“Build me a sundae! Please, Tanner. Pleeeeeeeeease!” Brent’s practically dancing with excitement.
“How about he builds everyone a sundae when he’s the last one back to the house?” I suggest.
“Last one?” Tanner squawks in mock outrage, but I’m already tossing Brent over my shoulder and taking off down the beach.
We beat the other two back to the house by over a minute, a fact we don’t let the others forget as Tanner sets to work building the four of us “the best sundaes in seventeen states.” And if my back still feels like it’s on fire? It’s a small price to pay for the huge smile on Brent’s face.
Chapter 7
Forty-five minutes later we’re sprawled out in the media room when Hunter’s fiancée and niece make it home from their girls’ day. Game one of the NBA finals is playing on the TV, but I’m paying more attention to Brent than I am to the action on the court.
The kid’s only eleven, but already he’s a hell of an artist. He’s sprawled out on the floor in front of me, working on a comic book with a football player hero that looks a lot like his uncle Hunter. Tanner and I are the trusty sidekicks and, from what I can see, the villain looks a hell of a lot like the quarterback from Dallas. Which…hell, yeah.
Hunter’s niece, Lucy, stops to give both her uncle Hunter and me a kiss on the cheek before throwing herself on her favorite honorary uncle, Tanner. He laughs as she lands in his lap, then stands up and swings her around in a supercharged game of airplane that has her squealing in delight.
At least until she notices his dreads. “You took the bows out.” Her lower lip quivers, and she just might be the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen.
Tanner gulps audibly. “I didn’t think they matched my shirt,” he says, shooting me a desperate look. “But if you have some green ribbon, you can put new bows in if you want.”
“Emerson?” Lucy turns around and bats her eyes at her soon-to-be stepmom. “Do we have any gween wibbon?”
“If you don’t, I’m happy to take you to the store to buy some,” I volunteer, barely holding in a chuckle as Tanner shoots me a death glare over Lucy’s head.
“Let me look, baby,” Emerson tells her as she starts tugging on one of Tanner’s dreads. “Why don’t you come help me, Shawn?”
“Me?” I shoot a puzzled look at Hunter, but he’s suddenly really, really interested in the game.
Something’s obviously up, but I figure it can’t be that bad if they’re sending Emerson in to do the dirty work.
“Sure,” I tell her, ignoring the pain in my back as I push to my feet. “It’ll give me time to steal you away from Hunter.”
He snorts. “Give it your best shot, pretty boy.”
“Game not so interesting now, huh?” I shoot over my shoulder as I follow his woman from the room.
“Everything okay?” I ask her as she leads me down the hall to the catch-all room. I think it’s eventually supposed to be her office, but right now it holds a bunch of odds and ends that don’t belong anywhere else. Including, it turns out, a box full of different colored ribbons.
“Funny,” she says as she digs through the colorful tangle. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
Warning bells go off in my head, and I start eyeing the door. Adrenaline may be my drug of choice, but I’ve watched Emerson use that perfectly reasonable tone on Hunter enough to know that I’m in danger—and I probably won’t know what hit me until after I’m already ass over teakettle on the ground.
“I’m good. Just hanging with your man, you know.”
“I’m glad he’s got friends like you and Tanner,” she says. “I know having you guys around has made Heather’s death a little easier for him.”
“Oh, well.” I clear my throat, not sure what to say to that. I’m more a doer than a talker at the best of times. I can bullshit with the best of them, but when things get real like this, I tend to forget how to string words together in any logical format. “It sucks that he and the kids had to go through that.”
She smiles sadly. “Yeah, it really does.”
An awkward silence stretches between us for a few seconds as she continues to search through the box of ribbons, but it’s broken when Emerson gives a triumphant, “Aha! I knew I had the right color in here.” She holds up a roll of ribbon pretty close to the exact color of Tanner’s shirt. And his eyes, now that I think about it.
“I’m sure he’ll be appreciative.” My tongue is firmly in cheek and from the wicked look she shoots me, I can tell she knows it. “Toss it to me and I’ll take it to Lucy.”
“I still have to cut it into pieces. Lucy’s not old enough for a grown-up scissors yet.”
“Oh, right. I didn’t think about that.” I start edging toward the door. It’s pretty obvious that Emerson has more to say, but it’s also pretty obvious that it’s not something I’m going to want to hear.
“So,” she says as she crosses to the craft table on the other side of the room and pulls out some kind of scissors with weird nicks in the blades. “Hunter tells me you went down to Mexico at the beginning of last month. How was it?”