Page 32 of A Little Discovery

I have the feeling I’m missing some details here, but Avery told me Spencer is a private investigator. It would be irresponsible of him to live with guys and not do background checks on them, right? Satisfied with my brain’s limited critical thinking skills for the time being, I go back to worrying about the pizza when Jay speaks up.

“That’s all well and good, but I’m going to go up and make some grilled cheese,” Jay says before turning to me. “You want one, Lucky?”

These guys will never stop surprising me. “But I ruined your dinner and now you have to cook. Let me at least do the cooking.”

Spencer chuckles and rests his chin on top of my head. “Jay is worse than Eli when it comes to vegetables. You hid the only type of pizza he will ever refuse. If the green peppers and mushrooms weren’t enough to deter him, the black olives would have sent him running.”

I huff and stomp my foot when I look at Jay. That’s not right. I don’t really know why it upsets me that these grown men won’t eat their vegetables, but it does.

“Daddies need to set a good example!” I say before stomping back into the room with the others. Plopping down onto a pillow, I cross my arms and mope. I know I’m throwing a bit of a tantrum, but it just isn’t right that these guys do so many things just right and then do something dumb like avoid tasty veggies.

Toby crawls up next to me and rolls over so his head is in my lap with him looking up at my face. “We need a tie breaker. It’s between these two,” he says, holding up two different Blu-ray cases. Looking at both of them, I don’t like either choice. I’m not in the mood for another animated movie, or one so recent… I scoot out from under him to crawl over to the bookshelves holding the movies. The bottom two shelves appear to be all movies from our childhoods or even before we were born.

I see a movie that I remember coming onto the tv when I was home sick once as a child. My nanny at the time, before Mother fired her, told me it was her favorite movie when she was my age. Some parts were really scary, but I like the unicorns and faeries. I pull it off the shelf and hold it up to Toby.

“Can we watch this one instead?”

“Tim CurryandTom Cruise? Absolutely!” he exclaims, ripping the case from my hand to put it in the machine to play. When the opening song starts, Spencer sits down on the pillow next to me, placing another in his lap. At my look, he adjusts me so I’m laying down with my head on that pillow and a blanket over me.

“Sleep if you want to, little one,” he whispers. “The movie will always be down here whenever you want to watch it.”

CHAPTER 22

SPENCER

Lucky has been at the house for a little over a week now, and I feel like I’m in purgatory. Every moment with him is pure bliss, but I still can’t forget the look on his face the night he ran from me. It just doesn’t feel right taking things farther than cuddling without him having his memories. The doctor says they could come back at any moment, or they could never come back at all.

“Will you just allow yourself to be happy and tell him how you feel already?”

Eli’s voice startles me out of my thoughts, and I realize I’ve been staring at the toaster that has already finished with my bagel. As I grab my food and step away, Eli tosses in some frozen chocolate chip waffles and pushes down the lever.

“You just wanted the toaster,” I say to him. “Besides, I want him to make an informed decision with all of the facts, not just what we’ve given him here.”

“Besides… meh meh meh, blah blah blah,” he teases. “Get your head out of your ass and talk to my nephew about this already. You both go back for classes today, and I need to know you have his back on campus… you know the bitch is going to find him there.”

I growl into my coffee cup at the reminder that Sabrina Carlisle is still walking free at the moment. Since she is not a violent offender, the district attorney isn’t in a rush to file charges to gether put in jail. He says he wants to make sure it’s an airtight case.

I smell something fishy there, but the only thing I can do is keep an eye out while I dig deeper. I’m waiting for my cyber-sleuth buddy to get back to me on what he’s found out. He will get me the breadcrumbs so that I can get the hard evidence. If only he wasn’t on the other side of the country, I would be on his ass in person to get him to rush this.

“You all can relax,” Toby breezes into the kitchen and goes straight for his Pop-Tarts. We’ve tried to switch him over to the store brands to save money, but he refuses. Considering it is one of only two of the name brand items he eats, I’ve learned to let it go. The other is Spagettios which I totally commiserate with him on that one. We tried the store brand once and threw out the entire can after one bite each.

He hits the cancel button on the toaster, pulling Eli’s waffles out to put his toaster pastries in. I just raise my brows while our Sadist looks ready to kill. Toby, the ADHD puppy, just doesn’t notice. Moments like this make me wonder if he really doesn’t notice or if he is acting out because he needs some discipline or release. He always seems better after a play session, so we might need to move up our planned house visit to the Devil’s Club. We put it off after Lucky’s accident, and then voted as a house to postpone until he is ready to go. We don’t want to leave him alone until everything is settled.

“I managed to sign up for the same class as Lucky and have nothing else today until after Daddy Spence is done with his classes,” he says as the toaster finishes his breakfast. “We got him covered for Mondays and Wednesdays. It’s the Tuesday, Thursday classes that will be tricky.”

Eli slides behind Toby to put his waffles back into the toaster and gives him a nice hard, well deserved, swat on the ass. The pupyelps in surprise which causes both Eli and I to laugh.

“Oooh, me too, Daddy,” Eric croons to Eli as he walks past him to largest of the three coffee makers in the room. We are a house that loves our coffee, and in the mornings, not everyone knows how to wait for their turn.

“Not a Daddy,” Eli mutters before grabbing his travel cup and naked waffles when they pop up. “Ash and Sam will be in the same building if not the same class for his Tuesday-Thursday class. I gotta go into the city today and see the lawyer. Dad wants to get Lucky’s trust released to him early now that he is divorced and the bitch can’t touch it.”

“I thought he already had his trust fund and the puppy killer spent it all?” Toby asks, rubbing his left ass cheek. We all stop and stare at our own resident pup in confusion. At our look, he takes a big bite of his breakfast and explains while chewing. “Lucky told me when she first approached him she reminded him of Cruella, like the movie with the dalmatians…”

Eli just shakes his head and smiles before he snatches up a briefcase and heads to the front. While he’s pulling on his shoes, he tells us, “Accurate depiction of Sabrina. But as for the money, Lucky had two trust funds. His parents, and therefore he, were only aware of the onetheyset up for him as a Holloway. Dad didn’t want to risk Nadine getting her claws into this one before Lucky was old enough to fight her for it.

“It was set up to release when he turns twenty-five or graduates, whichever comes first, but Dad wants him to have some of it a little early to make this whole situation easier on him. As the trustee, I have to be the one to sign off on it. I’m not dissolving it, but I am giving him access to some of the funds as a monthly allowance kind of thing.”

Toby is halfway up the steps before he turns to ask, “Why not dissolve it and give him all or the money?”

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