Page 88 of Devious Gambit

“Great,” he answered, folding his arms across his chest, expecting a missile of negativity fired at him from the senior Luxon men.

“You can always come back to the firm when the shit hits the fan,” I told him.

He read between the lines and shot me a scowl. “Yeah, I’m not dumping a lucrative career so you can spend your life swimming in the tropics.”

“Researching in the tropics,” I corrected him.

“Researching chicks in bikinis in the tropics,” he hit back.

“No, Maxwell,” smirking when his hands clenched into fists at being called Maxwell, “taking samples of coral and-”

Grandpa loudly cleared his throat. “You’re still not hung up on that little reverie?”

“Hung up?” I hissed. Erin patted my forearm to calm me down.

My mom sounded in, “Do you remember that tank you had when you were a little boy? You used to collect water boatmen, crawdads, tadpoles, and minnows and observe their behavior…”

“Who do you think he takes after?” my grandma asked. “I can’t think of anyone in the family who flirts with sea life.”

Erin snorted under her wine glass. “Is that why you turned up at my apartment in a foul mood? The porpoises won’t flirt back. Poor bro.”

“Why is my family so fucked up?”

“Language!” Mom bellowed.

“Maybe Jace is adopted,” Erin suggested.

“I don’t think so, he looks too much like the Howard side,” grandma stated.

“Thank fuck for that,” I mumbled. The Howard side is my grandmother’s family. She and I were always tight when I was a kid and it’s probably because I look and behave like her people.

“The Howards have a naughty streak,” my grandma added with a twinkle of pride in her eye. “I won’t tell you about the day my father was caught with his pants down-”

“-We don’t need to hear dirty stories at the table on Christmas day,” my mom shouted.

“Party pooper,” Erin giggled.

Celli’s black head popped up from under the table and I tossed him some turkey meat and scratched his head.

“Didn’t you have a cousin who fished?” Grandpa asked Grandma.

“Yes,” she answered proudly. “He drowned on the Ivory Coast while dragging up a rather large swordfish. Poor man.”

“Can we get on with the announcement,” Max stressed. “I need to get home to the wife and kids.”

“Under the thumb,” I mocked him and he hit me in the face with a turkey bone.

Dad glanced at Grandpa to see if he was ready, receiving a nod as a reply. “This is not altogether good news,” my father started.

“Wait,” I said, rising up from my chair to seize the bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet and pouring myself a large glass. Whatever was about to be announced was unlikely to fall in my favor, so I needed some poison to help the bad news go down.

My father continued, “I may as well pull the Band-Aid off in one fell swoop. You two boys wouldn’t know that your grandpa has been diagnosed with leukemia.”

An eerie silence draped over us with everyone looking in Grandpa’s direction.

“It’s terminal, I’m afraid,” Grandpa added.

“Did you know this?” I asked Erin.

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