Page 32 of Always Salty

—Keely to Cutter

KEELY

I grinned when I saw my brothers—all three of them—in my kitchen cooking.

Cutter’s wife, Milena, was absent, and I wondered if she was working today.

She’d had a soft opening for her coffee shop—a place that she’d had built that connected to her sister’s bakery—last week, and the hard opening was set for this Friday.

It was possible that she was busy getting stuff ready for that or going into work even though she wasn’t supposed to.

In the time that I’d known Milena Semyonov, I’d come to think of her as a good friend—and a great sister-in-law to have. However, she seemed a little bit hyper-fixated on work, as if her entire life, her personality, was what she’d accomplished.

That was why I thought I was crazy in the head.

I didn’t have that kind of drive—at least not when it came to work.

I wanted to experience life. I wanted to spend time at the beach every spring, and the mountains in the summer. I wanted to get married, stay at home, and raise my family. I wanted to raise chickens and ducks and have a single mini cow that danced in the morning when I brought him food.

I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom with a husband that wanted to spoil me.

Was that too freakin’ much to ask?

“Hey there, sister,” Chevy said as he backed away from the counter and saw me. “What’s your poison?”

I looked at the eggs that were being made and said, “Over hard.”

“Gross.” Chevy rolled his eyes.

“What’s gross is the thick yolk that makes a mess and doesn’t even taste good,” I countered, lying through my teeth because I liked all kinds of eggs now except scrambled.

“If you say so,” Chevy rolled his eyes. “We paid your rent for the next month. Also, you got a notice in the mail that your rent is back to what you’d expect. No more rent hike. Also, did you know that Castanon Enterprises owns this place?”

My mouth dropped. “We do?”

“We do,” Copper said, turning around with my over-hard eggs. “And it’s so well hidden, buried so deep in legal mumbo jumbo, that it would’ve been impossible to find had someone not brought the information to our attention.”

My brows rose at that.

“Actually, I don’t know. I just got an anonymous email with the information in it this morning,” he continued.

A flash of insight hit me. Another person that’d sent me an anonymous email came to mind.

But I immediately blocked off that train of thought.

It wouldn’t do for me to think about such things.

Even worse, I was so hyper-fixated on this man that thinking about him only gave him power.

And I would not condone his actions.

I would not.

Even if I wanted him to repeat his actions over and over again on me.

How sick in the head did that make me?

“What are you over there thinking about so hard?”

---