“It means I can’t very well crash here forever.” She reached the staircase and set Toby down. “Bet you can’t finish your oatmeal before I finish brushing my teeth,” she whispered in his ear.
Predictably, he was down the stairs like a shot.
She straightened again and arched slightly, working out the ache of carrying him that way. Both boys had grown noticeably in the last five months.
“And where do you think you’re going to crash?” Brady followed her again, this time back to the bathroom, where he stood in the doorway as if she were still five instead of twenty-five.
She widened her eyes dramatically. “Somewhere wild and crazy like my own place?”
He looked askance. “You can’t live on your own.”
She propped her fists on her hips. “And why not?”
“Because you’ve never lived on your own.”
“Then it’s about time, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t think!”
She made a face at him and shut the bathroom door in his face. And made a point of noisily locking it.
“Bella!” He banged once on the door.
She rolled her eyes at her reflection in the mirror over the sink and turned on the faucets until the water rushed loudly in the pipes.
Eventually she heard the creak of his footsteps moving away and her shoulders slumped with relief.
For all of Brady’s insistence that he was nothing like their father, sometimes he showed a dismaying similarity to him.
Despite her brother’s claims that she was a bathroom hog, she sped through her morning routine like usual. Because she was aware of the fact that she was taking up the bathroom in an already busy household. Plus, she’d learned her first morning there that the hot water ran out halfway through shampooing her hair if she dallied too long.
Also, there was that bet with Toby.
Her hair was streaming wet down the back of her T-shirt when she got downstairs a short while later.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Toby was still scooping up oatmeal. Tyler was drawing on a paper with a crayon, his cereal already finished. Arabella filled a mug with coffee and sat down across from them before reaching for a slice of toast from the stack sitting on a plate in the center of the table.
Without being asked, Harper passed her a small jar of jam and Arabella smeared some on her toast. She took a bite of the deliciousness and chased it with hot coffee.
She looked from Harper to the boys and back again. “So what’s on your schedule today?”
“We are going out to spend the day with Laurel and Larkin at the ranch. She’s offered to start teaching the boys how to ride horses.” Harper sipped her own coffee. “You can come, too, if you’re free.”
Arabella thought about her car battery and actually found herself hoping that it’d be dead. Just so she’d have an excuse to use Jay’s number that was stored in her cell phone. She’d only been out once to Laurel and Adam’s place located in the guesthouse at Callum’s Fame & Fortune Ranch. “Sounds like fun, but Petunia’s expecting me.”
“Even on a Saturday?” Brady asked, entering the room. His robe and towel had been replaced by jeans and a necktie that hung loose over his dress shirt.
“Yes, even on a Saturday,” Arabella said a little waspishly. The flower shop was open until noon. “You’re the concierge at Hotel Fortune. You’re working on a Saturday.”
“Sadly,” Harper said lightly. She rose and took the ends of Brady’s tie and deftly crossed one end over the other. “He’s going to miss out on all the fun.”
Arabella had a vision of Jay helping Toby tie his shoes the day they’d met.
She felt suddenly flushed and looked down at her toast, willing the heat to fade.
“I’ll leave the saddle-sore fun to you,” Brady said. “When you need a massage as a result, that’ll be fun for me.”
Arabella felt an urgent need to wash out her ears. She was glad her brother was ridiculously happy with Harper, but still...
“Maybe neither of you can make it out there for the riding lesson,” Harper said, “but we’ll be having a cookout later this afternoon. You can come for that, at least. About three o’clock. Brady, you’ll be off for the day by then. I’ll expect you both.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Brady drawled. “Any more orders?”
“None for the moment,” Harper said with a laugh.
Arabella tuned out their flirting as she slathered more jam on her toast and looked over to focus on Tyler’s drawing. There was a sun on one corner of the page and a brown blob with a long tail in the other corner. Murphy, obviously. And in between, four people. “Impressive. Is that you and Toby?” She pointed at the two smaller figures with shocks of dark hair standing next to the two taller figures.
“No, that’s the new babies,” he said, without missing a stroke of his crayon. “That’s me. That’s Toby.” He added slashes of bright red across Toby’s chest, obviously mimicking the red-and-white stripes of the shirt his twin was presently wearing.
Arabella cast her brother and future sister-in-law a sideways look. “New babies, huh?”
Harper’s cheeks went red. “Don’t look at me!”
Arabella raised her eyebrows and decided studying her coffee was safer than interpreting the look passing between Brady and Harper. Soon enough, though, her brother was off to the hotel and after reminding Arabella to turn on the radio before she left, too, Harper and the twins were off to their day of riding lessons.
Music soothed not only the savage beast, but it soothed Murphy, too. Even though Brady had put in a doggie door so the animal could go in and out of the house at will, without the radio playing Murphy got up to all sorts of mischief when he was left alone.
Since Arabella had already sacrificed one pair of shoes to the dog when she’d forgotten to leave the music on, it wasn’t a mistake she intended to repeat and she turned on the radio as soon as the door closed behind Harper and the boys.
Fortunately,
