Jack was happy to give Ava and Owen the guest room, but that meant he’d had to unexpectedly face at least one demon he’d thought he’d avoid—being back in his old room. It wasn’t the room so much as climbing that flight of stairs. When he reached the top, he reminded himself that there was no drunk Jack Senior on his arm, fighting off his son’s help, but that did nothing to keep the memory at bay. It didn’t matter much, just that tonight he’d be more restless than usual. There was also the matter of a chocolate Lab whimpering outside his door. Scully hadn’t woken him, only reminded him that it was past midnight and he was still wide awake.
He groaned and rolled out of bed, throwing on the T-shirt and jeans that lay on the floor.
“I’m coming, ya whiny mutt.” But really, he was happy for the company of someone who didn’t expect any more than to be taken for a walk and maybe play a little fetch with a now tooth-marked baseball. Besides, who could resist a dog named after the Dodgers’ former longtime announcer, Vin Scully?
He hadn’t confirmed this assumption with Ava or Owen, but he knew there was no other explanation. How had this kid who’d never known him turned out so much like he was when he was young? But if Owen could take after him without the two having ever met, then he could still end up like Jack Senior, couldn’t he? There was probably more of a chance after having grown up with the man.
Jack threw open the door, and Scully’s whimpers morphed quickly into excited panting and tail wagging.
“You’re so full of shit,” he told the dog, but gave him a scratch behind the ears anyway.
Luke and Walker’s doors were shut, but the master bedroom hung wide open at the other end of the hall. They’d left the room untouched so far—his brothers conveniently too busy to add it to their to-do lists. Luke always had to be somewhere when Jack brought it up, and Walker was usually gone with a six-pack if he was done working the ranch for the day.
Jack knew it was more than just clearing away the last of their father’s belongings. After their mother died, Jack Senior held on to all of Clare’s clothes, her bottle of perfume, and probably even her toothbrush. He’d left all of his wife’s earthly possessions exactly as they had been since the day they’d lost her.
He tried to forget about the times he’d successfully gotten a drunk Jack Senior into his own bed for the night, only to find him the next morning still passed out yet clutching one of his mom’s old T-shirts like a life preserver. Remembering shit like that tended to stir emotions—like sympathy—that he didn’t want stirred. But as he led Scully to the top of the staircase, his stirrings were thwarted as he recalled once again the last time he’d stood on that threshold with his father—and then was knocked violently down the wooden steps—and eventually out of the ranch for good.
“Until now,” he said aloud as he gripped the railing much in the way his father had held on to those T-shirts. Like a lifeline.
Scully scampered to the bottom as Jack moved slowly, steadily, holding his breath.
“Damn it,” he whispered as he stepped onto solid ground. “Let it go, already,” he told himself. But he’d been telling himself that for ten years.
“Come on, boy.”
Scully followed him to the front door, where he slid his feet into his boots. The cold night air bit at his flesh, and he shoved his hands into his pockets. The dog ran around the front yard, took a quick piss, and then ran back to Jack’s feet, where he stood wagging his tail. He was ready to grab a ball from the back of his truck when someone yelled “Shit!” from behind the house.
Instead of a ball, he grabbed a bat and rounded the side of the ranch as stealthily as he could with an excited pooch at his heels. He gripped the bat firmly in one hand, poised to react—until he climbed up on the deck, only to find it littered with crushed beer cans. Luke and Walker had left their lawn chairs abandoned as they poked at something with a stick in the fire pit below.
He dropped the bat onto the ground. “What the hell are you assholes doing?”
He bellied up to the deck rail while Scully leaned down on his front paws, his ass in the air as he still wagged that damned tail.
“Lost a full can in there.” Walker stared toward the blaze.
Luke snorted with laughter. “Some shitheads lack the hand-eye coordination needed to open a goddamn can of beer.”
Walker pushed his brother good-naturedly, but Luke stumbled too close to the fire for Jack’s comfort.
“Consider the can a sacrifice, and get your drunk asses back up here before it explodes or something.”
He could see the can. It wasn’t exactly in the flames, but retrieving it would be no easy feat, even if sober. He had enough on his plate as it was. He didn’t need his drunk brothers ending up in a burn unit on top of it.
Luke and Walker stumbled back up the porch steps, and Scully immediately dropped to his back, tongue dangling out the side of his mouth as he lay in wait for a belly rub. Walker obliged.
“Did I miss the invitation to the party?” Jack asked. “Or is this a nightly routine I’m only now learning about?”
“That depends,” Luke said. “Does the party include you filling us in on that meeting you had with Jack Senior’s lawyer? I get that you’re the most qualified for all that legal speak, but we’re not kids. We’ve been running this place for almost as long as you’ve been gone, big brother. I think we can probably grasp some of the finer details of what’s going on.”
Jack found the source of the beer cans—a cooler outside the sliding glass door—and decided he’d rather join his brothers than lecture them, as long as they stayed the hell away from the fire.
“You’re right,” he said, collapsing onto the bench that ran along the deck’s side rail. “I was waiting until I knew how I wanted to proceed, but it’s as much your decision as it is mine.” He took a long sip of beer and then tilted his head back against the rail ledge. “Thomas—Dad’s lawyer—found a buyer for the vineyard.”
All three of them were silent for several beats after that. It was Walker who finally spoke up. “Is it a good price?”
Jack nodded. “Best we could hope for, especially without knowing how much crop we’ll yield. How to actually turn the grapes into wine. Can we really sit tight and wait for wine to age before even knowing if it’s any good? Plus, no tasting room.” He scratched the back of his neck. “The deck is stacked against us.”
“We could build that tasting room,” Walker reminded him. “We get the Callahan brothers involved, and we could get a real good place done for little more than cost.”
Jack sighed. “And that would take months more.”
“How long we got to decide on the offer?” Luke asked.
Walker stood now and crossed his arms next to his brother. Scully sprang to his feet as well, so he was faced with a line of brotherly and canine interrogators.
“A week,” Jack said. “The offer is good for a week.”
Walker shook his head and let out a bitter laugh. “And if we sell—I mean when we sell because you sure as shit want the hell out of Oak Bluff—you take off to New York, right?”
Jack laughed bitterly. “You act like it’s a choice I’m making. I accepted a goddamn partnership. Everything I own that’s not in my truck is already in Manhattan.” The truth was, the This is my career argument was starting to sound less and less convincing even to himself.
“You tell Red about this?” Luke asked.
Jack clenched his jaw and shook his head. “And you won’t either. I don’t want to tell her anything before I have an answer. She knows about New York, and it’s not like me staying was ever on the table.”
Because there was that other niggling piece of truth—the one he couldn’t admit out loud that had the power to change everything. Ava had never said anything about wanting him to stay. Everything had changed since he’d returned, yet at the same time felt like déjà vu. She’d pushed him away before because she’d thought it was what he needed, and maybe it was. And maybe it was what he’d thought he needed when he accepted the partnership in New York. But that was before he’d pulled up in front of the Ellis property, before he’d seen his son. Before he’d started falling for the woman he’d never been able to forget.
“I just—I think she and Owen deserve better,” he said. Because despite everything that had changed in a matter of weeks, he was still the son of Jackson Everett Senior. He was still the kid who’d put another guy in the hospital when he’d completely lost control. And he was still the man who was terrified of what kind of father he’d truly be when he never intended on being one at all.
Walker scoffed. “Better than what? The son of an abusive drunk?”
Jack rose to his feet so he was eye-to-eye with his accuser. “Yes, Walker. Hell yes. They deserve better than the son of an abusive drunk who has no damned clue if he’ll be one someday, too. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”
Walker moved closer so their chests almost bumped. Jack knew he was riling Walker up, but hell if he wasn’t going to try to make them understand.
“If you’re so damn sure you’re him, then hit me,” Walker said.
Jack’s eyes widened. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Hit me,” Walker said again, and this time their chests did bump, forcefully. But Jack knew he was standing still.
He placed a hand on his younger brother’s shoulder and squeezed. “I think that’s one can too many for you. Sleep it off.”
Walker sniffed and puffed out his chest. “You think I can’t take it? You think I’m not man enough to take what you took on our behalf for five damned years? I don’t need your protection anymore, big brother. I don’t need you to waltz in here and take care of everything like you do—and be reminded of how you took care of everything when we were kids.” He gritted his teeth. “Leave if you’re gonna leave, asshole. Be free of this place. But even the score already and just. Just. Do it.”
Jack pushed him back an arm’s length, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to let this go any further. “There’s no score, Walker. Jesus. You don’t owe me anything, and I sure as hell don’t want to be some twisted Jack Senior surrogate for you so you can deal with whatever it is that’s eating you. Do all of us a favor and sleep it off.” It was like he was eighteen again, trying to coax his father to do the same before getting himself pushed down a flight of wooden stairs.
Walker let out a bitter laugh. “You don’t have it in you, even when I deserve it. You stand there, beer in hand, yet other than one time—after all the hell you took from him for five years—I’ve never seen you out of control once in your goddamn life. It ain’t my kid or my woman. I’d tell them to run as far away from here as they could if it was. It’s you, Jack, the one who always kept it together—who took every fist or boot so we didn’t have to. So don’t tell me they can do better. Don’t make that your reason for leaving us—I mean them—again.”
Walker crumpled his empty can and chucked it forcefully over the railing and into the fire. “Screw this,” he said and stalked off the stairs and toward the open field.
Jack stood there in stunned silence for several long moments.
“He’ll be all right,” Luke finally said. “He just needs to blow off a little steam.”
Jack realized his free hand was balled into a fist, and although he had to force himself to unclench it, he’d never once considered hitting his brother. “You think the same things he does?” he asked. “That you deserve the kind of treatment I tried to keep from you?”
Luke shrugged. “I think it’s a hell of a thing for any kid to watch the brother he looks up to most get abused by the one person who was supposed to protect them all.”
Luke’s ever-present smile was gone, and Jack felt an ache so big it almost rivaled the years of his life he kept trying to forget.
“We all got our demons to dance with, Jack. Walker’s still trying to find his way back to the land of the living.”
“And you?” he asked.
Luke winked, but it was forced. “Everything I do is living, big bro.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think you gotta do whatever makes living your life bearable.” He looked around the deck, littered with empty cans. “I’ll get this in the morning,” he said, then left his brother alone with his thoughts and a confused-looking dog.
Jack crouched so he was eye level with Scully. “That was ten years’ worth of unsaid shit that I guess needed saying, huh?”
The dog lapped at his jaw.
“Is that all you have to say?” Jack asked him, and he received another slobbery kiss in return. He gave Scully an affectionate pat on the head and stood. Then he started collecting the empty cans, cleaning up the one mess he knew he could.