Rowdy stared at Cranston, shock warring with the resurging shame. Hell, they should have known that invitation to dinner that they had ignored a few days before—Cranston never invited a soul to dinner—was more than some ruse.

“Chandler Mackay has been dead for thirteen years.” Dawg shook his head, obviously trying to reject the information. “That can’t be possible.”

“The youngest girl is sixteen.” Cranston nodded. “Not one of them is more than one year younger than the sister born before her. When their mother lost the little boy she’d been carrying, the year your father was killed, he never returned to the Texas home he’d bought, though payments on it were sent from a Cayman account until DHS was able to shut the account down and trace the payments. Now, what do I do with them?”

Dawg shook his head.

“Fine.” Cranston nodded his head. “I’ll tell the driver to take them to Somerset and drop them off.”

He turned to leave.

“Wait.” Rowdy stepped forward, desperation and surging disbelief making it hard to think. “The Nauti Buoy is empty right now. Put them there.”

Cranston turned back, his lip curling in a disapproving sneer. “Son, their mother, Mercedes, is as proud as they come. She’s not going to just unload her daughters on a bachelor barge and consider herself lucky. If she had been that sort of mother, then I would have handled this far differently. She wants to meet you. She wants to be accepted, not pushed to the side until forced to come begging.”

There was something in Cranston’s tone that Rowdy had never heard before: an edge of bafflement as well as respect.

There weren’t many people Timothy Cranston respected.

From the corner of his eye Rowdy watched a muscle jump in Dawg’s jaw.

“How old are the girls?” Dawg finally snapped.

“The eldest girl, Eve, turned nineteen on New Year’s Day. Piper turned eighteen in February. Lyrica turned seventeen in March, and little Zoey just turned sixteen this month.” Timothy gave them all a hard look. “Hell of an age to live under a bridge, don’t you think? Ever been there, Dawg? Ever seen what it was like? What it’s going to be like for four teenage girls that I’m betting my pensions are still virgins?”

They all had. They’d had nightmares for weeks.

Timothy sighed heavily. “Their mother, Mercedes, was only fourteen when she gave birth to her first child. She would have had five children if she hadn’t lost the boy she conceived only weeks after Zoey was born. Her body was just too weak for another child. She developed an infection that forced the doctors to do a hysterectomy. She’s thirty-three years old with four girls to raise, and she’s not lazy any day of the week, but neither does she have family and only very few friends. Those friends are not in a position to help her. The only education she’s had since she was fourteen was what she’s taught herself. How do you go to college with four babies?”

Dawg was slowly shaking his head. “She was a baby herself,” he whispered hoarsely, his eyes filled with horror. “She was just a baby. Fuck me. God, she’s younger than I am.”

She was almost seven years younger than Dawg, and she had four children by his father. It was unthinkable, even knowing the depraved bastard Chandler Mackay had been.

It was all Rowdy could think. All any of them could think, he imagined.

“He raped a baby.” Dawg’s voice sounded like a wheeze.

“Not much more than.” Timothy sighed, the compassion he felt in this moment making his shoulders droop as he watched the three men, wishing he could hide this part from them. “Chandler bought her from her parents in Guatemala. She was pregnant with his child when he slipped her into Texas and procured papers for her. She knew no English, had no way of supporting herself, and she didn’t have the option of running. If she ran, he told her the police would find her, and they would then send her back to Guatemala without her babies.”

“The babies of a rapist?” Dawg whispered as he stared back at Timothy in shock. “And she stayed?”

“She loves those girls, Dawg,” Timothy assured him, the sorrow he felt at this moment more than he wanted to deal with. “She’s given everything to her daughters, and survived at less than poverty level with the funds Chandler had arranged for her to receive along with the few jobs she had working under the table. He didn’t provide her a car; he didn’t provide her a means of supporting herself. And he paid others to ensure she didn’t date, have lovers, or dare to marry. If she attempted to have a lover, he promised her, then he would take the children, have them split up and placed in foster homes, and have Mercedes sent back to Guatemala. Then he proceeded to describe to her in graphic detail a horror story of what American foster families did to the little girls given to them.” He said the last with a sneer. “You can imagine the nightmares he gave her. The one time she dared to assert her independence and attempt to acquire her GED to enable her to acquire a better job, he had her babies stolen as she slept. She was a month getting them back and they all still have nightmares of those weeks.”

“He was a monster,” Rowdy whispered, his stomach roiling at the thought of what his uncle had done to another innocent child.

“Exactly,” Timothy agreed. “Hell is what she has lived in for quite a while. Then the money that paid the bills was suddenly cut off, the house taken, and with it the vehicle she busted her ass for years to buy because she’d been forced to forge Chandler’s name to it to acquire it. She was thrown on the streets and taken in by one of the Texas-based Homeland Security officers there that day. The woman called me immediately. She knew I’d worked the Mackay case here, and that I was still in the area. They were ready to fucking deport her, Dawg, and do just as Chandler warned her, take her children and put them in foster homes. I went after them, had them set up in a safe house until I could verify everything and run DNA tests on the girls.” He wouldn’t give any of them a chance to deny the girls or their mother. “They’re definitely Chandler’s daughters,” he told them. “And considering the fact that I made damn certain the majority of what Chandler had, that I knew of, was very illegally placed in your name and backdated far enough that it couldn’t be taken, I thought perhaps you could help Mercedes and her daughters. Because if you don’t, then she doesn’t have a chance of remaining in the States with those girls.”

The fact that he wasn’t so certain that Dawg would help wasn’t lost on Rowdy.

“You said she worked.” Natches looked as dazed as Timothy had felt as Mercedes told him what her life had been.

“She did, at a restaurant. She worked cleaning homes, or whatever she could do and still take her kids, until Eve was old enough to help with them, allowing her to take on additional house cleaning jobs to provide a little more for her children.”

“She couldn’t have made much,” Rowdy whispered. “Not with four girls to care for.”

“She had to have made friends.” Dawg seemed more in shock than anything.

“Would you have, if it meant your children would be placed in foster care if your so called friends or employers ever learned the truth of your presence in America, or the life you were being forced to live?” Timothy asked.

“Why keep the kids?” Natches questioned. “She had to have hated Chandler.”

“Her daughters are her heart and soul. Never doubt that.” Timothy sighed, wondering whether he had been wrong all these years about the honor and integrity of the three men he was facing.

As he opened his lips to say something more, Rowdy’s gaze jerked to the door.

Timothy felt his stomach drop as the door was pushed open, and the tiny, delicate little bundle of fire, Zoey Mackay, burst into the office.

“They don’t want us, do they?” Pain radiated in her face, her voice.

She could have been Dawg’s daughter, so much did the kid look like his own kid, Laken: delicate and fragile, long black hair falling down her back, celadon eyes filled with tears, her face sculpted into lines of such beauty it made a grown man want to weep.

Timothy rushed to her, bending to one knee as he placed his hands lightly on her fragile shoulders and stared into her eyes.

“Zoey, I told you to stay in the vehicle until I finished,” Timothy reminded her, his tone gentling.

Hell, he couldn’t yell at her; he couldn’t get mad at her. She knew the hell her mother and sisters faced if Dawg turned them away.

Dawg rose slowly to his feet, causing her to flinch as she followed the movement.

“If they wanted us, it wouldn’t take this long,” she accused him, her voice rough, big tears filling her eyes as she turned back to Timothy. “They would have wanted to meet us by now.”

“I was just asking some questions.” Dawg could feel something inside his soul bleeding.

He hadn’t thought Chandler Mackay could do more to make him hate him. That it was possible for the bastard to make him despise him more than he already did.

Until he stared at the girl glaring back at him.

She looked like an older version of his precious Laken.

His baby was only three, and already, her delicate, too fragile body was forced to keep up with the fire that burned in her soul.

“What kind of questions can’t we answer?” Zoey propped her little fists on her hips angrily, demanding that he take her into consideration, that he make a choice and he make it now.

“Zoey, Mr. Mackay and his cousins might have liked a few minutes to process everything,” Timothy chastised her gently as he straightened and stared down at her.

“And what makes you think Momma has time for him to process anything,” she cried out, her voice trembling as the tears that filled her eyes suddenly spilled down her cheeks as fear and anger filled her expression. “He’ll either help us or he won’t. Either way, Momma’s sick again—”

Timothy moved.

Rushing past the little girl, aware Dawg, Rowdy, and Natches were moving quickly to follow behind him, Timothy ran for the Excursion at a run.

Racing to the passenger-side door opposite the office he saw the young Homeland Security agent standing next to Mercedes Mackay, his expression concerned.

“Agent Rickers,” he snapped. “What’s going on?”

“Mr. Cranston.” Agent Rickers straightened quickly and moved back, his young face pale. “She’s weak again, sir. I was trying to make her more comfortable.”

The other girls had moved farther back to the third row of seats, watching their mother fearfully as she breathed heavily, her pale face reddened, perspiration pouring from it.

“Timothy, I’ll be fine,” Mercedes promised weakly. “You know how frightened they get.”

But she wouldn’t be fine, and Timothy knew it. Not if she didn’t get the help she needed.

“My dear, you should have sent one of the girls for me before you became so ill,” he chastised her as he took the damp cloth the other agent had been using to wipe the perspiration from her. It did little to cool her skin. Few things did when such attacks occurred. They came with a suddenness that couldn’t be predicted, and often left just as quickly.

“Timothy, get her in the office; we’ll call for Doc,” Rowdy ordered from the other side of the vehicle.

“Come on, Mercedes.” The gentleness in the leprechaun’s voice shocked not just Rowdy, but his cousins as well, though the young women in the vehicle didn’t seem surprised at all.

Cranston picked her up as though she weighed nothing, and she had to be three inches taller, at least, than the former agent.

Pick her up he did, though, and carried her quickly into the office, all the girls at his heels.

“What’s wrong with her?” Rowdy questioned the older man as he laid her on the office couch, the girls hovering around her.