I blinked. My throat had closed up. I glanced behind me again and noted that Aiden was standing next to Dom now, trying to pull him out. Kieran was staring down the aisle at Cara, who’d turned along with Kent.
“Stop,” Dom croaked out again, looking gaunt and haunted. Aiden touched his arm, but Dom shook him off, shoving past him into the side aisle.
The low murmuring that had begun with Dom’s first interruption ramped up. Daddy stood, half turning, so he could both watch his sons and keep an eye on what was going on at the altar.
Kent had dropped down to the steps. Cara crouched beside him, arm around his shoulder, lips to his ear. The overheated air crackled with tension.
“Lindsay, you’d best be explaining this to me,” Daddy said in a low, ominous tone.
Mama just kept waving her program, so fast her hair flew around her face. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved as if she were praying. When I looked at my brothers, there were only three of them. Dom had disappeared.
Kieran dashed out after him. Daddy and Mama followed, but I kept my eyes pinned on the couple that was supposed to be saying their “I do’s” right about now. Kent looked crushed. Cara, resolved. When she smiled down the aisle at my relieved-looking red-headed brother, I figured we’d be having another Love family wedding soon.
Whatever was going on with Dominic and Cara’s fiancé, I figured we’d also be dealing with, in typical Love fashion. My father roared at Kent when the guy headed out, presumably to find Dominic. I couldn’t recall when I’d seen his face so red, heard him speak such hurtful words, even relative to the one son he clashed with most often and most brutally.
“I won’t have that in my house, Lindsay. I tell you I won’t have it.”
He stomped out. Mama collapsed in a pew. A scrum of well-meaning friends with water and fans and whatnot surrounded her. I watched Kieran drop to one knee in front of his high school sweetheart.
“Dear Jesus, what has he done now?” Antony asked, coming up next to me, his face a mirror image of our father’s. I knew he did not mean Kieran.
Chapter Fourteen
Lucasville
One Year Later
I woke to the sound of my parents arguing.
This had been my alarm clock most days, for a full year since that horrific almost-wedding between Cara Cooper and Kent Lowery.
The big reveal—that my brother Dominic, the consummate ladies’ man and champion female heart-breaker, father to one child as yet un-introduced to the Love family thanks to an adventure/mishap in Germany a few years prior, had been having an affair with a man for the past year—had proven too much for my traditionalist father.
Mama didn’t care for it, I’m sure. But she was not about to cut her son out of the family as Anton had done at a typical, fraught, family gathering a few weeks after the event.
It had made for the brightest, loudest, most explosive, and scariest fireworks I had ever witnessed between my parents. Afterward, my father had been relegated to a cot in the pole barn, while my mother fumed and slammed shit around in the house during her waking hours.
The day after Dom tore out of the driveway on his Harley—after coming within an inch of a fistfight with our father —I sneaked out of the house and found him recuperating at a familiar hiding place.
About five miles out into nowheresville, the Brantley’s farm was home to a hot new trend in eating local and organic. Not to mention Diana Brantley, Dom’s very first girlfriend.
Diana and her sister Jen had transformed the debt-riddled mess of a tobacco farm their parents left behind into a trendy business, basically by selling whatever Diana grew in her garden or shot and killed and dressed on her own, at her sister Jen’s cute little downtown deli. “Brantley’s” was now a huge phenomenon. I’d even seen the Brantley name on a menu at a pseudo-locavore joint in the city, praising their goat’s milk cheese.
Most importantly, though, the place served as my tormented brother’s haven and always had. Dom had not treated Diana well. Everyone in town knew that. But whenever he needed a place to hide out, it’s where he went, and she didn’t seem to mind. Of all the women in my brothers’ lives—and there had been a fair few, including a couple of them they’d fought over—Diana was the only one I ever truly considered a sister.
When I pulled into her long gravel drive, I was happy to see my instincts were spot on. Dom’s Harley was there; along with Diana’s vintage Ford pickup with the word “Brantley’s” painted on the tailgate.
“Come on in, Angel,” she said, gesturing with her potato peeler. “Pull up a chair.”
“Got another one of those?” I asked, pointing to the implement in her hand.
“Of course. Second drawer.” We peeled about three pounds in comfortable silence. The only noises came from the cow making a low mooing sound every now and then and the clanking of the bells around her goats’ necks.
“So, where is he?” I drank two big glasses of water and waited for her to fess up that he was upstairs in her bedroom.
“In the haymow, last I saw him.” She started chopping the tubers and tossing them into a giant soup pot already warming on the stove. “He could probably use the company.”
“What is this I hear about the handsome new vet in town?” I bumped her hip with mine. “He’s making an awful lot of house calls out here lately.” She blushed.
“Can’t a girl have any romantic secrets?” She brushed a lock of her dark blond hair off her forehead with the back of her hand.
“Not in this stupid town, and you know better than most folks.”
“True.” She smiled at me. “And you? Will I be receiving a weddin’ invite soon, future Missus Robert Foster?”
“Oh, Lord, no. I broke it off with him last week, actually. He was making too many settling down noises for my taste.”
“Good for you. He’s a twit.”
I laughed. “Yeah. He has a humdinger of a skill set, though, I can assure you.”
“Again. Good for you. Now move on and find someone with that, plus a brain in his fool head.”
“That’s the plan.” I wiped my hands on a towel and picked up a knife. She shot me a glance.
“No. Go on and see your brother. He could use family right now, I think.”
I sighed and leaned against the sink. “It’s pretty bad, Di. The worst. And that’s saying a lot.”
She put down her knife and gazed out the big kitchen window. “He was a total mess when he came in here last night. I … I did what I could.” Her blush gave her away.
“Dominic doesn’t deserve you,” I said, putting my hand on hers. She shook me off and started chopping again, violently, as if to purge something, or perhaps imagining my brother’s nuts under her knife, which no one would necessarily blame her for.
“Yeah, well, he can stay out there a bit longer,” she said, not looking at me. “But we’re gonna be renovating the barn soon.” She put her wrist to her forehead and sighed.
“Oh? What for?”
“Jen and Dale have a wild hair about turning it into a … a … I don’t know … place for small events. I don’t want to. But I’m gettin’ outvoted.”
“Well, that will be nice.”
She made a dismissive noise. “Whatever. I think it’s dumb. But it does mean Mr. Love will need to find himself a new place to hide.”
I patted her shoulder and headed outside. I found him with his legs hanging out the upper level window of the barn, half-empty bottle of bourbon in one hand. “Well, if it isn’t the one sibling I can always count on to distract negative attention from me,” he said, patting the hay-strewn floor next to him. “Cop a squat, sister. Have a drink.”
I sat but waved the bottle away. “No, I’m meeting with Gayle over at the dance studio later. Don’t want her to smell booze on me during a job interview.”