Love Brewing (Love Brothers #3) (12 page)

2 Years Later

Dominic met the eyes of all the gathered Loves, his jaw set.

“Son, did I hear you correctly?” His mother’s cheeks had
gone an alarming shade of red.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m thinking you did.” He hated the way she’d
make him repeat things, especially stupid things. Because one thing he knew
about his current life position, one year from getting his Master Brewer’s
certificate but standing there in Kentucky with his obviously pregnant
girlfriend—it had to be the stupidest mess he’d managed to get into yet. And he
had a long list to compare it to.

But something about this one seemed okay at least he hoped
it would be. He pulled the girl closer. Antony held onto his squirmy little
redheaded daughter as he studied the two of them.

“Well hell, Dom. I didn’t even know you had a girlfriend
over there,” his sister said from the doorway.

Dom glared at Angelique. She reached for her purse and
pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Here, Mama. I’m about to pay it forward.” She
pointed her finger inches from Dom’s nose. “You are an unmitigated bastard,
Dominic Love. You know goddamn good and well Diana Brantley’s been waiting—”

Antony touched her arm as if to calm her down, but she
brushed him off. “Don’t touch me. I can’t believe this. You…you’re….” She
cursed again and stomped out of the room.

Dominic dropped his arm. The girl shifted slightly away from
him and crossed her arms. “Well, that’s about the welcome I expected. Let’s go,
Dominic.” She grabbed his arm. He kept his gaze on his father’s.

“I assume you have something to say about this?” He lifted
his chin, wanting to get the whole paternal berating the hell out of the way.
He needed for his father to pay him to brew again, not to mention provide him,
his girl, and his future child a place to live.

Anton Love regarded him in silence for a full count of
sixty. The tension roiling through in the room ramped up, choking him. But he
met his father’s icy silence. When Anton left the living room, slamming the
front door behind him without saying a word, Dom blew out a breath and met his
mother’s eyes, heart in his throat.

“Mama, we’re gonna move into the apartment over the old
brewery. Y’all got the tenants out last month, right?”

“Yes, we did but, Dom….”

He hated his lame-ass life so much at that moment, he could
barely breathe. “I’m sorry. I’ll declare I don’t know what came over me to be
so rude. Gina, is it?” She fixed her gaze on the girl to his left, her gaze
flicking down her thin body, taking in the protruding belly, then up again.
“Welcome to the family. I’m so…happy to know about more grandbabies.” She
glanced over at her oldest son as if seeking his support. He snorted and stood,
toddler AliceLynn asleep on his shoulder.

Dom glanced at Gina, mentally begging her to meet his mother
halfway and alleviate a small bit of the tension. The set of her jaw didn’t
bode well for that. How he’d managed to hook up with this acerbic wanna-be
model who’d been singing with some dude in Munich for coins, he had no idea,
but in a fit of loneliness, he had indeed and had managed to knock her up within
a few months.

“Birth control makes me bloat,” she’d declared, sprawled on
the single mattress on the floor of the dump he’d been occupying while trying
to focus on his goal—becoming a legitimate Master Brewer in a country where he
barely spoke the language and spent most of his days dead broke and hungry. Her
pale skin stretched over her bones in such a way that had enticed him with its
exoticness. He’d never known anyone like her—petite, skinny to the point of
emaciated, seeking the meaning to life through near endless pot smoking and
fucking him. It scared him sometimes how strongly he felt about her now. Like a
protector to her tiny, bird-like self—a real man, taking good care of his
future child.

Of course, he’d lost his mind when she’d told him. Until
she’d reminded him that he’d quit using condoms of his own accord, without
consulting her. But staying in Germany no longer seemed viable. She had no real
job, nothing other than the euros she scraped together on a good day singing on
a street corner. He worked around the clock when he wasn’t learning way more
chemistry than he thought necessary. Waiting tables at a sleazy coffee shop,
working the odd construction job one of his British-born teachers had found for
him, anything to keep him in food and with a leaky roof over his head.

So here he was, presenting the skinny, somewhat grimy mother
of his future child to his fastidious parents. It had gone about as well as he
could expect. “Can I use the old pick up?”

Antony muttered something Dom chose to ignore, keeping his
focus on his mother.

“Until I can make some money, get my own?”

“Sure, honey,” Lindsay said.

Anxious to get the hell out of there and install Gina in the
old apartment over the original brewery downtown, he snagged the keys to the
place and to the truck from the collection on the rack near the front door. The
house phone rang as he had been about to ask his mother for a set of sheets and
some towels.

Antony answered it. Dom registered a strange tone in his
brother’s voice after a few seconds. It got louder and louder, but he couldn’t
hear the words since he’d decided to head for the basement and find the linens
on his own, leaving Gina sitting on the couch, looking about as out of place as
a dirty, pregnant, hippy could.

He grabbed sheets, towels and a couple of pots and pans from
the lowest basement storage and headed up to the living room. Then he heard
it—the distinct sound of his oldest, strongest, most stoic brother Antony
roaring the word “No!”

He dropped everything on the couch next to Gina and raced up
the short flight of steps to the kitchen. AliceLynn had woken at the sound of
her father’s hoarse cry and was screaming in the bedroom down the hall. Lindsay
had the phone to her ear and was crouched down on the floor in front of Antony.

“What’s wrong?” he mouthed. His head still pounded with
residual jet lag and anxiety over his latest fuck up. AliceLynn’s screams
morphed into sobs making it sound like someone had her fingers in a vise.

His mother shook her head. Her words:
All right, can they
bring her up here?
confused him so he decided to alleviate the noise level
by getting the squalling toddler out of the crib his mother had set up for
regular visits with her first grandbaby.

The little girl’s expression screwed up in dismay when he
opened the door and was not her daddy or her grammie. Her nose ran and her
pudgy arms shook as she held them out to him. He picked her up, feeling awkward
and unsure.

“Shh, shh…it’s okay, kid. Stifle the screeching, willya?”

She studied him, then to his relief, she calmed, stuck her
thumb in her mouth and laid her sweaty head on his shoulder. He walked into the
kitchen and found his brother still on the floor, arms on his knees. Lindsay
sat in a chair, gripping Antony’s hands, her head bent, her lips moving. Dom
waited, heart in this throat. When Lindsay met his eyes, tears rolled down her
cheeks. He dropped into the chair next to her, jostling AliceLynn who resumed
her whimpering.

“It’s Crystal,” Lindsay whispered.

“Mama!” the little girl blurted out as she pulled away from
Dom’s neck. “Daddy. Daddy.” She reached for Antony, fingers opening and closing
in a gimme-gimme gesture. Antony didn’t move, but Dom noted how hard his
shoulders shook.

“Here, my darling, come to Grammie.” The girl was now
screaming “Mama, Mama, Mama,” over and over again. Antony lurched to his feet
and stumbled out into the hall without even glancing at his daughter.

Dom rose and watched Antony run out to his truck, jump in,
and then screech out onto the street.

“Can you go to him, Dominic?” Lindsay found a sippy cup and
stuck it in AliceLynn’s mouth. The girl threw it to the floor, squeaked out the
word “Daddy,” then collapsed into her grandmother’s arms. “It’s Crystal. She’s
dead. Accident on 75, coming home from Knoxville. Oh, my sweet baby.” She
crooned to the girl in her arms with words Dom knew were meant for her
distraught son.

Numb, he nodded, wondering how in the hell he could get Gina
settled and go rescue his brother before the man did something Dominic-level stupid.

“Gina,” he called. “Let’s go. I’ll take you to the… to our
place. Then I gotta go find my brother.”

“But we need food.”

He grabbed all the crap he’d dropped and glared at the woman
whose belly he’d swear had gotten even bigger in the last few minutes. He
jerked his chin toward the door. “I’ll get you something. Go to the truck, the
one on the side of the pole barn.”

At that moment, he’d have given anything to have Diana with
him, managing this horror show with Antony. He blinked, shocked, having not given
her much thought since latching on to Gina. A shaft of guilt-riddled pain
settled deep in his chest, realizing he’d let her down, again. He focused
forward and hustled Gina into the truck then the slightly stale-smelling
apartment with a couple of bags of groceries.

While he attempted to locate Antony, he called Kieran and
fielded a text from Aiden, who’d come in from high school seeking answers.
Angelique had come home from wherever she’d gone after her snit fit over Dom’s
reappearance with the baby mama and assured him she was managing AliceLynn with
Lindsay.

“Tell us when you find him, okay?”

“Yeah, I will. But I don’t really know where to start,” he
admitted as he drove away from the original Love Brewing building in downtown
Lucasville. “You call Daddy?”

“He’s on his way home now.”

Dom tried all the usual bars, the garage, the park with the
basketball court they used. On a whim, he dialed Diana’s number, then hung up,
knowing he had no business dragging her into this. He didn’t even know where
she lived anymore, figuring that if she’d stuck it out at college, she’d
probably be there right now.

Finally, he pulled into the drive at Antony and Crystal’s
small house, adjacent to the field that came with the property. The gate swung
open and he could see tire tracks in the mud. With a curse, he drove through
it, praying the man hadn’t driven into the pond or something equally foolish.
But he knew Antony better than that—he hoped.

The days surrounding Crystal’s funeral were a blur. Dominic
swore he’d never seen the like of it and never wanted to again. His brother
still reeked of bourbon even after his and Aiden’s attempts to get the man to
slow down the drinking for the last four days. He refused to even look at
AliceLynn, much less hold or soothe her, which had turned the little girl into
a real mess, screaming alternately for her mommy and her daddy, neither of whom
tended to her.

“I guess we’re gonna keep her a while,” Dom’s father stated
as they sat through the terrible tradition called the viewing the night before
the funeral.

The mounds of flowers and plants reeked and kept Dom’s
stomach in knots. He’d left Gina behind for this event, and she’d not
protested. Having to deal with her and all this had not been something he felt
capable of doing. But his heart ached, wanting someone there with him, someone
he could lean on when he wasn’t propping Antony up with one or the other of his
brothers.

The oldest Love brother had gone into some kind of catatonic
state and wouldn’t move from a seat he’d plunked down next to Crystal’s closed
coffin. Dom sat between his father and sister, clutching a Styrofoam cup of
weak coffee.

“He’ll snap out of it, Daddy.” Angelique touched a tissue to
her nose. “I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t know,” Dom replied. “He’s been damn scary to deal
with these last few days. Not sure I’d put the girl in his care at the moment.”

“That’s your mama’s view, too.” Anton glared at Dom.
“Where’s that skinny girl? She not participating in our grief?”

He clenched his jaw against the urge to snap out something
unhelpful in the current situation. “No, Daddy, not today.”

Kieran nodded his head toward Antony, indicating that Dom
needed to go sit by him. He rose to his feet, and made polite talk with some of
his parents’ friends, the pastor’s wife who’d been hovering, and with Crystal’s
stunned looking sister, Tricia. By the time he got to the front of the room
where the gruesome display of coffin, flowers, wedding photo, and his utterly
broken brother awaited his company, someone had already pulled a chair up next
to Antony.

He hesitated, choked with emotion he didn’t want anywhere
near him as Diana whispered in Antony’s ear. Her long blonde hair was loose,
hiding her face. She had on a dark blue dress and high heels. When he realized
he’d never seen her dressed up before then he wanted to put his fist through
the nearest wall.

Her eyes were dry and bright when she turned to him. He
blinked fast, jaw clenched, backing away. She got up, grabbing and holding him
close before he could escape. He willed time to run backward, so he could be
with her, where he belonged. Not for the first time, Dominic cursed his
inability to commit to any one thing for long. Darkness closed in on him,
narrowing his already tight throat.

After the last guest had departed and Angelique drove Antony
to his house at his insistence that he didn’t want to stay with the rest of the
family that night, Dom sat with Diana, passing a bourbon bottle between them on
the tailgate of the Love family’s spare truck.

He enjoyed the comfortable silence they shared, wishing he
didn’t have a crabby, pregnant girlfriend to manage later that night.

“So, I’m going to a new doctor this week. Mama says they
have some different drugs or something she’s been reading about that I should
try.” He didn’t know why that was the one thing he chose to talk about with
her.