“Your mom was close with my sisters and Josh’s and Tyler’s mothers. They were all like a big family by the time I moved back here from the UK. The Sunday dinners were a regular occurrence. It was actually at a Sunday dinner that we first met—that we first realized we were connected.”
I sat down on the arm of the couch so I could see him better, and Alec’s arm moved from my waist to my shoulders.
Lucian kept speaking. “The dinners were a bit more somber after you and your mother left, and then the accident in Japan . . .”
“We stopped doing the dinners after our parents died,” Alec finished for him. “It used to be, like, twenty people, massive amounts of food, and all kinds of ruckus. Then all of a sudden, it was just us. It wasn’t the same.”
“Olivia and Henry moved back a few months after that. The plan was for Alec and Ethan to move in with them, but by that stage all the boys were staying with me, and they didn’t want to be separated.” Lucian gave Alec the kind of nostalgic look a father might give his son. “But we did pick the Sunday dinners back up. It was more sporadic than it had been before, but even when Alec and Tyler were hanging around The Hole, getting their asses beat, they showed up for the dinners. They sulked and hardly spoke to anyone, but they still showed up.”
“Maybe we can make it a more regular thing now,” Alec mused.
Olivia and Ethan were in the kitchen, helping the catering team finish off the food preparation. Josh was deep in conversation with Charlie, and Henry and Dot and Tyler were looking at family pictures on the wall.
It was so . . . domestic—and a little foreign to me. Or maybe it was the entire concept of family that was foreign. Maybe that’s why I’d been so nervous in the car. I still wasn’t entirely sure how to be part of a family.
“Sorry I’m late!” Kyo rushed into the room, and Dot practically bounced over to him, giving him a kiss hello that was just on the border of too intimate for a family gathering. He greeted everyone just as the food was ready, and we sat down at the big dining table.
As we ate the amazing food and drank more bottles of the delicious, expensive wine, I relaxed. We may have been a large group, but I knew and was comfortable with each and every person at this table. The conversation flowed as easily as the wine.
By the time we were ready for dessert, we were all wiping tears from our faces as Kyo told a story of how a mobster’s spoiled daughter fell head over heels in lust with Alec when they were infiltrating the operation. She hadn’t even been deterred by the fact that he kept “accidentally” zapping her with pain any time she tried to touch him or go in for a kiss.
“Do you have any idea how hard it was to keep a straight face?” Kyo said between bursts of laughter as Dot leaned her head on his shoulder and completely lost it. “You got this constipated look every time she walked into a room.”
Alec scowled through the whole thing, but I could see his shoulders start to shake and his lips twitch from keeping the laughter in.
After everyone’s giggles subsided, the conversations became a bit more subdued. Ethan leaned forward, draping an arm over the back of my chair and speaking to Tyler on my other side. “Do you think there’ll be time to go to the fish markets in Tokyo? I really want to try some fresh tuna sushi.”
Mr. Takata had been in touch. He’d visited with his grandmother, but the older woman had simply smiled and asked to see me. He was extremely apologetic, but he was stuck between his duty to respect his elders and his newly declared fealty to me.
Now we were trying to find time to plan a trip, but between classes, demanding work schedules, and security concerns, it wasn’t easy.
Tyler shrugged, spinning his empty wine glass on the spot with his dexterous fingers. “Don’t know. We’ll have to play it by ear.”
“Have you not been to Japan?” I asked, my cheeks still a little flushed from the laughter and the wine. “The food is incredible!”
My big guy surprised me by answering silently, with a sad nod of his head. He started playing with