Page 12 of Uncharted

“Pie or cake?”

“Cobbler. It’s peach season, kiddo, and I want what your momma’s got.”

“She would give you a dozen if you called her up and asked.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been a minute since I heard about you calling your family, so maybe it’s a good chance for you to deal with them and don’t leave it to me.”

“It hasn’t been…” I began, stopping when she gave me a look that clearly said ‘cut the shit’, so I did. Then I thought about it, and guilt squirmed in my gut. “You’re right.”

“Damn right I am,” she said, picking her book up. “So tell Xander the happy news.”

“Ya don’t have the cobbler yet,” I reminded her.

She looked over her book. “Now why would I do that? Are you not good for your word?”

I frowned, ignoring a thump and a groan from the brothers. “That’s just mean, Cait.”

There were a lot of things in this world I accepted, and yeah, that included the fact that many people took one look at me and gave me a wide berth. I was a big guy; I was a loud guy, and I wasn’t exactly tactful, so I gave people a certain idea of what I was like. I didn’t blame them, even if it stung when I was given the kind of treatment reserved for someone who was a threat. But my parents had instilled in me an understanding of how to go through the world.

My daddy was a big man like me, a little smaller, but big enough to get the same sort of attention. Except he was more like Trevor and Mav, quieter, serious, and with a resting face that looked mean as hell. He was the first to teach me and my brothers that we would probably be giants in a world of smaller people and we needed to learn how to be gentle. It had been our mom who taught us exactly what that meant to, uh…different results.

Cait knew I had absorbed certain lessons from my daddy, taking them and shoving them down deep so they were as much a core part of me as my heart, lungs, bones, and veins. We were taught that our word should count as much as our lives, and if you couldn’t keep your word, then you worked like hell with every breath to still follow through. That you were loyal to those closest to you, that betrayal and backstabbing was the worst thing you could do, except for murder and rape. And that at some point, you were going to have to make a choice between what was easiest and what was best, and it was up to us to make the choice and live with it.

“Not if you meant what you said,” she said, and I sighed, knowing when I was beaten.

“I still wish you had a younger sister,” I told her.

“Younger, eh?” she asked, her eyes coming over the book, and well-honed instincts rang out in alarm.

“Just so she’s closer to my level,” I told her. “You’re too wise and experienced for me to have a chance. If I’m gonna be with someone, they’ve gotta be as gorgeous as you, but not always running over me like a tank.”

“Just most of the time,” she said, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Exactly, I don’t mind mostly being wrapped around someone’s fingers,” I said brightly.

I was intentionally trying to charm her, but I had never once used lies when I charmed someone…as far as I knew, anyway. Cait was a good-looking woman and, honestly, she wasn’t all that much older than me. Probably not much more of an age gap than between Colin and Xander. Except it was Cait, who would no sooner look at one of us like that than we would toward her. She was one of the guys, an older sister, and sometimes a cranky single mom, but she was Cait.

And she was gorgeous; I didn’t care if she sometimes looked older than she was, or that there might be more lines in her face than someone in their late forties should have. She was love, fire, spite, determination, and capability all wrapped into one.

“How do you do that?” she asked in a quieter voice, staring at me with curiosity as she dropped her book.

“Do what?” I asked, confused.

“You’re the only one who flirts with me, and it feels like it’s flirting yet not,” she said with a shake of her head. “Like you’d really give me a chance if I wasn’t the Den Mother for you fools.”

I grinned. “Because I would. You’re gorgeous, dangerous, and capable. Hard not to feel a little pitter-patter of the heart, right?”

She stared at me for a few heartbeats, barely blinking when a thump from the wrestling pair echoed up the hallway. “Your mother was right about you; you have soul eyes.”

“Soul eyes?” I wondered. “That uh…sounds like somethin’ she would say, but I, uh…dunno what it means.”

“You don’t need to,” she said with such fondness in her voice that I felt like a little boy again. A little boy standing in a worn-down but clean kitchen, holding a flower I had carefully dug up from the woods behind our home and stuffed into a cracked pot because I wanted to gift it but not kill it. A little boy whose mother stared at him with the same sense of wonder and something that was like happiness, but a painful kind, in her eyes as she hugged me with a quiet sob that was shared only between us.

“I’m sorry,” that boy had whispered, confused because gifts weren’t supposed to make people sadder, and his mother was already sad; he could feel it hanging off her like heavy, oversized clothes.

“No, my sweet boy,” she had whispered, holding him so close it felt like he couldn’t breathe. Except it was the good sort, the kind where you felt like you’d never breathe right again, and that was kind of okay.

Cait shook herself and sighed. “By the way, I forgot, something came for you.”