Page 69 of Jesse

“Emma?” Her huge father appears from a back room on the other side of the counter. “You’re not kidnapped.”

“Funnily enough,” I say, “I was kidnapped last night.”

“What?” everyone says.

“Kidding,” I say, extending a hand to her dad. He’s like six foot five, two hundred fifty pounds, easy. And his hand makes mine look like a child’s.

I’m not a small dude. I’m almost six two. Little bit leaner than the head of this clan here. But I can hold my own.

I think I can, anyway. Until the screen door swings open, bangs against the wall, and three leaner, let’s just call them super-muscular, Dumas clan members barge in.

“Who kidnapped Emma?” the first one says. Then stops. Because obviously no one kidnapped Emma. He’s got to be a full inch taller than his father. Tattoos all up and down his well-tanned arms and chest. Did I mention he has no shirt on? He doesn’t. He’s also holding—wait for it—a barracuda. Yup. I’m pretty sure that’s a barracuda.

While I’m picturing myself being beaten to death with a dead barracuda, the other two, equally as muscled up and mean-looking as this here first one—who I predict is our friend Lonz—stand next to him and fold their arms across their chests in a way that makes their biceps pop out like cannons.

I wait for the pec flex. The way I did back in the jet. But they are not fucking around. They are dead-ass serious.

OK. Yeah. I definitely cannot take the Dumas brothers. Maybe if Johnny and Joey were here, and Zach, and five or six of their closest friends… we might have a chance.

“She’s fine,” I say, laughing nervously and holding up both hands in surrender. “Just a little mix-up.”

“Who the fuck is this?” the big one asks.

“Mouth, Alonzo,” Mrs. Dumas chastises.

How did I know he was Alonzo? Um, maybe because he’s just what an Alonzo looks like?

Anyway, there’s like twenty minutes of bumbling explanations. Alonzo, Tony, Luke, and good old Jack decide they will not kill me, or beat me with a barracuda, once Emma and I explain—several times—that we just needed to pop over to the shops because I needed to buy a shirt.

That was awkward.

But ten more minutes of sidestepping the fact that their sweet, little pigtailed sister sucked my dick like a fucking porn star in her jet bedroom and then used my shirt to wipe my come off her tits, and we’re all back on the same page.

In fact, we’ve agreed to stay the entire week in one of their cottages. Emma just nods at her mother as this arrangement is made, all the while waggling her eyebrows at me. And I can’t figure out if she’s innuendo-ing me for a whole week of sex in this cottage, or telling me that we’ll be back on that jet tonight and to just play along.

Either way, I am bulldozed over by these people. Completely flattened like a pancake.

And I love it. I love every fucking minute of it.

But something else becomes abundantly clear during all this craziness.

She wins.

I cannot compete.

Emma Dumas’s bossiness blows mine out of the water.

It’s not her huge, overreacting, overprotective family, either.

I’m just… I’m falling, man. I’m falling fast. Hard. Like just jumped off a two-hundred-story building kinda hard and fast.

And getting kidnapped by her last night might be the best thing that ever happened to me.

“OK, listen, Mom,” Emma says. “I will come back in a few days but I really do have something important to do on Monday, so—”

“What’s more important than visiting your family? You never come home anymore. It’s like you abandoned us.”

“I was here two months ago.”