she could lose him in his own office. He would give her credit for sheer arrogance.
She slipped into the break room, and he could hear them talking.
“Did you get it?” Kenzie asked.
“No, but Dad said it would be in the fridge,” Kala replied. “There’s a lot of yogurt in here. Eww. And some gross stuff. Ah, there it is.”
“Uh, I think we should talk to Dad.” Kenzie was the reasonable one. “I think it might be gross.”
Oh, they were not going to do some weird science experiment in the break room. He strode toward the door. “Guys, I said you could get one bag of chips and something sweet to share.”
Kenzie was on the floor, her little arm all the way inside the vending machine. “It got stuck.”
“So did Kenz,” Kala admitted, holding up a stick of butter. He was fairly certain it was the butter Erin used on her toast every morning. “But I’m going to grease her up and get her out.”
That was the moment Seth chose to start crying.
Yep, just another day at the office.
* * * *
Charlotte tried to stretch her lower back. It had been aching all morning, but then she was only a week away from her due date and something always ached. The baby in her womb kicked like he was trying out for a professional soccer team.
Travis. They’d already decided on Travis. Her last baby because Ian hadn’t believed her whole “I never want to be pregnant again” line and done the one thing he’d sworn he wouldn’t do. He’d gotten a vasectomy. He’d whined and complained, and she’d had to hold a bag of frozen peas to his ball sack, but she knew why he’d done it. It was far easier for him to have it done than her.
The phone rang, and she gave serious consideration to letting it go because it was all the way across the room and sitting seemed so nice.
But then she remembered that Ian had all three kids, and while it meant she had a quiet house, it could also mean disaster for her husband.
Bud’s head had come up. He’d been napping at her feet as she’d sat and gone through file after file of papers her cousin had sent to her. Not that he didn’t nap most of the time. The dog she’d convinced Ian they needed had started out as an adorable, energetic ball of fluff and had grown into an adorable, lazy ball of fluff. She often caught Bud and Ian napping together.
“You want to go grab my cell for me, buddy?”
Bud’s tail thumped but he did not move. Yep. When he wasn’t trying to herd the girls away from potential danger, the big mutt was storing up energy so he could later hoover up all the food they dropped.
Charlotte yawned and pushed her chair back. There was nothing for it. She was going to have to answer. It wasn’t like she was getting anywhere. Every single lead she got seemed to direct her to a dead end.
Dead. Damn it. That was the one word she hadn’t wanted to associate with her investigation, but it was the only piece of information she’d managed to find.
She picked up her cell, recognized the name of the caller, and swiped across the screen. “Hey, Chels.”
“Hey,” her sister said. “I was calling to see if you needed me to come by. I saw Michael this morning and he told me Ian made a big-ass deal out of saying he was going into the office to finish up all his paperwork before he goes on leave because that’s what good employees do. Apparently Erin flipped him off. She couldn’t help going into labor early.”
Ian was good at pissing people off, but then she happened to know Erin had told everyone she could have the baby and never look up from her paperwork. “He took the kiddos with him. I’m good. It’s the first time this house has been quiet in…forever.”
She stretched, trying to get her back to release. She was pretty sure Travis would end up being her biggest baby. Oh, the doc tried to tell her he was only seven pounds, but she swore there was a toddler in there.
“Ian’s got three kids with him up at the office?” Chelsea laughed. “Well, we’ll see how that goes.”
It would likely go south at some point, and Ian would clean it up and never tell her the tale. He would tell the girls “don’t tell Mom” and actually believe