“He winded me!”
“I’m not about to be your referee.”
I smirked at him. “Someone’s on the sofa tonight.”
“Yeah, you keep on thinking that,” he told me as he grabbed me in a noogie.
When I twisted him over and let him fall straight to the ground, I left him seeing birdies twittering overhead, whistling as I returned to the kitchen where Inessa’s ‘feast’ was set up on the table in there.
I managed to catch the tailwind of Cammie’s, “Oh my God, Inessa, you surpassed yourself!”
“More purple soup,” Brennan wheezed as he approached me, holding his stomach as he hobbled past.
“Yeah,” I said with a grimace.
The one thing the Russians and the Irish agreed on were potatoes.
For whatever reason, Inessa never did anything with potatoes and gravy.
Sometimes I wondered if she did it on purpose.
Knowing her, she probably did.
“I don’t think Cammie even likes beets,” Brennan rumbled as I passed him a beer.
“Pretty sure Inessa doesn’t either.”
“I don’t,” my wife called over from the table, her brow arched. “But it’s tradition.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tradition. Remember that when I make you eat Colcannon. She doesn’t like it.”
Brennan frowned. “How can you not like mashed tatties with cabbage, butter, and bacon?”
My mouth watered at just the thought. “I’d prefer that to borscht,” I agreed.
“You eat that stuff with Aoife. Cammie and I make Russian food. Bump will know what Russian food is, Eoghan,” she warned.
“The Irish in him is more aggressive than the Russian,” Brennan pointed out. “You should be eating all the good Irish food to calm the beast.”
Inessa snorted. “You keep on thinking that, Brennan.”
Cammie cleared her throat. “He has a point, Inessa.”
She gaped at her sister. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I had terrible morning sickness until I started eating Irish food.” Cammie gave her a wry smile. “That eased my symptoms.”
“You have to be shitting me!”
Cammie chuckled. “I’m actually not.”
“This is a hoax. This is like that time you told me if I sucked Eoghan off, it would make the morning sickness stop.”
“That’s actually proven—” Cammie started.
“I appreciated that scientific study,” I concurred with a smirk.
“I’ll just bet you did,” Brennan joked, knocking his beer bottle into mine as we grinned at each other.