Love Brewing (Love Brothers #3) (22 page)

Diana kept her gaze pinned on the horizon, using every trick
in her book to keep from screaming. But it lurked, right under her surface. The
un-voiced shriek pressed against her vocal cords and filled her brain, willing
her to let it loose with a deep breath. She rubbed her knuckles into her sore
eye sockets and swallowed hard.

The baby shifted again, making her squirm in her seat. It
annoyed now where it had once thrilled. She hated it for being here when Lee
was not. She touched her stomach, which she would swear had ballooned in the
last three days since she’d found her husband dead on the bathroom floor.

Aneurism
, the doctors told her.

Fate
, she knew.

She simply wouldn’t be allowed happiness.

Diana,
Lee’s voice echoed in her head.
Don’t talk
like that
.

Fuck you, Lee. You’re the one who…left me.

“Fuck you,” she said out loud. “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck
you.”

Jen glanced over at her.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, clenching her fingers together. The
blur of ambulance, declarations of death, funeral homes, and managing it on her
own since Lee had no living family as an only child of long-dead parents
crowded her memory banks, shoving out anything good she’d experienced with him.

She’d been able to recall every single one of their fights
in the past few days for some reason. Irritating, but true. The man could easily
out-stubborn even her. She bit her lip, guilt over being so single-minded about
getting pregnant and letting it color everything about their brief relationship
making her head spin. But his lean, strong body, his voice—so calm when dealing
with frantic animal owners in the middle of the night—the fact that the baby,
his baby, would never experience any of it made her breathless with anguish
every time it penetrated her fog of devastation.

Damn doctors. This kid is about to be born yet they still
won’t let me have anything to dull the edges.

She sent a silent apology to Lee’s baby girl for the fact
that she’d never get the pleasure of knowing her amazing, darn-close-to-perfect
father.

“Come on, honey.” Jen’s voice made her blink. They’d managed
to get to the funeral home, her home away from home lately. Her sister had
parked, gotten out and was now waiting for her at the open passenger-side door.

“No.” Diana’s heart pounded and her throat had gone bone
dry. The baby gave her a whack in the kidneys. “I’m not going in there again.”

Jen crouched down beside her. “Diana, we have to.”

“No, we don’t. Leave me alone. Just go away.”

Her sister moved out of her line of vision. Hoping, Diana
knew, for someone to help pry her out of the car so she could go in that awful
place and listen to her church’s new minister make noises about what a
wonderful place Lee now inhabited.

She refused to participate in it. Maybe that would make it
all one long, drawn-out nightmare after all.

Dale showed up with his brother Cal, the man who had the
hots for Angelique so bad he’d declared he’d wait for her to come home from
school and marry her, at least according to the babbling the girl’s mother had
done while she sat with Diana that first night. For some reason, Lindsay Love
had been the person she called once the EMTs showed up and loaded Lee’s
lifeless body into an ambulance, three days ago.

Or had that been two days ago
?

A whooshing sound filled her head as mourners filed into the
stately brick building with its tall white columns. The same building she and
Jen had been in for hours, making arrangements for their parents.

Lee had touched a lot of people’s lives. She knew that. The
outpouring of support and sympathy in the past two days proved it. The place
would be packed, standing-room only, since she’d decided against moving the
service to the church. The less she had to see that stupid casket getting
hauled from place to place the better.

A small crowd had gathered outside her door. But her vision
continued to narrow, so she focused on it, and on the memory of Lee’s soft,
patient, ever-rational voice in her ear saying,
I love you, Diana
. She
put her palms on the dashboard. Before she knew it, they hurt because she had
balled them into fists and started pounding.

She couldn’t breathe. Her throat hurt. Someone was screaming
like a banshee.

Oh, right that would be her.

Her hair escaped its sloppy tie back as she punched the car,
beating it in lieu of pounding the crap out of karma, or of Lee, for doing this
to her, now, with his baby on the way, bloodying her knuckles in the process.

A strong breeze from the right sent the straggling ends of
her ponytail swirling across her face. Sweat dripped down her sides, ruining
whatever outfit Jen had forced her to put on that morning. The morning she
buried her husband.

Her neck creaking with the effort, she turned her head and
met the last set of eyes she could have conjured at that moment. Her relief
seeing Dominic Love’s face shocked her to her core. She started shaking, her
teeth chattering, entire body aching. Dom put a hand on her knee. She looked
down at it, then up at his eyes.

“What the hell are you doing here?” She could barely
recognize her own voice.

“Time to go in now, Diana.”

She grimaced at him. “Fuck you.”

He smiled, and pulled her out of the car. She held onto him
all the way into the building and through the service, soaking his shirt, his
tie, his neck. But he stroked her hair, murmured to her, and did not let her
go.

One month later

“Why do I have to wear this, Daddy?” Jace tugged at the tie.
“Where are we?”

“I told you not to do that.” Dom refastened the clip at the
boy’s neck, marveling that his mother had been able to find a suit that fit the
kid perfectly out the
few bits
she’d saved from her own boys’ wardrobes.
He led Jace around a small, picturesque church about halfway between Lexington
and Louisville.

The boy’s other arm still rested in a sling, the now-smaller
cast covering it from above the elbow to his fingers, the blue-wrapped plaster
awash in signatures from his cousins and friends at the school he’d been
attending here, under extreme protest.

Dom found the headstone, and spread a quilt out over the
grass beside it. “Come on, Jace. Grammie packed us a picnic.”

The boy shot him a skeptical raised eyebrow, until he
spotted the peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich on his grandmother’s homemade
bread. He plopped down, still yanking at his collar. “Why are we in our church
clothes on a Saturday for a picnic?” He glared at his father. “I wanna go to
Frankie’s house.”

“After this, I promise.” Dom opened a bottle of the whiskey
he’d found in the dark storage space under the old brewery with his father’s
mandated
Dom’s Cut
label, then pulled a juice box from the cooler and
stuck the straw in it. “Do you remember Kent?”

Jace brightened. “Is he here? Grammie told me he’d gone to
heaven and I shouldn’t ask you about him because it would make you sad.”

Dom regarded his son a moment, noting he still had a long
way to go to grow into his feet and wondering what sort of a young man he’d
become—better than he himself had been, that much Dom had firmly determined.
They’d moved home, after he’d agreed not to press charges against Chris as long
as Erasmus fired her. The two weeks he spent at Diana’s side after Lee’s
funeral had nearly done him in, but had also, somehow, strengthened him in a
way he didn’t expect. At one point, she’d paused in her near-constant, silent
perusal of her backyard and said to him, “You owe it to yourself to be a good
daddy. He’s the only shot you might get at it.”

He’d raised his mug of coffee to her, and a decision formed
itself then—no more running and hiding. He would come home for good and resume
his place at Love Brewing alongside his father, like he’d wanted to since he’d
been as small as Jace. It would not be easy, working his way back into he man’s
good graces, but he wanted it and had determined at that moment to make it so.

“No, Jace. He’s not here. And it does make me sad to think
about him. He brought you to me and I’ll never be able to thank him or do
anything as great for him. That also makes me sad.”

“Let’s cheers him, Daddy.” Jace held up his juice box. “He
was a nice man. I liked him.”

“I loved him,” Dom stated, clear-eyed as he touched the
Dom’s Cut bottle to the juice. “I wish I’d known how much a lot sooner. He’d
still be here, probably, maybe, who knows.” Dom took a sip and decided not to
go down that road of possibility, which would likely have caused even more
upheaval.

Jace sipped and regarded Dom with those scary brown eyes—the
same ones that met his own gaze every morning in the mirror. “You’re sad, like
Miss Diana.” He took a huge bite out of his sandwich. “I heard Aunt Cara
talking to Grammie about her. She thinks y’all should just get over yourselves
and get married.”

Dom froze with the whiskey bottle halfway to his lips. Damn
women and their gossip. He’d have to remind them that the Love house was now
full of little pitchers with big ears, and big mouths to match. He touched a
tender spot on his skull where Diana had nearly brained him with a cast iron
pan just three days ago in one of her near-hysterical fits of rage.

“Can Miss Diana be my mommy? I never had one.” Jace jumped
up to chase a butterfly that had landed between them then fluttered away.

Dom let him blow off steam for a minute. “Come over here,
boy.”

Jace trotted to him, obediently for now, as long as the
potential for his Grammie’s brownies still remained tucked inside the picnic
cooler. Dom held out his arms and his son settled into his lap, his legs hooked
over Dom’s. “Miss Diana and I aren’t getting married. We’re just friends. Good
friends, for a long time now.” Jace lunged over to get the rest of his sandwich
and tucked under Dom’s chin, chewing and, Dom knew, carefully considering his
response to that.

“You aren’t allowed to marry your friends?” He started
licking the jelly off his fingers. “That’s sad. My new friend in Sunday School,
her name is Lisa, she’s really nice and pretty, and she smells like cookies. I
want to marry her. But I can’t. Because she’s my friend.”

Dom kissed his son’s hair and laughed. “You are gonna come
up against all manner of nice, cookie-smelling girls in your life, don’t worry.
And as for marrying your friends, well….”

“Did you want to marry Kent? He was your friend.”

Dom flushed hot. “No. Not because he was my friend, but
because…never mind.”

“Granddaddy and Grammie were talking the other night in the
kitchen about it.”

Dom frowned, terrified that he would be having the
men
can’t marry men…but
conversation this early in Jace’s life thanks to his
own loud-mouthed, homophobic father. “Oh?” He attempted to stay casual.

“Yeah, Granddaddy was real mad and Grammie told him that the
Lord says nothing about who’s ’posed to love one another and that he should
shut up and get over it. They hollered for a while, then they hugged and were
kissin’ and stuff, so I quit paying attention to ‘em.”

Dom wiped his lips and tried not to let on how rattled he
was. “Yeah, that sounds about right for them. Sorry, dude.”

“Can we go to Frankie’s now?” Jace leapt up again, his
attention to things like friends and getting married all used up. “He has a new
hoop and I want to teach him how to free throw.”

“Sure. I’m gonna drop you there with your backpack so you
can change clothes. I have to go meet some builder people at the brewery.”

“Can I start working with you at the brewery, like you
promised?” Jace ran ahead at full speed, his hair flopping and reminding Dom
that they both could use some quality time in the barber’s chair. He’d been
working on getting bids done for the brewery expansion for the last couple of
weeks and had one more subcontractor to meet before he presented the options to
his parents. He’d proposed to triple their capacity and add a full-scale
distillery. Scary expensive, but he had the sales projections to support it.

“Soon, I promise.” He tossed the cooler into the bed of the
pickup he’d bought, trading in his beloved Harley in a fit of responsibility.
Skywalker barked at them from his appointed post guarding the truck bed
half-full of busted draft boxes and random brewery equipment Dom had bought at
an auction in Louisville the week before. Dom scratched the mutt under its
chin. “Buckle up, boy.”

“Yes sir.” Jace tugged the politically correct harness
contraption down over his shoulders. As he started to climb in, Dom noticed a
minivan screeching down the road, going way too fast. “Come on, Daddy. I wanna
go play with Frankie.”

“Hush a minute.” Dom shaded his eyes as the van got closer
to the empty church parking lot. It pulled in, nearly going up on two wheels,
cartoon-like, before lurching to a halt.

Diana’s sister Jen stuck her head out the driver’s-side
window. “Let’s go.”

Dom blinked, confused. “Go…where?”

“To the hospital, dumbass. Diana’s already there and I swore
to her I’d come find you.”

He stepped away, his brain fogging over with anxiety. “Find
me for what?”

She smacked the driver’s side door. “Are you that stupid?
The baby. Diana is screaming for you.”

“Oh no…no, no, nope, no way, no how, uh uh.” He gripped the
truck’s open door.

“Dom, you have to do this for her. She’s freaking out and
not cooperating with the doctors. The baby…it’s not going well. Just get in
your truck and follow me.”

“I don’t do hospitals, or anything that involves…placentas.”
His stomach flipped over, sending the two sips of whiskey he’d imbibed churning
around in his gut.