Chelle looked around from Nash to Bristol to Macon and then back to Nash. “What?”

“Mom has a demon chihuahua mix named Dudley who doesn’t even pretend to be well behaved,” Macon said. “Groucho, Mary, and Sir Hiss will be more than good enough to come.”

Chelle was still trying to process that last bit, but her mouth rushed ahead of her brain. “You want me to bring the cat, too?”

“He’s family, isn’t he?” Bristol asked.

She’d always thought so, but other people looked at her like she’d grown a third head when she said her pets were as close to kids as she ever wanted. Okay, so she hadn’t had that conversation with the Becketts, but it wasn’t like she was going to be around them long enough to have to go through the conversation that had been the final nail in the coffin of her relationship with her dad. When she’d told him she didn’t want kids, he promptly informed her that God had created women to be childbearing helpmates. She’d rolled her eyes so hard she was surprised she hadn’t ended up with a permanent view of her brain.

“She’s only a few blocks from here, and you know you want to give this another try,” Nash said as he held up Sir Hiss’s harness.

He wasn’t wrong. Sir Hiss needed to practice his cat-walking skills.

Still…

She glanced from Bristol to Macon. “Only if you’re sure.”

“Mom will be thrilled,” Nash said. “What do you think? Wanna go?”

And there it was. He was asking, not assuming what was right or pressing her with a mansplaining diatribe about why going to his mom’s was the best option. It was such an abrupt change from their first day together that she didn’t have words for it.

Maybe she could have resisted him even though every instinct in her body was telling her she could trust him, but add to that two additional pairs of double dimplers from his siblings who were nodding in agreement and she was a goner. It wasn’t fair.

“Okay,” Chelle said, still not quite believing this was about to happen. “Let’s do this.”

Nash took the dogs while she held onto Sir Hiss, and she only had to shoot Nash a warning glance once when he started to tell her the proper way to put a cat in a harness for him to back away from the dire pit mansplaining quicksand.