Page 15 of Ronen
Behind her towered her sons, all four of them–my dad and my uncles Lachlan, Brendan, and Finn. If I had to guess, I would say they had been trying to stop their mother from whatever fuckery she was about to get up to. She might be eighty-seven–having barely been nineteen when she had delivered her quads–but she was a feisty octogenarian, and still very much the matriarch of our family.
“William Sinclair,” she hissed, her voice sharp enough even I straightened in my seat.
She stared at the empty space of my passenger seat, her brown eyes narrowed. “You listen to me, and you listen good. You are not welcome here. No one, and I do mean no one, has a damn thing to say to you. Over fifty years later and we are still trying to undo the psychological damage you did to our boys. Stop pestering my grandson!”
William–poor, dumb William–started to say,“He’s my grand–”even though no one but me could hear him.
Holding a hand up to indicate he should stop talking now, I warned him, “Don’t say it.”
Grandma Mary turned her look on me, leaning in a little. Very slowly, she demanded, “What did he say?”
“Mom, let’s just go inside,” my Uncle Lachlan–the oldest of the quads–urged, “you’re not even wearing a coat.”
Grandma looked over her shoulder at him, and even though I couldn’t see her face, all my uncles took a step back.
Turning back to me, she smoothed down her pink sweater with one hand and gave me a warm look. “Ronen, sweetheart, what was thatmansaying?”
Rubbing my forehead, where a headache was brewing, I blew out a breath. “I believe he was going to say that I’m his grandson too, or something to that effect.”
“Oh really?” She straightened to her full height, which, to be fair, wasn’t that much. It still seemed to push the boundaries of physics to me that my tiny grandmother had given birth to not one, but four, hulking alpha wolves.
Poking at the thin air over the seat, she miraculously landed a blow in the middle of William’s chest. Her finger went right through him, but still, it was impressive as fuck.
“You listen and you listen good, William. Sharing blood doesn’t make you a grandfather. DNA means shit in this family. Because you know what? Even if you had still been alive when he was born, you would have been a shit grandfather. Like you were a shit father. And kind of a shit husband. I used to chalk it up to the massive age-gap between us, but I think it really was just your personality. Ronen had a wonderful grandfather and is better off for it. Leave this boy alone! Leave my sons alone. Stop trying to get Ronen to relay whatever messages you want to give them. No one cares about your redemption tour from the grave. Too little, too late.”
She leaned in a little closer to the seat, her voice lowering menacingly, in a tone I had never heard my grandmother use. “If I find out you haven’t stopped, when I die, I will make your afterlife a living hell. You’ll wish you had gone into the light, or down to the depths of hell where you belong, when you had the chance!”
“Okay,” my dad grasped her lightly by the arm, pulling her away from the open doorway. “Well, that was something, Mom, but let’s let the expert ghost whisperer handle it from here.”
“I mean it, William!” Grandma called, even while she was being manhandled back into the house. “You’ll see a side of me you never even dreamed existed!”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I blew out another breath of hot air, feeling exhausted to my bones.
How the fuck was this my life?
“Just go away, William,” whispering, I closed my eyes, leaning my head back on my seat. “Please. Let me have some peace.”
When I opened my eyes, it was to discover the seat next to me was blessedly empty. But his warning words hung over me like a black cloud.
Something is coming.
Chapter Six
Mason
He really wasn’t going to believe the excuse I had today for the missing book.
Legitimately, this one had actually been destroyed. And, I honestly was too tired to deal with his sarcasm, snark, raised eyebrows, accusing eyes…any of it.
I’d been up all night with my mama goat while she had labored with her first kid. She’d produced two kids–I always suspected she was an overachiever–two identical looking males. Her labor had been long and hard, and I hadn’t wanted to leave her side, especially since this had been her first delivery.
So, I had camped out in my barn, in her stall, all night. Except for a quick bathroom trip, when I had laid the book I’d been reading down. And returned to Cinnamon happily munching on a corner of it. More than, because she had managed to devour not only the corner but several pages, essentially destroying the book.
Well, Mr. Ronen S.–whatever the fuck his middle name was–Sinclair could just save his condemning, disapproving looks, take my money for the book, and move right the fuck along with his day. I was too exhausted to deal with him.
My plan was to drop by work, spend a couple of hours on the paperwork that was piling up on my desk, and head home for some much-needed sleep. After I check in on Cinnamon and the babies, of course. They were about the cutest things I had seen in a long time.
Grabbing my stack of books to return, I headed up the wide stone steps. Since it was past ten, the open sign was already flipped, and I held the door and waited patiently for Mrs. Everett when I reached the top.
