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.”