Page 115 of Free to Fall

“Mama and Dad?”

“Don’t ask. Let’s just say there’s no punishment you, Chuck, or I endured combined as teenagers equals how furious she is with him.” He lifts my glasses up and stares down into my face before quirking a brow. “Besides, there’s our twin thing.”

“Jon,” I reprimand.

“You need me here.”

“You should be back in Connecticut.” What I leave unsaid is supervising our father so he doesn’t go off the rails between our mother’s fury and his inability to reach me since I blocked him from calling after the first day.

He hasn’t stopped trying to reach out to Kalie and Grace, who calmly just ignore him.

Jon clasps his hand over my mouth. I glare at him. He leans forward conspiratorially, informing me, “Connecticut is a four-letter word this week.”

I mumble, “Issasmoresanfoursetters.”

“What did you say?” Jon lifts his hand.

Glaring at him, I enunciate, “It has more than four letters. Technically, it has four syllables.”

Loping his arm over my shoulders, he leads me back to my lounger. “Same difference.”

Before I can formulate a response to the man who argued with his Harvard professor for two hours on the finer details regarding the importance the USS Lassen had in rescuing hostages from a passenger cruise ship, he taunts our younger cousin. “Besides, it’s not like I could trust Mr. Hollywood to take care of you.”

“I was doing a fucking fine job of it before you arrived.”

“Tuck your dick back in your board shorts, Pete. No one here cares about seeing it,” Kalie snarks. Her head flops back down since the surprise isn’t some hot celebrity she can hook up with.

Peter winces. “You girls are getting more vicious as you age.”

“See what happens when your species turns on us?” Grace’s smile is feral.

“Is it time to start day drinking yet?” I wonder.

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” Kalie warbles the infamous line from the old Alan Jackson/Jimmy Buffet anthem.

“Christ, Kalie. Are you taking singing lessons from Aunt Em drunk at a karaoke bar?” Peter sneers.

“Are you disparaging my singing?” she asks sweetly.

“No, I’m questioning if anyone in a twenty-mile radius is now deaf,” he volleys.

Kalie isn’t about to take an insult like that sitting down. Quickly, I duck behind Jon as Kalie unscrews her thermos of ice water and dumps it right onto Peter’s lap before he puts together what she’s doing.

Jon chortles even as he pulls me down onto the dry part of the lounger. Peter leaps up to chase Kalie. “You’re threatening the continuance of the Hunt line! Christ, that was cold, you pain in my ass!”

“More like a pain in your balls, Pete. I thought you passed biology in college.”

“Watch your smart mouth, Kalie.” He catches up to her and scoops her off her feet. Stepping over to his pool, he simply walks off the edge, ensuring Kalie takes the plunge with him.

“Oh, good. I got here just in time for the good stuff.” Jon grins.

I scrub my face against his shoulder. “No, you got here just in time for me.”

He presses a kiss against the crown of my head. “I’ll always be here for you, Laura.”

That causes my heart to flip painfully in my chest because another man who I loved also said that to me. Just turned out to be a lot shorter time than I expected.

From the Journal of Dr. Laura Lockwood

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