Page 83 of Fix Me Up, Cowboy
He barks, climbs onto the front passenger seat, and makes himself comfortable.
“Oh, like that is it?” she says on a laugh, and we return to the ranch in our respective vehicles.
Deacon is outside playing with Maui when we arrive. Jake and TJ are watching the pair, as is Asgard.
As soon as I step down from the truck, Deacon comes hurtling toward me, with Maui hot on his cowboy-booted heels. He flings himself into my arms, and I scoop up the giggling boy.
Charlie visits with his new buddies.
“Hi, Uncle Noah.” Deacon parks both hands on my cheeks, squishing them together to give me a fish face.
“Hey, little man,” I attempt to say, which makes him giggle harder. He then waves at Kate as she approaches us. “Hi, Auntie Kate.”
He started calling her that a few days ago; none of us have bothered to correct him.
I lower him to the ground. “Are you okay if Kate stays here for a few weeks while we work on her house? She’ll be staying in the bedroom next to yours.”
He grins at Kate, revealing a mouth full of baby teeth. “Are you going to read me bedtime stories?”
“Don’t your mommy and daddy usually do that?” I ask him, mostly because I know they do.
“Yes. But now Auntie Kate can tell me them, too.”
She crouches to his level. “I can certainly do that. I love reading bedtime stories.” She tickles him and he flings himself at her, almost knocking her onto her ass.
Once Deacon peels himself off her, she asks, “Are you going to read to Charlie? He loves it when you do that.”
Deacon can’t read yet, but he loves to point to the different pictures in his books and tell Charlie what they are.
“You guys want to help us bring Kate’s stuff into the house?” I call out to my brothers, who look amused at the interaction between Kate and TJ’s son.
“Sure.”
“Why not?”
They push away from the fence and grab her stuff from the truck to take upstairs.
Kate, Deacon, and the dogs follow us.
In her room, Deacon clambers onto Kate’s bed, pulling himself up with the covers and making a mess of them. Then he plunks himself in the middle of the pillows.
Maui barks and jumps his front paws onto the bedding. That makes Deacon giggle, and he scrambles over to him.
And now the bedding is a bigger mess.
Charlie tries to put his paws onto the bed, but he doesn’t come close to Maui’s level of success. So he barks at the injustice of being too short.
“Maui, down,” Jake says, nudging the one-year-old black Lab off the bed. Maui flashes his puppy-dog eyes that worked a lot better on Jake when Maui was a young puppy. The same puppy-dog eyes that still have Sophie giving in to his wishes.
“Deacon, you’re not supposed to be on Kate’s bed,” TJ reprimands, a heavy dose of eye rolling in his tone. There’s also a spark of amusement because none of us were much better when we were Deacon’s age.
Actually, when I think about it, we were a helluva lot worse. Deacon hasn’t tried scaling the living room curtains.
Yep, guilty as charged.
He scoops up his son and lowers him to the floor. Deacon quickly distracts himself by playing with the dogs.
“That’s okay,” Kate says, doing her best not to laugh. “It’ll be messy when I sleep tonight.”
