“It’s ten in the morning,” Kane objected, and Quinn panicked, shaking his head no at his brother.
“Do you really want a piece of this?” Rafe opened the front door, smiling broadly at Brigid. “Come on in. How’d you get up here? Don’t tell me you flashed a badge too?”
“A badge?” She frilled, a red-haired dilophosaurus coming in for the kill. “I don’t be needing any stinking badges. Now where’s Quinn—ah, there ye be.”
She was short, shorter than most women, but standing firm in the middle of Rafe’s living room, Quinn felt himself cower beneath her height. She’d donned heels and dressed for battle in jeans and a UCB sweatshirt, yet unlike Kane, Brigid Morgan came armed with nothing but her Irish temper and a concerned maternal look on her face that could wither up any objections her children might make against her pushing into their lives.
Kane took one look at his younger brother, then nodded at Rafe. Standing, he patted Quinn on the shoulder, then slid past him. “Beer sounds like a great idea, Rafe. Let’s go.”
“Coward,” Quinn slandered Kane before he got out of earshot.
“Yep,” Kane agreed cheerfully, giving his brother another pat. “He’s all yours, Mum. All yours.”
HIS BROTHER and lover were faithless cowards. Sniveling, soft-boned assholes who’d sooner crawl off into the safety of a well-poured Guinness than help him stave off his mother’s coddling. Even Harley’d abandoned him, fleeing as soon as she heard the tick-tick of Brigid’s heels across the penthouse’s wooden floor. Once more Quinn couldn’t help but sympathize with Miki. His mother was a menace, and there wasn’t a damned thing anyone could do about it.
Then she sat down next to him and burst into tears, sending Quinn down into a spiral of thick guilt and sticky remorse.
She was so frail in his arms, a bird of a woman made large by personality and a whirlwind determination, but Quinn panicked when he felt his mother’s heart skip and stutter in her chest as he held her tightly. They sat together, unmoving while being serenaded by the storm outside. A crack of lightning bleached the sky. Then a rumble of thunder shook the windowpanes, rattling the glass under its shocking boom.
Brigid’s penny-bright hair tickled Quinn’s nose, and he patted down the errant curls, hoping to give himself a bit of breathing room. There was so much to say to his mother, but he didn’t know where to start. Going through everything weighing on his soul, he chose the most important slice of his life to bare himself with.
She cried herself out, leaning back so she could dig in her pockets. After coming up with a handkerchief, she wiped at her eyes, laughing when she showed Quinn the smeared eyeliner left on the fabric. “Can’t even keep my face on. How am I going to keep you safe?”
“I don’t need keeping, Mum,” Quinn objected.
“Of course ye do, love. Ye all do.” Brigid patted his leg, then picked up his cold coffee, sniffing at it. “How are ye doing? And here? Not at Kane’s, then? I got yer message, but there was no understanding the why of it.”
“Mum, I need to talk to you about….” His Gaelic scrambled his brains, floating toward words like lover, mate, and a piece of his whole, but nothing right seemed to come to mind. He didn’t know how to tell her how he felt or the fears he had of Rafe coming to his senses and walking away. “God, this is shitty hard.”
The tears in her eyes—his eyes—were gone, replaced by a sharpness Quinn’d felt pare him bare to the bone in the past. Her gaze flitted across his throat, then back to his face, digging into him until Quinn shifted uncomfortably on the couch. He reached for his cup for something to do, then remembered it was in his mother’s hands, so he abandoned it, waiting for her reaction.
“I worry for ye, my Quinn.” She answered in the same rolling tongue of her homeland, a misty, poignant burr under a sweet honey. “With everything going on with ye right now, I worry. And ye’re here, Quinnigan. With Rafe.”
It’d been forever and a day since she’d called him that, the teasing bastardization of Quinn and her maiden name. Quinn’d been a compromise of sorts. Donal hadn’t wanted a son named Finn Morgan dogging his bloodline. There’d already been one, and he’d gone off to be a bloodthirsty pirate when trim frigates sailed the seas. If there was one thing longer than an elephant’s memory, it was one belonging to an Irish clan.
First time he’d heard the story, Quinn wished his father had relented. It would have given him something to connect him to the perplexing fey creature who’d given birth to him.
“Ye’ve always been yer father’s boy.” Her gaze drifted from him to the storm churning black across the Bay. “I’ve understood that. And no matter what I’ve done or said, I know we’ve never been…. Ye’ve always been the one furthest from me, and I regret that above all other things. All other.”