Guess he thinks it’s his place to correct his brothers.
His hands go to his hips as he turns to stare at the front of the house. “Place looks like shit. Why haven’t you done nothin’ to it?”
He strides toward the porch, taking the stairs two at a time. His hand goes around one of the railings and tugs at it.
“Someone is going to fall ass over teakettle if they’re leanin’ on this.” He gives Dallas a pointed look.
His brother's hands go up. “Fine, we’ll fix it.”
Duke nods. “It’ll take you a half hour. You’ve mended plenty of fences on the ranch. This will be a breeze.”
The guys all nod.
They follow their older brother to the porch, though they’re all mostly the same size.
I’ve never seen four giants like this.
Their poor mother…
I trudge along behind them, noting the girls next door still on their porch, smirking beneath my baseball cap.
Oh Lord, those girls.
I imagine they’re ecstatic to be living next to these guys. If I were them, my post-teenage hormones would have been raging, and I’d have spent the majority of my time accidentally running into them on their way to class, orchestrating it so I was walking out of the house at the same time.
“Going in my direction?”College-aged Duke would have said.
“Who? Me?”
“Yeah, you. I’ll walk you as far as the quad…”
Sigh.
As my luck would have had it, I wasn’t outgoing, so I wouldn’t have had the courage to stand outside gawking at the hot guys next door, let alone accidentally bump into one of them so they’d walk with me to class.
Nope, shy Josephine Kettner would have waited until they were out of sight before leaving the house so she wouldn’t have had to make awkward small talk, thinking anything she said would be dumb and make her look foolish.
“You comin’?” Duke is holding the door open for me, and I catch a whiff of him as I walk past him into the house.
“Did you shower this morning?” God, he smells good. I noticed it in the truck, but I’m reallynoticing it now that I’m brushing past him.
He nods. “Sure did.”
“Oh my God, what time did you wake up?”
He shrugs, laughing. “I don’t know. Five?”
“It’s Sunday,” I hiss. “Who in their right mind wakes up at five on a Sunday?”
“I had to wake up early to outsmart you, remember?”
I feel weird entering the boys’ house before he’s all the way inside, hesitating in the small entryway, glancing around as if I were taking a home tour and assessing every square inch.
The first thing I notice is that it’s a mess.
Not just from the clutter everywhere but from the dirt on the ground in the tiny foyer. They have dark hardwood floors, which are prone to show all the dirt—and do.
“Come on, the kitchen’s this way.”