Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 110550 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110550 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
I bolted out of the elevator. The stranger turned, blinking at me as my daughter jolted awake.
“Oh, no— Feisty, wait!” Genny called.
“Give her to me!”
Laurel burst into wails. The woman didn’t fight me, handing over Laurel within seconds of me about to snatch her.
Shooting away, I put ten feet between us in a blink—cradling Laurel tight to my chest. “Who are you?” My voice was ten octaves too high. “Why did you have her?”
Inexplicably, the woman smiled at me. “I’m so sorry. You must be Mackenzie. This wasn’t the greeting I had in mind.”
“Who are you—?”
Genny moved as fast as the boot allowed her. Flying past me and my crying offspring, she threw her arms around the stranger. “Mom.”
I put it down to the sobs in my ear that it took a full ten seconds for that word to penetrate. Mom? Did she say Mom?
“Hold on, you’re Genny’s...”
“Mother,” Adeline Redgrave finished. “Yes, I am. Sorry again for frightening you.”
Heat licked my cheeks. My goodness, I just shouted at my boyfriend’s mother like she was a kidnapper.
“Sunny was busy with his fathers,” Adeline continued, “and this little one was nodding off in her high chair. She fell asleep in my arms while I was looking for her crib. Got everything but in that nursery.”
Of course there wasn’t a crib in the nursery. I had it moved to my bedroom.
“I came out here to ask Fuller where to put her down, and naturally you didn’t take too well to a stranger carting your kid off.”
I laughed mirthlessly. “A perfectly reasonable explanation. I’m the one who is sorry. I went nuts, screaming and carrying on for no reason. I should’ve recognized you. You look just like Liam. Or Liam looks just like you.”
They truly did look alike though Liam was blond and built, where this lovely older woman was redheaded and slim. From the shape of her brow, to the amused twist to her lips, and down to the same nose. Liam received the masculine frame from his father, but his everything else from his mother. A mother I was told was pushing sixty but could’ve been Angela Bassett for all the effect she let age have on her beauty.
“Liam does look like me, and it used to make him mad when people said it.” She chuckled, dropping a kiss on Genny’s head. “He claimed everyone was telling him he looked like a girl.”
“Beat a few people up for it too,” Genny mused.
“Ahh. The infamous Hunt temper. Even worse for how it smolders beneath a placid surface—building, building, building,” Adeline said. “You don’t know you did anything wrong until... they erupt.”
“Wow, what a description,” I said. And why does it excite instead of scare me?
I bounced Laurel, murmuring softly to soothe her. If it was possible for her to be cussing me out with her whines and shouts, I’d deserve it. I woke the poor kid up from a perfectly good nap for no reason. If I thought about it for half a second, I’d have realized Thatcher wouldn’t let anyone in this building that we couldn’t trust. “I’m sorry, baby girl. Want to go for a walk outside? You like the gardens.”
“Ah!” I took that response to mean I better do something, or she was going to lose it.
“I’ll walk her around,” I said. “Hopefully, she’ll fall asleep quickly and I’ll be forgiven.”
“I’ll come with you,” Adeline offered. Cupping Genny’s face, she smooched her cheek. It struck me then that was the first time I witnessed someone be affectionate with the youngest Hunt and not be hurt for it. “You, my love, go upstairs and rest that leg. I’ll be up soon with a case of Leffe Blonde—your favorite. Flew it in from Belgium yesterday.”
“You’re my favorite mom, did you know that?”
“It doesn’t come free.” Adeline hooked through my arm. “I’ll trade you for everything you kids have been keeping from me. All of it.”
Genny lost her smile quick. “Of course,” she muttered under her breath.
The three of us were already walking off. I cast glances at Adeline in the elevator. I didn’t know much about the Merchants when Sunny crash-landed into my life, but I knew quite a lot about them now.
I was standing in an enclosed space with the most dangerous woman in Cinco City.
“Five little monkeys.”
I jerked. “What?”
“Five little monkeys,” Adeline repeated. Her enigmatic smile said she knew what I was thinking, but how could she? “When my babies were fussy, I sang “Five Little Monkeys” at the top of my lungs and it stunned them into silence. I have a horrid singing voice—even infants know it.”
Snorting, I cracked up. A sudden vision of a dumbfounded baby Sunny, gaping at his wailing mother flashed across my mind. And with it, she suddenly went from legend... to human.
“I’ll have to try that one day.” Another day because my baby was settling, her angry cries reducing to soft sniffles. I buried my face in her curls, breaking under the fear that sent me racing down that hallway. No one is ever going to take you from me, Laurel. Never again.