Keeping 13: Boys of Tommen #2

Not a single one. She was teammate now. My best friend. Of course, I didn’t dream of saying that aloud – Gibsie would have heart failure if he heard such blasphemy.

"Do you have batteries I can take out?" Johnny asked her. "Your optimism is endless."

"I'm a sunny-side up kind of girl," she told him.

Twisting onto my stomach, I looked up at him. "I love this, too."

"Do you want to stay forever?" he offered lightly, but I could see the pain in his eyes. "We can hide in this tent and never come out?"

"I think Gibsie would have something to say about that," I replied, giving him a smile.

"Where there's a will there's a relative," he shot back, grinning wolfishly.

Take that time to enjoy yourself, son. Go and be a teenager. Go mad. Have fun. Unwind. Get drunk – not too drunk or your mother will kill me," he quickly amended with a smirk.

"You are the definition of kill them with kindness and bury them with a smile," Feely told me.

"And you're even cuter now that your voice is breaking," I snickered. "My little Tadhg is growing up." Waggling my brows, I asked, "Should we have the talk?"

"About Johnny sneaking in and out of your room every night of the week when he was here? Naked," he shot back, not missing a beat. "That talk? Sure. Do you want to have it here, or down in the kitchen with his mother?"

I swiftly snapped my mouth shut.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," he answered himself, giving me a knowing smirk.

"My binding 13."

I choked out a pained laugh, thinking about that stupid bet. "You heard about that?"

"Yeah." Half-sobbing/ half-laughing, Shannon smiled and nodded. "I won."

"Hands down." I kissed her puffy lips. "Undisputed."

"Now, I'm keeping 13," she told me. "So come home to me when you're done, okay?"

"I will."

"What are you doing?" Ollie's voice filled my ears and I dropped to the mattress quicker than a cat.

"Tears, rugby, and those two fighting? This is our normal."