“These are my husbands, Mike Jones and Terry Jessop.”
Handshakes instead of hugs followed those introductions, more chairs were brought to the table, and people adjusted to make room for the newcomers.
When they’d first come into the house, Dale had thought this was one huge table. Now he saw while it was still big, it was nicely big enough for the Benedicts seated around it.
“You are in time for pie and a story.”
Addison grinned. “Oh, goodie.” She rubbed her hands together and smiled at him and Parker. “We weren’t here when it happened. Michael builds furniture, and we were at a trade show in Oklahoma and then were taking two days for a mini vacation afterward—so we missed all the fun.”
“You have a sick definition of fun, sister,” Jesse said. He was smiling, and Addison stuck her tongue out at him in response.
Then Jackson ruffled her hair before he took his seat.
Dale could never recall his cousins—his Uncle George’s kids—all getting along as well as they were right then. I think I might be witnessing a miracle.
“The fun started when a bachelor party we were having at our ranch had a party crasher—Mother Nature.” Chase grinned as he looked around the table. “Some of the men sitting here—namely, Jackson and Lucas—were on the volunteer firefighter roster that day. There’d been a call in the afternoon, a grass fire caused by a lightning strike, at the other end of the county. So they missed all the fun, too.”
“Lusty has a well-equipped fire department, and our full-time firefighters, Grant and Andrew Jessop, are very well trained,” Brian said. “They’ve even taken smoke jumper training in California. Most of the men of Lusty spend a month or so a year on that list, which includes training and practice time. Not many of us have actually had to fight a fire.”
“They organize the lists so that, usually, only one husband per household is on the roster at a time,” Cord said. “Which was why Jackson and Lucas were, but Trace and I weren’t.”
“And neither of us went—our cousin Steven went in my place—because the man we were honoring was our long-time foreman, Ricoh Stone,” Chase said.
“While some of the men were off playing Smokey the Bear and the rest were eating, drinking, and playing poker at the foreman’s house at our ranch, most of the women, except me because junior here was acting up, were at the Big House attending a shower for Ricoh’s fiancée, Angela.” Carrie shook her head. “Sorry, the Big House is what we call the house where Grandma Kate and her sons and daughters-in-law live.”
“We’re really looking forward to seeing her again,” Parker said. “How is she?”
“Still living life at sixty miles an hour,” Jackson said.
The woman has to be in her nineties! Dale could only marvel at that.
“To make a long story short, what happened was a tornado formed and then immediately hit the foreman’s house. We had about ten seconds warning, if that. We’d been playing poker, shooting the shit, when our cell phone alerts went off. We all dove under the two large tables we were using—all twenty of us—and that was what saved our lives. Ricoh had made them out of very strong hickory, and they held up when the house fell on top of them and us.”
“I recalled telling the man when he was showing me those tables in progress that they were going to be heavy as hell to move,” Mike Jones said. Then he grinned. “Ricoh said that once they were in his house, he didn’t expect to be moving them around much.”
Dale was intrigued. “So how did the women save your bacon?”
“Yeah, you have to tell us that part!” Parker grinned and looked at the women.
Jesse and Barry’s wife, Charlotta, gave him a huge smile. “I like these cousins!”
“Well, I heard the explosion of the house collapsing. I’d been in our house several hundred feet from the foreman’s house. I was supposed to be at that shower at the other end of town, but as I said, morning sickness, morning, noon, and night. As soon as I made my way outside and saw the damage, I hauled myself to the Big House.”
“Where the rest of us were,” Laci said. “Including Brittany Phillips, soon to be Kendall. She’s a lieutenant in the Marine Corps.”
“Brit just started giving orders, got us moving, and stopped us from diving in first thing to dig the guys out,” Charlotta said. “She understood enough to know, just from what we could all see of how the house came down, that someone had to make sure we wouldn’t do more harm than good trying to rescue our trapped loved ones.”
“The whole house had come down, and there were only minor injuries?” Parker’s eyes were wide as he looked around the table. “That’s a miracle!”
“It is, isn’t it?” Addison nodded. “We arrived home the next day but had already been texted by the women here. So, we drove to the ranch…” She closed her eyes briefly. “I started to shake when I saw what was left of Ricoh’s house. I knew Veronica had already heard about the incident, so I sent her a picture of what was left of the place. We both agreed the only word for the outcome was miracle.”
“Ricoh had a sprained ankle, his best friend, Julián, a broken wrist,” Trace said. “There were cuts and bruises and abrasions—and one ass injury.”
Dale raised one eyebrow. “An ass injury?”
All the men were smiling, and the women just shook their heads.
“One of our two ranch hands, Duncan Moore, had just slammed down a natural royal flush.” Cord grinned. “He somehow ended up with a shard of glass in his butt.”
“Doctor Robert said the odds were probably greater on the shard of glass than the royal flush.” Jackson chuckled. “Which made Duncan an awesomely lucky man that night.”
The men were laughing out loud, and Dale just shook his
