Sloe Ride (16 page)

“I so don’t want to do huge tours,” Miki grumbled. “Dude, I just got to breathing again. I’m not sitting in a goddamn tour bus for four months at a time. Albums. I’m there. Some shows. Right there again. Longass roadwork? Not happening, and that’s where the drugs and shit happen.”

“No. Agreed.” Damien nodded. “The three of us don’t do anything but booze. He won’t get any shit from us. But now we’re counting fucking chickens before we’ve raided the hen house. We don’t even know how Rafe’s playing is. He could have gone to crap. Hell, we might give him a listen and say no. Then what?”

“Then it’s a no.” Quinn shrugged. “Look, did Sionn cross the line when he asked you about Rafe? Yes. But you’d do the same for Miki. If you knew Miki wanted something so bad he hurt inside, you’d do everything you could to make it happen for him.”

“Only reason Kane’s still around and not being chewed on by crabs down in the Bay.” Damien stumbled forward a step when Miki pushed him. “Being honest. Kane does things for you… to that pain you’ve got inside of you and makes it a little bit better. I’m good with that. Hell, I’m happy for that, but it’s hard sometimes, Sinjun. And don’t tell me it doesn’t go both ways.”

“Nah, it does. I’m just not the asshole who says it out loud,” Miki rumbled. “Look, you didn’t like any of the last squillion we heard. Why not give Rafe a try? What’s the worst that can happen? We have to go looking again? That’s pretty much where we are right now anyway.”

Quinn saw the minute shift of something dark and terrified in Damien’s expressive features, a quivering fear he stilled nearly as quickly as it rose up. Something lurked behind the guitarist’s arrogant amicability, something Quinn wanted to scrape at and expose to the surface to heal.

“Damie, you asked me what I thought about Rafe? I don’t think Rafe’s the issue here. Either he’ll be good for the band or he won’t.” He paused, catching Damien’s frown. “I think the question you need answered is if you really even
want
to form a band. Maybe the reason you don’t want to hear Rafe isn’t because you’re scared of what he might do, but because if you actually do choose a bassist, you’re starting something new. Something without the other two. Without Johnny and Dave. A bassist—actually choosing one—will be the final nail in Sinner’s Gin’s coffin, and maybe, just maybe, neither one of you are ready for that yet.

“Hell, you might never be ready for that,” Quinn continued gently. “But that’s something you have to figure out for yourself.”

They were silent as Quinn gathered up his reluctant cat, his blanket, and the thermos he’d brought up with him. He smiled at the friends, ducking around them as he made his way back downstairs. “Now if you’ll excuse me. I’m going to go see if my brother’s found out who is trying to kill or scare me, feed my cat her breakfast, and then get ready to go to my parents’ house so they can flay the skin off my back with their prying into my life. I’ll see you both when you get there.”

Quinn got to the door and had his hand on the knob before Damien finally said something. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the tongue-lashing he’d been anticipating.

“Okay, is it me, Sinjun?” Damien’s words chased Quinn inside. “Or is that cat wearing a sweater?”

Splash of wine, sip of gin

Twisted metal ’round my heart

And nobody wins

Fire coming down hard

Coming hard from above

Skin torched clean off my bones

And my soul’s done scarred.

—Fire and Bones

R
AFE
CAUGHT
himself checking his hair in his rearview mirror, fluffing back a few blond strands from his face. Showing up a few hours early would help him settle his nerves, and if he was lucky, he could get Donal to talk him off the ledge he felt he was on. He’d already spent half an hour trying on clothes, wondering if he should dress up or dress down. What he personally knew about Damie and Miki could have fit between his fingers. Sinner’s Gin had been a fortress of personalities and friendships, impossible to break into but with glimpses of golden promise other musicians envied.

Or at least
he’d
envied them.

Back then, Rafe thought he had what Damie and Miki had. He and Jack, plus or minus the sex, they’d been tight. Next to Sionn, Rafe would have bet his life Jack would have stood by him no matter what.

“Shit, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself, Andrade,” Rafe reminded himself as he turned onto the street. “You’re the one who set everything on fire. Jack would have been a fucking idiot to tie himself to a loser headed to hell. Now you’ve got to convince these guys to give you a chance. Good fucking luck.”

The Morgans’ house looked the same, a gut-punching, heart-twisting same. Rafe caught one glimpse of flowers and yellow paint on a rambling Victorian perched on a hilly corner, and he knew he was home again. Brigid’s green thumb was in full force, although Rafe was halfway convinced she merely stood on the front lawn and shouted at the landscaping to produce what she wanted. His back still ached from weekends of pulling weeds for extra money. Then his eyes stung when he thought of all the halfhearted arguments he’d fought with Brigid or Donal about the extra cash they’d shoved into his hand.

His world then had been made up of Morgan hand-me-downs and leftovers in plastic containers for him to take back to the tiny one-room apartment his mom found above a dry cleaner’s. There’d been times when his heart hurt at his mom’s grateful expression when he’d come home with a new pair of sneakers and clothes Brigid bought but said didn’t quite fit any of the boys and the guilt he’d felt when Donal convinced his mother Rafe wouldn’t be a bother on their trips to Disneyland or even the three times he’d gone with them to Ireland.

He’d grown tanned from afternoons in their pool and learned how to drink from stolen whiskey bottles right before he’d perfected the fine art of throwing up in the toilet bowl. He’d been caught smoking cigarettes with Kane behind the garage, and neither one of them expected to see twelve when Donal’d found them coughing their lungs up. Rafe’d stupidly eaten his cigarette, burning his tongue, then threw up on Donal’s shoes immediately afterward.

Actually, Rafe grinned to himself as he maneuvered around Con’s black Hummer parked at the curb for a quick getaway, he seemed to spend a hell of a lot of time throwing up at the Morgans’. Eating, fighting, and tossing his cookies defined his childhood and teens, with not much changing when he’d become an adult.

It’d been Donal who’d given Rafe his first
good
bass, a 1970 cherry-red Gibson EB-0 he still preferred over anything else he owned. At the time, he’d been speechless at the gift and the faith Donal had in him. Later, alone and mourning his life, it’d been the Gibson he’d turned to, hearing his surrogate father’s voice in its deep, rolling tones.

In many ways, the yellow house on the corner was home, a home that meant fighting for parking space, but still—
home
.

And a home, Rafe found out when he opened the front door and stepped in, that definitely was weathering a ferocious storm.

A loud, testosterone-fueled, Gaelic-accented storm.

“He’s dead, Quinn. If that doesn’t get it into your thick skull that someone’s after you, then what the… don’t you walk away from me. Quinn!” Rafe recognized Kane’s as the first crackle of thunder rolling out of the house. “Fecking hell. Da! Talk some sense into him.”

The storm hit Rafe hard when Donal’s third son stalked into the front vestibule to snag a leather jacket from a coat rack in the corner. Passion and a Morgan temper lit an emerald fire in Quinn’s gentle eyes, and the golden specks hidden in their depths were drowning in his blown-out pupils. His black mane was a bit wild and fell in soft waves nearly down to his broad shoulders.

An inch or so shorter than Rafe, Quinn was all Morgan, a long-boned Celtic simmer of fallen-from-grace angelic looks and wickeder-than-sin body. He came up short when he spotted Rafe standing in front of the door, his full mouth parted slightly and his chest heaving beneath a white shirt thin enough to look as if it’d been poured over Quinn’s torso. Quinn’s chin tilted up, a Morgan challenge if Rafe’d ever seen one, and the fire Rafe caught earlier turned molten when Quinn’s thickly accented growl broke the silence between them.

“You here to box me in too, Andrade?” Quinn snarled. “Because I am not going to be
handled
.”

If Rafe hadn’t already wanted Connor’s little brother naked and spread out on a bed underneath him, the Quinn standing in front of him right at the moment would have done him in.

“Hey, Q, I don’t even know what’s going on.” Rafe held his hands up in mock surrender. “I just got here.”

“
Breac
.” Donal came into the foyer, nodding a hello at Rafe, then turning his attention back to his son. “Ye’ve got to think this out. Kane’s only thinking about—”

“You know what Kane’s thinking of, Da?” Quinn stepped around to face his father, the poet folded into the warrior Donal and Brigid bred into all of their children. “He’s thinking I’m nothing more than a scatterbrained, broken-headed little boy who can’t take care of himself. That’s what he’s thinking, Da. That’s what they all think. And most of the time, I don’t give a fucking rat’s ass what they think because it’s no skin off my nose, but this time… I’m done, Da. No more of this.”

The foyer grew crowded fast, especially when Connor and Kane shoved their way in. The brothers dissolved into shouting, flinging heavy Gaelic about so fast and furious Rafe with his meager understanding of the
language was mostly lost. He was able to pick out a lot of the
profanities—he’d learned those first and well—but the rest of it was a battle of temper and spit.

Donal stood quiet for a second, meeting Rafe’s uplifted eyebrows with a resigned shrug. The three brothers were a gradation in size and fury, the smaller the Morgan, the hotter the anger, and for once Rafe seriously contemplated stepping outside before the foyer erupted in a fistfight where even an innocent bystander would take a punch to the face.

Connor and Kane had Quinn cornered, never a good sign in the Morgan household. If they’d been smart, they’d have given Quinn room. If there was one thing Rafe knew about Quinn, it was that he was the most vicious when his back was up against the wall and he had nowhere to go but forward. He’d been witness to the final moments of Quinn’s temper snapping when they’d been younger. Rafe’d been too far down the hall when a pair of seniors decided a pubescent Quinn Morgan would make a good target. One shove too many and the soft-spoken, too-young Morgan turned deadly, pulling out every trick he’d learned growing up in a brawling, loud Irish family.

Rafe’d only stopped laughing long enough to pick up one of the guy’s teeth and hand it back to him.

Clearing his throat, Rafe shouted in between a break in the Irish, “Can someone please tell me what’s going on? ’Cause if I’m going to get punched out here, I’d like to know why.”

“No one’s punching anyone.” Donal shut his sons down before they could begin again. “Quinn, walking away doesn’t solve anything. Ye know that. Come back inside, and we’ll be talking this out.”

“There’s nothing to talk out, Da,” Quinn argued, but he shoved past his brothers to put his jacket up. “Kane’s got the crazies.”

“Simon’s dead, Quinn. That’s not the crazies,” Kane retorted. “I’d ask Rafe here to talk some sense into you, but that’ll be like….”

“Hey, now, standing right in front of you,” Rafe protested as he followed them into the large main room beyond. “And who’s Simon?”

“His ex.” Connor’s voice dropped deep, a granite whisper rolling through the grass. “Don’t know how much of an ex he could be if they never had sex. Two years. No sex. Who does that?”

“Wait, Quinn has an ex?” His voice carried through the space, and Quinn frowned. “Not that you can’t have an ex, Q. It’s just… dude. Guess in my mind, you’re still that kid tagging along behind us.”

“I haven’t been a kid in a long time, Rafe. I’m skipping past thirty. Thought we’d had that discussion, you and I.” Quinn slapped Kane’s arm when his brother rolled his eyes. “You laugh like you’re so old there, K. But need I remind you, there’s only two years between us.”

“It’s ’cause you’re wee,” Kane shot back.

“Compared to the lot of you, maybe,” Quinn countered. “In the real world, I do just fine.”

“You do fine here too,” Rafe muttered to himself, and Donal shot him a look from under thick black lashes. “Can someone back this up a bit and tell me the whole story? Or do I just fill in the blanks on my own?”

R
AFE
SAT
on one of the long couches and listened, stroking at the son of an old marmalade alley cat he’d found and brought to Brigid years ago. As the cat purred, Rafe’s heart stopped and started, then stalled as Kane laid out Quinn’s narrow escape from a rampaging truck, then a slashed-apart tire. Connor’s pacing picked up when an explosion was mentioned, connecting the road rage to the assault on Quinn’s life. Simon Kappelhoff’s death was the final straw for Kane, and he’d spent the last half hour trying to convince Quinn to hole up somewhere until Kane and the other badge-wearing Morgans figured things out.