“And I know him from somewhere,” Kane swore to himself as he unpacked a set of chisels he’d gotten shipped to him. “Damned if I haven’t seen him before.”
He was too pretty to forget. Not a delicate face, Kane thought, but vulnerable and beautiful. Those high cheekbones and full lips had been nearly hidden beneath the man’s shoulder-length mane, but when his long fingers pushed the dark brown strands out of the way, Kane forgot how to breathe. Now Kane caught himself wondering how the man’s wide mouth would taste, or if he could chase away the faint pain lines around the younger man’s lips.
The belligerent young man needed at least ten more pounds on him, and the kanji characters inked on his upper arm were splotchy and uneven, more like an old prison tattoo than calligraphy. The tips of his fingers ghosted over the ink, obviously an old habit, and the motion drew Kane’s attention to the man’s bared chest and the whorl of down around his flat belly button. The faint trail led down, disappearing under the younger man’s loosely tied cotton pants, the jut of hip bones barely holding the waistband in place.
“No, last thing I need is that kind of trouble,” he scolded his brain, then found himself fretting about the faint blue cast around the man’s mouth and his shivering, half-naked body. The guy was definitely trouble and, despite the lean muscles and long legs, much too skinny for Kane’s tastes. Too skinny and far too memorable.
The dog was still a menace, and its presence was a constant reminder of the pale, pretty-faced man next door. Sitting right outside of the workshop, the mutt woofed and scratched and panted like a blond, furry harbinger of doom.
It also reeked like it took a dive in the River Styx.
His focus shrunk down to the spinning block he’d set into lathe clamps and the small red-brown curls he coaxed from the wood. The sweet smell of the curled chips seduced him, and Kane quickly lost touch with the rest of the world. He didn’t notice the chill biting through the air when the sun dropped behind a wall of clouds, and he didn’t hear the dog’s ruffling snores as it chased something in its sprawling sleep.
When the cramping in his hands became too much to bear and a bead of sweat tickled his eyebrow, Kane finally pulled back from the burl and took his foot off of the pedal, letting the lathe spin down so he could inspect his work. Running his hand over the carved wood, Kane felt for uneven spots in the grain.
“Look at the cop doing some work.” A deep voice much like his own jerked Kane’s attention up. “Hey, where’d you get the dog, and why’s he eating your lunch?”
Kane glanced at the corner of the studio where he last saw the terrier, only to find it chewing on the remains of the ham sandwich Kane had left on his work bench.
“Fucking dog,” Kane swore loudly.
“Nice,” Quinn drawled. “You kiss our mother with that damned mouth?”
“Sure I do. She likes me best. ’Zup, Qbert?” Kane returned his younger brother’s broad grin. After flicking the lathe off, he began to shake off the curls covering his shirt and thighs. Nodding to the scruffy dog, Kane said with an ironic chuckle, “That’s not my dog. He’s from next door. So far, he’s stolen some koa, a screwdriver, and now my sandwich. Don’t leave your wallet out where he can get it.”
“Ever thought of… I don’t know, rolling the door down… to keep the dog out?”
“Yeah, it crossed my mind,” Kane drawled. “But I like the fresh air.”
A year separated them, and the second and third Morgan boys spent much of their youth being mistaken for one another. Now that they were older, subtle differences made it easier to tell them apart. Kane’s collar-length hair, the tiny scar cutting through Quinn’s right eyebrow from a Hot Wheels accident, and the opposite-angled slight breaks in their noses gave their mother something to focus on when she needed to know who she was scolding.
Of all his siblings, Kane was closest to Quinn. They’d spent their boyhood years sharing a room until Connor moved out and Kane claimed the converted attic for his own. A few months later, Kane helped Quinn move his things into the long room, since Quinn spent more time in Kane’s new room than he did in his own. The rest of the Morgan children spread out through the remainder of the rooms, quickly establishing their own territories in case their older brothers changed their minds.
It was Quinn whom Kane called the night his girlfriend left him, and it was Kane that urged Quinn to come out of the closet they’d both been hiding in. It was also Kane who helped him weather the storm that hit when Quinn told their traditional Irish Catholic family that he preferred men.
Kane told their family he’d considered the occasional man as well, and if the younger brother was to be damned for it, the older would be damned as well.