For the Love of Family (3 page)

Eight years later

T
WO HOURS INTO HIS
grandmother’s dinner party, held on the lantern-lit patio behind her waterfront home in Belvedere Cove, Matt Malone could hardly keep his eyes open, even though he had just knocked back a cup of black coffee so thick and strong it could have walked across the lawn on its own two feet.

He stifled a yawn, recrossed his legs and rotated his shoulders.

He hated this point in a party, when the food was eaten and all the decent conversations were exhausted. The women had finally grown tired of pretending to be interested in guy talk, and vice versa.

It was at this moment, when the special-interest groups started forming, that he could always tell whether a Malone-brother relationship had any future. Tonight, the guest list was small. Just the three guys and their dates, and Nana Lina. And, judging by how the women had clustered together as soon as it was humanly possible, not a single brother had a chance of eating Nana Lina’s pasta with the same lady this time next year.

Oh, well. Matt didn’t care much. Tiffani, his date, was inventive in bed, but she thought she was also a creative cook, and loved to make him pancakes the morning after. She thought she was a great conversationalist, too.

Well, one out of three wasn’t bad, but it wouldn’t take her to next year.

The summer night was balmy, with a light wind carrying the scent of the Pacific across the grass. The Japanese lanterns swayed from the trees, and the candles guttered sleepily on the tabletop.

His grandparents had bought this house, just over the bridge in Marin County, because Colm loved the water, and Nana Lina wanted space for entertaining. She adored having the whole family gathered around, and, a true extrovert, she knew how to throw a party, and never missed a chance.

Right now she was showing Red’s girlfriend, Marie, the purple rhododendron. Marie was oohing and aahing over the flowers. This was her first Malone get-together, and she was still trying to flatter Nana Lina. Colby’s date, Stephanie, and Matt’s girlfriend, Tiffani, knew better than to bother. Nana Lina might look like an old lady, but was sharp and dangerous as a steak knife, and she wasn’t partial to the taste of baloney.

Instead, Stephanie and Tiffani were huddled over the necklace Colby had just bought for Stephanie. These weren’t stupid women, so it blew Matt’s mind how many ways they could slice the same plain gold chain. Apparently there were infinite variations on the theme. Snake chain, foxtail chain, wheat and rope, popcorn,
tinsel and diamond. White gold, rose gold, yellow gold, and every combination of the above, all available to the high-priced crap-maker.

Colby stood with his back to them, staring out at the water, munching a pear and pretending to be deaf. But Matt caught Red’s gaze, and knew that he wasn’t the only one bored out of his skull. Red grinned and tipped his head a fraction of an inch westward. The message was clear.

The boathouse.

Matt stood up right away and stretched. It was safest to be the first. By the second or third departure, someone might have caught on that this was a breakout. Everyone knew it was the slow fish that always got tangled in the net.

“I was thinking. I’d better go check on that thing. You know, that thing on the boat. Nobody has put any stuff on it in ages, and you never know.”

Red rolled his eyes. Okay, as excuses went it was pretty lame, but Matt could tell the ladies weren’t really listening, so a clever one would have been wasted, anyhow. He grinned at his little brother and sauntered away slowly. You never hurried. Fast, jerky motions drew attention.

He made his way down the sloping lawns, over the creaking boards of the dock, and then slipped quietly through the open boathouse door. The dim, musky interior was as blessedly silent as the interior of a church.

Only the sound of water lapping against the sailboat, and the invisible plash of a shorebird launching itself into flight.

Instantly, he felt wide-awake again. He flicked on the
bare overhead bulb and settled into the most comfortable deck chair. Another perk of being the first to arrive.

Colby showed up next, and Red followed maybe two minutes behind. Each man entered with a heartfelt sigh from deep in the diaphragm. Forget next year. Those women weren’t going to make it to next month.

Colby, the eldest, snagged the next best lounger, leaving Red to make do with the three-legged, moldy-canvas director’s chair. They kept meaning to get another solid one, but they never did. Maybe it was too entertaining to try to avoid being the one who got stuck.

Colby pulled three beers out of his jacket pockets and handed them around. “Listen,” he said, shaking his head, “if you ever hear that I’m about to buy another woman jewelry, would someone please stop me?”

Red laughed. “How about we just shoot you? You will obviously have lost your mind.”

“You’re not finished buying geegaws,” Matt assured him. “Steph clearly thinks this necklace is an appetizer. She’s already drooling for the main course.” He waggled his eyebrows ominously. “A big fat, juicy diamond ring.”

Colby groaned and popped the top of his beer can with an emphatic sizzle. He had turned thirty-two last month, and women clearly thought he was old enough to start making commitments. Problem was, Colby was as commitment phobic as anyone Matt had ever met, up to and including himself.

Red, at only twenty-nine, could still claim youth as an excuse, although Matt sometimes wondered whether his little brother might be the first to settle down. He loved kids, and wanted one of his own.

But he still had a lot of growing up to do. He was about three-quarters kid himself. As if to prove it, Red picked up one of the antiquated blue darts and tossed it toward the target, which they’d affixed on the far wall about twenty years ago.

Half the fun of boathouse darts was the iron-clad rule that, if your dart fell into the frigid open water where the
MacGregor
sailboat was tied, you had to jump in, fully dressed, to get it yourself.

Matt propped his feet against the wall and rolled the cool beer can across his forehead. He probably wouldn’t open it. He didn’t drink much anymore. He didn’t have time.

As the general manager of Diamante Pizza, his grandmother’s chain of delivery pizza franchises, which covered about seventy-five square miles of California coastline, he couldn’t afford a slow-motion hangover morning.

Now that they were planning this expansion—which was exciting, exhausting and riskier than anything he’d dared to do before—he was on the road every day. He worked harder than anyone on the payroll, including the delivery guys. In fact, he’d been known to deliver many a pizza, in a pinch. Made plenty of them, too.

He loved all of it. He wasn’t the most glamorous CEO in California, or the richest. But he was probably the happiest.

It beat the hell out of that yuppie corner-office prison he’d come within a whisker of checking himself into for life. He’d been only twenty-two, but he’d felt like a defeated, hopeless old man. He still remembered the claustrophobic feeling that had come over him when
he’d accepted the job offer, like being buried alive, or smothered in his sleep.

And he still remembered the night he had decided to turn it down. The night the lights came back on in his life. And the mysterious, beautiful stranger who had helped it all come clear.

Red skipped onto, then off, the 26-foot
MacGregor
to get to the other side and retrieve his darts. He had hit everything but the bull’s-eye. He came back, set down his beer with a glare, as if it was responsible for his crummy aim, and started over.

“What I can’t understand,” he said irritably, “is why they need to talk about jewelry so much. I mean, you want to hang a bunch of glittery shit from your ears and your neck, well, hell, it’s kind of nutty, when you think about it, but hey. If it feels good, go for it. But do you have to spend all night
talking
about it?”

“What else do they have to talk about?” Colby smiled. “They don’t like football.”

Matt raised his unopened beer in an affirmative salute. “There you go.”

But Red was on a rant, and he was enjoying himself too much to drop it. “I mean, would we do that? Hell, no. I’ve got a nice gold watch Grandpa Colm gave me, right? Say I take it out, I want to show you. You say, ‘Nice watch, bro.’ And that’s it. Game, set, match, we’re done.”

Colby shrugged. “It’s a girl thing. Like curtains, or slipcovers. You ever hear them get revved up on slipcovers?”

Red turned around. “What the hell is a slipcover?” His eyes widened. “Does it come from Victoria’s Secret? Because
that
I could happily—”

Colby tossed his wadded-up cocktail napkin at his little brother. “Idiot,” he said affectionately.

“Well, I still don’t get it. How the hell do you get emotional about a piece of jewelry? A guy just wouldn’t. I mean, okay, there was that one trashy-looking mystery earring that Matt used to sleep with—”

Matt laughed. “I did not sleep with it.”

“That’s right!” Colby leaned forward eagerly. “He’s right. You were obsessed with that thing, man. You did the third degree on everyone at the Halloween party that year, trying to find out whose earring it was.” He turned to Red. “But I’m not sure this counts, because it wasn’t like normal jewelry. It was symbolic. It stood for all kinds of important stuff.”

Red screwed up his face. “Like what? What did it stand for?”

“Sex, of course. Fabulous, sweaty, no-strings sex with a gorgeous stranger.” His voice was full of laughter, though his face was deadpan. “Dream sex. The best sex our brother Zorro ever had. Or rather, never had.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Red pulled a fake-pity face. “Poor Zorro. He slept right through it.”

“I did not sleep
through
it,” Matt said, although he was having trouble not laughing himself. It did sound ridiculous, now. At the time, it had been much harder to take. He had wanted that woman more fiercely than he’d ever wanted any other woman in his life. “The sex part never happened. I fell asleep on the way home, and when I woke up, she was gone. All she left behind was that earring, tangled in my shirt.”

Colby shook his head. “That,” he said, “is just sad.
No wonder you sleep with it under your pillow. No wonder you keep it, even to this day, locked in your diary, taped on the tearstained page next to the word
Nevermore
.”

“Give it up,” Matt said. “I don’t have a diary. You must be thinking about your own. That pink one? With the lace?”

Red was strangely silent, and Matt suddenly realized that his younger brother was giving him a quizzical look.

“What’s the matter?” Matt laughed. “Is the pink one yours?”

“You
do
still have it,” Red said slowly. He twisted the dart absently between his fingers. “The earring. I saw something in your valet, when I borrowed your cuff links the other night. I didn’t think about it, but now that you mention it…”

“You stole my cuff links, you little bastard?”

It was a decent try, but Matt knew his diversion wasn’t going to work. God, he wished he had thrown that damn earring away. He’d meant to, a dozen times over the years. He wasn’t even sure why he hadn’t. It had sifted farther and farther to the bottom of his valet, until he rarely even glimpsed it, and even more rarely let it cross his mind.

But it was there. And now Matt was never going to hear the end of it. Brothers were worse than Inquisition torturers. Once they got something good on you, that was when the fun began.

“You really do still have it?” Colby looked incredulous. The torture potential of this tidbit obviously hadn’t dawned on him yet. “For real? You’ve kept it for what, eight years? That old piece of toy-store crap?”

They heard footsteps on the dock. Ordinarily, that would have been bad news, signaling the end of their solitude, but right now Matt welcomed any distraction.

The figure that appeared in the doorway was far more daunting than any of the young women. It was Nana Lina, and she stood with her shoulders back and her chin up. They all knew what that meant.

They were in big trouble.

“First of all,” she said in her clear, autocratic voice. “I’d like to observe that if you boys are so insecure in your own manhood that you consistently choose to date young women who have no imagination, starch or charm, that is in itself a grave disappointment.”

Red put down the darts. “Nana Lina, we’re—”

“I’m not finished. And besides, I’m not talking about your date, Red. Marie at least has a real feel for flowers.” She turned to glare at Colby and Matt, and Matt knew that neither of them felt a day older than ten. “Secondly, when you feel the need to escape those women, as you undoubtedly will, given that they are, as I said, without imagination, starch or charm, you will
not
abandon me in their midst. I assure you I find them every bit as stultifying as you do, and I don’t even get the benefit of having sex with them tonight.”

Red was young enough to blush, but Matt laughed out loud. God, she was fantastic, wasn’t she? She couldn’t have nailed the problem better if she had been able to read their minds. Deep inside, they knew. They were taking the cheap way out, getting great sex without having to put much effort into the relationship—a pretty present would make up for any little oversight or missed date.

Colby laughed, too. Matt leaned over and kissed his wonderful grandmother on the cheek. Then he took her arm.

“I’m sorry, Nana,” he said. “Next time we’ll bring you with us.”

And as they slowly walked her back up the lawn to where Marie, Stephanie and Tiffani were chatting comfortably, not appearing to be particularly distressed by the absence of the men, Matt let the new awareness sink in.

He needed to stop dating girls like this. It was cliché, this laziness, this running away from commitment, running straight into the undemanding arms of bright-enough, nice-enough good-time girls.