Mama’s Boy by Avery Flynn
Chapter Fifteen
Fiona
The rest of the train ride was taken up by Dixon, Nash, and Griff telling Fiona stories about the summers they’d spent with their grandma at Gable House. Somewhere between the one about an epic treasure hunt on the island in the middle of the lake and the fifth scary story about what ghosts haunted the tower room, she’d forgotten not to laugh.
“So there’s Dixon, running through the rose garden in some sorry-ass ghost costume with a pillowcase full of garter snakes while Grandma’s goose Maurice is chasing him and honking loud enough to be heard miles away,” Nash said.
She looked over at Dixon on the seat next to her, trying her best to ignore the deep laugh lines around his hazel eyes that were on full display. “Did Maurice get you?”
“Bit me right in the ass,” he said with a laugh. “But I still won the race.”
The train started slowing down then, coming to a stop at a small platform painted the same midnight blue as the train car. Through the window, she spotted a sign that read Gable House: Beware of Attack Geese.
“You have your own stop?” Fiona asked as she stood up, trying to wrap her brain around this fact when she didn’t even have a washer and dryer in her apartment.
Dixon shrugged. “Grandma was one of a kind.”
Yeah, her nana’s quirk was whipping up moisturizer for the dinner-at-four crowd in her kitchenette while his was matching the colors of her personal train car to her personal railway platform. The rich really weren’t like the rest of the world.
From the platform, it was a quick golf cart ride down a well-maintained asphalt path to Gable House. The closer they got, the harder it was for Fiona to keep her working-class, Waterbury-born-and-raised jaw from dropping open in shock. The house was huge. White stone with midnight-blue shutters and the double front doors painted a gleaming emerald green, it had straight-from-a-fairy-tale towers with ivy wrapping around them on each end that went taller than the house’s three stories. The roof was the same green as the doors, and the white stone that made up the outer walls must have been inset with something, because everywhere the sun hit sparkled. The manicured yard in front of the house was dotted with shrubs trimmed to look like geese.
Dixon pointed to the shrubs. “Those are the attack geese.”
“Do they come alive at night?” Because really, looking at the house, the whole place looked more than a little magical.
He settled back against the golf cart seat as they sat in the back, hip to hip. “We used to stay up at night to find out, but they never did.”
“Maybe the moon needs to be full.” She no more than got the words out when Nash took a turn on the path fast enough that her upper body ended up pressed against Dixon. She put out a hand before she completely slid into his lap, her palm landing smack dab on the upper half of his rock-hard thigh because of course it did. She yanked her hand back and by the force of certain embarrassment held herself rigid until they got back on the straightaway. “Sorry.”
“My fault. I should have warned you Nash is a horrible driver,” he said, scooting the whole three millimeters he could to open up more space between them.
Annoyance flicked at her skin as she watched him try to make himself smaller, which for a guy whose broad shoulders and muscular chest filled out his cable-knit to perfection was pretty much impossible. Did she have the cooties? She brushed her teeth. Her deodorant had never let her down before. And here was this guy shrinking away from her like she was actually hitting on him. Not likely. He was too much exactly her type for that—all sexy hair and perfect ass with a side helping of secret dork mixed in. No way. She’d learned her lesson. If a guy was her type, she was not interested—not one little teeny-weeny bit. Her judgment when it came to men wasn’t just flawed; it was beyond repair.
“Keep the comments to yourself until you finally learn to drive,” Nash said over his shoulder as he steered the golf cart around what should have been an easy bend in the path.
Grabbing ahold of the oh-shit handle on the side of her seat, she asked, “Why can’t you drive?”
“I live in the city,” Dixon said. “I don’t need to.”
“And there was the whole mom thing,” Griff said as they turned onto another path that led up to the house.
“She isn’t wrong,” Dixon said. “Public transportation is better for the environment.”
“Hence taking the train,” she said.
He looked over at her and smiled. “Exactly.”
Her stomach flipped in a way that had nothing to do with Nash’s berserker-level driving skills and everything to do with the man who had gone searching for the worst date possible so he could win a bet.
Hello! Hear that siren? It’s reminding you not to be a dumbass. The dude is a jerk—a hot jerk—but a total and complete unreadable asshole. You’re here for a reason. This is Operation Moisturize Nana!
She flinched.
Correction: Operation Nana. Forget what you thought before. Your brain really is a scrambled mess.
That was exactly why she was going to keep her mouth shut from now on. No more laughing at funny stories. No more appreciating Dixon’s ass in those jeans. No more leaning in a little extra on the turns so she could get a sniff of his cologne that put ideas in her head about lazy afternoon sex in front of a fireplace.
She was done with all that.
Really.
She was impervious.
That single word echoed in her head with every step as she walked from the golf cart to Gable House’s veranda. She made it up the steps before a pissed-off honk blasted through the early fall dusk. She spotted a pair of white feathered wings outstretched in her peripheral vision half a second before the honks came in fast and angry. Before she could even call out a warning, Dixon was running serpentine through the landscaped geese while a real-life one was hot on his heels.
