Hey, Daddy: Chapter 1

I think my problem is I like to see how red my flag can get.

—Nastya’s secret thoughts NASTYA I grunted as I shoved the huge box into my car.

The giant box had started off on the cart that I used when I had big purchases that I needed help carrying—I did a whole lot of Amazon one-hour pickups that required this.

I’d rolled the cart to the back of the car and had used everything I had to get the damn thing into the back cargo area.

It’d taken me a couple of tries—because damn, it was awkward—but eventually I’d been able to manage it.

It was a nugget ice maker and I couldn’t wait to test it out.

“Hey,” an amused voice called out.

I grinned and made a dive through the open window of the car, throwing my arms around my sister.

“Hey!” I squeaked. “What are you doing here?”

“I had to go get diapers before I met you at the bar…” She paused. “You want to ride with me? I’ll come back and drop you off when I’m done.”

“Absolutely,” I said as I ran back to the X3, caught up my purse, closed the back hatch of my SUV with a distracted click of the button, and came hauling ass back to my sister.

God, it was still so crazy to say that.

My sister.

Well, not necessarily “my sister” as much as which sister.

When I was eight years old, we’d gone to the Smoky Mountains in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, to have a much-needed family vacation.

What we got was my baby sister, Marina—now known as Maven—getting abducted.

My parents spent the rest of their lives searching, never giving up.

Then one day two years ago, we’d all been having family dinner—we’d moved to Gatlinburg in hopes of maybe one day seeing her again—when we’d gotten the news that our sister had been found.

Maven smiled and said, “Get in the car, or we’ll be late.”

I did, getting into the passenger seat and buckling up.

I kicked a couple of naked Barbie dolls to the side and said, “Your car is so trashed right now.”

“I know.” She groaned. “I never realized how crazy it was to have children.”

Maven now had three. Lola, the love of my life, Brando, the sweetest boy I’d ever met, and Redford, the hellion.

“You should get your husband to get it detailed,” I instructed.

“He refuses because he doesn’t want the kids eating in the car.” She rolled her eyes. “Like I could stop that. I have two small kids, one of which is a toddler and doesn’t understand why he has to be cooped up in his car seat for an hour during school pick up and drop off, and he expects me to keep the kids entertained without, might I add, an iPad?” She snorted. “Mr. ‘I don’t intend to raise iPad kids’ wants me to entertain these kids without technology or food? Yeah, right.”

“I do agree with the iPad kid thing.” I shuddered. “I saw a kid in Target throw a fit a little bit ago because her mom wouldn’t let her have her phone when the kid’s iPad died. Threw the biggest fit, and the woman buys her all kinds of toys to get her to shut up.”

“I understand the necessity of it, which was why I agreed with the no iPad thing, but not the no food thing,” she agreed as she hooked a left and turned into the bar parking lot we were meeting Milena at.

Milena’s SUV was already in the parking lot, so we headed inside and found her in a corner booth at the back of the room.

My other sister, Milena, smiled from the other side of the booth as the two of us fell into place in front of her.

Our family had been back to normal now for years, and yet I still felt like I was riding on the edge, waiting for Maven to disappear again at any moment.

Moving to Dallas hadn’t been in question.

Once we’d realized that Maven was here, and she was kind of tied to this area due to her man’s family, all of us had packed up and moved.

Even our grandmother, Jessa Semyonov, had come.

Though, out of all of us, I think that Grams settled in the best.

She found a new elderly community apartment to move into, and she was having the time of her life.

Speaking of…

“Did you know that the retirement community does a ‘Buff Wednesday?’”

Maven blinked. “What’s a ‘Buff Wednesday?’”

Milena choked. “Please tell me it’s not what I think it is.”

“If you’re thinking it’s that they do Bingo in the buff, then you’d be correct.”

Maven’s peal of laughter had my heart fluttering.

Milena groaned. “That’s just awful.”

“I love her.” Maven wiped tears of hilarity from her eyes. “I have to go see her, but I think I might skip tomorrow since it’s Wednesday and all…” She paused. “I should send Auden. Do you think he’ll die of embarrassment?”

“I don’t think that Auden will have any issues. He is pretty hardy.” I laughed.

Auden was a police officer with Sunnyvale PD and had previously been with Dallas Police Department.

The man could handle just about anything, even our naked grandmother.

Movement at the bar caught my eye, and I glanced that way and froze.

“Wow, who is that?” I heard myself say.

The bar we were at was one of the only ones in Sunnyvale, which was where Maven now lived.

She’d been at a house in Dallas, but after she’d met her husband, she’d moved into his newly built home.

I’d assumed that since she’d had us meet her here, she might know some of the people, but Maven disappointed me by saying, “I have no clue. He’s definitely very debonair, though.”

That was the truth.

The man at the bar was tall and built.

He was wearing a pair of jeans that fit him like they were specifically made for him. They were worn out in all the right places—at the front pocket where it was evident he put his keys and even a Skoal ring on his back right pocket.

He had the finest ass I’d ever seen in my life.

He was standing with his back to us, one leg hitched up on the barstool in front of him, turned to talk to the man at his side. His tight black t-shirt left nothing to the imagination, and not in a conceited “look at me” way, but in a way you could tell he’d had the t-shirt for a long time, and had slightly grown out of it.

Not in a chubby way, but in a bulk kind of way.

Like the shirt was from years ago, and he’d gone from a young man to an older man.

And he was older, as the salt and pepper in his hair and his beard attested to.

I couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but what I could tell was they were light.

The blue light of the Amber Bach sign above the bar made them glow in an almost eerie way.

The man at his side said something to him that made him throw his head back and laugh.

Even his laugh was sexy.

“How’s work?” Maven asked me, rudely yanking me out of my ogling of the sexy older man at the bar.

I grinned. “Secret shopper for Dallas, Texas official.”

Five years ago, when I’d had no idea what I wanted to be, I’d thought…what the hell. I’d apply for the first job that I saw.

My brother somehow always made it impossible to work without having a bodyguard up my ass twenty-four-seven, so why not find a job that allowed me to do what I wanted without anyone telling me who could and couldn’t be around me all day, every day.

I wasn’t saying that I approved of Shasha’s overprotectiveness, but sometimes I decided to allow it.

And if he really pushed, I let his guard come along.

Today wasn’t one of those days, though.

I imagined that was likely due to the fact that I was at a bar five minutes away from twenty cops—half of which were now related to our sister.

“And the Amazon review thing?” Maven asked.

I smiled.

“Still going strong,” I admitted. “My new neighbor probably hates me because my door is always filled with packages and blocks half the hallway.”

“I’m sure the man has no issues with you getting packages,” Milena pointed out.

“Actually, you’d be wrong about that.” I snickered. “The apartments are questionable on whether they’re actually up to code or not.” I paused. “Don’t you dare tell our brother about that.” I pointed at the two women individually. “Anyway, so I heard him come home last night, and the light was out in the hallway as always. But when I came home last night, I’d left them all out in front of my door because I really, really had to pee. By the time I was heading back to the door, he’d come home…and promptly tripped on them. I heard him hit his door with a thud, then curse me out.”

“Ooops.” Maven snickered. “Too bad you don’t have that Ring camera up yet.”

“I’m not putting one up,” I admitted. “This apartment is only temporary until I can find a better place to stay. If Shasha finds out that I’m living there, he’s going to shit a brick.”

Shasha was my big brother.

He was also very…particular.

Why was he particular?

Because the man was running the Russian Bratva and felt like it was his God given right to run roughshod over my life.

The only reason he hadn’t realized yet where I lived was because I might or might not have used a fake name on the lease when I signed it.

See, I knew that I was in danger.

Your sister gets kidnapped, and you start to realize a few things.

Like how connected your family is, how ruthless your father and eventually your brothers are, and finally, how overwhelmingly protective they can get once they realize that they’re not invincible.

“So how did you get our brother to allow you to move to an apartment that’s on the south side of Dallas without having the entire place wired and under twenty-four-seven surveillance?” Maven asked curiously. “And when are you going to move into the house he had built for you?”

Never.

I would never move in there.

I bit my lip, not wanting to tell her, mostly because I didn’t want to have her lying for me.

And she would.

If anyone knew overprotectiveness, it was her.

Though, that overprotective instinct came from all the men in her life, not just her brothers.

Having a cop for a husband who’d almost witnessed you die…that tended to amp up the protective streak.

Not that I blamed poor Auden.

“I didn’t.” I left it at that.

“Didn’t how?” Milena leaned forward.

“If I tell you, I’d have to kill you,” I teased.

She smirked. “You couldn’t kill me if you tried.”

I gasped. “I so could, too!”

“No, you couldn’t.” Maven snickered. “You accidentally stepped on the cat’s tail last week, and you called me crying about it for an hour.”

Well, that was different…

“That was different,” I grumbled, echoing my thoughts.

“It’s not different, and you know it.” Milena snickered. “There was this one time when she was taking me to college. The college has this long ass drive, and so you kind of wind back on yourself a bit as you go through the trees. I was getting her to drive me because I’d just had my wisdom teeth out and I was under the influence of Vicodin. We turn down the drive, and she accidentally runs over a squirrel. When we turn back toward the direction of where she hit it, she could still see it struggling, and she started to cry so hard that I had to go finish it off with a shovel from the groundskeeper. And drive her back to the road with her eyes closed.”

“That was awful,” I admitted. “I never want to run over another animal again.”

And stepping on Rudy’s tail was awful.

He was a feral cat that my sister tried, and failed, to domesticate.

The vet had told her that he had some health problems when she trapped him to get him neutered, but ol’ Rudy was still going strong.

Movement had me turning my head toward it.

The man at the bar caught my eye again, and I nearly had a heart attack when I realized he was staring right at me.

“Your cobwebs are making themselves known,” Milena drawled.

I flipped her off. “Fuck you.”

“You haven’t gotten laid in a while?” Maven teased.

I sighed. “I haven’t gotten laid in a while.”

“How long is a while?”

I changed the subject.

“What’s the plan with your hair, Milena? Are you going to keep it or dye it next week?” I asked.

Years ago, we’d thought it would be awesome to all have the same hair color like we did when we were kids, and I’d gone from black hair to blonde. I loved being blonde, but I hated the upkeep it took to make it happen. That, and my hair felt like it would break with a stiff wind the more I dyed it.

Milena had been complaining about her frequent trips to the hairdresser herself last week, and she’d told me that she was thinking about going back to black like I had.

Which would leave Maven alone with her blonde curls.

“Haze Hopkins, as I live and breathe.”

My head turned, and I once again locked onto the man behind me.