Page 64 of Walking Red Flag

MILENA

Last night I’d slept perfectly.

It was the first full night of peaceful sleep I’d had since I’d moved out of my brother’s house.

Sadly, shortly after finding myself in the best place on Earth—Cutter’s arms—Shasha reminded me that I was babysitting everyone’s kids today so their parents could go out to a booze and shmooze for the City of Dallas.

I’d eagerly agreed to stay home and watch everyone’s kids.

The rest of them were headed to the champagne brunch that would only take just a few hours.

Sadly, only two minutes after crawling into Cutter’s lap, I crawled out of it.

After letting me know that he’d be at the coffee shop if I needed him, and him inputting every number he could think of into my phone, I’d left.

An hour later, I was at Shasha’s place with six children.

An hour after that, I started getting messages from Cutter.

Cutter:

What do you think about this?

I gasped at the amount of work he’d gotten done in just a couple of hours.

I now had floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side of the room. In the middle was a board that would eventually become the back counter where I kept all the machines.

“It’s gorgeous!” I said aloud, then typed it in so fast that I misspelled both words.

Me:

Tits Gorgonzola!

Me:

It’s gorgeous!

Me:

I was over animated and my fingers didn’t slow down enough to make sense of my words. Then I hit send without reading it, and yeah. That’s embarrassing. Please act like I never sent the first message. Also, please forgive me for my verbal word vomit.

Cutter didn’t respond, which gave me enough time to finish the fingerpainting craft that I was doing with all of the kids.

“Grandma gets mad when we paint on the counter,” Brando admitted.

“Grandma isn’t here. Aunt Millie is,” I replied cheekily.

Though, just sayin’, but the Carter matriarch would totally let them paint on the counter if they’d asked.

Likely what happened was that Brando had taken his painting to other places and hadn’t stayed at only the counter. Meaning, he wasn’t allowed to paint at her house anymore without an overabundance of supervision.

“I think we should make this bigger,” Lola said as she widened her arms, indicating the huge piece of paper that I’d gotten Brecken to source from her school.

We were making a mural to put on the walls of the principal’s office.

Only…

“Nathaniel, don’t you dare.” I narrowed my eyes at Nastya’s oldest.

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