Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 77415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
“Mom said I need stitches!” Lydia told her older brother.
Linc looked down at Lydia’s still bleeding face.
“You also need to grab a towel so you don’t leak all over the fuckin’ floor,” Linc said laughingly.
“Linc!” Ellen growled, pointing her knife at him. “Watch that dirty mouth of yours.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Linc growled. “What’s for dinner? I’m starving.”
“You’re a professional football player,” I cut in. “Why are you starving? You have enough money to buy a fuckin’ grocery store.”
A carrot hit me on the forehead, and I turned my gaze back to my woman.
“Was that necessary?”
Ellen’s lips twitched. “Wipe up that blood, and stop cussing. It’s crass, dammit.”
Linc snorted.
“I am rich,” Linc said, grabbing the paper towels on his own and wiping the blood up himself. “But I still feel like I shouldn’t spend it. Like, if I do, I might need it again one day and not have it.”
I laughed.
“Your financial advisor has you fixed up well into your nineties with only what you made this year,” I told him, then stood up from the kitchen table to grab the bag that Lydia was hauling by one handle, dragging it along the floor, and smearing the blood into the grout lines of the kitchen tile. “Maybe, if you stopped giving it to us, you’d feel like you had more money.”
Linc grinned.
“You didn’t think I’d be able to do it, did you?” he challenged me.
“I knew you’d be able to do it,” I countered. “But I didn’t think you’d think I was stupid enough not to give it back to you in some way.”
Linc’s eyes narrowed just as Ellen threw all of her cut up veggies into the pot that she was about to start cooking the stew in. “You better not have given it back.”
I grinned. “I didn’t. I started a college fund for your children.”
“I don’t have any children,” Linc countered. “At least none that I know of.”
Ellen slapped him on the arm with a wet towel.
“Watch it, boy,” she ordered. “I specifically remember giving you the birds and the bees talk when you were sixteen. I even showed you how to roll a condom on a cucumber.” She stopped next to Lydia and pressed a four by four piece of gauze against her cut.
Her concentration was amazing.
I was so proud of her for finishing nursing school and going on to become a licensed nurse practitioner.
***
“Why did you use a cucumber and not a banana?” I asked her, leaning my hips casually against the counter and crossing my arms over my chest.
Ellen’s lips twitched. Her eyes flicked from me to Linc and back again.
“Because a banana wouldn’t be proportional to what he has to work with,” she explained.
My brows rose. “Why would you know what my sixteen-year-old son was working with?”
Her lips twitched as she continued to disinfect the cut. “I didn’t know. I was only assuming the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.” She looked at my dick. “Or eggplant from the vine.”
I snorted.
“Eeeeewwwwww,” Linc whined like he was ten instead of twenty-five, slapping his hands against his ears. “That’s so gross.”
“That’s life,” I countered. “What time do you leave to play on Sunday?”
Though Linc now lived over two hours away in Louisiana, he still made it a point to come over every week, even if it was only for a couple of hours.
At twenty-one, he’d been drafted by the New Orleans Saints as a first-round draft pick. He’d, of course, been ecstatic. But no one had been more ecstatic than me.
And, ever since, he’d been smashing the records of some of the best quarterbacks in history.
This year was the first year, however, that he was going to the Super Bowl, and I could tell he was nervous. Just looking at him, I could see the way he held his body strung so tight.
“Tomorrow,” Linc answered. “What about y’all?”
“We’re leaving tomorrow, too,” Ellen answered as she got her suture kit ready. “Though, we’re driving. We’re going to spend some time in ‘Nawlins.”
I snorted.
Ever since Ellen had learned that Linc was going to be a player at LSU, she’d done her best to learn the culture of New Orleans. Then, when she’d found out that he’d been drafted by the Saints, she’d been in hog heaven. She loved the area, and I knew that, if there ever came a time when we were looking for a new place to live, New Orleans or something in the surrounding area would be where we went.
And not even because Linc now lived there, but because she loved the culture so much.
It’d been where we got married—for a second time. It’d been a private ceremony, just her, me, Linc and Lydia. It was where she’d told me that she was pregnant, and also where her water had broken with Laura, our third child.