Page 85 of Down & Dirty

Jake turned around, his eyes on me now. “Don’t you want to get back to that pretty girl you convinced to come freeze her butt off this weekend?”

Of course I did. But there was something nice about knowing we’d given Sky a little time to herself. So I pushed the cart ahead of me into store and reassured him, “She’s enjoying herself just fine.”

“Without you around, I believe it,” Mack said, falling into step beside me. “You two work together, right? Fishing off the company pier?”

It was a little shocking that my brother had actually noticed that detail. “We don’t work together directly. It’s fine.”

“Too bad we don’t have any ladies in our office for you,” Jake snickered, clapping Mack on the shoulder as he passed him.

“No thanks,” he muttered bitterly, but my father had already disappeared down the frozen food aisle.

“Bachelor for life, huh?” I teased.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Like you’re husband material now? Whatever. With your revolving door, you’re worse than me.”

I coughed into my hand to hide an uncomfortable laugh.Husband material.Shit. Given my track record, I wasn’t going to argue with him. And I sure as shit wasn’t going to tell him I was already married. But the amount of disbelief on his face pissed me off. I’d never cared about marriage, or even considered it, before Skylar, but now? Now that I’d gotten to know her, to hold her? Now, husband material was maybe exactly what I wanted to be.

“Maybe I’m finally growing up.”

“If that were true, you’d stop riding and get a real job.”

I shot Mack a look. “I have a real job, asshole. Just cause it’s not as boring as moving dirt, doesn’t mean my paychecks are any less real.”

He laughed, but it wasn’t funny. “That’s right, it’s all about the money. You figure out that magic number you need to hit? Or are you just going to keep falling until you stay down?”

The memory of my fall at the end of last season flashed through me, my back twitching like it had heard him. This was a tired argument. Normally it came from Jake, but he was too busy looking at what was left of the frozen vegetables. “I’m pretty sure OTM wouldn’t have hired me if they didn’t think I still had some wins left in me.”

My brother shook his head with a disgusted smirk. “Always for sale.”

“At least I’m doing something I enjoy.”

“Are you?” he asked, his head cocking to the side like he knew something I didn’t.

I went to respond just as Mack was pelted in the chest with a bag of frozen corn.

We both looked over to see Jake coming our way, a second bag still in his hands. “Go get the marshmallows.”

Mack shook his head again but walked away without saying anything else.

Jake tossed the second bag in the cart while I bent to retrieve the one off the floor. “Skylar know what she’s in for tomorrow?”

“You mean his attitude?”

“I mean you two arguing about the mashed potatoes and god knows what else.” My father’s eyes were bright and playful, even as he gave me a long-suffering look. I didn’t think it was just having Skylar there; he seemed more at ease in general.

“She has a brother, she understands.”

He sniffed, like he didn’t believe me. “At least it’s just the two of you.”

“You heard from Beau lately?” I was still surprised he’d reached out after the photos from the premiere had hit the tabloids.

“He checks in. Seems like they’ve got him on something super high-level these days. We have our calls monitored or some nonsense.” His tone was annoyed, but I didn’t miss the way he gripped the cart handle a little tighter. We were all uneasy with Beau’s deployments. How could we not be?

Beau would hate us worrying about him. Especially at Thanksgiving. It was his favorite holiday. “It’s probably for the best, keep him from talking your ear off with stories.”

Jake laughed at that, pushing the cart around the corner as I grabbed a bag of pastel mints from a display and dropped them into the cart.

We found Mack two aisles over, standing behind a couple of women, each of them rifling through the bags of marshmallows on the bottom shelf. They were clearly unaware or uncaring that he had been waiting for them to move. Jake and I stopped back and just watched as Mack tried once, twice, three times, to bob between them and grab a bag, but every time he got close, one of them would shift, and rather than risk grazing them with his arm, he’d jump back.

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