CHAPTER1
Jordan
Anyone who has ever told you that the youngest isn’t the favorite in the family is lying to you. I laugh whenever my parents attempt to refute the fact that my little brother, Kaidan, isn’t their favorite. They don’t play favorites, and they love us equally. Yada, yada, yada. And yet, somehow whenever anyone asks about us, my brother’s name and his accomplishments are spilling out of our mother’s mouth faster than you can count to one Mississippi.
“Did you hear?” my mother asks me, setting down her craft scissors with such urgency you thought Santa had told her the good news.
“No, I’ve been hard of hearing most of my life, didn’t you know?” I respond, eyes still locked onto the small needle in one hand as I sow popcorn together in a classic garland.
My mother huffs and takes the low road in her rebuttal. “This! This is why you’re single, Jordan.” She rubs her temples as if I’m the one giving her a headache when really it’s her crippling caffeine addiction. The one she passed on to me.
“Mother, my sharp tongue happens to be one of the many reasons why men choose to date me.”
And the fact that it has other uses.I keep the crude thought to myself.
“Back in my day—”
“What did you hear?” I ask as enthusiastically as I can muster. I interrupt her because I do not want to hear about the courting she enjoyed when she was sixteen up until she was twenty when my father married her.
I think she tortured the man into asking her.
“Kaidan is bringing his girlfriend to the party!” She’s all too easily distracted from her intended lecture to tell me the good news.
“So we need to make another stocking?” I ask, uninterested.
It’s a new girlfriend every year. He brings a date to every party because unlike me, he’s learned, you bring a date and people stop asking about your love life and when you’re going to get hitched and when you’re going to get married. On and on and on.
It feels like a Jane Austen novel sometimes. I am a spinster, unwed and a burden to my parents. And my brother will inherit the castle and all the family riches, if he can only find the one to give him an heir to continue the Greenhorn name.
I do live at home. But it isnotmy fault! My landlord sold the building. The new owners decided to renovate, and I did not want to be homeless only to return to a spike in my rent. So I took the chance at a fee-less cancellation in my contract and moved in with my parents.
A decision I am thoroughly regretting this Christmas. My brother still lives at home, going to college, in his fifth year. But no one mentions that I finished a four-year program in three going to summer school and taking twenty-one hours each semester.
Oh, no, that’s not an accomplishment.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my little brother. He is incredibly smart, but he has a wild streak and mismanaged attention issues that have him changing majors every year. This year he’s working on a double major of psychology and criminal justice. Kudos to him if he wants to be the next serial killer hunter, but I’m thinking it’s so he can understand himself because I can’t understand him. That’s for sure.
“What’s this one’s name?” I ask, considering I haven’t met her yet.
“Don’t be like that…”Like what?!“But her name is Kelsea.” Mom smiles at the name. “She’s a year younger than your brother, she’s going to med school next year.”
“Wow, when’s the wedding?” I joke. My mother wanted me to be a doctor, her fascination aspiring from herGrey’s Anatomyobsession.
“A spring wedding would be nice, wouldn't it?” And Mom is lost in la la land about spending money on some one-day event forked over for my brother’s nuptials.
There’s no use fighting.
“Yes, it would. But I’ve always thought winter was pretty.”
I didn’t think she was listening but she latches onto it quickly. “Ooh, Jordan, a Christmas wedding?” she questions, eyes wide and watery.
Fuck, she’s sprung a leak.
“Who’s getting married on Christmas?” comes from the entry.
Speak of the devil.
Kaidan strolls into the kitchen, beelining for the fridge. My brother is seldom alone, and three men follow him in through the sliding door like puppies let in from the cold. I recognize two of the three. Kaidan ruffles my hair as he passes me, taking advantage of my occupied hands.