My eyes narrowed at the woman that was walking up the pathway to my door.
I walked toward it on stiff legs, glaring at the woman that dominated my thoughts.
Yanking the door open, I waited impatiently for her to get there.
“What are you doing here?” I asked warily.
We hadn’t left it on the best of terms the last time we saw each other, so I was honestly surprised to even see her on my porch. Let alone my property.
Then again, when I’d left her at the diner, I’d fully intended on calling her.
Had really planned on it.
But the murder I’d been working on had finally been solved. I hadn’t had the time to sleep, let alone call her.
“I got a call from Petra saying she was hungry…” She hesitated. “And that you weren’t here.”
My eyes narrowed, then I turned around and yelled at the top of my lungs. “Petra Corsair, get your ass over here!”
Petra, my sweet little niece whom I loved with all my heart, came around the corner sheepishly.
“Yes?” she asked sweetly, curling a lock of her hair.
I narrowed my eyes. “I thought I told you to brush your hair?”
Petra’s lips thinned as she opened her mouth to reply to my growl.
But before she could reply, I felt my shoulder being shoved as Cannel came into the room. “You don’t brush curly hair, dummy.”
My eyes narrowed on a new set of doe eyes.
“You do when you’re in my house and want me to fix it,” I growled. “I don’t like braiding her hair and having her whining about how much it hurts when it gets tangled.”
I was pissed.
Way pissed.
So pissed, in fact, that I might’ve said a few things I didn’t mean if I didn’t calm the fuck down.
And it was all a certain woman with her stupid pretty eyes, and her stupid sweet mouth, and her ever-present ability to anger me at the drop of a hat, that had me all discombobulated.
“Will, go take a nap.” Cannel narrowed her eyes. “And hopefully when you wake up, you’ll be in a better mood.”
How she could tell that I was tired, I didn’t know.
I was on the verge of saying something that would be wrong to say, but luckily, I was saved by the doorbell again.
“Ohh, this is so good!” Ashlie whispered. “I’m so glad that you called her.”
I gritted my teeth and pushed past the three happy people that had come to mean a whole lot more to me than I’d realized.
When I swung the door open wide, a man wearing a WAITR shirt held out a bag of food.
I frowned.
“Umm,” I hesitated. “I didn’t order food.”
He grinned. “It’s already paid for by a” —he looked at the bag— “Jane Schultz.”
I sighed and took the food. “You got a tip?”
“A substantial one seeing as we don’t ever deliver this far. Enjoy.”
My eyelid twitching, I made it back into the kitchen and placed the bag of tacos on the table. “Ohhh, tacos!”
That came out of Petra’s mouth.
Cannel looked amused by it all.
I wanted to bend her over my knee and spank her.
“Which one of you called Grandma and told her you were hungry?” I asked.
I looked at the food that I’d been stirring on the stove, and realized that, like them, it didn’t look very appetizing either. It hadn’t from the very beginning.
“Ummm,” Ashlie looked sheepish. “I might have mentioned I was hungry, and you were mad, and cooking.”
Meaning, my mother didn’t think that I could cook without taking my anger out on the food. Something I might, or might not do, upon occasion.
“Why are you mad?” Cannel looked amused.
I wanted to kiss that amusement right the fuck off her face.
“Because he broke his phone, lost a number he wanted, and refused to go ask that person for her phone number,” Petra chirped.
There was a moment of stunned silence and then, “I guess he could’ve just asked you for that phone number, right, Pet?”
The words that came out of Cannel’s mouth had my lips twitching slightly.
“He could have,” Petra confirmed. “But then he would’ve had to stop angrily stirring the slop on the stove to do that. Or admit that you were the one he was missing. He’s been a bear all week. It’s been awful.”
Sometimes, I wondered how the hell the girls had grown up so fast.
I didn’t remember them always being this intuitive.
I gave up and reached for a taco right when the scanner by the stove started to go off like crazy.
“Officer down. Officer down!”
My heart kicked up in my throat as my ears went hyper focused on the radio.
“What is your location?” the dispatcher asked.
And even with her calm, smooth voice filling the airwaves like always, I knew damn well that she felt the tension.
“CrossFit gym in town,” someone said. “Active shooter on the premises.”
My head whipped around to look at Cannel.