Page 600 of The Winslow Brothers

Winslow Brothers Five Years Later

Flynn

My house is built out of concrete and steel, but with the way my twin boys are tearing through it, the damn thing might as well be made out of toothpicks and prayers.

A crash echoes from the kitchen, followed by the unmistakable sound of something clattering to the floor. Then,silence.If you’re a parent, you know that silence, and you know it’snevergood.

“What’s going on in there?” I question, pushing off the couch to standing. My beautiful Daisy, curled up beside the spot I just left with some romance book that Cassie Kelly gave her, doesn’t even look up. Part of my role as the man of this house is to handle this kind of shit so she doesn’t have to.

“I don’t even want to know,” she says, and I laugh.

“Trust me, I don’t either.”

She glances up at me with a cheeky grin. “Too bad for you you’re the dad—aka the muscle.”

“You make our parental approach to our kids sound like we’re mob bosses.”

“I see no issues with that.” Daisy just shrugs and puts her focus back to her book, flipping a page with one index finger. “We do what we have to do to survive, and I’ve always loved cannoli.”

“I guess I’ll handle it,” I mutter, and my wife just flashes another grin at me.

“Love you, Flynn.”

“Yeah, yeah, Dais. Love you too,” I call over my shoulder as I make my way to the scene of the crime.

I round the corner and find our seven-year-old twin menaces in the middle of the kitchen.

Ryder is on the floor, groaning dramatically, while Roman stands over him like he just won a WWE title belt. A barstool has tipped over, and there are crumbs from their abandoned bag of potato chips mashed up fucking everywhere on the hardwood floor.

I swear, these two have been nothing but wild chaos since the moment they came into this world, a stark representation of the Jude and Ty Winslow side of my genetics. Lord knows those two fools were downright insane growing up, and if it weren’t for Rem’s and my protective tendencies, they never would have made it through puberty.

One time, Rem and I stopped our two youngest brothers—who were under ten at the time—from making Molotov cocktails on the Fourth of July just before disaster struck. Outside, on our uncle Brad and aunt Paula’s very wooden deck that’s connected to their very wooden lake house in the middle of a fucking forest, they would have turned the whole fucking thing into scorched earth.

No doubt, we all dodged a bullet that day.

But now, I’ve got two crazy fools of my own to keep alive.

“All right, why does it sound like a WWE wrestling match in here when you told your mom you just wanted to ‘chill and eat a snack’?” I cross my arms, giving them the Dad Stare.

Roman straightens up, grinning. “We’re not wrestling, Dad.”

Ryder, still on the ground, his hair visibly tousled, nods. “Yeah. We’re not wrestling.”

Fucking liars. The both of them.I narrow my eyes. “Then what are you doing?”

“Uh…” Roman glances at Ryder briefly before meeting my eyes again with a confident smile like the sarcastic little shit I know him to be. “We’re just…uh…hugging.”

“You were hugging?”

“Yeah,” Roman says with a nonchalant shrug. “Aggressively hugging.”

Aggressively hugging?Give me a fucking break.

I glare at Roman. “You and I both know you’re full of shit.”

“No, he’s not. We’re hugging,” Ryder says, coming to his brother’s defense.

“Yeah. Okay.” I sigh and run a hand down my face. “How about youaggressively hugeach other off the floor and clean up this damn mess before your mom sees it?”

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