“For the three of us?” Jonas looked outraged. “Doesn’t that seem wasteful?”
“It seems practical,” Rafe snapped. “I make good food, but I’m not cooking for you babies.”
They both looked at him with regret in their eyes. Rafe realized that a trap had been sprung on him. “You two discussed this. You planned this pity party! You want me to do the woman’s work—”
“Don’t let a female hear you talking that way,” Sam interrupted with a glance toward the ceiling, as if he suspected Sabrina might be lurking upstairs. “You’ll get your head handed to you.”
“I don’t care.” He shot his brothers a sour look. “What a pair of wienies.”
“If you cook,” Jonas said, “I’ll do the grocery shopping.”
“And I’ll do cleanup,” Sam said. “Sort of. We’ll eat off paper plates and use paper napkins. No more niceties like cloth napkins, which Fiona used to spoil us with.” A woeful sigh escaped him.
“And what about clean sheets in the bunkhouse?” Rafe asked. “Basic hygiene? We haven’t taken care of ourselves our whole lives.”
“No time like the present,” Sam said, injecting cheer into his tone.
Rafe wasn’t buying it. “We need a housekeeper. Jonas, you’re going to have to open the purse strings.”
“I can’t,” he stated. “Remember, we said we were going to be cautious with our resources until the lawsuit gets dismissed.”
Crap, Rafe thought. “If I cook it, you eat it, no whining. And I never, ever do cleanup.” The very fact that his brothers had shanghaied him into this, when he needed to be thinking about Julie and her long, beautiful legs, teed him off greatly. “I do not have time to be Rachael Ray for you lazy bums. But I will, as long as all I ever hear from you is ‘mmm-mmm good.’”
“Deal,” Jonas and Sam both said, and Rafe stalked out of the kitchen, wondering why today was his day to have everyone lined up against him.
He poked his head back inside the kitchen. “Starting tomorrow.”
His brothers nodded eagerly.
“By the way,” Jonas said, “congratulations.”
Rafe blinked. “On what? Being a patsy?”
Jonas stared at him for a long moment. “Yeah. Sort of.”
“Great. Thanks.” Rafe left again, wondering why Jonas had looked so surprised. “Jerk,” he muttered under his breath, though he loved his older brother. The word jerk made him think about Julie calling him that, walking away from him in her pretty white dress, and he decided maybe thinking about her was just too hard.
To hell with his brothers. They were weird, anyway, even for Callahans.
He was the last normal one left on the range.
FIVE MINUTES LATER, RAFE stared at Julie’s latest handiwork in the bunkhouse. As pranks went, it was a doozy. He appreciated the size and scope of her one-upmanship. He hadn’t wanted to pay attention to her, so she clearly had decided there were better ways to get a man’s attention.
She’d put a sign on his bedroom door in the bunkhouse. It had a stork carrying a blue-swaddled bundle of joy.
His breath stung in his chest. “‘Congratulations,’” he read aloud, “‘baby Jenkins arrives in May. Julie.’”
Rafe was reeling. There’d been no warning. No clue.
Except from Jonas, but whoever paid attention to him? “My world has gone mad,” Rafe muttered, and tore the stork off his door.
He was not having a baby. This was some mad attempt by Julie to rattle him, like the time she’d doodled on his face. Only this would last longer than a week. His brothers would be in top form over this joke. Everyone knew that Callahans were supposed to marry and populate. She was adding fuel to the fire.
But the sign said May. That was pretty darn definitive, and judges were typically pretty careful with details. Rafe tried to take another gulp of air and decided he might be having a wee panic attack. He needed a shot of something stiffening, like perhaps whiskey.
He hit the bar, and didn’t bother with a glass, just let the liquor burn down his throat from the bottle. After capping it, he wiped his brow and concentrated on the pain.
“I had no other way to tell you,” Julie said, stepping out of his room. Rafe’s throat went dry as a bone, no longer moist from the alcoholic drenching. “It takes a lot to get your attention, cowboy.”
“There’s no way,” he told her. “I used a condom when we were in the field. Mind you, it wasn’t the newest, but latex lasts forever. It’s nuclear material. So you must be mistaken, Julie. Condoms are safe.”
“I don’t remember hearing the sound of foil tearing open in my office.”
This was true. “I figured you were on the pill or something by then,” he said, and Julie looked outraged.
“Excuse me if I never considered us an ongoing thing.”
He blinked. “And now?”
“Now you know.” She walked past him, obviously about to leave. “That’s all I owe you, Rafe.”
“Who else knows?” he asked, wondering if he needed to talk to Bode.
“You and whoever saw this sign.”
“Did Jonas know you were waiting in my room?” Rafe’s head was spinning. “I mean, he told me congratulations.”
She smiled. “I asked him not to.”
Great. Everyone loved pulling the wool over good ol’ Rafe’s eyes, he thought bitterly. “Well, things will have to change. You, me, everything.”
“Probably,” she said, and walked out the door.
As if he was supposed to know what to make of that. Rafe hurried after her. Julie got in her truck, gunning it, sending up plumes of driveway dust, and the little judge went off without even a glance at him.
Not even caring that she’d totally kicked his ass in a major way.
“I’m going to be a dad,” Rafe said. “More importantly, I’m also going to be a husband, whether that little judge and I ever see eye to eye on the subject or not.”
“Talk to yourself often?” Sam asked, wandering by with a smirk on his face. “Dad?”
“Only when I want to,” Rafe said, and headed off to ponder what the hell had just happened to him.
“YOU’D BEST FIND A BUNKER,” Jonas told Rafe an hour later when he found him staring up at the ceiling, his gaze fixed on the plaster as he lay on the leather sofa. “Bode’s going to tear you limb from limb when he hears the not-so-good news. Jeez, Rafe, what were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Obviously. This throws a wrench into everything.”
“Tell me about it,” Rafe said. “Great sex goes out the window once the little woman’s got a bun in the oven. And I never got to have great sex with her.” He moaned piteously.
“Ugh,” Jonas said under his breath to Sam, who leaned over the sofa to punch his brother in the chest with a grin. “Do something with him, will you? Explain to him how neatly, with one fell swoop, he’s destroyed our court case you’ve slaved over for three years.”
“Idiot,” Sam told Rafe. “You’re supposed to be the smart one. Turns out you’re the dumbest of all.” He laughed, enjoying his brother’s plight.
“It’s not funny,” Rafe said.