“Absolutely not.”
“Santa. Hat.”
“Just repeating the words is not an effective argument, you know.”
“A hat in the style of Santa.”
“Rhys, I will chuck you straight out of that window if you come any closer to me with that abomination.”
Bowen had been in Graves Glen for—he checked his watch—about twenty minutes now, and this was the third argument his brothers had had. The first had been over peppermint lattes (Rhys was in favor, Wells was not). The second had been about . . . well, Bowen hadn’t really been paying attention until Wells and Rhys had gotten pissed off enough to lapse into Welsh, and by that point, it had mostly just been insults.
Now Rhys stood on the other side of the counter at Penhallow’s, the magical shop Wells ran in Graves Glen, dangling a red-and-white hat at his eldest brother with a decidedly demented gleam in his eye, and Bowen wondered if he should get involved.
Of course, the last time he’d done that—the Yule Brawl of ’02—he’d ended up with a dislocated elbow, bright green hair, and the unfortunate “talent” of only being able to speak in iambic pentameter. It had taken their father nearly a week to find a reversal for that spell, and even now, Shakespeare made Bowen shudder, so yeah, probably best to sit this one out.
Luckily, there was another Penhallow happy to put a stop to this nonsense.
Just as Rhys went to lean in a little closer, hat still dangling from one crooked finger, it was snatched out of his hand by the baby strapped into some kind of contraption on Rhys’s chest, and as the three brothers watched, Rhys’s son, Taran, attempted to shove the entire thing into his mouth.
“Oh, no, fy machgen, let’s not do that,” Rhys said, tugging the hat from his son as Wells chuckled.
“See? The boy is clearly on my side.”
“He is not,” Rhys said, putting the now slightly mangled and damp hat on the counter. “He just doesn’t want us arguing on Bowen’s first day back. A peacekeeper, my son. A pacifist. Isn’t that right, Taran?”
At the sound of his name, the baby tilted his head back, giving a gummy smile to his father before releasing what, to Bowen’s ears, sounded an awful lot like a banshee’s cry and flailing out with one adorably small hand to try to grab a handful of wands from the ceramic vase on Penhallow’s counter.
Both Wells and Rhys made nearly identical shouts of alarm as they reached out to steady the vase, but a few wands escaped anyway, rolling to where Bowen sat perched on the arm of a velvet wingback chair.
He leaned down to pick them up, but before he could, one slowly floated up from the floor, wobbling a little before clattering back down.
Taran gave another happy shriek, kicking his little feet and waving his arms, and Bowen got up and walked over to Rhys, crouching down to look in his nephew’s eyes.
They were the same clear hazel as Vivienne’s, but the expression in them was pure Rhys Penhallow, and Bowen frowned as he straightened up.
“One of you was really enough,” he said, nodding toward the baby strapped to Rhys’s chest. “Not sure I’m up for going through this again.”
“First of all,” Rhys said, wrapping one arm around Taran’s middle, “I was a delight as a child. All my teachers said so.”
“You know the words ‘handful’ and ‘chaos personified’ and ‘perhaps actual demon, has your family been dabbling in sorcery?’ do not mean the same thing as ‘delightful,’ don’t you?” Wells mused.
He’d turned away, pulling a massive black ledger out from under the counter, so he didn’t see the deeply offended glare Rhys shot his way.
“And ‘pleasure to have in class’ is what they say when you’re a stuck-up swot who will never know the touch of a woman, but you don’t see me pointing that out to you, do you?” Rhys replied.
“Stuck up, yes,” Gwyn, Wells’s girlfriend, chimed in, clomping up the stairs from the storage room, a cardboard box cradled in her arms. “And I don’t know what a ‘swot’ is, but that does kind of sound like Esquire, so I’ll allow it. However!”
She dropped the box on the counter next to Wells, its contents rattling as she leaned over to throw an arm around his neck, pulling him close even as he began to write in the ledger.
“Trust me, he knows this particular woman’s touch very, very well.”
Wells smirked, finally lifting his gaze from the book. “Thank you, my darling,” he said, turning to press a kiss to Gwyn’s temple.
Rhys’s hands hovered around Taran’s head, landing briefly over his ears before settling over the baby’s eyes instead, and Bowen grunted in amusement.
“See what you did, being a smart-arse?” he asked Rhys. “Now we have to think about Wells shagging, and that’s on you.”
Rhys’s hands flew back to Taran’s ears, the baby giggling and kicking his feet again. “Yes, I realize that backfired on me, now let’s all just stop talking about it before Taran’s first word is ‘shagging’ and Vivienne curses me yet again. Justly this time.”
“It was pretty justly the first time,” Gwyn said just as Wells muttered, “You honestly did deserve that,” and Bowen added, “Complete wanker behavior.”
Rhys straightened up to his full height, looking as dignified as a man could with a small child wearing a onesie proclaiming “Daddy’s Li’l Turkey!” strapped to his chest. “You are all horrible influences on my son, and I can no longer risk his potential moral degeneracy by staying in your company. Come, Taran. Let’s go see if the nice ladies at the Coffee Cauldron have one of those cake pops for you to mangle.”
With that, he left the shop, the bell overhead jangling.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to Rhys being someone’s father,” Bowen said, watching his brother walk past Penhallow’s window, one hand still firmly on his son’s stomach, his dark hair flopping over his forehead as he leaned down to press a kiss to Taran’s head. It was strange, the way that casual, affectionate gesture made Bowen’s chest feel a little tight.
“The hell of it is,” Wells said with a sigh, “he’s really bloody good at it. No idea how he picked it up so naturally.”
Bowen glanced over at his older brother. The estrangement from Simon Penhallow had been necessary for all three brothers, but Bowen knew Wells had taken it the hardest. Of course, Wells had been the most hurt by their father’s scheming in the end.
Wells must’ve been thinking the same thing, because he sighed and seemed to shake himself a bit before saying, “Anyway, his propensity for chaos aside, Taran is a delightful child. Thank Rhiannon for those Jones genes, I suppose.”
“Aww, babe, you think I’m delightful?” Gwyn replied, then pointed at Bowen. “You are my witness, Bowen. He said it.”
Smiling slightly, Bowen lifted his hand in acknowledgment. “I was also witness to how absolutely shattered he was when he thought he’d fucked it all up with you, if you want to hear that story. Again.”
“You know I do,” Gwyn said with a wink, and the tops of Wells’s ears went slightly red. “Anyway,” she went on, “Esquire is right about Taran being delightful. I’ve asked Vivi to start bringing him into Something Wicked whenever she can, because he may be only ten months old, but that kid is a natural born salesperson. He’ll point at something in the store and start cooing over it, and the next thing you know, everyone wants whatever it is he liked. It’s like . . .”
