Page 46 of I Can't Even

“Mom and Dad both have shit eyes.” He held out his hand. “I’m Auden.”

I shook his hand, and then was given an introduction to every single brother, again, as if they knew I hadn’t retained their names from the first time we were introduced.

“You got your glasses with you?” Quincy asked.

“In the cruiser,” he answered. “Want to run out and get them for me?”

Quincy was gone moments later, leaving me with six of the seven brothers staring at me.

“Your vision is bad enough you have to have your glasses on?” I wondered. “I had laser surgery when I was fifteen, and it was the best decision I’ve ever made.”

“We’ve all thought about it,” one of the brothers said, “but only Atlas ever went through with the procedure.”

“This is a nice place that you have, Ellodie.” Germaine, the dad of this tribe of tall, hot men, looked around. “I thought coming up to the building that it would be a bit run down on the inside like it is on the outside. But they updated it recently. I was in here a couple of years ago for a domestic dispute before I took the assistant chief position, and it was falling down around our ears.”

“I think it was updated about three years ago,” I said. “I just moved in last year, though.”

“It is a great location with you working at the hospital,” he said.

“It’s a great location, but pretty hard to find. It took me a while to find it this morning,” the youngest Carter brother, Garrett, grumbled. “Because this bitch doesn’t use his blinker.”

He pointed at Quinn, the youngest of Quaid’s triplet set.

“It’s no one’s business where I’m going,” Quinn argued.

“It is when we’re all literally following you,” Garrett contradicted him. “You were the only one with the address since y’all didn’t text in the group, but individually.”

“I don’t like texting in the group. You all send too many text messages,” Quinn defended himself.

“We don’t send that many,” Atlas or Auden said. “You just don’t like getting any messages. One message is too much in your opinion.”

Quinn shrugged, then looked at me. “Are you sure you want us protecting you?”

I opened my mouth, and then closed it before Quaid butted into our conversation. “She doesn’t get a choice.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it before common sense reared its ugly head.

He was right.

I needed to have someone protecting me. It freakin’ killed me to admit it, but I wasn’t trained in any way to defend myself.

Sure, I could lift a fifty-pound haybale up and over my head like it was a feather, but other than throwing a punch at someone standing still, I had no clue how to make sure I wasn’t murdered by a serial killer.

“Fine,” I said as I sat down on the arm of one couch. “What do we need to do from here?”

The brothers talked, and I mentally catalogued everything there was to know about the Carter men.

Quincy, Quaid, and Quinn were triplets. Then there were Auden and Atlas. Followed by Gable and Garrett. Rounding the crew off was the patriarch of the Carter Clan, Germaine, who looked freakin’ great for his age. The younger Carter men could only hope they looked half as good when they got to his age.

Each and every one of them were muscled, though Quaid and Garrett were a little more on the thick side. But I wouldn’t say they were fat by any means. It just meant they had way more muscle than the other six.

And all of them were dwarfing my delicate furniture that I’d gotten at an antique thrift store.

Maybe we should’ve gone to Quaid’s place…

Another knock on the door had me glancing at it nervously.

Were there more?

---