Home > Wild Dreams (Wilder Irish #12)(6)

Wild Dreams (Wilder Irish #12)(6)
Author: Mari Carr

“Hey, normally you’re the one hogging the whiskey. It’s not my fault you went and got knocked up,” Oliver teased. Sunnie had shocked them all at Thanksgiving dinner when she said she was thankful for generous maternity leave. The next great-grandchild was coming in May, and Oliver couldn’t be more thrilled for Sunnie and her husband, Landon.

Landon took another chug of Jameson and grinned when Sunnie narrowed her eyes at him. Landon was already three sheets to the wind, something that was pretty unusual for the straight-laced cop.

“What?” Landon said, giving his wife an innocent look that missed the mark by a mile. “I’m drinking for two now.”

Sunnie laughed loudly and grabbed another ornament, muttering, “asshole,” before returning to the tree.

Oliver gave up on taking ornaments from the pile and instead started shifting some of the lower ones higher. He turned and caught sight of Gavin kicked back in the recliner, enjoying the show. “Thanks for the help, bro,” he said sarcastically.

Gavin raised one eyebrow. “You all look like a bunch of ants scurrying around a sugar cube. I’m not even attempting to break into that mess.”

Erin, Oliver’s girlfriend, came out of the kitchen with a tray full of mugs of homemade eggnog. Oliver quickly walked over to grab one before the vultures descended and there was none left. Erin made killer eggnog, using, as she said, “fresh-from-the-chicken’s-butt eggs” from Leo’s family’s farm.

Oliver and Erin had been dating just over a year, his first truly serious girlfriend, and the more time that passed, the more convinced he was that she was the one.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one he wanted.

Gavin, who wouldn’t budge for the tree decorating, stood quickly to help himself to one of the mugs of eggnog before relieving her of the heavy tray.

“Thanks,” Erin said, before pointing at Gavin’s glass. “By the way, that’s your third one.”

“You’re keeping count?” Gavin asked. “You can’t keep your eyes off me, can you?”

Erin rolled her eyes at his joke. “Don’t you wish.”

“Actually, I’m afraid you’re lacking…” Gavin said, slowly shaking his head as he gestured toward his crotch with his mug hand, while trying to hold steady the eggnog tray with the other.

“Oh, that’s right. I don’t have a penis,” Erin said. And then, because she and Gavin were professionals when it came to teasing each other, she added, “Phew. Dodged that bullet.”

Gavin chuckled and gave her the win, placing the tray on the coffee table before resuming his seat in the recliner.

“Sunnie,” Erin said, lifting up one of the mugs. “I made an alcohol-free one for you.”

Sunnie’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Although I’m going to pretend it has rum in it. Between Landon and my dad, I don’t know how I’m going to make it six more months without alcohol. I swear they’ve found a way to double-down on their overprotectiveness. Something I seriously didn’t think was possible. To make matters worse, Dad actually called me this morning and spent twenty minutes lecturing me on the importance of prenatal vitamins. I had to put my foot down when he started to launch into the pros and cons of natural childbirth, reminding him he was a cop and not a doctor.”

Erin laughed. “I think it’s great your dad is so excited.”

“That’s because you’re watching it from afar,” Layla said. “You just wait until we start having babies. The Morettis are going to be just as insanely annoying.”

Layla, Erin’s cousin, was dating Oliver’s cousin, Finn. Gavin constantly joked that the blending of the two families was unavoidable, considering half the East Coast seemed to be related to either the Collinses of Baltimore or the Morettis of Philadelphia. As such, Gavin had determined their dating pools were seriously limited, and overlapping was bound to occur.

“I didn’t say they wouldn’t be annoying,” Erin said, “but the fact that they live in Philly might help mitigate some of that.”

Miguel—Layla and Finn’s third—snorted, then pretend-sneezed the word, “Bullshit.”

Finn slapped his boyfriend on the shoulder. “Amen to that. The Moretti brothers might live in another state, but they still find ways to make their presence known.”

Layla rolled her eyes. “My brothers are fine…now.”

“Now being the operative word,” Miguel added.

Layla was the youngest and only girl in a family of five, and her older brothers had taken some time warming up to the fact their kid sister was shacking up with not one but two men. However, it had been two years now, and the Moretti brothers had not only accepted the relationship, but they’d welcomed Finn and Miguel into their fold…and joined the Collins clan at the same time.

Erin handed out the rest of the eggnog, Colm and Kelli each grabbing a glass. Most of the cousins—the ones with kids—had headed home after dessert, but more than a few of them had opted to hang out longer to help decorate the Christmas tree.

Oliver missed the days when there were a lot of cousins living in the apartment that Aunt Riley had dubbed the Collins Dorm. As the youngest of the cousins, Oliver had waited impatiently for years to be old enough to finally move in. Of course, by the time he’d gotten there, most of the others had fallen in love and moved out. Right now, it was only he and Gavin sharing the too-big space that had once been the home Pop Pop shared with Grandma Sunday and their seven kids. Oliver swore that one day it was going to be his family, his own hopefully huge brood, filling this apartment.

As he glanced at Gavin and Erin, he felt—as he always did—that spark of hope that it would be the two of them living here with him. And while there was no indication that would ever work out, Oliver was nothing if not an optimist. He got that personality trait from his father, Sean, who’d gotten it from Pop Pop.

Erin perched on the arm of Gavin’s recliner, the two of them sipping eggnog and watching the family continue to jostle for a position around the tree as they added ornament after ornament—each of them containing some memory or story of years gone by—until they reached the final four.

Padraig carefully held up the box that contained the special ornaments, and he took off the lid.

“Hang on,” Sunnie said, grabbing her phone. “I promised Pop Pop we’d FaceTime him when we got to this part.”

Their elderly grandfather now lived with Sunnie’s parents, Riley and Aaron. They’d added an “in-law” style suite to their house when Pop Pop’s knees got too bad to continually make the trek up and down the stairs that led from the pub to this apartment.

“Hey, Pop Pop. What do you think?” Sunnie asked as she held the phone up to show him the tree as Colm plugged in the lights.

“Oh my. What a bonny tree. I think that might be the best one we’ve ever had,” Pop Pop said.

Oliver and Gavin shared a grin. Pop Pop said the exact same thing every year.

“We’ve got Grandma Sunday’s ornaments here.” Sunnie turned her phone to show him the box, which Padraig had placed on the coffee table.

Pop Pop referred to them as the “family’s treasure,” as if they were a band of pirates and this was their buried booty. Oliver doubted there was anyone in the family who couldn’t recite the story of how Pop Pop and Sunday had been so poor during their first Christmas in America that they hadn’t even been able to afford ornaments for their Charlie Brown-style tree.

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