by Liz Crowe
“I’ll be back, Diana. I promise. Wait for me?” He pulled her close, tucked her hair behind her ears and kissed her before she could protest.
“Yes,” she sighed into his mouth. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
He picked her up and carried her to the couch, and drove all thoughts of the colossal mistakes she continued to make over him from her brain. As he entered her body after drawing a bittersweet climax out of her trembling body, she cradled his face between her hands.
“Don’t close your eyes,” she demanded. “Look at me, Dominic.”
He did as he moved against her and when he came, he said as clear as day, “I love you.”
She sucked in a breath and held on tight, wanting to believe him and knowing she was the world’s biggest fool for doing so.
Chapter Fourteen
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 clos
ing 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.
“Oh?” Diana propped on her elbows in the truck bed. He attempted to ignore the warmth of her thigh next to his. “I hope these don’t make you so fuzzy and sleepy.”
“Yeah, me too.”
He shook his head to dispel the memory of the now ex-teacher’s Airstream, the pot, booze and pussy she’d plied him with, thinking she could drink, smoke and fuck him out of his depression a few short years before. She hadn’t.
He matched Diana’s stance, swinging his legs alongside hers. He’d gone off the meds halfway through his sophomore year, which likely had led to the wild hair, going-to-Germany-for-a-brewing-certification adventure. Which landed him here, wishing he could kiss his oldest friend and knowing he had a testy baby mama waiting for him in a crappy, one-room apartment.
“Pretty fucked up,” Diana said, meaning his brother’s trauma, but startling him with the general usefulness of that particular phrase just then.
“You don’t know the half of it, babe.”
“Oh, I think I do. I talked to Angelique yesterday after Jen called me up at school.”
“Oh.” He sat up and moved away from her, snagging the almost-empty bottle.
“I’m gonna go.” She jumped down and grabbed her shoes. “It’s good to see you. But I sure am sorry it has to be like this.”
Suddenly so desperate for her to stay it hurt his whole body, he tried to pull her close. But she moved out of his reach.
“No, Dom. You have a baby coming. So, congrats on that. See you tomorrow at the funeral.”
He stood, his arms still out, as if holding onto her the way he wished he could.
The next day, he ignored Diana on purpose, angry at her for no good reason. Gina came
with him, her unwieldy belly protruding off her bony frame in a way that seemed so obscene it sickened him.
Which brought on the guilt.
Which made him want to drink. Which he did, after the Love family house had finally emptied out, with Antony, Kieran and Aiden. So much so, they all ended up passed out on patio chairs around the pool.
“My life sucks,” Dom slurred at some point during the proceedings.
“Fuck you,” Antony had yelled, heaving one of the empty beer bottles across the dark lawn, his voice tight with agony. “Fuck you, you selfish prick!” Dom wished the man would just cry. But he knew his brother never would do that. “Fuck all y’all.”
Kieran had raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.” And the brothers had toasted each other in silence.
Chapter Fifteen
Now
“Diana.”
The voice came from somewhere in the fog, confusing her. How had she gotten out here, near the pond in the middle of the night? She swiped at the spider webs draping over her vision.
“Diana!” The voice sharpened, angry, she could tell. But why?
Oh no, it’s Lee. He knows I’ve been screwing Dominic every night as if it were my job.
Something about the damn man had become extreme catnip to her after that night by the fireplace. The fact that she’d agreed to marry the perfect, calm and polar-opposite-of-Dom veterinarian had zero impact on the raging lust for her one-time boyfriend. She’d been manic these last few weeks, trying to move the renovation of the old barn forward by the sheer force of her will, arguing with her sister, brother-in-law, her fiancé, everyone, including Dom. Strange, since their new relationship seemed constructed out of guilt, remorse, confrontation and the wildest, most satisfying sex she could remember experiencing.
Awkward, especially since her family’s old farmhouse now housed another Love family member. Angelique had been released from the hospital after a ten-day recuperation, gotten into an immediate knock-down-drag-out with her mama and had called Dom, hysterical, claiming she had her bag packed and would be hitching her way farther South. He’d driven Diana’s truck over to the Love family home, scooped her up and deposited her in the room he’d been occupying for the better part of a year—Diana’s old bedroom.
