by Violet Duke
“Bennett coaches with me over at the high school,” continued Sienna. “He, Jackson and Donovan here have been friends since…high school, right?”
The guys nodded.
Lia turned to Bennett. “My fiancé and I were looking for our own place recently and we heard a rumor that there are only like four apartments in the whole building. Is that true?”
“We like our space, and we didn’t want to deal with a bunch of tenants,” confirmed Donovan. “So when Jackson inherited the old building from a relative, we completely shelled it out and made four huge apartments, spanning eight floors.”
“Meaning there’s a fourth musketeer in that last apartment?” inquired Xoey, growing more fascinated with the guys by the minute.
“Actually, Jackson’s old buddy from college bought that one—in cash—back when we were first starting to design the building. The guy is one of those software geniuses who made a ton of money in college and just kept on making more of it. So we gave him the penthouse floor.” Bennett shook his head. “Not that he’s even been back in the states to come visit it once.”
“Dog him all you want,” countered Sienna, “but his funds helped you guys trick out that building exactly the way you want. Pool, gym, soundproof walls to counteract the revolving door of women you all date.”
Jackson tossed a pretzel at her. “Don't lump me in with these two. For the record, I haven't dated anyone in at least six months.” A microflash of buried pain darkened his eyes for a bit.
And was gone a second later.
While no one else seemed to notice, Xoey did. Because Isaac did the same thing from time to time.
The easy going smile was back on Jackson’s face two blinks later. “And I mean dating in even the loose definition that Bennett and Donovan use, too. So you can stop with the slander.”
Sienna gestured zipping her mouth shut but her eyes were still dancing with laughter.
“Speaking of which, how’s your apartment holding up?” queried Bennett with his first serious tone of the night.
“Yeah, we still don’t like that you moved out to that old walk-up on the industrial edge of town,” added Donovan in that big-brothering way Lia’s brothers always spoke to her.
Xoey chuckled to herself over the prospect of Cactus Creek having a dangerous edge of town. Or any sort of edginess whatsoever, dangerous or otherwise. Theirs was more a fun, offbeat, marshmallow-bouncy, no-sharp-corners type of town that could probably be the inspiration of a fantastic board game.
Jackson was apparently with the guys in his assessment that they filmed crime shows here on the weekends, however. “My buddy’s offer for you to housesit the penthouse for him for the rest of this year still stands. The soundproofing works up there, too,” he added drolly.
When Sienna turned bright pink, the tide of the conversation shifted completely over to a different variety of big-brothering altogether. Xoey found herself thoroughly entertained. As an only child, she’d never had this sort of sibling relationship with anyone. And since she’d been living on her own since she was eighteen, she’d never felt the need to be coddled.
But it seemed kind of nice.
It didn’t come as a surprise when Sienna smoothly excused herself to go to the ladies room without answering any of the guys’ snooping questions.
What had come as a surprise to Xoey, however, was the belated realization that somehow, she’d managed to throw back four jumbo shots of tequila while chasing it with what was probably the world’s tallest glass of margarita on the rocks, strong enough for her to be able to exhale dragon fire if she got too close to a lit candle.
She had an awesome bar staff.
Raising another shot up to her bartenders, she quickly tossed it back.
A micro-minute later, Xoey heard Lia answering a call from her fiancé Hudson, on a cell phone which, strangely, sounded like it was still ringing even though she was talking.
Huh.
Some expert deductive reasoning soon had her entertaining the possibility that the ringing was coming from inside her head.
She shushed everyone at the table to silence to see for sure.
Meanwhile, she gazed down in surprise at the now empty, fairly blurry margarita glass and a fantastically architectural leaning tower of what looked like six stacked shot glasses next to it.
Oh yeah, she was drunk alright.
CHAPTER FOUR
XOEY WAVED HAPPILY when she saw Sienna and Lia return to the table around the same time. They were looking at her strangely, but that wasn’t anything new.
What was new was the fact that she was sitting in Jackson’s lap.
At her double take, he chuckled softly. “Hello again, sweets. I’d shake your hand for the third time but I’m afraid you’ll slide back onto the ground again if I do.”
She shrugged with a smile, and whispered loudly by way of logical answer, “Hey…where’re my shoes?”
The guys smiled at her dotingly.
She nodded back her thanks. Yes, that was a good answer.
“Xoey’s completely sloshed,” informed Bennett with an adoring headshake. “Cutest little drunk ever.”
She turned around to see who they were talking about.
Donovan grinned.
Xoey’s eyes widened at the effect.
Suddenly, a stupendous discovery hit her. She turned to study each of the three guys at the table then more carefully, and then murmured incredulously, “Holy crap.”
“Figured out another of life’s mysteries, beautiful?” asked Jackson.
Yes. Yes, she had. “Doc, Bashful, and Dommy are my three exes!” she exclaimed, swinging her gaze over to Sienna and Lia, expecting to hear applause over her tremendous discovery.
Weirdly, they weren’t clapping.
Lia was, however, smiling. “Let me guess. She gave you three dwarf names?”
“Yep,” replied the guys in unison.
“I’m Doc, apparently.” Jackson gave her a wink behind those sexy wire-rimmed glasses.
“McSizzling,” she added, remembering how the pharmacist she’d dated for the past few weeks had liked folks to use his full name. “Doc McSizzling.”
“And apparently, I’m Bashful,” supplied Bennett, who was simultaneously flirting with a gorgeous redhead the next table over.
“Because he and his pocket buddy aren’t bashful at all,” explained Xoey in complete drunken clarity.
Lia and Sienna turned their amused eyes over to Donovan.
“Making you Dommy dwarf,” laughed Sienna. “I can see that.”
Jackson smirked over Donovan’s annoyed look, but remained silent.
Bennett had no similar sense of male decorum. “Can you just imagine a little stuffed Disney dwarf wearing the same expression as Donovan, with tiny handcuffs and a blindfold in the pocket of his Italian suit?”
Donovan ignored their resulting laughter and gazed at Xoey. “Sweetheart, what were you saying earlier about the three of us being your exes?”
Dommy dwarf was her new favorite, most attentive dwarf. “Each of you are almost exactly like my three exes.”
Sienna frowned.
And Xoey proceeded to dub thee Grumpy dwarf.
“Xo, you’ve had way more than three exes.”
Ah, so she was another wise doctor like Jackson. Duly noted. “I have. But I’ve only had three exes and ohs.”
Fascinatingly, a cartoon vision of tic-tac-toe played out in her mind’s eye and she smiled at it, wondering if she would win.
Jackson placed the straw from her water glass up to her lips for her to quench her thirst.
She had been thirsty. Wow. Doc was now edging out Dommy for best dwarf ever.
For some reason, she had all the guys’ complete attention now.
Along with two somewhat uncomfortable looking girlfriends.
Was it something she said?
“Um,” said Lia glancing at Sienna. “You know, Sienna and I aren’t the best fit for this sort of girl talk. Exes, may
be. But definitely not, errr, ‘ohs.’”
Sienna nodded emphatically while smacking Bashful for snorting. “Dani and Quinn have way more estrogen in each of their little pinkies.”
“So maybe we should do this later,” concluded Lia. “Since Dani is in the middle of painting her new house with Luke, and Quinn and Rylan are still spoiling Coop with his first trip to Disneyland.”
Speaking of Disneyland. Xoey munched on the pretzel Jackson held up to her lips, and then informed them glumly, “Do you know that sometimes, it’s not Cinderella that leaves without a trace? Sometimes it’s Prince Charming.” A sad sigh fizzled past her frown.
All smiles left the guys’ faces and three mirrored looks of concern gazed back at her.
It was almost identical to the look of sympathy Dani always gave her when this particular sob story of her past would sneak back into her memories.
No. Not happening. She didn’t want sympathy tonight.
Blinking in revelation a second later, she knew then exactly what she did want.
Another epic oh.
Or at least that sense of truly connecting with an amazing man that came with it.
Waving away the guys’ worried looks, she stated firmly, “Don’t you go feeling sorry for me. Fairytale endings are overrated. Seriously, I’d take a real and honest-to-God ‘oh’ over that fantasy any day. That kind of connection you just can’t fake.”
She’s tried. And apparently, guys get really bruised egos over that.
Could be because her version of faking it was inspired by When Harry Met Sally.
And Xoey certainly wasn’t a Meg Ryan.
She got her second tequila wind then and smiled at the return of the warm rain of simple, undemanding tranquility, cheerfully thinking of the last Meg Ryan movies she’d seen.
Yes, plural. There’d been a Meg Ryan movie marathon last week when Isaac had been out of town for the day. And she’d watched every last one.
“That looks like a happy thought,” murmured Jackson encouragingly. “Care to share with the rest of the class?”
“Gabe’s gadget read me wrong,” she declared. And then smiled again.
The guys were now completely puzzled.
The girls were not.
Lia’s brows hopped up in shock. “I don’t think anyone’s ever said that before about one of my brother’s gadgets.”
“Oh!” Sienna glanced at Lia’s watch in question. “I heard about that. In the gym the other week, right? That mood-analyzer Gabe built into your watch to lo-jack you.”
“I wouldn’t say lo-jack,” replied Lia loyally.
Xoey snorted. Lo-jacking was the absolute least intrusive methods the Spencer boys used to watch and worry over their little sister.
“Yeah, okay. Lo-jacking is probably accurate.”
Donovan slid his business card over to Lia. “Tell your brother to call me. I might be able to get some big financial backers if he decides to put that watch into production. I’ve actually been following your brother’s work with biofeedback technology—”
Bennett rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to Xoey, cutting him off. “So tell us why a wrong gadget-reading made you smile, honey.”
She looked at the five pairs of eyes staring at her now.
“You can’t laugh,” she warned.
Bennett shook his head. “I’m not sure we can guarantee that.”
Lia and Sienna both whacked him on the arm.
“What? It’s a compliment. The woman is freakin’ hilarious.”
“We won’t laugh,” promised Sienna.
Xoey mulled it over, and then admitted quietly. “I wasn’t thinking about a guy when Gabe’s gadget read me.”
Donovan grinned. “Well this conversation just took an interesting turn.”
“Perv.” Xoey couldn’t help but chuckle. “I wasn’t thinking about a girl either.” At his playfully disappointed look, she added as a consolation for his pervy entertainment, “I was thinking about three guys.”
A look of surprise preceded a firm headshake. “I hope you don’t mean us, babe. Because we don’t share our women,” he replied. “We tend to lean toward the possessive as hell style of dating.”
All three guys nodded resolutely.
That was so unbelievably cute.
“My three exes,” she clarified. “I was thinking—well, reminiscing, really—about my three exes when...” She narrowed her eyes on Lia and Sienna. “You two better not laugh.”
At the girls’ silent nod, Xoey revealed her dark, dirty secret in full.
“I was reminiscing about my three exes when I was watching Kate and Leopold.”
A collectively bewildered look crossed all five faces before her.
“Is that the royal British couple?” asked Bennett, thoroughly confused. “No, wait…”
Jackson was tapping away at his phone, as was Lia.
Lia was faster. “It’s a rom-com movie with Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman.”
The five bewildered expressions were back.
And all the water and pretzels Jackson was plying her with was making the drunken haze lift enough for her to notice.
“It was up on cable during a Meg Ryan marathon,” she explained weakly.
When Sienna reached over to sniff Xoey’s margarita glass, Xoey’s forehead hit her forearms on the table. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me you guys. I’ve never wanted a guy to climb up a fire escape with flowers for me, nor have I ever wanted to stand at the bow of a ship and risk toppling headfirst into the Atlantic.” She peeked up at her friends. “But I was a freakin’ crying mess that whole day. I even looked up some real life reunion stories at the Empire State Building. There were a ton, and I cried through those too.”
Sienna gave Lia a puzzled look. And Lia filled in, “Sleepless in Seattle. Even I knew that one.”
“I’ve never been that girl, you know?” Xoey shook her head, wondering where it all went wrong. “I’ve always, always been a Sally not a Kate.”
“Winslet?” queried Sienna, looking utterly lost without map.
“I think we’re back to Kate and Leopold,” offered Lia, though she looked unsure herself.
“Yes, Kate and Leopold. They were soulmates that defied time and space. It’s inspiring. I want to find an epic love like that. A man like that.” She exhaled a long, sad sigh. “I know, stupid, right?”
“Not stupid, honey. It’s sweet.” Jackson stroked a comforting hand on her back.
She looked up and saw the three men on the table looking at her the way Lia’s brothers always did when they were hovering over her.
Her heart squeezed in her chest. Growing up an only child without even any cousins in America, Xoey had never known what it felt like to have that. And with her parents having moved back to Spain not long after her eighteenth birthday, she’d almost forgotten what it was like to have a family at all.
Her parents were good people, and if they were still living in Arizona with her, she had no doubt they’d have a great, close relationship. But they’d had to return home after her only uncle on her father’s side was killed in a terrible house fire, along with his wife. They’d left seven very young children orphaned, not to mention two aging parents, and a family business to take care of.
There had never been any question. Her hard working, loyal immigrant parents’ American dream had come to an end at the wake of that family tragedy.
Even so, she knew they were unequivocally happy back in Spain.
She checked in on them frequently, emailing them weekly and talking with them a few times a month at the very least. With her youngest cousin having just gotten into a prestigious college preparatory academy, and the next three above him still smack-dab in college, money was tight, of course, but they never let her send them any.
They were good parents.
They’d just…had to focus their parental attention on her seven cousins for the last twelve years. Which made sense. She’d been eighteen when they’d left, wit
h a scholarship to cover her undergraduate tuition, and the work ethic to be able to work around her school schedule to pay for the rest. She’d managed. Hell, she’d thrived—look at her today.
Still.
Seeing three real live big brotherly guys in front of her made her feel a familial void in her life she’d never really given much thought to until now.
“Can I be Snow White?” she asked so softly she wondered if they could hear her. She gazed at the guys one by one as she stated her case. “I don’t have any experience being a sibling, and I definitely won’t cook and clean for you. But I’m an excellent wing-woman, and can make sure you’re never without beer in this town.” Feeling the still-potent alcohol in her system giving her liquid courage, she asked again, “So…can I be Snow White? Can I keep you?”
All three guys smiled at her with nothing short of sheer adoration.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been told there would be no chance of sex in a sweeter way,” replied Donovan, thoughtfully.
“And via mass rejection, too. Efficient,” teased Bennett.
Xoey kept staring at them, not knowing what to do with those non-answers.
“That’s a yes, sweetie,” supplied Jackson. “Sienna would probably welcome the company, in fact. Since we’re apparently a little overbearing.”
Sienna’s indelicate snort redefined Jackson’s parameters of ‘little.’
“You know, I really should introduce you three to my brothers,” chimed in Lia. “Who, you can borrow, Xo, if ever these guys are busy big-brothering Sienna.”
Xoey gave her a hell no headshake. “Not happening. Those Spencer boys are a handful, and Caine is way too hot for me to think of as a brother. Sorry. I know that grosses you out and pisses Isaac off, but it’s the truth.”
Bennett frowned. “I’m not sure which I’m offended over more, the fact that you think we’re the tame bunch, or that you think this Caine guy is hotter than me. And who’s Isaac?”