Page 24 of The Holiday Heartbreaker

“She’s been warned,” he said.

“I’m glad that she responded to that ad,” Gus said. “I don’t know if this would’ve come together without her.”

“Yeah. She seems great,” Brody said. And he ignored Lachlan’s look at him.

“So what else do we need to do to prep for Monday? That’s when we have guests coming in, right?” Brody asked.

He was ready to have work piled on him. Give him something to do.

Work hard. Play hard.

He had to have one to have the other.

“As a matter of fact, Brody, I have a rock wall that I need finished.”

“Perfect,” Brody said.

He loved penance more than anything else. And if that penance might handle his unwanted sexual attraction to the hot single mom who had just moved onto the ranch, all the better.

All the better.

DINNER CAME AROUND a whole lot quicker than he was prepared for. He had taken a little bit of an Elizabeth break, and now it was time to see her again. It was handy that she always came with the kid as an accessory.

Plus, his whole family was around now.

Alaina had made about ten pizzas, and he marveled at the industriousness of his sister-in-law, even while heavily pregnant.

She had taken to her role on the ranch with gusto, and he had a feeling that Alaina, as the youngest of the Sullivans, just liked having something that she was in charge of.

Being Gus’s wife suited her.

And it suited Gus too, which shocked Brody more than just about anything else. He would’ve said that Gus would never get married.

Actually, he would have said that none of the McClouds would ever get married, and now there were only two of them remaining who hadn’t.

It was a weird-ass thing.

She had changed since their earlier encounter on the ranch. She had swapped her jeans—which had been a real visual delight, in his opinion—for a pair of navy blue wide-leg pants that were made of a very thin material, and if he was not mistaken, when she moved, it gave him a pretty intimate outline of her backside.

Not that he was looking.

He was officially not looking.

She sat down at the other end of the table, away from him, making conversation with the women and Gus. Talking particulars about the therapy program and the upcoming programming that they had on the schedule.

He could see that Benny’s attention was wandering. Yeah. Well. Brody couldn’t blame him.

He felt a strange moment of empathy for the kid. All by himself, around all this stuff he wasn’t part of. Brody had grown up with a lot of brothers. He was still surrounded by them. But he knew what it was like to feel separate. To feel different. He wondered if Benny felt alone even when he was with his half siblings. They were part of something outside him. That was the thing. Even if his dad was great, and his stepmom was nice, and they tried to integrate him, Benny had come from another situation.

The empathy was getting a little uncomfortable now. Brody didn’t traffic in fine emotions like that.

“My brother doesn’t have video games, but I happen to know that he has some pretty great toys upstairs,” Brody said. “He just got a lot of it out because he’s having a baby soon.”

“Boys don’t have babies,” Benny said.

“His wife... Whatever, kid. Anyway, do you want to go play with some army men or not?”

“I guess,” he said.

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