The Slow Burn ~ Kristen Ashley

by Ashley, Kristen

  Fuck.

  He was gonna hurl.

  Neither Johnny nor Toby said anything.

  They also didn’t move.

  Fortunately, this time she got the hint.

  “Right. Five thirty. At the mill. Tomorrow. I’ll see you there,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Johnny grunted.

  Toby said nothing.

  She started backing away and her attention turned to Toby.

  “Please tell Adeline thank you and I’m sorry that I—”

  “You approach her again, tomorrow’s off,” Toby declared, and she stopped. “You’re not getting this because Addie put in a word for you. You’re gettin’ this only because Margot wants us to listen to you. You don’t get near Addie, Eliza, and you absolutely do not ever approach Margot. You understand that?”

  She appeared stunned. “Margot wants—?”

  “This is not question and answer time. Tomorrow is question and answer time,” Toby told her. “And that would be us asking the questions and you answering. You get me,” he jerked a thumb at his brother, “and Johnny. That’s all you get. Now, do you understand that?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Tomorrow,” he forced out.

  “Okay, Tobias. Tomorrow.” Her eyes moved to Johnny. “Johnathon.”

  Johnny said nothing, though he jerked up his chin.

  She kept backing away and gave them a small wave before she turned and walked away.

  Neither man waved back.

  “Gotta call Addie,” Toby muttered, returning to the engine of the car and digging in the back pocket of his coveralls for his phone.

  “Gotta call Iz,” Johnny muttered, moving to rest a thigh against the fender.

  His woman was at a cash register at the Mart, so he had to leave a message.

  Johnny talked longer, but not very long. Izzy was the director of a department at work. She had year-end stuff she needed to do and had taken a few days off before Christmas. So she was busy.

  The minute Johnny got off the phone, though, Toby set his socket wrench aside and got out from under the hood.

  “You okay?” he asked his brother.

  “Yup,” Johnny answered.

  “I can see it,” Toby said. “Dad all in for that.”

  “Yup.”

  “Explains some things,” Toby muttered, looking toward the open bay.

  “Yup,” Johnny agreed.

  He turned his attention back to Johnny. “Addie told me she said it was about her parents.”

  “You said.”

  “And I don’t give a shit.”

  Johnny held his eyes a beat.

  Then he said, “Yup.”

  “This is for Margot.”

  “You have the reaction you want, Tobe,” Johnny said. “I’m not gonna big-brother your ass into anything. Not again, but not about this shit.”

  “I just wanna warn you, that’s where I’m at.”

  “My mind isn’t much more open than yours,” Johnny replied. “Especially not with her ambushin’ you and Addie. She couldn’t know that play was gonna force Margot and Dave to share something with us before they were ready. But that’s what happens when you pull shit like that and don’t let the people you’re pullin’ it on have a say in how it goes down. But what if she has other kids, Toby? What if we have sisters and brothers? Ones she didn’t leave.”

  “Then I feel sorry for them.”

  “And if we wanna know them, we might have to put up with her.”

  Fuck.

  Great.

  He blew out a breath.

  Johnny changed the subject.

  “Addie resign?”

  “Yeah. Talked her into givin’ ’em just the two weeks so she has a week off to go shoppin’ for clothes and just chill before she has to start. She can’t take vacation until after six months, so she saw the wisdom of that.”

  “You got her to go far, fast,” Johnny remarked, knowing all about Addie’s independent streak, and not just what Toby told him.

  “I think it had somethin’ to do with that crib Margot helped me pick out.”

  Johnny grinned at him.

  Toby grinned back.

  He felt it fade before he said, “It’s all about Margot. Everything’s good. Sierra’s whatever she is. Addie’s got a job she’s excited about. It pays better. She knows where I’m at with her so the shit I do for her and give to her and Brooks, I feel she considers it now all in the family. Her ex is a ghost and I don’t think that’s gonna change, so when the time comes for me to adopt Brooks, that’s gonna be a pain in the ass, finding his ass. But life is settled. Except Margot.”

  “What about Margot looking after Brooks?” Johnny asked.

  Toby shook his head but said, “I had a chat with Dave. He really wants us to keep letting them look after him. Says Margot’s at her best when Brooklyn’s there. She’s not weak or spacy, but he doesn’t leave them alone. When the radiation starts, though, we’ll have to have another conversation. Addie’s down with that.”

  Johnny nodded before he asked, “Is she gonna put more effort into getting in touch with Perry?”

  “Already did. She called some of his friends yesterday. Apparently, he’s left Chattanooga. They say he’s in Nashville. Though none of them shared contact details and she thinks they know how to get hold of him, they just aren’t telling her. Which means he told them not to share. Which means he’s vapor.”

  “Fuckin’ dick,” Johnny muttered.

  “The longer he stays away and stiffs her for child support, the more ammo we got if he comes back and wants to cause trouble.”

  “Yeah. He’s still a fuckin’ dick.”

  “No argument there.”

  Johnny locked eyes with him, and Toby knew immediately where his mind was at.

  “We gotta—” Johnny started.

  “We will,” Toby declared.

  “Dave’s gonna—”

  “We’ll be on it.”

  “I thought at least Eliza would unravel,” Johnny said quietly. “After their mom . . .”

  He didn’t finish that.

  He didn’t have to.

  Though he did say, “Granite and steel packaged up in goose down and kitten fur.”

  “Say what?” Toby asked.

  “You got soft leather and smooth whiskey and I got goose down and kitten fur. But under what we got, it’s granite and steel. Daphne made that. That’s her legacy. That’s what she gave us, what our kids will get. That’s why I know, as fucked up as it sounds, Margot’s good. Because she knows this too. So it’s gonna be about Dave. Because he’s Dad. He’s you. And he’s me. And if it goes down like that, we have to be prepared. Because without his woman, he’s gonna be nothin’ but empty.”

  “Yeah,” Toby said quietly.

  “But we’re on it,” Johnny vowed.

  “Yeah we are,” Toby agreed.

  They stared at each other a beat, both feeling the same thing, and in that moment not much of it was good.

  Then the Gamble Brothers got back to work.

  “You know, I fought for a full hour with Margot about that dinnerware, Lollipop. It’d suck you reduced it to rubble in my sink so I gotta go and find whatever artisan conned Margot so I can buy more,” Toby noted, having dishwasher duty with Addie because she didn’t give a shit where he shoved the plates and silverware.

  She fortunately quit banging his plates around and turned to him, looking confused. “Why did you fight with her? This stoneware is rad.”

  “One place setting cost a hundred bucks.”

  Her gaze coasted down to the sink as she breathed, “Holy shit.”

  “And I only know what the term ‘place setting’ means because Margot said it fifteen hundred times when we were arguing about those plates.”

  She shot him a grin.

  “She found it for me at some art festival in Owensboro,” Toby told her. “Texted me a picture. Said it went with my couches. So with full disclosure, we argued for forty-five minutes
via text that I did not need over a thousand dollars-worth of dishes, seein’ as she said I had to have serving bowls and platters and shit too. We only argued on the phone for fifteen minutes.”

  Addie held up a plate, looked to his couch, to the plate, which was matte black on the outside with some ridges, speckled like an egg on a blueish-gray cream on the inside, and then she looked to him.

  “It does match your couch,” she noted.

  He smiled at her.

  She jerked the rinsed plate at him and declared, “I hate you have to talk to that woman.”

  “Baby, you’re the one who said I should listen so I know all her shit is her shit.”

  “I take that back,” she muttered to the sink.

  “You were right and Margot’s right, and Johnny and I will listen and then it’ll be done.”

  “I said that before we knew about Margot or the fact that woman would darken the town of Matlock imminently.”

  “Well, that’s how it happened. We deal. We move on. It’ll be over by this time tomorrow.”

  Or he hoped, since Addie had worked late that night, so now it was even later, and he had a feeling it would not be fun to have to rap with Sierra for much longer than, say, ten minutes.

  “I hope so,” she said his thoughts out loud, holding some silverware his way without looking at him.

  “Babe,” he called.

  Her eyes turned to him.

  “I get what this is. But Johnny and Izzy essentially have a two-room house, and you and Iz can’t huddle in the bathroom with Brooklyn so you can be close to your men while we talk to Sierra.”

  “So meet the woman here,” she returned. “We’ll hang in the loft.”

  Yeah.

  That was what it was.

  Both of them hated their men were facing this without them close.

  “That mill was Dad’s.”

  She shut up.

  “We want that in her face.”

  She picked up the handled scrubber that had dishwashing liquid in it and started to go to town on a pot.

  She did this and muttered, “Whatever.”

  He decided to move them along.

  To do that, he shut the dishwasher door, leaned a hip against the counter and announced, “After we’re done here, I’ve got some ideas about what I wanna do to the shack. I want you to look.”

  She again turned his way. “The shack?”

  “I’m gutting it, for the most part.”

  She stopped looking at him and started staring at him.

  He just kept talking.

  “New kitchen, new bathrooms, add a laundry room. Fresh paint through the place and maybe fresh carpet. Though I’m thinkin’ wood or maybe tile. And there’s space over the garage that’s unfinished. I wanna make it into a playroom and put bunkbeds up there. It’s only got two bedrooms. If we’re all there together, Johnny and Izzy start making babies, you and me add to that, they get older, we’ll want privacy, they will too, and the kids can hang together over the garage and have cousin time.”

  She set the pot on the drying pad and turned to him. “There’s a lot to unpack there, Talon.”

  “Sock it to me, Lollipop.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the concept of the shack.”

  Fuck.

  Shit.

  That was where Stu had taken Brooklyn when he kidnapped him.

  Christ, Toby hadn’t even thought of that.

  “You want me to get rid of it?” he asked carefully, only for her brows to draw together.

  “Why would I want you to do that?”

  Even more carefully, he said, “Because of Stuart Bray.”

  She waved a wet hand in front of her face and went back to the last pot. “He caused enough drama, no reason for him to make you lose your man retreat.”

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s a man retreat. Or at least I thought it was. Therefore, I don’t get the concept of the shack, because I don’t know why you’d need laundry and a brand-new kitchen if you dudes just go up there to slaughter innocent fish and scratch your testicles.”

  He wanted to laugh.

  But he didn’t because he had to push, “I mean about Bray.”

  Slowly, she turned her head his way. “He gets nothing more from me, Tobias. He took what he has from my life, which was four hours of sheer terror, and that’s the end of it. And honest to God, that man rotting in prison for a mandatory twenty years, that’s actually the end of it.”

  Granite and steel.

  “Okay, baby,” he whispered. “And just to say, it was a man retreat. My grandmother wasn’t big on cleaning fish, or since Gramps hunted, game, so she avoided it. My mother, as you know, was history. Now there are women with the Gamble Men. So it’s gonna be a family retreat.”

  “I’m down,” she said, finishing with the last pot and resting it against the other on the drying pad.

  “That doesn’t seem like a lot to unpack,” he remarked.

  She grabbed a dishtowel, turned to him, leaned her side against the counter, wiped her hands and asked, “How many kids you want?”

  “Including Brooklyn, three.”

  “I want six,” she declared, tossing the towel aside, “Not including Brooklyn.”

  Well, shit.

  “Baby—”

  “And I want that staggered, like a sister wife, even though you will have no sister wives, so in the end I’m just getting done with my last baby and then my first baby gives me grandbabies.”

  Well . . .

  Shit.

  “Addie—”

  She smiled huge at him. “I know that’s all kinds of crazy, so I’ll settle for two more in quick succession so we can strap their asses in the car and head to the shack on weekends. But I warn you, I’m not cleaning any fish.”

  He reached out, grabbed her waist and slid her along the counter to him.

  She set her hands on his chest.

  “So that’s hammered out,” he muttered.

  “Yep,” she replied.

  “I’m suddenly not feeling going through shack ideas on my laptop,” he told her.

  “Oh no you don’t. You don’t get to dangle getaway home renovations in front of me then yank them away.”

  “You’d really rather look at cabin kitchen ideas than get fucked?”

  She leaned deeper into him, “You really have to learn when I’m teasing, Talon.”

  “I’m sure it’ll sink in eventually, Lollipop.”

  His head was descending but it stopped doing that when she pulled hers back.

  “Why do you call me Lollipop?”

  “Why do you call me Talon?”

  “Because you are so totally Talon McHotterson.”

  “And you’re so totally Lollipop McGorgeouson.”

  “I’m not sweet.”

  “And I’m not sharp.”

  Her head tipped to the side and she murmured, “Ah, I see.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “It’s ironic.”

  “Mm.”

  “Excellent call, Talon.”

  “Lollipop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shut up.”

  She smiled up at him.

  And got herself kissed.

  They moved it to the bedroom.

  And when they were done, they fell asleep without the Christmas lights glowing in the room.

  But the moonlight did it.

  And Brooks was in his crib next door.

  Dapper Dan slept at the foot of Brooks’s crib. New territory, looking out for his boy.

  And sometime in the middle of the night, Barbarella woke Toby up by curling on his ankles.

  So Tobe fell back to sleep with Addie in his arms, the other female in the house on his ankles, his boys in the nursery, and his lips tipped up.

  They were like this because he had everything he ever wanted.

  All of it under his roof.

  His family.

  The next night, they knew she’d showed when
Ranger, Dempsey and Swirl all got up and started barking at the door.

  Only one cat scattered, the other two hung where they were (bed and couch respectively).

  Neither bird bothered to chirp.

  Johnny and him were sitting at Johnny’s dining room table with beers.

  They looked at each other before they both got up and went to the door.

  The brothers then walked out and stood at the top landing of the steps that led to the only floor of the mill (as of yet) that was finished.

  There was one large room that housed kitchen, living area and bed. A massive bath and closet to the back. And some storage areas for Johnny’s camping and fishing gear, water heater, furnace, Wi-Fi central and shit like that.

  After the winter, Johnny was going to build an attached garage and start finishing up the downstairs, which now housed Johnny and Izzy’s vehicles, and the brothers’ ATVs and snowmobiles.

  They’d planned some together time after the wedding before starting a family.

  But when that time came, Johnny wanted to be ready.

  And as was noted, Gamble Brothers didn’t fuck around.

  These were Toby’s thoughts as he watched his mother get out of a black BMW 7 Series.

  “Moisturizer and high-performance vehicles,” Toby muttered.

  “What?”

  “The woman isn’t hurting for money,” Toby said.

  Johnny looked back down at her and replied, “Yeah.”

  They shifted to stand side by side and face the stairs as she walked up them.

  She was about six steps from them before she laid a hand on her chest and noted, “It’s a very strange feeling to be back here.”

  Toby clenched his teeth to stop himself from saying something he’d regret.

  Johnny moved to the door and shoved it open.

  The dogs bounded out.

  “My!” she cried.

  They bounded to her.

  She plastered herself to the railing.

  “Boys! Yard!” Johnny barked.

  Three heads with floppy ears flying looked up to their dad.

  Then they clamored down the steps.

  “You have . . . you have a lot of dogs, Johnathon.”

  “Johnny,” Johnny said tightly.

  “Sorry, I . . . we called you that when you were little but—”

  “Only Margot calls me Johnathon,” Johnny told her.

  “Oh,” she whispered.