Sergeant Zerbrowski of the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team, RPIT, and his lovely wife Katie held an annual barbecue at their house for all the cops who could come. They timed it for when the worst of the summer heat was past, but it was still shorts and tank top weather. This year was unseasonably cool, so late August was the date. It was the earliest they’d ever been able to do it. The cookout was family friendly, so light drinking at best, and if you wanted to get drunk, Katie Zerbrowski would hand you your head in a verbal basket before she kicked your ass out the door. Since she was a few inches smaller than my own five foot three, and more delicate looking; it was always fun to see her take on a big, tough, drunk cop and win, but I’d stopped going a few years back. Far too many small children, not my favorite thing, and too much family stuff. When I’d been the only single female at the thing the wives had either tried to fix me up, or the single guys had tried to hit on me, or . . . my social skills hadn’t been up to it, but that had been before Micah Callahan and Nathaniel Graison.
They’d been to dinner at the Zerbrowskis’ house before, both to a cop cookout and a dinner party, but those had been much smaller events. Katie and Zerbrowski had handpicked the guest list for people who would deal better with the fact that I came with two men, and would have married both if it had been legal.
I hadn’t intended to brave the big event. I wasn’t a fan of crowds, and I didn’t want to have to alienate cops I’d have to work with later by defending my lifestyle to them, but Nathaniel was Facebook friends with Katie, and she’d been mentioning how much work it was finishing up her second master’s degree along with planning for the big party, so my wonderful domestic boyfriend had offered to help, and just like that we were committed.
Nathaniel had been cooking for days, mostly sides like potato salad, macaroni salad, and coleslaw, which he’d all managed to make with less mayonnaise, or lite mayonnaise, or something that made it healthier but still yummy. He’d also baked a frosted layer cake and a batch of homemade rolls. If it had been left to Micah and me, it would have all been store-bought, and much less healthy, though eyeing the chocolate layer cake, I was wondering what he’d done to it to make it “healthier.” I was really hoping nothing. I liked chocolate cake.
I wasn’t the only one. Matthew, who was four, asked from his child safety seat in the back, “When can we have cake?”
“After meat and veggies,” Nathaniel said automatically from the backseat. We’d been babysitting Matthew a lot in the last two years.
I was driving, so I could only glance back at Matthew and Nathaniel. He was holding the cake in his lap, because iced cakes and cars are always chancy. This was the first time that any of the other cops’ wives had really treated Nathaniel like another wife, and he was a little nervous about it. It was cute, and so was he. Okay, he was gorgeous, his face model-handsome where it showed around the sunglasses. They hid the lavender eyes, not blue, but the color of spring lilacs. The blue tank top he was wearing would make his eyes lean closer to blue, but they weren’t. I’d never met anyone else with lavender eyes, but they were just the cherry on the too-pretty-to-be-mine cupcake that was Nathaniel, because the tank top also showed off the muscles in his shoulders and arms, a hint of chest. The shirt was a little loose as it fell around his upper body, because a tank that clung to his body would just be unfair to the other men at the party.
He had his ankle-length auburn hair back in a braid, but I realized that his hair was only a little more red auburn than Matthew’s browner auburn. How had I never noticed it before? Maybe it was that Matthew’s curls had finally grown long enough to trail over the collar of his blue T-shirt, because he’d persuaded his
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