Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 70488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70488 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 282(@250wpm)___ 235(@300wpm)
I ignored him and walked to my front door.
Two
If I say “first of all,” run. I’ve prepared charts, data, research, and will destroy you.
—Bernice to Hux
Hux
“Huxley Nelson Hosea,” my mother said through the phone. “Where are you?”
I rolled my eyes so hard my head ached. “I already told you I’m not coming.”
There was only so much family time I could deal with, and I’d done enough family events this week, thanks to the holiday, that my cup runneth over.
Or whatever that saying was.
“You sound like you’re at home doing nothing.”
I looked at the radio in the corner of my shop that betrayed me and said, “I am at home. But I’m not doing nothing.”
I was working on a car, drinking a beer.
Two of my favorite things in the world to do.
“It’s just dinner,” my mother groaned.
“Mom,” I said stiffly. “It’s dinner every single Sunday. I’m sorry, but I’m not part of the Reagan family. I’m a Hosea. We have lives of our own, and sometimes we don’t go to family dinner because we don’t want to.”
My mother had started planning weekly family dinners when the show Blue Bloods came out. She thought the whole “Sunday family dinner” thing was a great idea and started to implement it.
The only problem was that our family had never had a family sit-down dinner together. We’d always been everywhere. My sister in cheer, my brothers in lacrosse. Me in soccer. We’d never, ever had time to eat dinner together as a family, so we hadn’t.
Then Mom had started crying, and we’d had to start.
To this day sixteen years later, it was only a rare occasion that we had all the family together.
My sister, Heidi, worked at a dog food factory working two in the afternoon to eleven, five days a week, on a rotating schedule. My brother, Hampton, was a firefighter who worked forty-eight hours on, seventy-two hours off, also on a rotating shift. Harvey worked at a steel mill as a supervisor and was the only one of us who worked regular nine-to-five hours during the week.
Then there was me, who owned my own meat processing business that was attached to our parents’ store in town.
All four children had their own separate jobs, where on their off days they also had to come in to work at The Mercantile, my mom’s entire life.
Everyone loved The Mercantile.
Everyone but the Hosea siblings, who wanted nothing to do with it because it had consumed our entire childhoods.
Being forced to work there from the age of about twelve and up, all four of us had all but jumped at the chance to move out and find a career that could support us.
Which my mom freaking hated.
She wanted her family around her to give her free labor, any chance that she could get.
My mom was a tightwad.
Always had been.
She was also a taskmaster and wasn’t a very great boss.
I felt horrible for my mom’s employees.
They were definitely worth more than she paid them.
Listening to her tell you what to do, day in and day out, would be hard for someone who didn’t have to do it out of familial obligation.
Hell, sometimes it was hard to even like my mother, let alone love her.
“Are you even listening to me?” my mother grumbled.
I saw a car pull up and knew it was my new neighbor who was a club brother’s sister.
Creed had come to me when she was about to move in to explain her situation to me. He let me know that Bernice was delicate and I needed to watch out for her.
I had agreed, because who wouldn’t?
But that was until I saw her the first time.
She was a knockout.
Auburn hair that went down to her waist when it was free of a braid—which she had it in ninety-nine percent of the time. Small and skinny, but you’d never know due to the amount of clothes she had on at any given time.
There’d been one time when I’d seen her through the front window that my mouth had nearly dropped to the damn floor. Why? Because I’d seen her with only a single layer of clothing on, and I felt like I’d taken a hammer straight into the solar plexus.
She had a gorgeous body.
Though very slim, she had tits and ass for days. Her legs were long. Her hips would be perfect to accommodate my babies…
“Huxley!”
I sighed. “Mom, I’m at home, yes. But that’s because I’m freakin’ tired. I want a day off. You made me work for twelve hours yesterday hauling in boxes of shit. My back hurts. My shoulders hurt. My legs hurt. And I have to work all day tomorrow. I need a day off.”
As I explained, Bernice parked and got out of the car.
She walked up to the front door, but I could tell that she was freaking out. She was looking over her shoulder every few seconds.