Timothy wiped Mercedes’s face again. Rowdy could have sworn the leprechaun’s hand was shaking.
“What did you do, Mercedes?” he asked her gently. “Didn’t you rest last night?”
Mercedes’s lush lips almost tilted into a smile. “What do you think, Tim?” she asked, forcing her eyes open.
Tim?
No one, but no one, had ever been allowed to call Timothy Cranston “Tim.”
“I think you were up all night pacing and worrying.” He sighed. “I told you there was nothing to worry about.”
“Is there not?” she asked him sorrowfully. “Chandler’s son is suddenly besieged by four young females he knew nothing of, and a sick mother to boot? Ah, Tim, do you not know human nature far better than this?”
“I know the Mackays far better than this,” he assured her, praying he was right. “And the Mackays do not turn their backs on family.”
The look he slid them assured the Mackays that they’d better not start now.
“Is Doc on his way, then?” Christa asked Dawg as his hand tightened on her hip, his need to draw her closer evident.
“Half hour, his nurse said.”
“Twenty minutes then.” She nodded.
Dawg watched the young woman; hell, she had four grown daughters and she was younger than he was. He watched her, watched her daughters, and in their eyes he saw pure, raw fear.
“Cranston, what do the doctors who have suggested a specialist say could be wrong with her?” Dawg asked; the low rasp of the tone wasn’t lost on the former agent.
Cranston swallowed tightly, the action at first almost unnoticed. But the slight flinch of his facial muscles wasn’t missed by Dawg.
“They think she could have an advanced form of chemical poisoning that’s slowly weakening her lungs. One of the jobs she had was at an industrial chemical processing plant that’s since been shut down for its unsafe working conditions.” Clearing his throat of obvious emotion, he lifted his gaze to Dawg’s, and no one missed the plea in his eyes. “The treatments she needs are expensive—”
“Timothy, no.” Pride was evident in Mercedes’s weak voice as she laid her hand on his arm. “Let’s not talk of this. Let the girls and their brother talk.”
“Mercedes, I won’t let you lie here and suffer,” he snarled, his voice hoarse and filled with emotion. “Not anymore.”
Timothy Cranston was in love.
Dawg lifted his gaze from Cranston, only to realize the four girls were watching him suspiciously, fearfully. There wasn’t one of them who didn’t expect him to turn them away.
“Doc’s here,” Christa stated as a vehicle pulled up in front of the door. “He’s early. He must have already left the office.”
Dawg nodded. “Let’s get your mother taken care of,” he told the girls. “Once we have her checked out, we’ll talk.” His gaze dropped to Cranston’s again before lifting back to the girls. “But have no doubt: You’re family. And we stick by family.”
“One of you killed your cousin,” the eldest stated. “I heard one of the agents talking about it after we arrived at Tim’s. Is that how you take care of family?”
She might have resembled Dawg enough to be his kid, but it was Natches’s emerald eyes she stared at him from.
“Eve.” Her mother gasped, obviously shocked by her daughter’s rudeness.
Dawg just gave Eve a mocking smile as his hand tightened at Christa’s hip once again. “Only those who betray us and have a gun trained on the someone we love,” he assured her. “Then, Eve, trust me, it didn’t matter who he was then; Johnny was dead.”
Eve’s nostrils flared before she finally relaxed enough to simply nod her head.
“Mackays don’t betray one another.” Cranston tore his gaze from their mother long enough to stare back at each girl with a glint of steel in his eyes. “Remember that, girls. You stand for who you are, what you are, and for family. That’s what your mother’s taught you, and that’s what you live by.”
“Only if you stand for us first,” Lyrica spoke up warily.
Dawg nodded. “Understandable. And we’ll show you our good faith.” He glanced to Natches and Rowdy. Each of his cousins nodded in turn. “We’ll take care of you and your mother, because you’re family, and that’s what families do. Whatever treatments your mother needs, whatever care, she’ll have it. Just as you’ll return to school and do your part.”
“In return for what?” the other girl asked suspiciously.
“In return for being part of the family,” Dawg growled back at her. “I just told you that. Loyalty begins somewhere, and I’ll make that first step. From here on out it’s up to you. But betray us or yourselves, hurt us, yourselves, or another of the family, and you’ll risk all of it. Come to us, talk to us, and we’ll help you the best way we can. But you don’t lie to us, you don’t cheat us, and you don’t dare betray one of us.”
What the hell was he supposed to do with four sisters?
Each girl nodded before the door opened, heralding the doctor and his nurse. Within an hour an ambulance arrived and, with Cranston riding with her, whisked Mercedes Mackay to the hospital and left four clearly suspicious, frightened, and exhausted young women in his keeping.
And Dawg would soon learn, along with Rowdy and Natches, just what they might have to face in another decade or so.
With their own daughters.
ONE
It was after two in the morning before Eve Mackay stepped into her bedroom and closed the door behind her quietly. Staring around the small suite, it was damned hard to believe how her life had changed in five short years. From destitution to security. From paralyzing fear of what the future would bring, to looking forward to each day as it arrived.
From losing the meager roof over their heads to partial ownership in the business her mother now owned.
Luckily, her room was on the more private side of the large house her mother had turned into Mackay’s Bed-and-breakfast Inn. The two-story sprawling farmhouse had been completely renovated and redecorated with the private residence on the second floor, the eight guest suites, large chef’s kitchen, and open television and game room on the main floor.
A wide porch wrapped around the house, allowing guests easy access to the balcony doors into their rooms when the main entrance was locked after midnight.
Eve had taken the smallest guest room at the back of the house for herself, rather than one of the bedrooms in the upstairs residence, as her sisters had done. She’d needed the privacy, whereas her sisters had still needed the closeness the upstairs rooms provided to their mother.
Now she was thankful for it. Arriving home after two in the morning and going through the main residence would be guaranteed to alert her mother, and her mother’s lover, that she’d arrived home.
Living upstairs would have enabled her mother to keep tabs on her, too, and as much as she loved her mother, she had no wish for that.
Opening her eyes and drawing in a deep breath, Eve reached back and rubbed the tense muscles of her neck before moving to the bathroom and a hot shower.
Releasing the heavy weight of her long, straight black hair and massaging at her scalp with her fingertips, she wondered why she had gotten none of the curls that her younger sisters had in abundance. Zoey’s hair fell to her waist in soft corkscrew curls that Eve used to threaten to cut off out of pure jealousy.
No matter how hard she’d tried, Eve had rarely been able to get her hair to take curl for more than a few hours. A few days at the most only after a trip to the salon when she had a chemical wave put in it.
It hadn’t been worth it.
She’d learned to live without the curl her other sisters had in varying amounts. Piper’s hair was wavy. It fell to her shoulders, thick and heavy as it framed her aristocratic features and gave her exotic sea green eyes a lush shimmer.
Lyrica kept her hair to a length that fell just below her shoulder blades. The deeper waves in her hair bounced and gleamed with a blue-black
sheen that went perfectly with her summer green gaze.
Zoey’s hair fell below her waist, clear to her hips in those long, corkscrew curls that were impossibly soft and silky and made other women want to kill for them. Her hair was just as exotic as her eyes, which were the same celadon as their brother Dawg’s, that pale, ethereal color that always drew second and third looks.
Eve’s hair was more like Natches’s: straight and thick. It was impossible for her to do much in the way of styling it. She pinned it up, put it in a ponytail as she had tonight, or just left it long to the middle of her shoulders.
Her eyes were the same emerald green as Natches’s, but her looks, like her sisters’, were closer to Dawg’s.
Big, bold, and as familiar in Pulaski County, Kentucky, as the mountains themselves, Dawg and his cousins—her cousins—Rowdy and Natches had been all that had saved her and her family at a time when they’d been certain life as they’d known it was over.
It had been, she guessed, but Dawg, Rowdy, and Natches had made it better. They’d taken her, her sisters, and her mother under their wings and gave them a life.
Her mother was given the house that had once been taken away from Dawg by the cousin that had betrayed his country and his family and had nearly killed Dawg’s wife, Christa. The same cousin Eve had heard agents accusing Natches of having killed. After Johnny Grace’s death the property had reverted back to Dawg, and had been sitting empty for nearly three years before Eve and her family showed up.
He’d had the renovations done under her mother’s direction, agreeing to allow her to sign a promissory loan for the amount it had taken to renovate it. Mercedes Mackay had then opened the bed-and-breakfast she’d always dreamed of having.
Her sisters were in college, and Eve had graduated from the local technical college with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
As she stepped from the shower, wrapped her hair in a towel, and quickly dried off, she grimaced at the paleness of her skin.
It was June; by now she usually had a nice golden tan over her body, and instead of coming in at two in the morning from a job, she’d been sneaking in after a night of carousing herself.
When had the fun and good times started leaving a bad taste in her mouth? she wondered as she brushed her teeth.
She’d been in Somerset for five years now, and the past three years the nightlife she had once sworn by had quickly become boring, with a heavy air of immaturity.
Quickly applying a moisturizing facial cream, she then lotioned her body and spritzed a toasted-vanilla body spray over herself.
It was a lot of work to go through just to go to bed, but after eight hours at the bar where she worked, Walker’s Run, and waiting on tables in the outside smokers’ patio, she smelled of old tobacco smoke, the sweaty bodies that had brushed against her, sawdust, and the greasy food she’d served.
She couldn’t bear the thought of going to bed smelling like the bar.
Mackay’s Fine Dining, previously Mackay’s Restaurant and Cafe, the restaurant Natches’s sister Janey owned, wasn’t as bad, but it still called for a shower. Maybe she’d go work for Dawg at the lumber store for a while. Natches would readily let her work at the garage as well, but Eve wasn’t ready for the oil baths she had experienced the few times she’d worked there. His redneck mechanics thought it was funny to find ways to upend the pails of old oil in ways that left her covered in the nasty sludge. And though Natches always fired the responsible party when they could be identified, after the first firing, Eve was always careful to ensure no one was identified.
She had just been there temporarily because she liked working on cars. It wasn’t a job she needed to feed her family and she wasn’t going to be responsible for having a man with a family fired because he was offended by a “girl,” as they called her, doing their job.
Pulling on one of the summer-thin camisole-and-shorts pajamas she preferred, Eve moved to the balcony doors she’d slipped through earlier and opened one side quietly. The bed-and-breakfast had a full house for the next few weeks, though several of the rooms had been rented for more than two years now by three guests who often gave their free time to Mercedes to do odd jobs around the inn. Her mother greatly reduced the amount of their stay in return, and one to two days a week the three men took care of repairs needed in and outside the inn as well as yard work.
The one beside her was one of them.
Stepping outside, she moved to the oval wicker chair hanging from beneath the second floor wraparound balcony, with its thick, fluffy cushions and curled into it with a weary sigh.
She was exhausted, but she’d never go to sleep easily if she went to bed now.
Why couldn’t she be one of those people that dropped right off to sleep? Instead, she spent far too long staring up at the ceiling or with her eyes closed, fighting for peace. Or far too many sensations raced through her body, demanding satisfaction, as they were tonight.
As they had been since the first hour on the job that night, when Brogan Campbell had walked into the bar.
It was that arrogant swagger that made him so tempting. Or maybe it was that slightly tilted curve to his lips. As though he saw beneath the facades of those he talked to and was amused by the deceptions they practiced.
It sure couldn’t be that red-gold hair with all the sunlit and burnished brown highlights it held that framed his hard-hewn face and tempted her to touch it to see if it was as warm as it looked. And it couldn’t be the arrogance in those icy gray-blue eyes, or the subtle darkening that always affected them whenever she caught his gaze.
Whatever it was, the second he’d entered the bar that night she’d known it.
She’d known it and responded to him.
Her breasts had swelled, her nipples becoming hard and peaked as her skin seemed to sensitize. She became so aware of the sensitive folds between her thighs that she felt them dampening, felt the slick juices as they made their way along the tender tissue of her vagina to ease out along the lips beyond.
She had become so horny so fast she’d almost dropped the tray of drinks she’d been carrying.
That was the effect Brogan had on her. And knowing he was sleeping in the suite next to hers didn’t help matters, because she knew—knew beyond a shadow of a doubt—that he wanted her as well.
That was the reason she was working the job that would bring her home at the latest possible hour and work her the hardest. Unfortunately it wasn’t working her hard enough, evidently.
“Eve. Hey, Eve, you there?”
Eve glanced up at the bottom of the balcony at the sound of her sister Lyrica’s voice hissing from above.
“You’re supposed to be asleep, Lyrica.” She grinned, keeping her voice soft as she answered her.
“Oh, great, that was you I heard drive up.” Her sister’s loud whisper was followed by the sight of a slender foot bracing on the outside of the balcony railing.
A second later the other foot joined it; then her sister was reaching for the thick post next to her and shimmying down it like a pro. Hell, she was a pro. All three of Eve’s sisters were. They’d learned early how to slip from the house and make the most of a perfectly good summer night.
They hadn’t fooled their mother, though. It never failed that their brother, Dawg, or one of their cousins, Rowdy or Natches, or one of their friends would find them after an hour or so and escort them home. They were never out long enough to get into trouble, but always long enough to satisfy the thrill of escaping for a while.
Lyrica dropped from the lower balcony railing, barefoot, dressed as Eve was in a pair of shorty pajama bottoms and a snug camisole.
Her long black hair was twisted into a braid behind her as she leaned back against the rail she had just jumped from, her hands gripping the vinyl-covered railing.
“Aren’t you supposed to be helping Mom with breakfast in the morning?” she asked her sister.
“Well, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.” Lyrica tuck
ed a stray strand of black hair behind her ear as she shifted on her feet and smiled back at Eve brightly. “I was hoping I could get you to cover for me.”
Eve’s brow lifted in doubtful surprise. “Did you even notice what time I came in tonight, or what time it is now?”
“Yeah, you came in at two thirty and it’s now ten after three.” She waved the time away. “Come on, Eve; it’s really important. I know you won’t get much sleep—”
“Try no sleep,” Eve reminded her. “What would be the point of going to sleep if I just have to get up again in less than two hours?”
“I know; that will so suck.” Lyrica pouted as she brushed another strand of hair back and shifted on her bare feet again. “So you’ll do it for me?”
“I didn’t say that.” Eve laughed. “I said what would be the point of going to sleep if I were to do that? And I have to be back at the bar at six tomorrow evening. I’m closing with Matteo, so I’ll be even later getting home. I’ll need some sleep.”
“Come on, Eve; you can get to bed before noon, and that will easily give you five hours’ sleep.”
“And I easily need eight,” Eve pointed out. “What’s so important on a Saturday that you can’t help Mom and Piper with breakfast?”
Lyrica blew out a heavy breath, her head tilting to the side as she gazed down at the boards of the porch. A second later, her gaze lifted as she stared back at Eve. And Eve knew that look. Her younger sister was considering the best way to work her oldest sister to get what she wanted.
“Tell me why,” Eve bargained. “Otherwise I’m going to bed. Like I said, I have to help Matteo close the bar, and I need my sleep if this isn’t important.”
“Maybe it’s just important to me.” Lyrica shrugged. “I was invited to go with some friends to Louisville for a spa day.”
Her expression became animated, her voice filling with excitement. “Massages, a mani and a pedi, and being spoiled and rubbed and oiled for hours and hours.” Lyrica was all but jumping in anticipation. “Please, Eve, pretty please cover for me. I can’t just slip off and leave Momma a hand short. Piper would kill me if I did that.”