Love, Tussles, and Takedowns (Cactus Creek #3)(13)

Having grown up an only child, Hudson couldn’t even imagine what that whole scenario would’ve been like. To him though, it sounded kind of great. “So how long did it take them to break you? A few months?”

“Ha! Try weeks. Even when I spoke in Chinese just to try and throw them off, they’d just barrel right along doing a valiant job keeping up, even as they completely butchered the language. They were relentless. I remember Max even got detention once because of it. He’s a year older than me but we were in the same economics class. I’d made the mistake of correcting the teacher when he made a joke about Max and I clearly sharing the same genes. Max deemed it a tangential offense and started in on the copycatting all through class until the teacher sent him to the principal’s office. Caine and Gabe decreed later that Max was clearly within his copycat rights, and while they never went on record about it, my foster parents seemed to be rather supportive of the whole thing also. Even to this day, if they ever hear me say the phrase, ‘foster brother,’ even when it’s justifiable in its usage—like, say in an introduction—they slip right back into copycat torture.”

She walked them into a bazaar or open market of sorts and led them over to the food booths. “So yes, my brothers were fairly dogged about deleting the word foster from my vocabulary in reference to them. My foster parents never pushed me about it though.”

The shift in her tone made it clear that a part of her had wanted them to.

Hudson suddenly felt an insanely strong desire to pull her into his arms to comfort her.

What was it about her that made him want to protect her?

As he looked around, he saw various town folks eyeing him up and down, studying him as if they were committing his features to memory so they could describe it to a police sketch artist later. It was the same last night in the brewpub too. They were all clearly protective of her as well.

And for some bizarre reason, he was envious of them. That they knew enough about her to be protective.

That they’d get to keep feeling protective of her.

Even long after he left town today.

It occurred to him then that Lia hadn’t said anything for a few minutes. She was just leaning against the railing beside him watching the scenery, giving him a little interruption-free time for him and his thoughts.

A comfortable silence. That’s what they were in right now. No smartphones to fill the quiet, no teasing hand-waving in front of his eyes to bring him back to reality.

When he ghosted his hand over the small of her back to get her attention, she turned and smiled as if she were finally seeing the sun peek out from behind the clouds. Gazing at him for a moment without standing, he felt her silently checking to see if there were more clouds on his horizon, one leg swinging gently like she had all the time in the world to wait for him.

Never had he met anyone like her before.

“Hungry yet?” she asked as she stood.

Yes. More than he’d been in a long time, in fact. But not in a dirty way. He just felt hungry, period. Eager. For whatever was going to come next in their day.

And since it’d been a good six months since he’d felt like that, he didn’t want to rush through it.

“You said you needed to stop by your shop first for a bit, right?” He looked across the street and saw a small shop bearing Lia’s name and an emblem of pre-Civil War rifles. “Why don’t you go take care of what you need to do first? We can meet up for breakfast after you’re done.”

“Are you sure? I’m actually only open by appointment on weekend mornings since I’m usually doing on-site appraisals or auctions for clients.”

“Take your time. I was actually going to check out that toy shop across the way. One of my friends works with the community outreach programs out where our troops are deployed in the Middle East, and I know they rarely get things for the kids so I was thinking of sending her some cool toys that she could ship over for them to hand out.”

She smiled. “Okay. How about I meet you in the town center in about a half hour?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

A plan in theory, perhaps.

But in reality, the second Lia stepped foot into her shop, two people immediately stopped him in the street to essentially ask him ‘what his intentions were’ with their Lia. The kindly old woman in the hand knit sweater who stopped him first was perhaps just as fierce in her warnings as the gruff biker dude that growled out a brief, “Don’t you dare hurt that sweet woman.”

He’d managed to get two-thirds of the way down the main street when he saw that half his time was already up and if he wasn’t mistaken, Lia was already at the town center, getting chased around the grassy area by a screeching swarm of kids.

“I take it you’re Lia’s mystery guy. The one everyone’s buzzing about this morning,” said a cheerfully amused voice from the next bench over.

Hudson had always been good with faces, but not names. “You were at Luke’s wedding a few weeks back, right? You’re the brother of one of the other groomsmen.”

The man’s eyebrows hopped up in recognition. “You were in the wedding party too—Luke’s friend from high school. Sorry, I didn’t recognize you there for a second. And yeah, I’m Brian Sullivan. Good memory. Connor’s my brother.”

Hudson looked over at the kids, wholly astonished to see them now quiet, and marching in a military-grade single file behind Lia holding what looked like… He squinted. “Are those play-fort sized Lincoln Logs?”