you've seen someone naked, and when all your friends know you've seen each other naked. And they clearly did more than just see each other naked so it's a miracle, really.
I think, deep down, Luna is fine with them hooking up. She's not the kind of person who polices sex. I think she's just focusing all her attention and energy on this one thing, instead of letting other things cloud her mind. Namely the fact she's going for lunch with the girls with the intention of telling them everything.
She's nervous as shit and she's not even trying to hide it. The girls are doing their best to reassure her but since they have no idea what they're reassuring her about, it's not exactly helping. I tried my hand at calming her down too; in the shower, and then on the bathroom counter, and on my bed a couple of times, too.
And it worked, on some level. By the time the girls cleared out of here, she was too wrecked to be stressed.
I'm changing my sheets when my phone rings, the ringtone specific to Lux filling my bedroom. I dive for my phone, snatching it off my desk before the first ring even finishes. “Everything okay?”
“Everything is fine,Dad,” Lux groans. I can just picture her rolling her eyes. “I'm just calling to tell you that the ad you put up got a few responses.”
My shoulders slump in relief. The ranch hand position. I forgot about that. I swear, every time she calls—or even if she doesn’t, honestly—I get this voice in the back of my head convincing me that something's wrong with her, or the baby or the girls or the ranch.
I like to think I'll calm down a little when the baby arrives, but really, I have a hunch that when the new tiny, incredibly fragile addition to our family arrives, the permanent pit of worry in my stomach is only going to expand.
“Okay.” I balance my phone between my ear and my shoulder as I toss dirty bedsheets in the laundry basket. “I can come up sometime next weekend to interview some of the applicants.”
Like I knew she would, Lux objects. “I can do it.”
“I wanna be there.”
“But I get the final say.”
“Stop being difficult.”
“I'm-”
“Enough,” I cut her off with a huff. “This isn't up for discussion. If we're inviting a stranger to work on our land, toliveon our land, to constantly be around my nephew and my sisters, you bet your ass I'm going to be there to vet them.”
It’s a testament to how tired my sister is, proof she really is in desperate need of some help, that she doesn’t argue further. She just sighs and mutters a reluctant agreement before swiftly changing the subject, launching into the latest gossip floating around our hometown.
Unsurprisingly, most of it pertains to her new situation; once that belly started showing, word got around real quick. And God, did those words get twisted.
One version of the story is that she got pregnant on purpose to trap Mark. Another is that she was cheating on him all along with not one but both of the ranch hands and the baby isn't even his. It sounds like the newest one claims that he found out she was pregnant when the rest of the town did, and now she's trying to keep the baby from him.
It's funny how, in every tale, Mark escapes unscathed.
Fucking small towns.
Lux is a better person than I am because she laughs it all off, like she does now. Her cackles drift through the phone as she recites an encounter with the matriarch of the town's gossip hierarchy, a woman I'm pretty sure is older than all my sister's and I combined. “God, I thought Sue Allen's ancient head was gonna pop off when Line threw her out of the store for talking shit about me.”
