Nash Brothers Box Set

by Carrie Aarons

  I try to make light of it as my hand moves. “Didn’t think you’d be in for such excitement when you moved to Fawn Hill, huh?”

  Presley’s full peach lips tug up in a small smile, but she’s still wearing that look of worry. Maybe she’s concerned about Chance?

  It takes a few minutes of gentle tugging, but I finally help the dog out, and go to the garbage and sink to clean off.

  “What is … this?” I ask as the water runs over the material in my hands.

  “Oh God …” Presley’s plea is a whisper, and when I turn, I see one hand over her eyes.

  And if I’m not mistaken, that raspy voice is full of embarrassment.

  Turning back to my hand in the sink, the object becomes clear.

  It’s a pair of hot pink lace underwear, cut thong style.

  “Oh … I … well …” I stutter, completely unprofessionally.

  I just had my hand up her dog’s butt, and I’m blushing over a pair of sexy underwear. Real great bedside manner, Keaton.

  “Who knew that Chance and I had the same taste in thongs?” Presley laughs sheepishly.

  I swear, my balls tingle when she says the word thong. What the hell is wrong with me?

  “One time, I had a goat that ate its owner’s vibrator.”

  The minute I say it, I know I’m in deep shit, literally, when it comes to this woman. I never lose control or get struck by word vomit. I’m Mr. Dependable, the amiable, boring one … according to my brothers.

  Presley’s eyes go wide, and then she keels over, laughing hysterically until her breath comes out in gasps. She laughs as if the very act is going out of style, and I can’t help the smile that splits my face watching her.

  “How did the goat even get a vibrator? I can’t even imagine, and I think I’m embarrassed!”

  I grin. “They keep it in the house as a pet. Don’t go spreading that around, I’m supposed to keep that whole doctor-patient confidentiality thing.”

  “Oh, I doubt the goat will find out.” She winks.

  And my heart beats twice, rapidly enough that I have to clutch a hand onto the collared polo at my neck. I haven’t felt it do this in … two whole years. An instant flash of pain follows the beats because that’s what the organ is trained to do.

  My smile fades and I snap off my gloves, bending down to pat Chance on the head again.

  “He’s all set. Welcome to town, Presley. I hope you can learn to see the beauty in Fawn Hill.” I keep it professional.

  Flirting with a woman who loosens all of my control so quickly, without much more than her name and her preference of pink thongs to go on, is dangerous. I don’t need that kind of complication in my life, especially with everything that is already on my plate.

  She frowns, I’m sure at my split-second change in mood. “Thanks. How much do I owe you?”

  I turn to scribble in Chance’s chart, avoiding eye contact. “It’s on the house. Just tell Hattie to get him into training.”

  3

  Keaton

  Pull out of my office driveway onto Main Street, take a right on Horsham Road, a left on Woodfield Avenue and continue driving until the pavement becomes gravel.

  About half a mile after that, you’ll reach Nash Trail, aptly named by my father when he built the house he would later raise a family in.

  The big yellow farmhouse wasn’t actually on a farm although my parents’ acreage was nothing to laugh at. They’d settled in Fawn Hill over thirty years ago, before my brothers and I were even born, and Mom had loved this style of home so much that my dad built her dream for her. Two floors, brick and shiplap exterior, with white columns studding the wraparound porch.

  With four boys, they needed the six acres their property sat on. My brothers and I almost burned the house down three times, crashed six cars between us, broke bones left and right, and were regularly menaces.

  The word reminds me of Presley McDaniel, and I have to pause as I turn the engine off. Her face, all of that thick, red hair … it had plagued my mind for the rest of the week. On my daily outings for lunch, I’d purposely avoided anything left of my office, knowing I could probably see her through the window of her grandmother’s bookstore that doubled as the town post office.

  I shake my head, focusing on walking into my parents’ house, the American flag my father hung years ago waving over the detached garage.

  The house I grew up in was picturesque, as was my childhood. And when I was old enough, I took over my father’s veterinary practice. My grandparent’s only had enough money to send Dad for his vet tech certification as a teenager … college just wasn’t a thing they could afford. He helped out in Fawn Hill’s existing practice and put himself through night and weekend veterinary school until I was about eight years old, when he became a full-fledged doctor. I remember his graduation; how proud he looked, how Mom cried, and how cool it was to see my last name plastered on the sign outside the vet’s office.

  I inherited his love for animals, and when the time came, my parents helped put me through college. The unspoken agreement, as his oldest son, was that I would follow in his footsteps and take over his practice. Good thing I never wanted to do anything else, although from time to time, I wondered if my life would be completely different if I hadn’t toed the line.

  Sighing, I get out of the car, knowing that instead of the quiet beer on my couch I crave, I’ll be walking into noise and nagging.

  As soon as I push through the red front door, which only reminds me of a certain stranger’s hair, I’m bombarded.

  “Woah, dude, way to be late. At least it’s not me. Hey, Ma, I’m not the last one here!” Fletcher, my youngest brother, calls out as he pops a piece of cheese in his mouth.

  He walks away, not even bothering to say hi or ask how my day was. Here we go.

  I didn’t mean to be cranky; I loved my brothers, but since my father’s sudden passing two years ago, I felt more like a parent than a peer a lot of the time.

  And there it was. The reason why I felt so … off every time I arrived for Friday night dinner. My mother still insisted on the tradition, but I always expected to walk in and hear his booming laugh. Who knew that a healthy, recently retired man could die of a heart attack on a Sunday in July?

  Certainly none of us. My family hadn’t been the same since, though we all put on the front that things were all hunky-dory.

  The pain, that sharp, poisonous stab of agony, is still fresh in all of my internal organs as I walk through the house. My heart, my gut, my mind and everything in between sours as my shoes tread the same carpet that my father did. He was my hero, my role model, and I don’t say those things lightly. The man had integrity and knowledge; he gave love and affection freely to his boys even if it wasn’t the most manly of things.

  Perhaps his passing spurred this need to be alone in me. He’d done everything right, had been the picture of a family man. And the world took that away from him, way too early. What would it do to me?

  “Oh, Keaton, sweetheart, you’re here!” My mom was stirring a pot on the stove, and I went over to kiss her cheek as she stuck it out for me to greet her.

  “The golden child graces us with his presence.” Forrest rolls his eyes as he sets plates out on the table we’ve been eating at since I was five.

  Forrest and Fletcher are twins, and six years younger than I am. Forrest is older by a minute, something he never lets our brother forget, and they both still make just as much trouble as they did when they were ten.

  Although, they do it in different ways. Forrest just received his fourth warning from the state police department to stop hacking into things he shouldn’t, except they’ve also extended two job positions so he doesn’t take the warnings seriously. He’s the county’s only forensic detective, and the kid is a goddamn genius, not that I’d tell him that. It would only go further to his head.

  Fletcher walks in, cradling a beer, and by the gait in his step, I know it’s not his first. My baby brother could be just as successfu
l as his twin, but of all of us, he has the biggest weakness. Alcohol is his crutch, his weapon, his medicine, and his addiction. I’ve tried twice to get him sober, and they’ve both ended in him not speaking to me for months. I’m afraid of what is going to happen if we don’t all intervene soon.

  “Sorry, I run my own office.” Opening the fridge, I grab a beer and use an opener to flip the top off, taking a long pull.

  “Always rubbing the business owner card in our face. Ever think that some of us are happier as worker bees?” Fletcher laughs.

  He’s currently on his fifth job, and second auto body shop, since graduating high school six years ago.

  “Boys, stop it. Can we just have one nice Friday night dinner with no teasing?” Mom scolds us, and we all shut up.

  My mother is petite, more than a foot shorter than all of her boys, with dark hair and darker eyes. She’s a third Native American and her looks prove it. We’re all a mix of our parents, except for me, the only one with Mom’s eyes. Their dark brown hair mixed with translucent blue eyes, courtesy of our father, don’t quite match my dark eyes and dirty blond hair.

  “Listen to your mother.”

  A deep, annoyed voice sharply snaps from the doorway.

  Bowen, the middle child, walks in, still in his boots and apron.

  “Hybrid, much, Bowie?” Forrest chuckles.

  “Shut up, Jungle.” Bowen flips him the bird and sits down next to me.

  The nicknames never stop when you grow up among four immature boys.

  “Did you have a call today?” I take in the boots dirtying Mom’s floor under the table.

  He nods, stealing my beer. “A small electrical fire a couple miles from town, before you reach the highway. Had to close up shop to respond.”

  By day, Bowen owned the barber shop in Fawn Hill. And by other day, and some nights, he was one of the only four volunteer firefighters we had.

  “Everything go okay?” I scowl at my pilfered drink.

  He nods. “Yep.”

  Bowen is a man of few words, but we were closer with each other than we were with the twins. We were only two years apart, we’d grown up in tandem, and no one would ever have the bond Forrest and Fletcher did.

  “All right, come help bring the food to the table,” Mom hollers and we all jump up.

  “Thanks for cooking, Mom.” Bowen kisses our mother as he picks up a bowl of mashed potatoes, and she pats his arm.

  “You know, there is nothing I like better than sitting down to a meal with my boys.” The sadness in her eyes for the person missing from this dinner table is unmistakable.

  “Mom, did you get to the library this week?” I try to distract her.

  She nods, as the serving dishes are set on the table, and we begin to dig in. “I did, helped Lily put away the new shipment of children’s books. They are just so darling, all of those little cardboard-bound stories. If only I had a grandchild to read them to.”

  Her sigh echoes around the table, and none of us are touching that with a six-foot pole. She’s been dropping the line for a year now, telling us that the family is lonely and needs some happiness and why doesn’t just one of us settle down already.

  Fletch is shoveling meatloaf into his mouth while Forrest sneaks looks at his cell phone in his lap. Bowen is being typical Bowen, looking angrily off into space as if the whole world has offended him.

  “I had to retrieve a pair of pink underwear from a dog’s butt today,” I say, hoping to break the tension.

  Almost everyone at the table lets out a laugh, and I launch into the story, welcoming the hilarious distraction.

  The only thing I leave out is the saucy redhead who won’t seem to leave my thoughts.

  4

  Presley

  “Girl, how do you even have a high school diploma?”

  Grandma chides me as she rips the packaging envelope from my hands, shaking her head so that the white-gray curls cut close to her scalp bounce.

  “I’m just getting used to the machine, that’s all,” I grumble, chastising myself on top of her insult.

  Working a postage machine shouldn’t be this hard, but I’ve never used one and Grandma’s teaching about any process is usually one clipped sentence that makes no sense. Thus, I’m left to figure almost everything out on my own, which ends in mistakes and her criticism.

  This won’t work for long since the whole reason I moved to Fawn Hill was to take a majority of the responsibility at McDaniel’s Books & Post. Grandma had started the shop with my grandfather when they were newly married at the age of eighteen, back when you couldn’t buy books on the Internet or print out your own packing slips. The store doubled as both a place to buy novels and a center for all shipping, mailing, copying and any other business needs. Honestly, the concept was kind of genius, and McDaniel’s was the only post office in a twenty-five-mile radius, so Grandma did well for herself.

  Until this fall when the doctor diagnosed her with debilitating glaucoma. She’d had an operation, after which my dad, her son, had come to town to care for her. But the surgery hadn’t worked like they’d hoped it would, and she was essentially losing more of her vision daily. She needed someone to help her out at home and in the shop. I don’t know what made me volunteer one random afternoon when Dad had called to ask how my, multiple, jobs were going, but I had.

  Maybe I’d needed an out from my crappy life in New York. Maybe I needed to prove something to my family … that they could count on me. Maybe I wanted to spend more time with the grandmother who’d been so much of a mystery to me growing up.

  Either way, here I was. With said grandmother bossing me around as I messed up time after time in her store.

  The bell over the door jingled, and a petite woman with dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, and a kind smile walked to the counter holding a small package.

  “Hello, how can I help you?” I asked her.

  Grandma came bustling out of the back supply room, her sturdy, thin body hustling around. “Oh, Eliza, hello!”

  The woman who had just walked in, Eliza I guess, smiled wider. “Hattie! Good to see you, how are you feeling?”

  “Well, those damn doctors keep trying to off me, but here I am. And if this one would learn quicker, I’d be able to retire.” Grandma rolled her eyes at me.

  My blood pressure shot up. No one said anything about her retiring since my stay here wasn’t permanent. But hell … what did I think? I couldn’t just help for a while and think her blindness was going to reverse itself. Yet, I hadn’t thought about it until this very moment.

  Was I really going to stay and live my life in Fawn Hill?

  “This must be your granddaughter. I’d heard she was in town but haven’t had the pleasure yet. Hi, I’m Eliza Nash, it’s so nice to meet you.”

  Nash, huh? I studied her as she set her package down on the counter between us. Yes, she did look like him. The eyes mostly, but the man I’d met almost a week ago must be her son.

  “Presley McDaniel, it’s nice to meet you.” I smiled back.

  Small-town niceness was slowly working its way into my blood.

  “Eliza here has four boys; all live in town. You met her oldest, the vet, Dr. Nash, when Chance ate your underwear the other day.” Grandma pats me on the back.

  Eliza lets out a laugh. “That was Chance? I should have suspected, the troublemaker. Keaton told us about that over Friday night dinner.”

  A vision of what her family table must look like on a Friday night popped into my head, and before I could stop the thought, I wondered if the handsome doctor had a wife. Did they hold hands as he told his mother the unfortunate poop problems of my grandmother’s dog?

  “Keaton is a good egg, that one. Shame he hasn’t been snatched up, yet.” Grandma eyes me, a devilish twinkle in our matching green pools.

  The woman has a sixth freaking sense; I swear.

  His mother sighs. “You have no idea how much I long for a daughter-in-law. If just one of them would settle down and give me a h
andful of grandbabies, I’d be complete. The house has just been so lonely since Jack passed.”

  Her sadness is palpable, and my heart hurts for her. I don’t even know her, but I can tell from the droop of her eyes that she lost someone very close to her.

  Grandma walks around the counter and squeezes a supportive arm around her shoulders. “I know how you feel. Since Lester went to heaven, it hasn’t been the same. But we’re still here, and we have to try to carry on.”

  This woman must have lost her husband, I realize, because she wears the same look of grief as my grandmother, who lost her husband five years ago.

  Eliza sniffles and nods then perks up. “Gosh, excuse me. I didn’t come in here to break down. I came to mail this package to my sister in Connecticut.”

  “Well, good thing you did, because Presley here just started to fly solo and she can help you with whatever you need.” Grandma gives me an encouraging look, which fills me with confidence.

  Even though she teases me, and can be rough around the edges, my grandmother has shown more pride in me than my parents have in my entire life. Not that I had anything resembling a tough childhood, and I love my parents, but as the middle child, I’ve never been doted on per se. I’ve never had the drive or talent like my older sister or younger brother, and the members of my family usually count on me to screw up.

  Grandma is giving me a chance, and my chest fills with determination to prove her right.

  “I certainly can. Would you like to send this via USPS, Fed Ex or UPS?” I start with my questions, trying to follow the steps my grandmother walked me through.

  Eliza asks me how much it will be for each, so she can weigh her options. Using the computer behind the counter, I let her know, and once she picks the postal service, I put in her details and print the label, sticking it on her package. Then I ring her up, make the sale, and smile once she’s told me she doesn’t require anything further.