A Very Merry Bromance (Bromance Book Club #5) (43)

Colton stood, stretched his arms over his head, and stifled another yawn. “I’m going to go take a shower. Help yourselves to the kitchen.”

The sound of a stampede followed him as he jogged upstairs. When he came back down twenty minutes later, he found them all gathered around the kitchen table with plates loaded with ham, potatoes, and squash—all the things he was supposed to serve Gretchen last night.

Mack grinned, fork halfway to his mouth. “Damn, dude. You had a whole-ass meal in the fridge.”

“I made it for Gretchen last night, but we didn’t get a chance to eat it.” He’d belatedly remembered to put the food in the fridge an hour after Gretchen left.

Malcolm coughed and recovered. “Okay, there is so much about what you just said that requires further explanation.”

“Yeah, starting with why the hell you made Gretchen a ham?” Gavin laughed.

“Because ham is the superior Christmas meat!” God, why did everyone have some kind of vendetta against ham?

“Dude, chill,” Mack said. “We’re just trying to get details.”

Colton dragged his hands over his wet hair. “Fine. Gretchen came over last night to decorate my Christmas tree—”

“Is that a euphemism?” Del interrupted.

“No.”

Malcolm shushed everyone’s laughter with a single look. They settled down as if scolded by the teacher. “Please continue, Colton.”

“We literally decorated my Christmas tree, or, I mean, we started to. And we were going to eat afterward but we got interrupted.”

“By what?” Yan asked.

The most amazing kiss of my life. “A song in my head.”

“You wrote the songs with her here?” Noah said.

“But you won’t play them for us?” Vlad added.

“No, I didn’t write them with her here. I . . .” he winced. They were going to lose their shit over this. “I sort of told her to go.”

“You . . . told her . . . to go.” Malcolm repeated the words as if they’d never been strung together in that order before.

“It’s just that I knew I needed to get the song down, and I couldn’t do that with her here, so . . . I let her drive my car home.”

Vlad set down his plate and started cracking his knuckles.

“Okay, before you go off,” Colton said, holding up his hands to protect himself from the coming verbal attack, “she wasn’t pissed or anything when she left.”

Conversation ceased suddenly as Pickle exited the mudroom and the location of her litter box. Trailing her was a smell to wake the dead. It spread throughout the kitchen like a dark storm cloud until it blanketed everyone and everything.

Noah covered his nose and mouth with his hand and mumbled beneath it, “Fuck, dude. What the hell are you feeding that thing?”

“Fancy Feline,” Colton grumped. “And who are you to talk anyway? Your girlfriend’s cat is a menace to humanity.”

“But he’s not rotting from the inside out.”

Malcolm gagged. “You gotta switch her to something organic.”

“No cat should produce a smell like that,” Mack said, grimacing at his now-forgotten food. “You need to take her to the vet or something.”

Colton didn’t have time for this shit. “I thought you guys were here to wrap presents.”

“Yes,” Vlad said, shoving one last bite of ham in his mouth. “We must wrap.”

As the guys scattered, Colton grabbed the bags of gifts he’d bought for the guys’ kids and met them all back in the living room. He found them all seated on the floor near the Christmas tree, and the room already looked like an explosion inside Santa’s warehouse. Wrapping paper and bows overflowed from craft store bags next to each man, and towering piles of unwrapped presents filled the center of the room. Clothes and baby dolls and stuffed animals and purses.

Colton chose a puppy-themed paper from the pile in the center of the room and rolled it out between his splayed legs. Then he pulled his first present from the bag—a toy guitar that played songs with a push of a button.

“Please tell me that’s not coming to my house,” Yan said.

Colton grinned. “To Oscar, love Uncle Colton.” Oscar was Yan’s three-year-old son with his wife, Soledad.

Yan groaned. “Someday I’m going to get you back for all the loud things you have given my kids.”

“My wife had to hide that mini drum set you got Grady last year,” Del said of his two-year-old son. He and his wife, Nessa, also had a six-year-old girl named Josephine, or Jo Jo for short.

“It’s my job to promote music education,” Colton said, plopping a red bow on top of the gift.

“What the hell did you get my kids this year?” Gavin asked. He and his wife, Thea, had twin girls.

Colton pulled two ukuleles from a bag. Gavin groaned. “Thanks.”

“Bring the girls to my house,” Colton said. “I’ll teach them how to play.”

“Can I leave the ukuleles there too?”

“Nope.” He wrapped them in the same puppy-dog paper as the toy guitar.

Noah suddenly gaped at Gavin. “What the hell are you doing?”

Gavin’s eyebrows tugged together. “Wrapping.”