“And they’re the ones who had Four?”
“Yep. Katie is allergic, but her mom doses her up with antihistamines when I come so the girls can at least have him visit.”
I shook my head. “I still can’t believe you took me on a private plane to Boston for dinner.”
Max smiled. “Are you mad?”
“No. You make things into an adventure. But it is a little odd to be traveling to meet a guy’s family when we’ve only just met ourselves.”
“It won’t seem so strange if you stop thinking of it as meeting the family of the guy you just met and start thinking of it as meeting the family of the guy you’re gonna date all summer.”
I laughed. “Pretty confident of yourself.”
“You gotta put things out there to the universe if there’s any shot you’re gonna get them to happen.”
Through my peripheral vision, I caught motion at Max’s brother’s front door. A woman walked out and smiled and waved. I knew Max had said his brother was older, but this woman looked old enough to be his mom. Still, who was I to judge?
“Is that your sister-in-law?”
“Nope. There’s one more thing I forgot to mention about dinner tonight.”
Max looked a little nervous, which made me nervous. “Oh, God. What else is there?”
His eyes lifted over my shoulder to his brother’s house, and then he brought out the big guns—flashing his dimples the way a little boy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar might.
“My mom’s in town visiting, too. And all of my brothers and their wives.”
• • •
A little while later, Tate’s wife, Cassidy, and I were alone in the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?” she asked. “I’m sure you could use something after meeting the entire family.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said, only half kidding. “I’m about thirty seconds from searching your bathroom for perfume or mouthwash and chugging the bottle.”
She chuckled and took out two wine glasses. “The Yearwood family is…a lot.”
I sighed. “I had no idea I was meeting the entire family until five minutes ago when we were in the car out front.”
Cassidy smiled. “That sounds about right, though we knew about you. You know why?” She filled two glasses and passed me one.
“Thank you. I’m a little afraid to ask how you knew.”
“Because Max called us at six AM one morning to tell us all about you.”
I’d been sipping my wine and coughed it down the wrong pipe. “What?”
“Yep.” She nodded. “Six fifteen, actually. Don’t get me wrong, he knows we’re up, but he doesn’t usually call at that hour. In fact, he doesn’t usually call. It’s Tate who has to track his brother down to check in.” Cassidy tilted her wine glass at me. “You’re also the only woman he’s ever brought over.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. So I drank some of my wine instead.
“The Yearwood men are sort of like large trees,” she continued. “You can’t chop them down very easily, but when they fall, they’re sort of immovable.” Her voice softened. “They’re good men. I can vouch for that. As loyal as they come and honest to a fault. They say if you want to know how a man will treat his wife, you should watch the way he treats his mother. Those boys won’t even curse around Rose because she doesn’t like foul language.”
Suddenly the kitchen door burst open, and two enormous men rolled in. Literally rolled. Max and his brother Tate were on the floor, wrestling around like two teenage boys.
Cassidy pointed to them, completely unfazed by the scene. “Whichever brother gets all the other brothers in a headlock first doesn’t have to help with the dishes. A few years back they upended my tree on Christmas Eve. Somehow they snapped the thing in half, in addition to smashing three quarters of the ornaments. I have three little girls who get up at the crack of dawn to run and see what Santa left under that tree. So I made them march over to the tree lot, pick up a new one, and see if they could find replacement decorations so the kids wouldn’t be devastated in the morning. Most stores were closed by then, except for Lalique. Do you know the brand?”
“They sell expensive crystal vases and fancy bowls, right?”
Cassidy nodded. “That’s the one. But apparently they also sell collector’s ornaments for the holidays. Max bought all their remaining stock. I almost died when I saw the receipt. He spent twenty-seven-thousand dollars on decorations for the tree so it would have ornaments. And he wasn’t even the one who’d knocked it over.”
My eyes widened.
Cassidy nodded. “I told you—they are a lot.”
A few minutes later, Max flipped his brother on his back and wrapped him in a headlock. Tate had started to turn red when Mrs. Yearwood walked in and yelled at them. They stopped, both panting, and Max pointed at his brother.
“That counts. You would’ve tapped if your mommy didn’t have to come in and save you.”
“No way, Altar Boy.”
Mrs. Yearwood rolled her eyes. “You’ll both do the dishes for being idiots.”
As I stood in the kitchen watching the antics, I realized something strange. I should’ve been freaked out that a man I wasn’t dating had flown me to Boston to meet his entire family. Yet here I was, inside their home for only fifteen minutes, and instead of being nervous or anxious, I felt warmth in my chest.
Max walked over and hooked his big arm around my neck. Leaning in, he whispered, “You good?”
I smiled back. “Yeah, I think I am.”
Dinner with the Yearwoods was one of the most entertaining meals I’d had in a long time. The brothers argued, their mom told embarrassing stories, and we laughed more times than I could count. After, I got up to help clear the table. One of the chairs had a place setting no one had used. I’d assumed someone was late for dinner.
“Do you want me to leave this setting?” I asked Mrs. Yearwood. “Is someone still coming?”
Her eyes caught with Max’s briefly, before she smiled at me. “You can take it, honey. That’s Austin’s seat, my second youngest. He passed years ago, but I like to include him in family dinner when we’re all together. On the holidays when dinner is at my house, I usually invite someone in need of a warm meal from my church to share Austin’s seat. Otherwise we leave it empty for him.”
I swallowed. “Wow. That’s…beautiful.”
She smiled. “I’m glad you think so. A few of my boys thought it was creepy for a long time. But they’ve come around after all these years. Now they just like to tease me that I only set a plate for my son and not their dad, so clearly I liked him better.”
After dinner was cleaned up and the dishwasher loaded, Cassidy suggested we go sit out back on the deck and make a fire in their chiminea. It was a beautiful night, one that reminded you warm weather was coming soon.
Tate built the fire, and the ladies made a semicircle around it while the other brothers went out on the lawn to toss a football around. But the nice game of catch quickly escalated to tackling each other and rolling around on the lawn.