Jackson shook his head. “Bullshit. I’ve seen you two together. Even a deaf, dumb, and blind man would pick up on the fact that you’re siblings. You’re so much alike. You have the same long-legged walk. You both talk with your hands. You actually enjoy arguing. Weirdos. And you have the same way of tipping your chin out when you’re mad.”

“Whatever,” I said. I didn’t want to know any of these things. “Annabelle had no right to call Lexi without asking me.”

“Maybe not,” Jackson said. “But who else do you have?”

I sat up straight and stared at him. “You.”

“Sure, until you get pissed off enough to fire me.”

“Which is becoming more likely every second,” I said. “Even then, I’ll still have Lupita and Juan.” Even I could hear the note of desperation in my voice, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t completely alone like I had been in my teens.

“They will be retiring soon to spend their time with their grandbabies, my brother,” he said.

No more Lupita? I hated the very idea that she might retire on me. Still, I wasn’t going to play this game. Annabelle had been wrong, and Jackson was not going to sway me on this point.

“I’ll hire replacements,” I said. “For all of you.”

“So you’ll have staff tending to your needs for a paycheck,” Jackson said. He wrapped his enormous arms around his middle and shivered. “That just gives me the warm fuzzies. How about you?”

“Your point?” I asked. I really was going to fire him.

“That Annabelle was right to call the only available member of your family to come check on you when you were injured,” he said. “That’s what family is for, and you owe Annabelle an apology.”

I gaped at him. “I owe her an apology? How about she owes me an apology for crossing boundaries she had no right to cross?”

“Was she your girlfriend?” he asked.

I hated that he used the past tense. “Something like that.” Shit, we hadn’t even been together long enough to determine if we were boyfriend and girlfriend, which seemed an awfully lightweight way to describe my feelings for her. For the first time in my life, I’d fallen hard.

“Then let’s litmus test this,” Jackson said. “If Annabelle had gotten hurt, cracked her head or broken her arm, and her—let’s say brother just to keep the genders matched—her brother was here in town, and you knew him, would you have called him?”

I opened my mouth to say, “No, absolutely not,” but Jackson held up his hand, stopping me. “Slow your roll, really picture it. Annabelle, lying in her bed, broken, hurt, rejecting a visit to the hospital when she has a history of medical issues.”

I could see it, and it gutted me. I hated the mere idea of her being injured.