Page 6 of Whispers and Wildfire

Wordlessly, I nodded. I was going back to the beginning for a new beginning. There was something poetic about that. I certainly had plenty I was ready to leave behind, and not just my ill-fated marriage.

And most of my memories of Tilikum were good ones. Not all. But most. And the ones that weren’t?

I’d just have to avoid them.

CHAPTER 3

Luke

Uncle time wasone of my favorite things. My sister, Annika, had asked me to come over and hang out with her kids for a while so she could get some work done. I was more than happy to help. I stood outside in her backyard, watching my nieces and nephews run through a sprinkler, their squeals of laughter filling the air.

I could think of worse ways to spend a hot summer afternoon.

Annika and her husband Levi Bailey were at the forefront of the Haven family baby explosion. They had four kids—eleven-year-old Thomas, seven-year-old twins Emma and Juliet, and four-year-old Will.

Thomas had a sperm donor out there somewhere, and if that shithead ever showed his face in our town, he’d be facing a wall of Haven—and Bailey—brothers, ready to rearrange his face. But Levi had stepped up as a dad to Thomas from the beginning—a lot like my parents had with each other’s kids when they got married.

My dad, Paul Haven, had three boys—Josiah, Garrett, and me—and my mom, Marlene, had three—Reese, Theo, and Zachary. Then they had Annika together. If someone asked, Iactually had to stop and think about who was biologically related to who. We’d all been a family for so long, no one even thought about it anymore.

Annika and Levi were like that—they were just a family. The fact that Levi wasn’t Thomas’s biological father didn’t matter. Levi was his dad.

I admired that about them. Hell, I admired that about my parents. They’d taken a shitty situation and turned us into a family. Granted, we’d driven them crazy—six little boys so close in age would do that. But we were probably a lot less screwed up than we could have been.

Okay, so I was kind of screwed up. But it could have been worse. At least I wasn’t Reese. Our oldest brother had bailed, taking off for who knows where, and no one except Mom had heard from him in years.

Jerk.

“Careful, Juliet,” Thomas said as his sister did a cartwheel through the spray of water.

“I am being careful.”

I just smiled. Thomas was the mini-dad of their family, always looking out for his younger siblings. I doubted they appreciated it, but I thought it was pretty cool.

“Who wants a popsicle?” Annika called as she opened the sliding glass door.

My hand shot into the air.

She rolled her eyes at me. “Okay, Uncle Luke, but we’ll go in reverse age order.”

“Me! Me! Me!” Will chanted, jumping up and down in his bright red swim trunks.

Annika handed him a popsicle, and he immediately tore open the wrapper and bit the entire top off. The other kids took theirs in turn, and she held up the last two. “These might both be orange, or maybe one is red.”

I grabbed the one in her left hand. “Either one is fine. Thanks, Sis.”

She unwrapped hers. Red. “No problem. Thank you so much for coming over. I actually got some work done.”

“Happy to.” I set my wrapper on the patio table and had a taste of mine. Orange. Not bad. “They’re pretty much entertaining themselves out here anyway.”

“Nothing like a sprinkler on a hot day.” She tilted her head as she ate her popsicle. “Imagine what it will be like when the babies are all running around in a few years.”

“Chaos,” I said with a soft laugh. “Beautiful chaos.”

The babiesreferred to the second round of the Haven family baby explosion. Back in March, Garrett and Harper welcomed their surprise baby girl, Isla, making Garrett’s teenage son Owen a big brother. Only a couple of months later, Zachary and Marigold had their first baby, a little girl named Emily. And rounding out the baby-splosion was Josiah and Audrey’s baby girl, Abby, born just a few weeks after Emily.

I figured that was just what happened when three of your brothers got married in the same year.

It looked like the weddings-and-babies phase had died down, and everyone seemed to be enjoying a relatively uneventful summer. I didn’t want to say it was too uneventful, considering the alternative in my family seemed to be the opposite. Between Audrey’s stalker, Marigold’s abduction, and Garrett’s cold case turning deadly, we’d been through a lot in the past couple of years.

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