Page 84 of Tell Me Something True

“That’s something at least. But I’ve had my fill of watching one of my brothers in the throes of an extreme case of sexual tension for the day, so if you could stop with those longing looks and all that innuendo, that’d be great.”

Now they all looked at Miles.

Like he’d said before.

His sister had a big mouth.

He chomped on a piece of chicken. Toby had cheffed up what for most people would just be chicken and potatoes by placing the split chickens under bricks wrapped in foil and roasting them alongside whole baby potatoes tossed in olive oil and rosemary, and two pans of homemade cornbread, in the outdoor wood burning.

Everyone had oohed and aahed and were on their second helpings. Except Willow who was on her third.

To Miles, everything tasted like dirt.

Except the beans. They just tasted like shit.

“That’s it,” Verity muttered, tossing her napkin down on her empty plate. “I can’t take it. I cannot, in good conscience, ignore the elephant in this room any longer.”

Ian, bent over trying to get Bella to help him finish his green beans, looked up and frowned. “There’s a elephant here?”

“An elephant,” Kat corrected. “And it’s just an expression. It means there’s a secret but it’s a secret everyone knows, but no one wants to talk about.”

“Like Uncle Eli’s yips?”

“He doesn’t have that,” Urban said quickly, straightening in his seat, as if to block any bad luck from reaching Eli through the TV.

Verity huffed out a breath. His sister hated having attention pulled away from her. “Can we stop talking about Eli’s yips—”

Urban’s left eye twitched. “Stop saying—”

“—and start talking about Miles going through a major mid-life crisis?”

Now it was Miles’s eye that twitched. He pressed a finger against it. “I’m fine. And I’m only thirty.”

“Premature midlife crisis then, which is way worse because you don’t even have the imminent fear of death to blame for it. And you’re hardly fine. You’ve barely said a word since you got here—”

“Just enjoying my dinner,” he gritted out, stabbing a potato.

“—and you haven’t tried charming a single smile out of Kat.”

“Which I’ve appreciated,” Kat assured him in her husky voice.

Obviously, she hadn’t missed his scintillating conversation and humorous tales of being a small-town police officer.

Then again, she wasn’t a fan of Miles or his charm.

Which was complete bullshit. He was charming as hell.

“Nor have you flirted with Willow,” Verity went on, relentless in her pursuit of whatever the hell point she was trying to make, “which is so unlike you, especially since it combines two of your favorite things; flirting and ticking off Urban.”

“Flirting isn’t one of my favorite things.”

The adults all stared at him again with varying degrees of amusement—Ian was too busy not so subtly sliding his green beans, one by one, onto the floor, to call bullshit on his response.

Verity rolled her eyes. “Please. You love flirting. It’s like some sort of Pavlovian response to seeing a woman. Any woman. Regardless of age, sexual orientation, or relationship status.”

Way to make him sound like an asshole.

“I appreciate and respect women,” he said tightly, offended that she thought so little of him. “I love getting to know them. And I don’t think it’s wrong of me to give them attention, to do my best to make them feel special and beautiful and interesting. Because they are.”

---