Worth Fighting For

“And I’m Gabe,” Gabe said, stepping up beside his brothers. With all of them standing together Patrick could see how similar they all were. Tall men, like him. Gabe had Patrick’s blond hair and olive skin. Max and Jonah had Iris’s dramatic coloring—dark hair and light skin—though Max’s eyes were dark. And Jonah’s eyes, like Gabe’s, were blue.

Patrick glanced at Iris and caught the worry in her expression, her clenched hands and tight lips.

The parking lot was filled with dangerous fumes, combustible tempers and incredibly hurt feelings. The wrong word uttered and Patrick knew the whole place would go up in smoke. But he didn’t know what to say. What to do. This whole situation was too big to be dealt with. How did one pull it apart and try to fix what was so terribly wrong?

“Well, now,” Iris said, charging into the clutch of boys, wrapping her arm around Jonah’s waist and grabbing Max’s hand, giving them both a little jostle. She glanced around, her smile fierce, her eyes daring any one of them to say something wrong at this moment. “Isn’t this nice.”

Patrick tipped his head back and laughed.

That’s how, he thought, pride and respect for Iris washing over him. That’s how you do it.

IRIS COULD BE a powerful riptide, dragging Jonah places he didn’t want to go. School. Church. Parties. Into the Riverview Inn for lunch.

“Go,” he told her when she turned to wait for him. Patrick, Max and Gabe had already headed for the front doors. Max and Gabe had practically grabbed the laughing Patrick and ran away with him, as if rescuing him from Jonah. “I’ll be right in.”

This was not my idea, Jonah wanted to yell. But he didn’t have enough air. He didn’t have enough air to walk to the lodge, much less give those men, his brothers, the fight everyone was itching to get to.

My chest, he thought, a frenzied panic starting to claw up his back.

“Mom,” he said when she continued to stare at him with her obsidian eyes, knowing him far too well to believe him. She thought he was going to turn and run.

“I have to call Gary,” he lied. “A quick call and I’ll be right in.”

She quirked an eyebrow and he smiled, dug into his pocket and chucked her his car keys, which she caught deftly in one hand the way she used to when he was a teenager.

Go, he wanted to beg, please just go.

“Happy?” he asked and immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes got wet and she bit her lower lip.

“I am, Jonah,” she said, standing against the rustic and wooded background of the inn like a brave and noble pioneer woman. Which so suited how he always saw her. Strong and stalwart. Unflinching but also, most of the time, unsmiling.

Life had been hard on Mom.

“I am very happy right now,” she said and Jonah forced himself to smile so she would leave him for a few minutes. Just a few was all he needed. Or he’d pass out on the gravel.

His body awash in cold sweat, he waited until she worked her way down the path to the lodge before he opened his passenger car door and slumped into the seat. Gasping, he pawed open the glove compartment and grabbed his emergency inhaler.

It had been weeks since he’d needed this. Weeks since the asthma had fought past his carefully acquired relaxation tools.

He took a deep puff from the inhaler. Another. Waited, inhaler poised, until finally, he felt the steroids at work, opening his lungs. His throat.

Air, like cold, clean water, filled his body, and his head stopped spinning.

He stared at the brilliant blue sky, the muscular shoulders of the Catskill Mountains and waited for his body, his constant betrayer, to fall into line.

“See you later, Tim!” The tall blonde, Daphne, shut the kitchen door behind her and stepped onto the gravel heading toward her white pickup truck with the Athens Organics logo in green on the side.

But she stopped, like a deer sensing danger and glanced over at the Jeep, the open door and him slouching in his passenger seat.

God, she was pretty.

Her hair, so gold it seemed white, was lit like a halo around her head, as if further proof of the differences between them. He could practically feel the devil’s horns pushing out from his skull. Her green eyes raked him. Her lush mouth opened slightly in surprise and, he was sure, a mild disgust.

Not wanting her to see him like this, he tossed the inhaler back in the glove box and sat up. Met her gaze as if he had nothing to hide.

She lifted a hand—a farewell or a greeting he didn’t know—then walked to her truck, got in and drove away, right past him, without another glance.

CHAPTER THREE

JONAH HAD SAT THROUGH more than his share of tough negotiations. He could sit unfazed through the heaviest, stoniest of silences, smiling slightly until the opposition cracked.

It was a skill he’d picked up from the many hours Aunt Sheila spent with him playing Stare Down during that chicken pox incident.

But even he had to admit that lunch was rough. Rough in the way the Nuremberg Trial was rough. Rough like the South surrendering to the North. Civilized on the surface but only one wrong word away from an all-out brawl.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Mom asked, resting her head against his shoulder, while linking her arm through his. He was walking her from the lodge to her cottage across the clearing that was filled with the electric-green of a new spring. He slid on his sunglasses against the blaze of the sun.

He had to admit, much like the meal he hadn’t eaten and the room he didn’t eat it in, the place was nice.

That was all he was going to admit.

“It was pretty bad.” He laughed, putting his hand over hers and holding it tightly.

“Well, you didn’t help,” she chastised him. “Sitting there like some kind of—”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Tough guy.”

“I am a tough guy,” he protested.

“Please,” she said. “You barely said two words.”

“They talked plenty,” he reminded her. Had they ever. Alice and Delia, the redheaded Texan, could talk paint off a wall. They were like two birds—bright and pretty but chattering constantly. He’d tuned them out until one of them mentioned Daphne, then like some kind of radar, he tuned right in.

Idiot, he thought.

“Max and Gabe barely said two words,” she said, seeming preoccupied.

“Gabe said enough,” he assured her. Gabe, when everyone was occupied with passing dishes and spooning out salad and cooing at the black-haired, squashed-face baby, had turned to him, eyebrow arched in a way Jonah completely understood and said, “Dirty Developer?”

He’d pushed away from the table for one wild moment, ready to put his fist in Gabe’s smug face but Max put a hand between them and said, “It would break Iris’s and Dad’s hearts if you fought.”

It had been the appropriate bucket of cold water. But still, Jonah felt that anger in his stomach. The anger remarkably similar to the one that had fueled him for years on the playground when kids called him shrimp or tiny tunes or baby.

But he did hope that before he left he might get a chance to have a quick conversation with Gabe Mitchell. The kind of conversation that might end in a bloody nose.

“So, are you satisfied?” he asked, glancing down at her. “Family reunited so we can all get on with our lives.”