I glance up at the brothers, all of them focused on their sister with love in their eyes. They may be ridiculous, but Lennox has no idea how lucky she is to have a family who cares about her. I’d kill for anything that resembled her family.
I clear the lump in my throat, but my hand holding the needle twitches and–
“Ow!” Michael yells, “That hurt.”
Oops.
Lennox gapes at me. “What are you doing? You can’t give people real tattoos!”
“Chill. I just poked him with a pin,” I say, quickly dropping the needle to get lost in the stack.
“Wait, what’s going on?” Michael asks, shooting out of the chair and away from me.
“That was payback,” Lennox says.
And my work here is done. I stand up and retrieve my supplies.
Each one of the brothers starts yelling at Lennox and I take the opportunity to silently slip away. Juliet is at the kitchen table eating a cinnamon roll and offers me one.
“Did you really poke Michael with a needle?” she asks.
“Accidentally.” I take the proffered cinnamon roll, recalling what happened. Itwasan accident, but I never did clean the needles. “Do you think your fiancé is up to date on his vaccines?”
“Karli!”
“Kidding.” Mostly. There might have been blood. I take a bite of the heavenly confection, chewing slowly. “Better safe than sorry?”
“What if–” Juliet starts, but she’s cut off when Lennox comes sprinting into the kitchen, three brothers on her trail.
She barricades herself on one side of the island, but the one with the beard catches her and throws her over his shoulder.
“I’ve got her,” he says, chuckling as Lennox tries to tickle his sides.
Michael grabs something out of the fridge. And then, it’s a tangle of limbs and laughter as whipped cream flies through the air in every direction.
A glob lands on the table in front of me and I watch it melt on the wood surface. Is this something normal siblings do?
It almost looks…fun. How pathetic is it that I want to join in?
But the fight is over soon and then they are all cleaning off and apologizing to each other.
Ugh. That’s not normal. I take my cinnamon roll and go wandering around the house in search of a television. Juliet will want to stay a while, which is fine, I’ll just make myself at home.
Chapter 2
Trent
Well,that’sanewone. Lennox managed to pull one over on all of us.
I take a bite of my cinnamon roll and smile, recalling the horrified looks on my brothers’ faces when Karli, a.k.a. the crazy lady, had pulled out pins the size of syringe needles. Wimps.
Okay, they weren’t the only ones. I was terrified.
“I knew the whole time,” my twin brother Sean says while scarfing down a cinnamon roll.
“You did not.” I know him well enough to know he was as fooled as the rest of us. Calling his bluff is essential to our relationship. If I fail to do so, I end up with one eyebrow. Or in a chicken costume. Yes, both have happened.
“Okay, I didn’t. But I knew there was something fishy about the engagement.”
