“Sounds like a gorgeous house,” Jasper said. “Those old houses are worth the trouble.”
“It is. And they are, yeah.”
“So did you have a groundskeeper or what?”
“Well, we had a gardener. We still hired specific people for repairs, but I always liked to watch them work. Our usual handyman would explain things to me when he saw I was interested.” I shrugged. “Still, the first few houses I did were easy jobs, and I barely broke even. I wasn’t going to auctions yet. They weren’t houses you would have even looked at.”
“That’s awesome, though,” Jasper said. “I’m sorry we hassle you so much. Gotta haze the new kid.”
“I’m not sorry,” Jake said. “What kind of alpha would I be if I didn’t assert dominance?”
I noticed that Jake was slinging the bowling balls as fast as he could while glancing back at us. He seemed like he would rather get in on the conversation than play the game.
“He’s not the alpha,” Jasper said to me.
“Right…”
“We’re just brothers, not a pack. There is no alpha. Unless it’s Dad.”
“What about you? Did your dad teach you guys this stuff?” I asked, as my turn to bowl came back around.
This time, I actually knocked down a few pins, but the small child in the next lane was still slaughtering me.
“Yep. Dad taught us everything,” Jake said. “We’ve been doing this since we were fourteen, and our brother Declan builds furniture for a living, so it’s the family business.”
“Must be nice. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a family that doesn’t think you’re weird.” I laughed, trying not to sound like I needed therapy. I knew I should be grateful for growing up with so “much”, at least that was what everyone told me. You should be grateful, Helena.
But mostly, I just felt incredibly lonely. I used to cry in my dorm room at boarding school and then have to suck it up quickly if my roommate breezed in. School dances were especially dreadful. Dressing up and wearing makeup and trying to angle for the richest and most handsome boys just drove me into more crying in the bathroom while listening to the most emo music of 2010.
So when I bought a truck and hitched an old trailer up to it to call home and left them all behind, and my parents told me I was going to be so lonely? Nope. I was never lonely.
Not…that kind of lonely.
But I was sort of aware that I was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who never had the pleasure of falling asleep in someone’s arms or passing out after a killer orgasm. I had just finished fixing up a warlock’s bungalow outside of Scranton, so that was just three weeks of cleaning up an old man’s house, in Scranton, all by myself.
“Well, for what it’s worth,” Jake said, “I’m glad we’re just hanging out for once. I guess you’ve passed your initiation.”
“So no more calling me ‘pipsqueak’ or ‘kid’?”
“All right, all right, but I’m still going to call you Baroness. I like that one.” Jake lifted his brows at me a little suggestively, and his eyes were teasing me with visions of what it would be like to hear that nickname rolling off his tongue in the heat of passion.
Right after that look, I rolled my first strike. The guys offered me high fives.
I was probably getting too excited about it. I could be such a kid sometimes.
“I think it’s time for a round of beer,” Jasper said. “My treat. Are you a Bud, Miller, Michelob, Coors, or Yuengling girl?”
“Augh…Yuengling, I guess…it’s local…”
“Hey, Hel, you can’t drink fancy beer while you’re bowling,” Jake said. “Get some nachos and wings too.”
“I was going to pay for this stuff.”
Jasper waved me off and headed for the snack bar.
What was I going to do if this really was, like, a double date?
I didn’t know whether to be excited and flattered or just nervous. I couldn’t kiss them both. I probably wouldn’t have even been so flustered over it except that my brother had actually entered into a bond marriage, sharing his wife with his two best friends and her familiar. My parents were so pissed and humiliated over it that he was estranged from the family. It actually took the heat off of me, but I wasn’t exactly welcome at home either, not after I went to the wedding. I was surprised to see my arrogant, lonerish brother looking so happy to be spending the rest of his life with his friends and the girl they met in college. But that was the side of him I guess I never saw at home. He was happier with his friends, and in a bond marriage.
These guys weren’t into that. (Surely not, right?) But they had probably heard about my brother’s scandalous nuptials. (So what if they thought I was into it?)
I think I managed not to be totally awkward as the beer loosened me up a little and the hot wings and nachos tasted like heaven after the hard work and a couple days of surviving on TV dinners and Kind bars. We swapped stories about weird stuff we’d found in houses and absurd buyers.
“I had one who hated granite countertops because she said she didn’t like the taste of ‘granite energy’ that absorbed into her food,” I said, and we were howling at the idea.
“We had one that kept taking a ton of measurements and asking stuff like, how soundproof are the walls? How much weight can this beam support? Does the basement flood? I don’t know if he was opening a BDSM cave or a torture dungeon.”
“Judging by how skeezy
