Page 55 of Shades of Grey & Gold

“Don’t move!” Maggie whisper-yells. “Don’t make any sudden movements, he spooks easily—”

The girl behind her—younger and shorter, with the same dark hair and a phone in her hand—pushes past the outstretched arm. “Oh, stop it.” She looks at me with a bright, open smile. “Hi. I’m Sophia, the youngest sister.” She makes a face at Cal. “He’s had that face for thirty-one years of his life, it only looks threatening, but we know better, he’s a big, soft teddy bear—”

Cal is on his feet before she can get another word out.

He grabs Sophia first, wrapping an arm around her head and pressing a kiss into her hair while she shrieks and tries to escape. Then Maggie, who gives into it more graciously. He holds them both for a moment, and I watch his face do a thing—a thing where all the tension goes somewhere else for a second and he’s just a brother who missed his sisters.

“Since we’re apparently doing introductions,” he says with a frown at me for my earlier slip up, releasing them and gesturing between me and the chaos. “Maggie. Sophia.” Helooks at me. “Max.”

“Max,” Maggie repeats, and smiles, giddy. She tilts her head at me. “Are you the reason he’s been too busy to come home for months?”

“Maggie,” Cal’s voice warns.

“I’m just asking—”

“Maggie.”

Sophia has climbed onto the stool on the other side of me with the ease of someone who has been doing exactly this since childhood. She looks at me with her chin in her hand and a wide smile on her face.

“He never brings anyone home,” she says conversationally. “Like, ever. In the history of him existing as a person, this has not happened.”

“Sophia.” Cal again, with slightly less patience.

“So, I just want to say—” Sophia continues, unperturbed, “that statistically, when someone who has never once brought a person home finally does, it usually means—”

“Don’t,” Cal warns again, leaning forward on his stool to try and make eye contact with Sophia.

“—they’ve already decided,” Sophia finishes, placing both her fists under her chin and batting her eyelashes. “So. When’s the wedding?”

The kitchen goes silent.

My face does something that I have no control over as I feel the heat start at my neck.

Cal chokes on the coffee his mother had just handed him.

Maggie dissolves. She folds over the counter, shoulders shaking, the laugh completely silent which somehow makes it worse.

“Sophia!” Cal’s mother’s wooden spoon makes contact with Sophia’s shoulder with a soft, dull thud. “Basta2, you’ll scare the poor girl away before she’s even finished her espresso.”

Sophia is still laughing, rubbing her shoulder, completely unrepentant. “I’m just trying to understand—”

“You’re being a menace,” Cal says, but I can tell the corner of his mouth is trying not to lift as he takes in my expression. He’s close enough that his arm is against mine, and he’s not moving it.

His mother sets a coffee in front of me. It’s small and dark and smells extraordinary.

“Drink,” she says. “It’s my special recipe. You look like you need it.”

I pick it up. I drink. It tastes like chocolate and warmth and it’s perfect.

Cal is looking out the window at the back of the property. There’s a smaller building out there—a guest house or office, separate from the main house, with double doors facing the yard. I’ve noticed him looking at it twice already.

Maggie notices too.

“Go,” she says, nodding toward the back. “We won’t kidnap her.” A beat. “Probably.”

Cal looks at me.

I nod. I’m okay. The coffee is extraordinary and his mother is already asking me how long I’ve known him, and his sisters are still arguing about whether Sophia’s comment was appropriate and I am, against all available evidence, completely fine.