Sal shook his head and patted his brother on the shoulder. “I told you to check out her charity, not the woman herself,” Sal laughed before walking away to sweep Emma up into his arms.
At that moment, Gus’ three other brothers walked in and heard their conversation. “What’s going on?” Thomas asked, holding one of his twin sons in his arms. Dennis instantly jumped down from his father’s arms and ran over to hug his Uncle Gus. Dennis’ younger brother by five minutes, Josh, was right behind him.
Gus had children hanging off of every limb so he wasn’t able to explain. But Antonia was unencumbered and perfectly happy to embarrass her brother. “Apparently Gus has been making out in the bushes with some society dame. And she’s blond to boot! He’s breaking free of his redhead obsession. What will the world come up with next?” she asked sarcastically, punching her big brother on the shoulder lightly.
“I wasn’t making out,” he countered above the din of laughing children.
“Sure looked like it to me from the picture,” Sal chimed in from the family room.
Victoria followed behind her family, not in a hurry to interrupt her boys from their fun. “Why were you making out in the bushes? Isn’t that a little high schoolish?” she teased.
“I wasn’t making out!” Gus said more loudly.
“He didn’t even know her name,” Antonia added.
Victoria tsked her brother in law. “Why were you making out in the bushes with someone you didn’t even know?”
“I knew her first name. She wouldn’t tell me her last.”
Sal’s wife, Laci, was coming down the stairs and heard Gus’s last comment. “Why wouldn’t she tell you her last name? Was she afraid of you?”
“I’d be afraid of you too, if I were a woman,” Brett Hancock, Antonia’s husband added, rushing over to pick up Emma who squealed in delight.
“She wasn’t afraid of me and we weren’t making out. Can everyone get that through their heads?” he shouted, exasperated. “And shouldn’t we be getting to church? This crowd is too rowdy to get there late. Father McGulligan frowns at us throughout the whole service when we do.”
The five kids, Sal’s son Adam being the youngest at ten months, hid from their relatives, preferring to play rather than get strapped into car seats for the drive to church.
Carlo, the youngest of the brothers, but still a year older than Antonia, had walked in at the last moment and saw the newspaper with Gus’s photo. He slapped Gus on the shoulders playfully. “I thought you didn’t want to go to that thing last night,” he said, a huge grin on his face.
“Okay, okay. Can we move on to something more interesting?” he said and picked Emma up since she was trying to push between his legs.
“What could be more interesting than my big brother making the society page?” Michael, the second youngest of the boys, asked, grabbing Josh and tossing him over his shoulder and hanging him there by his ankles. Both kids were screaming in delight. There had never been a great deal of peace in this house but now it was total chaos.
“Don’t we need to get going?” Gus asked, exasperated by all this talk about someone whose name he hadn’t even known until five minutes ago.
“What’s your rush? We have time. At least a few minutes to hear about how you ended up in the bushes last night?” Laci joked, her long brown hair bouncing behind her as she lumbered down the stairs, heavily pregnant with her second child.
“I agree, you have a lot of explaining to do,” Thomas said, laughing as Gus rolled his eyes.
“She probably didn’t tell me her last name since she knew what an invasive family I have.” The whole family slowly moved out of the house and into cars, then off to church for the Sunday service. Gus was grateful for the relative silence of the service but noticed several of his siblings looking at him curiously, a smile on their faces during the service. He pretended to ignore them while he mulled the woman’s name around in his mind, reliving the kiss they’d shared the previous night instead of paying attention to the sermon.
Alana woke up at her normal time on Sunday and stretched her tired body. She’d been up half the night reliving the kiss she’d shared with Gus so she didn’t feel very refreshed even though she’d gone to bed over eight hours ago. She was embarrassed that she didn’t know anything about the man. Except that he was a great kisser. Oh, and there was the knowledge that he was extremely well built with muscles in all the right places, she thought, her mind wandering back to the feel of him underneath his tuxedo jacket. That man’s chest was rock solid, she remembered.
Alana could feel her face flare with color at the idea of her being so forward with a man she didn’t know. How could her body have betrayed her to such a point with a stranger? She was not that type of woman, she told herself.
Rolling out of bed, she sighed deeply. This was not a good thing, she told herself. She could not be mooning after a man like Gus, whatever his name was.
She pulled on a robe and some slippers, then went downstairs to the patio to join her father for breakfast.
Kissing him on the cheek, she sat down next to him and poured herself a cup of coffee. “How are you?” she asked, taking the front page section of the newspaper and scanning the articles.
“Fine, fine. How are you?” he asked, eyeing his daughter carefully.
She didn’t bother to glance up at him or she would have seen the twinkle in his eyes as he asked that question. “I’m fine,” she said.
“Did you have a nice time last night?” he asked.
Alana didn’t answer immediately. She smiled up at Maria, the cook and housekeeper who brought out a bowl filled with fresh fruit, Alana’s usual breakfast. “Thank you Maria,” Alana said and the woman disappeared back into the kitchen.
Ed Mason waited another few minutes before asking his question again. “How was your evening last night?”
“Oh, it was fine,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “The usual group of people, no one very interesting.”
“Hmmm..” he said.
That got her attention. “Why do you ask?” she asked suspiciously. She knew she was being silly. There was no way her father could know how inappropriately she had behaved last night.
Ed opened up the section he’d been reading and turned it to face his daughter. He almost laughed openly when she realized what he was showing her. Her gasp of horror was priceless.