Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Please let this not be Franken-dinner, she thought.
“I can do this. I can totally… do this.”
Just as she plunged her ladle into the sauce, male voices percolated down at the front door.
“Upstairs, yeah?”
“Yup,” Dev answered her twin. “And then everything else in the basement. She wants to clean her weapons on the second-story porch so they don’t stink up the house.”
Heavy footfalls boomed an ascent up the stairs, and she looked overhead to follow the creaking of floorboards as the males made their way to the corner room that faced the back view. She imagined the two of them chatting back and forth about something, nothing, anything, as they unpacked the gunmetal that had recently come into her life.
Refocusing on her pan, she put a ladle’s worth of sauce on the bottom to help things not stick, then she started laying out the noodles shoulder to shoulder, just like her granmahmen always had.
“Her weapons” was certainly a new phrase, at least as it related to Lyric. But she’d been learning all kinds of things in the Brotherhood’s training center, like how to shoot a handgun, a rifle, and a shotgun, or throw a grenade, or fight with a knife or with only her hands. She didn’t know where it was all leading, and if she was honest, she didn’t see herself out in the alleys, hunting for lessers.
Not with Lash knowing who she was, not with the chance of her running across him. If the head of the Lessening Society got ahold of his seriously estranged son’s mate? Yeah, nobody needed to think about that outcome.
Still, she was getting physically stronger, mentally tougher, and more secure in herself. She hadn’t figured out what she was going to do long-term, but she was already helping her mahmen amplify her Etsy business with some good social media engagement. After all, she was well familiar with how the algorithms worked, and whaddya know. Using what she’d learned for a higher purpose, to help Luchas House and Safe Place?
Made her feel good.
“Okay, next…” As her voice trailed off, she went for the plate of shredded soft cheese. “It’s the mozzarella and then the cottage cheese.”
No ricotta. Her father Qhuinn was not a ricotta guy, and she was making this especially for him—
“Are you sure you guys want to do this?”
She looked up at her grandfather. Rocke had just come out of the bedroom, his hair wet from a fresh shower, his flannel shirt pressed, his khakis, the same. As he settled himself onto the stool in front of her, Lyric’s heart ached for him. He was having a hard time of it, which was not unexpected. All those years of a happy mating? For godsakes, she and Dev hadn’t even been together for a month and she would be utterly lost without him. After a hundred years or more?
“We’re very sure,” she said with a smile as she glanced out toward the hearth.
The beautiful cloisonné urn that contained her granmahmen’s ashes sat in a position of honor in the center of the mantel, right under a photograph of the gazebo and the pond that had been enlarged and framed. They’d had a beautiful celebration of life last week, and everyone from their little community had come. Seeing all the people standing around, hearing stories and sharing laughter and tears, had been a reminder of how supported they all were—and she had caught Dev standing off to the side, staring over the males and females with a banked expression of humble surprise.
It was as if he had been alone for so long, he’d forgotten what being in a crowd of family was like. Or… perhaps he had never known that closeness, and didn’t that make her glad he was with all of them.
“Well, I’m happy you’re here,” Rocke said. “You two fill the house up. But I don’t want you to think you have to take care of me.”
Lyric started on her next layer, working with the noodles again. “Oh, I promise it’s not that. He and I want to live together, and your basement is perfect for us. We’re grateful you’re taking us in.”
And okay, sure, fine, it was a little to take care of her grandfather. He’d lost some weight, and though he was resolutely composed in the old school way of things, the dark bags under his eyes were the telltale that he was not sleeping during the day. She also had the feeling he just wandered around a lot, going from room to room, no doubt reliving happier times. They kept finding cans of Coke or half-eaten sandwiches or books that were cracked open in all these odd places in the house.
Like he kept trying to find a place to settle, and never quite got one.
The truth was, they’d all been a little worried about him, and with her and Dev here to keep an eye on the male? It was a good thing, all the way around—