“Noelle,” Dad says firmly. “You can take your hand off your gun, sweetheart. You’re a little outnumbered.”
Reluctantly, I pull my fingers away from my waistband and tuck them between my thighs. Just in case my finger gets twitchy. “Yet I have a better aim than you all put together,” I mutter in frustration.
“Only because Dad took pity on you and thought you needed more target practice than we did,” Trent grumbles.
“Aww, poor big bro,” I coo, reaching for his cheek.
He knocks my hand away to Alison’s giggles.
I continue. “Did nobody teach little baby Trent how to shoot a bull’s-eye?”
Devin looks at the two terror children in the corner, his lips forming the widest, cockiest smile I’ve ever seen. “Someone did.”
Trent leans over me to thump him in the arm, but I block his swing.
“Hey, now!” I protest.
“Thought you had a better aim than all of us!” he vents.
I ball my hands into fists and slam them both down onto my brothers’ thighs, making both of them cry out in pain.
“Cagna!” Trent hisses as I jump up and away from both his and Brody’s attacks. Sure—he refuses to curse in English, but Italian is all good until his kids learn it.
I hold my hands out to the sides and smile sweetly. “And to think—I meant to do that. Another two or so inches outward…” I whistle innocently and shrug my shoulders.
“Noella! Trent! Brody! Devin!”
“The hell did I do?” Brody exclaims, looking at Nonna.
She furrows her brow, her dark hair perfectly pulled back from her still-youthful face. “You all are children!”
“I’m thirty-three!” Trent protests.
“You no-a act it!” she retorts, straightening to her full five-foot-two height and slamming her hands onto her hips.
That’s it, Nonna. You stare down that six-foot-three police officer grandson of yours.
“And you!” she says, rounding on me.
Oh, shit.
“You-a the worst!” Her finger points at me and she waggles it with far too much enthusiasm, if you ask me. “You wind-a them up! All-a time! No wonder you-a single! No man want-a your attitude!”
I catch Drake’s grin from the corner of my eye and shoot him a glare before turning puppy-dog eyes on Nonna. “Aw, Nonna, that’s so sweet. Don’t you know that the guys all say I get my attitude from you?”
Immediately, she bristles, and all three of my brothers sit bolt upright, as if someone just sent an electrical charge shooting up their spines.
“Aha! You think-a that? She has-a same attitude as-a me?!” Nonna shrieks.
“Mamma, maybe you need to lie down,” Dad interjects, stepping in front of her. “Just for a half hour.”
Nonna narrows her eyes, but Dad lifts his eyebrows and twists her toward the door before she can argue. After one final angry stream of Italian about how no one in this country or family respects her, Dad all but frog-marches her up the stairs and out of earshot.
“Nonna says bad words,” Aria says from the corner, her large, dark eyes the spitting image of Trent’s.
Trent winces. “Nonna is bad sometimes,” he answers, opening his arms for his daughter to climb onto his lap. “How did you know?”
“Sometimes, you and Mom yell bad words at each other. They might be Italian, but, Dad, I’m not stupid.”
I cough to cover my amused snort and look away. That’s what you get for trying to pull the wool over a ten-year-old’s eyes, Trent Bond.
“Dinner’s ready,” Mom says, breaking through the awkward moment caused by Aria’s announcement.
We all get up and head to the dining room, and despite my best efforts, Mom directs Drake in the empty seat next to me. I stare at her flatly as he tucks his legs beneath the table and deliberately kicks my foot with his.
“The hell are you? Twelve?” I hiss, kicking him back.
“Thirty-one,” he replies, his light-blue eyes devoid of their previous chill. Now, they glimmer with laughter. “And yourself? Still on the brink of puberty?”
“Twenty-eight.” I grab my wine glass and throw half of it back in one go.
Mom notices, her eyebrows shooting up.
“What?” I ask her.
“Nothing,” she replies, her pearly-pink lips curving into a smile.
I drop my eyes to the red smudge on my glass and rub at it with my thumb. Damn that man. What is he even doing at family dinner? I was always under the impression that family dinner is for family, girlfriends, fiancés, and husband/wives.
Oh. Hell no.
The crazy witch upstairs is trying to set me up with Drake Nash.
“Nonna!” I slide my chair back. “I swear to god I’m gonna beat your Italian ass into next week!”
Devin grabs the back of my chair and stops me from running upstairs at her. “Noelle,” he says through laughter.
“God will probably thank me for it!”
“She’s just being nice.”
“Nice? No. Nice is her nose up your business instead of mine. Nice is her nose up Brody’s backside inside of being up in mine all the time!” I humph and drop back into my chair.
“Shut up and drink.” Brody shoves my glass toward me.
“I love you, Brodes, Dev, but I swear to God that both of you are ten seconds away from my drink in your faces if you keep siding with the crazy old bat.”
“You only have one drink,” Devin observes.
I grab Drake’s full beer bottle. “Yeah?”
“Put the bottle down, Noelle,” Drake drawls. “Devin, let her go. We all know she’s as dangerous as a snail in a heatwave.”
I slowly cut my eyes to him, grabbing my fork and jabbing it into my spaghetti with deliberate force. “Are you sure about that, Detective? Because there are nine people around this table right now and only one of us has given you a bullet in your foot.”
Drake smiles slowly, and the curve of his lips and the glint in his eye are so fucking sexy that I want to smear my pasta sauce all over his hot little face. “Yet only four of us have a gun about their person.”
Slowly, I lift my wine glass to my lips and sip, despite the fact I only just wiped my lipstick mark away. Dad chuckles from the end of the table, and Devin’s cough is enough to make me fight against the smirk that wants to form.
Oh dear.
Drake Nash doesn’t know me very well at all.
I glide my foot up his calf, making sure to show him I’m wearing boots. “You sound so sure, Detective.”
“You’re wearing boots.”
“Cleverly observed.”
“Aunt Noelle always carries a gun in her boot,” Aria states a mere second before sucking up a strand of spaghetti with a giant slurp that sprays marinara sauce at her brother.
“Does she now?” Drake asks, his eyes trained firmly on mine.
“Yep. She says every woman with more sense than all the men in her family put together carries a gun, because a real woman needs to be prepared for everything.”
“And?” I prompt her, never breaking Drake’s gaze.
“And no matter how dangerous a man is with a gun, he’ll always be impulsive, but a woman will always be more calculating and therefore more dangerous than a man can ever dream of being.”
“When the hell did you teach her that?” Trent booms.
“Ask your wife.” I grin, lifting my wine glass once more.
Oh, shoot me. One woman surrounded by four cops, a florist, and a pensioner who fancies herself a matchmaker? I had to learn somehow, and if that meant playing Poor Little Noelle until I whooped ass at target practice, so be it. And if my sister-in-law is happy for her daughter to learn the way I did, then, well.
She’s more a Bond than my brothers are.
“Touché,” Drake hums. “One gun or two?”
“Take a ticket and get in line, Drake,” I whisper back. “You’re not the only man waiting to find out.”
“I could demand you tell me.”
The threat in his tone makes me laugh. “You could. But you won’t.”
“You sound real sure there, Noelle.”
“Oh, I am. Real sure, that is.” I twirl some spaghetti on my fork and seal my lips around the metal prongs, sucking the yummy pasta into my mouth. A string of spaghetti falls loose, and I suck it up with one sharp breath. Then, with his eyes still focused on my lips, I say, “If you were going to demand I tell you, you’d have done it instead of staring at my lips like they were on your dinner plate instead of a Bolognese.”