The Quinn Brothers

by Nora Roberts

  He had that quiet way about him. Linda knew what they said about still waters. And she was just dying to see just how deep Ethan Quinn’s ran.

  Ethan was well aware where her eye had wandered, and he was keeping his peeled as well. For running room. Women like Linda scared the hell out of him.

  “Hi, Linda. Didn’t know you were working here.” Or he’d have avoided Village Pizza like the plague.

  “Just helping my father out for a couple of weeks.” She was flat broke, and her father—the owner of Village Pizza—had told her he’d be damned if she was going to sponge off him and her mother. She should get her sassy butt to work. “Haven’t seen you around lately.”

  “I’ve been around.” He wished she’d move along. Her perfume gave him the jitters.

  “I heard you and your brothers rented that old barn of Claremont’s and are building boats. I’ve been meaning to come down and take a look.”

  “Not much to see.” Where the hell was Seth when he needed him? Ethan wondered a little desperately. How long could those damn quarters last?

  “I’d like to see it anyway.” She skimmed those slick-tipped nails down his arm, gave a low purr as she felt the ridge of muscle. “I can slip out of here for a while. Why don’t you run me down there and show me what’s what?”

  His mind blanked for a moment. He was only human. And she was running her tongue over her top lip in a way designed to draw a man’s eyes and tickle his glands. Not that he was interested, not a bit, but it had been a long time since he’d had a woman moaning under him. And he had a feeling Linda would be a champion moaner.

  “Copped top score.” Seth plopped into the booth, flushed with victory, and grabbed his Pepsi. He slurped some up. “Man, what’s keeping that pizza? I’m starved.”

  Ethan felt his blood start to run again and nearly sighed with relief. “It’ll be along.”

  “Well.” Despite annoyance at the interruption, Linda smiled brilliantly at Seth. “This must be the new addition. What’s your name, honey? I can’t quite recollect.”

  “I’m Seth.” And he sized her up quickly. Bimbo, was his first and last thought. He’d seen plenty of them in his short life. “Who’re you?”

  “I’m Linda, an old friend of Ethan’s. My daddy owns the place.”

  “Cool, so maybe you could tell them to put a fire under that pizza before we die of old age here.”

  “Seth.” The word and Ethan’s quiet look were all it took for the boy to close his mouth. “Your daddy still makes the best pizza on the Shore,” Ethan said with an easier smile. “You be sure to tell him.”

  “I will. And you give me a call, Ethan.” She wiggled her left hand. “I’m a free woman these days.” She wandered away, hips swinging like a well-oiled metronome.

  “She smells like the place at the mall where they sell all that girl stuff.” Seth wrinkled his nose. He hadn’t liked her because he’d seen just a shadow of his mother in her eyes. “She just wants to get in your pants.”

  “Shut up, Seth.”

  “It’s true,” Seth said with a shrug, but happily let the subject drop when Linda came back bearing pizza.

  “Y’all enjoy, now,” she told them, leaning over the table just a little farther than necessary in case Ethan had missed the view the first time around.

  Seth snagged a piece and bit in, knowing it was going to scorch the roof of his mouth. The flavors exploded, making the burn more than worth it. “Grace makes pizza from scratch,” he said around a mouthful. “It’s even better than this.”

  Ethan only grunted. The thought of Grace after he’d entertained—however unwillingly—a brief and sweaty fantasy about Linda Brewster made him twitchy.

  “Yeah. We ought to see if she’d make it for us one of the days she comes to clean and stuff. She comes tomorrow, right?”

  “Yeah.” Ethan took a piece, annoyed that most of his appetite had deserted him. “I suppose.”

  “Maybe she’d make one up before she goes.”

  “You’re having pizza tonight.”

  “So?” Seth polished off the first piece with the speed and precision of a jackal. “You could, like, compare. Grace ought to open a diner or something so she wouldn’t have to work all those different jobs. She’s always working. She wants to buy a house.”

  “She does?”

  “Yeah.” Seth licked the side of his hand where sauce dripped. “Just a little one, but it has to have a yard so Aubrey can run around and have a dog and stuff.”

  “She tell you all that?”

  “Sure. I asked how come she was busting her butt cleaning all those houses and working down at the pub, and she said that was mostly why. And if she doesn’t make enough, she and Aubrey won’t have a place of their own by the time Aub starts kindergarten. I guess even a little house costs big bucks, right?”

  “It costs,” Ethan said quietly. He remembered how satisfied, how proud he’d been when he’d bought his own place on the water. What it had meant to him to know he’d succeeded at what he did. “It takes time to save up.”

  “Grace wants to have the house by the time Aubrey starts school. After that, she says how she has to start saving for college.” He snorted and decided he could force down a third piece. “Hell, Aubrey’s just a baby, it’s a million years till college. Told her that, too,” he added, because it pleased him for people to know he and Grace had conversations. “She just laughed and said five minutes ago Aubrey had gotten her first tooth. I didn’t get it.”

  “She meant kids grow up fast.” Since it didn’t look as though his appetite would be coming back, Ethan closed the top on the pizza and took out bills to pay for it. “Let’s take this back to the boatyard. Since you don’t have school in the morning, we can put in a couple more hours.”

  He put in more than a couple. Once he got started, he couldn’t seem to stop. It cleared his mind, kept it from wandering, wondering, worrying.

  The boat was definite, a tangible task with a foreseeable end. He knew what he was doing here, just as he knew what he was doing out on the Bay. There weren’t so many shadow areas of maybes or what ifs.

  Ethan continued to work even when Seth curled up on a drop cloth and fell asleep. The sound of tools running didn’t appear to disturb him—though Ethan wondered how anyone could sleep with the best part of a large sausage-and-pepperoni pizza in his stomach.

  He started work on the ends and corner posts for the cabin and cockpit coaming while the night wind blew lazily through the open cargo doors. He’d turned the radio off so that now the only music was the water, the gentle notes of it sliding against the shore.

  He worked slowly, carefully, though he was well able to visualize the completed project. Cam, he decided, would handle most of the interior work. He was the most skilled of the three of them at finish carpentry. Phillip could handle the rough-ins; he was better at sheer manual labor than he liked to admit.

  If they could keep up the pace, Ethan calculated that they could have the boat trimmed and under sail in another two months. He would leave figuring the profits and percentages to Phillip. The money would feed the lawyers, the boatyard, and their own bellies.

  Why hadn’t Grace ever told him she wanted to buy a house?

  Ethan frowned thoughtfully as he chose a galvanized bolt. Wasn’t that a pretty big step to be discussing with a ten-year-old boy? Then again, he admitted, Seth had asked. He himself had only told her she shouldn’t be working herself so hard—he hadn’t asked why she insisted on it.

  She ought to make things up with her father, he thought again. If the two of them would just bend that stiff-necked Monroe pride for five minutes, they could come to terms. She’d gotten pregnant—and there was no doubt in Ethan’s mind that Jack Casey had taken advantage of a young, naive girl and should be shot for it—but that was over and done.

  His family had never held grudges, small or large. They’d fought, certainly—and he and his brothers had often fought physically. But when it was done, it was over.
<
br />   It was true enough that he’d harbored some seeds of resentment because Cam had raced off to Europe and Phillip had moved to Baltimore. It had happened so fast after their mother died, and he’d still been raw. Everything had changed before he could blink, and he’d stewed over that.

  But even with that, he would never have turned his back on either of them if they’d needed him. And he knew they wouldn’t have turned their backs on him.

  It seemed to him the most foolish and wasteful thing imaginable that Grace wouldn’t ask for help, and her father wouldn’t offer it.

  He glanced at the big round clock nailed to the wall over the front doors. Phillip’s idea, Ethan remembered with a half grin. He’d figured they’d need to know how much time they were putting in, but as far as Ethan knew, Phillip was the only one who bothered to mark down the time.

  It was nearly one, which meant Grace would be finishing up at the pub in about an hour. It wouldn’t hurt to load Seth in the truck and do a quick swing by Shiney’s. Just to . . . check on things.

  Even as he started to rise, he heard the boy whimper in his sleep.

  Pizza’s finally getting to him, Ethan thought with a shake of the head. But he supposed childhood wouldn’t be complete without its quota of bellyaches. He climbed down, rolling his shoulders to work out the kinks as he approached the sleeping boy.

  He crouched beside Seth, laid a hand on his shoulders, and gave a gentle shake.

  And the boy came up swinging.

  The bunched fist caught Ethan squarely on the mouth and knocked his head back. The shock, more than the quick and bright pain, had him swearing. He blocked the next blow, then took Seth’s arm firmly. “Hold it.”

  “Get your hands off me.” Wild, desperate, and still caught in the sticky grip of the dream, Seth flailed at the air. “Get your fucking hands off me.”

  Understanding came quickly. It was the look in Seth’s eyes—stark terror and vicious fury. He’d once felt both himself, along with a shuddering helplessness. He let go, lifted both of his hands palms out. “You were dreaming.” He said it quietly, without inflection, and listened to Seth’s ragged breathing echo on the air. “You fell asleep.”

  Seth kept his fists bunched. He didn’t remember falling asleep. He remembered curling up, listening to Ethan work. And the next thing he knew, he was back in one of those dark rooms, where the smells were sour and too human and the noises from the next room were too loud and too animal.

  And one of the faceless men who used his mother’s bed had crept out and put hands on him again.

  But it was Ethan who was watching him, patiently, with too much knowledge in his serious eyes. Seth’s stomach twisted not only at what had been, but that Ethan should now know.

  Because he couldn’t think of words or excuses, Seth simply closed his eyes.

  It was that which tilted the scales for Ethan. The surrender to helplessness, the slide into shame. He’d left this wound alone, but now it seemed he would need to treat it after all.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of what was.”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.” Seth’s eyes snapped open. The anger in them was adult and bitter, but his voice jerked like the child he was. “I’m not afraid of some stupid dream.”

  “You don’t have to be ashamed of it, either.”

  Because he was, hideously, Seth sprang to his feet. His fists were bunched again, ready. “I’m not ashamed of anything. And you don’t know a damn thing about it.”

  “I know every damn thing about it.” Because he did, he hated to speak of it. But despite the defiant stance, the boy was trembling, and Ethan knew just how alone he felt. Speaking of it was the only thing left for him to do. The right thing to do.

  “I know what dreams did to me, how I had them for a long time after that part of things was over for me.” And still had them now and again, he thought, but there was no need to tell the boy he might have to face a lifetime of flashing back and overcoming. “I know what it does to your guts.”

  “Bullshit.” The tears were burning the backs of Seth’s eyes, humiliating him all the more. “Nothing’s wrong with me. I got the hell out, didn’t I? I got away from her, didn’t I? I’m not going back either, no matter what.”

  “No, you’re not going back,” Ethan agreed. No matter what.

  “I don’t care what you or anybody thinks about what went on back then. And you’re not tricking me into saying things about it by pretending you know.”

  “You don’t have to say anything about it,” Ethan told him. “And I don’t have to pretend.” He picked up the cap Seth’s blow had knocked off his head, ran it absently through his hands before putting it back on. But the casual gesture did nothing to ease the tight, slick ball of tension in his gut.

  “My mother was a whore—my biological mother. And she was a junkie with a taste for heroin.” He kept his gaze on Seth’s and his voice matter-of-fact. “I was younger than you when she sold me the first time, to a man who liked young boys.”

  Seth’s breathing quickened as he took a step back. No, was all he could think. Ethan Quinn was everything strong and solid and. . . normal. “You’re lying.”

  “People mostly lie to brag, or to get out of some stupid thing they’ve done. I don’t see the point in either—and less in lying about this.”

  Ethan took his cap off again because it suddenly felt too tight on his head. Once, twice, he raked his hand through his hair as if to ease the weight. “She sold me to men to pay for her habit. The first time, I fought. It didn’t stop it, but I fought. The second time, I fought, and a few times more after that. Then I didn’t bother fighting because it just made it worse.”

  Ethan’s gaze stayed level on the boy’s. In the harsh overhead lights Seth’s eyes were dark, and not as calm as they had been when Ethan had begun to speak. Seth’s chest hurt until he remembered to breathe again. “How’d you stand it?”

  “I stopped caring.” Ethan shrugged his shoulders. “I stopped being, if you know what I mean. There wasn’t anybody I could go to for help—or I didn’t know there was. She moved around a lot to keep the social workers off her tail.”

  Seth’s lips felt dry and tight. He rubbed the back of his hand over them violently. “You never knew where you’re going to wake up in the morning.”

  “Yeah, you never knew.” But all the places looked the same. They all smelled the same.

  “But you got away. You got out.”

  “Yeah, I got out. One night after her john had finished with both of us, there was . . . some trouble.” Screams, blood, curses. Pain. “I don’t remember everything exactly, but the cops came. I must have been in a pretty bad way because they took me to the hospital and figured things out quick enough. I ended up in the system, might have stayed there. But the doctor who treated me was Stella Quinn.”

  “They took you.”

  “They took me.” And saying that, just that, soothed the sickness in Ethan’s gut. “They didn’t just change my life, they saved it. I had the dreams for a long time after, the sweaty ones where you wake up trying to breathe, sure you’re back in it. And even when you realize you’re not, you’re cold for a while.”

  Seth knuckled the tears away, but he didn’t feel ashamed of them now. “I always got away. Sometimes they put their hands on me, but I got away. None of them ever . . .”

  “Good for you.”

  “I still wanted to kill them, and her. I wanted to.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t want to tell anybody. I think Ray knew, and Cam sort of knows. I didn’t want anybody to think I . . . to look at me and think . . .” He couldn’t express it, the shame of having anyone look at him and see what had happened, and what could have happened, in those dark, smelly rooms. “Why did you tell me?”

  “Because you need to know it doesn’t make you less of a man.” Ethan waited, knowing that Seth would decide whether he accepted the truth of that.

  What Seth saw was a man, tall, strong, self-posse
ssed, with big, callused hands and quiet eyes. One of the weights that hung on his heart lifted. “I guess I do.” And he smiled a little. “Your mouth’s bleeding.”

  Ethan dabbed at it with the back of his hand and knew they’d crossed a thin and shaky line. “You got a good right jab. I never saw it coming.” He held out a hand, testing, and ruffled Seth’s sleep-tumbled hair. The boy’s smile stayed in place. “Let’s clean up,” Ethan said, “and go home.”

  FIVE

  Grace had a morning full of chores. The first load of laundry went in at seven-fifteen while the coffee was brewing and her eyes were still mostly shut. She watered her porch plants and the little pots of herbs on her kitchen windowsill, and yawned hugely.

  As the coffee began to scent the air and give her hope, she washed the glasses and bowls Julie had used the night before while babysitting. She closed the open bag of potato chips, tucked it into its place in the cupboard, then wiped the crumbs from the counter where Julie had had her snack while talking on the phone.

  Julie Cutter wasn’t known for her neatness, but she loved Aubrey.

  At precisely seven-thirty—and after half a cup of coffee—Aubrey woke.

  Reliable as the sunrise, Grace thought, heading out of the tiny galley kitchen toward the bedroom off the living room. Rain or shine, weekday or weekend, Aubrey’s internal clock buzzed away at seven-thirty every morning.

  Grace could have left her in the crib and finished her coffee, but she looked forward to this moment every day. Aubrey stood at the side of the crib, her sunbeam curls tangled from sleep, her cheeks still flushed with it. Grace could still remember the first time she’d come in and seen Aubrey standing, her wobbly legs rocking, her face glowing with success and surprise.

  Now Aubrey’s legs seemed so sturdy. She lifted one, then the other, in a kind of joyful march. She laughed out loud when Grace came into the room. “Mama, Mama, hi, my mama.”

  “Hello, my baby.” Grace leaned over the side for the first nuzzle and sighed. She knew how lucky she was. There couldn’t have been a child on the planet with a sunnier nature than her little girl. “How’s my Aubrey?”