Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 36987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 185(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 123(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 185(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 123(@300wpm)
He gasped. “I’ll have you know we’re the Brain Teasers.”
That did it. Brad started laughing, and it was infectious, and then Thomasin was giggling too. I knew she’d probably be crying in moments, but that was okay. Everything had to come out, so it would be cathartic and cleansing and they could both forgive.
“You’re a heathen,” Kurt pronounced, but he reached for my hand and held it for a long moment. I was thinking that maybe he really didn’t think that at all.
It was late when we reached our destination. Around two in the morning. To me, cabin in the woods conjured pictures of a tiny, creepy shack with floorboards you could see the dirt underneath. And if not that, then something that creaked in the wind that people on the frontier back in the 1800s would have been more than happy for.
I should have known better—what we walked up to was neither.
Kurt parked the SUV in the garage that opened with a fob he waved in front of a panel beside the stairs. That too had been in the zippered pouch.
Once we pulled into what was a three-car garage, when the door closed, lights came on. A door led to an elevator on one end, and on the other, an archway led to stairs. The boys were amazed. They’d never seen an elevator in a house before, and I let them take that, with their mother, all the luggage and the dogs, while Kurt, Brad, and I took the stairs, with Bubs taking the ride across my shoulders.
There was a steel door to get into the main house, and it slid open seamlessly with a touch of my palm, letting us off next to the kitchen. Walking to where the elevator was, I saw a panel there, like the one I’d just used, that would allow Thomasin and her sons to step into the living room. The elevator looked like one in an older building, the kind with the metal frame you had to yank open and close.
“George, can you reach in here and let us out?” Thomasin asked, standing next to the panel that needed a handprint to activate. Interesting that, just like the stairs, anyone could go up, but exiting was the tricky part. And the way the panel stuck out from the wall, the elevator had risen and come to a stop directly beside it. I was impressed with the design.
“Go ahead,” Kurt prodded me. “Let them out.”
But I shook my head and looked at Dennis. “You try, buddy.”
“No, it wouldn’t be his hand,” Thomasin said.
“Why do you think all our palms were scanned?”
“Oh, but that’s too fast,” she assured me.
I shrugged.
Dennis leaned around his mother and put his hand on the panel. It scanned, and the elevator gate popped open, the main latch releasing, which allowed Brad to move it to the side.
“Awesome,” Dennis said, rushing out of the elevator.
“How?” Brad asked as the boys, the dogs, and my cat, who jumped down onto a table, then to the floor, left us.
“Because I have super-thorough, scary-ass friends. Those scans were already uploaded because they wanted to make sure, like Jing said, that you can all access the cabin so that you’d be safe in case something happened to me.”
“Don’t say that,” Kurt said sharply.
“But it’s true.”
“And cabin is a loose term, don’t you think?” Thomasin said.
It was. Yes.
This was the most luxurious cabin I’d ever been in in my life. Ski lodge was a better term. The enormous windows went from the floor to the exposed-beams ceiling, easily thirty feet up, and everywhere you looked, there were chandeliers, built-in bookshelves, and antiques.
“Holy crap,” Brad said, chuckling. “This is not what I was—oh, that’s really nice.”
It was the tree. Not a real one, but a big artificial one that had to be fifteen feet, strung with white lights. I hated that. I liked multicolored lights, and I preferred real trees. And I knew there was a big debate over that. The people who had tree farms needed people to buy real ones, and if everyone bought fake ones, then what would happen to the farmers? Used Christmas trees could be composted, which was good, but if everyone had the fake ones—and kept them—then that was probably better for the environment. I didn’t know what was best from an environmental/supporting-tree-farmers standpoint, but for me, I had to have a real tree.
The first year Kurt and I were together, he was going to bust out his fake one from the basement, but the look on my face had stopped him.
“Couldn’t we go get a real one? I love the smell of a real tree in the house.”
He’d smiled and nodded, and this year, there had not even been a discussion. We had gone and gotten a real one that we decorated together. What was amazing was that even though we were going out of town this year, we still got a real one that he made sure someone, who turned out to be Hannah, came and watered. It would still be good by the time we returned before New Year’s.