That brought her out of whatever haze she was in. “You’re not moving in, Maude,” she snapped, leaning around to see behind me. “Every time you come to stay, I wake up with rollers in my hair that you’ve already sprayed with that cement mix you call hairspray. Last time it took five shampoos to get it out.”
Patting the side of her bouffant nonchalantly, Maude shrugged, “It’s a good look, I can’t help it if you want boring flat hair because you have no taste.”
Straightening back up again, Katy whispered, “She teased my hair so much that I had to sit with conditioner on it for an hour just to get a brush through it. It was out to here.” She held her hands about a foot away from her head.
Judging by the height that the lady had going on with her own hair, I didn’t doubt that there was no exaggeration on this at all.
Bond and Canon came back in, both of them loaded down with bags, and the ladies all appeared from where they’d been upstairs and started working on sorting it out in the kitchen.
Watching it all, Katy kept her voice low. “How many people are in my house?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” I muttered back. “It’s a lot, though.”
Hearing this, she drew in a shaky breath and then looked around the place again, stopping when she saw the twins still working on their creation. It looked like she was about to freak out, but then her head tipped to the side. “Holy shit, I couldn’t figure out why that was bugging me so much. I had them in order of color and author in the individual sections, but something was really wrong with it. It’s the heights of the books I should have gone with, not the author.”
See, those guys had figured it out. Watching them, they stood back and nodded at each other and then turned and moved toward the stairs. My hope was that they were headed to the bedroom we’d just set up to work on the shit waiting to be put away.
“Knock, knock,” a deep voice called from the doorway, and I saw a tall guy holding a little girl with dark brown ringlets. “Someone’s come for a sleepover with her Katy.”
Hearing the name, the girl looked up from where she’d been playing with the collar of the man’s shirt and searched the room, stopping on ‘her Katy’. The smile that took over her face would have melted even an iron heart, and I didn’t have one of those, so I swear mine took flight. She was gorgeous!
“‘Lodie,” Katy cooed, walking up to her and catching her just as the little girl launched herself out of who I presumed was her uncle’s arms. Bringing her close to her chest and leaning her face into the baby’s neck, she sighed, “There’s my precious ‘Lodie.”
A big hand clamped down on my shoulder and Reid muttered, “Shit, man, I’m gonna cry. I don’t have ovaries, but even mine are screaming out right now.”
My brother was a goof, but he wasn’t wrong.Five hours later…
We’d left Katy and Elodie to do their thing two hours ago after ordering in enough pizza to feed Nairobi, and now I was looking at the work I did outside of the garage and wondering if Katy knew about it. It was unlikely seeing as how I’d only told Tabby and Jose about it, but never say never.
“So, we’re going to go through chapters five to nine tonight,” Karen, the female narrator for the book told me. “We’re slightly behind so we have to catch up. You good with that?”
This was the first time I’d ever done a narration with someone and so far it had been ok, but now we were getting into the sex scenes of this book and I’d been dreading it. When Tabby had made the joke about me being an erotic book narrator, I’d laughed it off, but over a matter of days the idea had stuck and I’d looked into it. In the space of eighteen months, I’d narrated seven books, with this being my eighth, and I enjoyed it. I also liked the fact that few people knew I was doing it, and for once I didn’t have eyes watching me.
This was one of my biggest hang-ups, and I knew it was something that my brothers sometimes had issues with, too. For as far back as I could remember, I had eyes on me. I was the longest baby the hospital had ever had when I was born and it had made the newspapers. I was the tallest kid in my class throughout school. I had a deep voice and liked to sing – something I did without realizing it – so again, attention. I had eyes that drew attention, too. And I hated it. I wasn’t comfortable with it at all and never had been. When all the guys in my class were planning which girls they were going to ask out, I was thinking of ways to turn dates down. I just didn’t see what they saw and when things were pointed out about my appearance or singing to me, it made me feel awkward and unsure.