Chapter Three #2
“She’ll be back,” said Carter Redmond, grinning like he knew something. “Mark my words.”
“If you don’t stop with that, I’m going to ban you,” Tennessee grunted at him. “For life.”
And since he wasn’t known for idle threats, that brought about the peace he was looking for. At least until the garrulous old man contingent heaved themselves off into the rest of their days. He wasn’t sure what to do about his own head.
When the breakfast rush was over and he’d cleaned up to his satisfaction—which was to say, to a high level that his family had been known to call obsessive, but no one asked them to cook anything, did they—he wandered through the private passage to the General Store, where his brother Dallas had just opened.
Assuming he’d rolled himself down the hill in time, Tennessee thought uncharitably, like his brother was still sixteen.
He wasn’t, of course. He was a grown man and he was right where he was supposed to be today, but old habits died hard.
Dallas lifted his chin in greeting, but didn’t say anything while Tennessee moved around him and into the area behind the counter in the store that served as the general office for the Lisle family enterprise. Or at least, the supplemental office to the one Tennessee kept in his house.
“Why are you in such a mood?” Dallas asked after a while, kicked back with a to-go cup from the coffee cart outside. The coffee cart that was now a staple, since Helena Patrick—their sister—had made the whole town obsessed with her fancy espresso drinks before she’d revealed her identity.
That wasn’t Tennessee being grumpy, though he knew he was often grumpy. If that meant people stayed away from him, great. Less drama for him to handle. The Helena thing was just a fact. What he was surprised by was that he really hadn’t noticed how much she looked like Cat.
Well. Maybe not that surprised. Tennessee had never had a fancy espresso drink in his life, and he also didn’t spend much time studying women. Mostly, he cooked and he cleaned and he handled the books and he tracked inventory and he kept all the various Lisle concerns running.
He had no time for mochas or mysterious women.
So there was really no reason Matilda should haunt him the way she did today, like she’d come in last night and shrugged off more than her coat and—
You need to stop, he ordered himself.
He glared at his brother. “Who says I’m in a mood?”
“I don’t rightly know,” drawled Dallas, looking entirely too relaxed for a man who’d been hermitting in a deeply foolish Rocky Mountain lighthouse for the better part of the last decade.
“Could be the way you’re stomping around like you’re hoping the floorboards give way.
The way you’re slamming everything down when you touch it.
Or maybe it’s just the force of our deep brotherly bond after all these years and I can just tell from looking at you. ”
“Great,” Tennessee muttered. “We’re talking about bonds. That’s terrific. Maybe later we can braid each other’s hair and read out a few select pages from our feelings journals.”
“I thought we were turning over a new leaf.” Dallas could clearly tell that Tennessee was out of sorts, because he looked like he was having the time of his life.
He settled back in the chair behind the counter and treated his older brother to his best shit-eating grin.
“After all, this is the new blended family model. We’re all going to be happy if it kills us, Tennessee. Even if that means feelings journals.”
Tennessee rubbed his hands over his face. He was much too tired for this. Still. “In theory, I couldn’t be more supportive. Truly. In practice, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“That’s a hard same for me,” Dallas said with a laugh. “All kidding aside.”
“Count me in on that,” came another voice, and Tennessee wasn’t sure he liked the fact that he recognized it immediately. Or that it… sounded a lot like his own voice.
He and Dallas turned, and Tennessee wasn’t particularly surprised to find Finn Patrick standing there on the other side of the counter.
The oldest of the Patricks, that put him between Tennessee and Dallas.
And the truth was, while none of them were particularly surprised to find out they had half siblings, maybe—that didn’t make it easy. It didn’t keep it from feeling weird.
That didn’t make it bad. Just weird.
Finn grinned, and Tennessee had to believe he wasn’t the only one who found this whole family resemblance thing part of the weirdness. There was just so much of it.
He and Finn were just about the same height, though to his mind, Finn had cowboy stamped all over him.
Not that Tennessee hadn’t been called a cowboy himself—a title he was happy to own, born and bred Montanan that he was—but he didn’t think he looked like he was about to leap on a horse at the slightest provocation.
Finn, on the other hand, looked like he might have cantered over to the store bareback. No matter the weather.
But aside from that, it was wildly evident that they were all related. They all had the same chins. The same blue eyes. Finn’s hair was much darker than Dallas’s and Tennessee’s, since they tended toward a hint of their mother’s copper. And maybe his build was also a little leaner, a touch taller.
It was wild.
“I can’t stop staring,” Dallas admitted, crossing his arms. “It’s weird to have a fully grown new brother, that’s all.”
“Again, agree,” Finn said in the same tone—friendly, but with no small bit of authority underneath. He shook his head. “Not that it’s a bad thing.”
“Not at all,” Tennessee agreed.
The funny thing was, weird as it all was and would likely continue to be, he meant it.
It had been less than a week since his mother and Peyton had dropped the bomb, gathering them all together in the old Victorian house halfway up the hill.
It wasn’t that much of a bomb for the Patrick side of the family, of course.
Because Helena had been here the whole time, hadn’t she?
Right here, under their noses, and somehow Tennessee and the rest of his family hadn’t noticed how much she looked like one of them.
Like Cat especially. Now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t unsee it.
Point of fact, it was so obvious that he had to wonder if they’d all been willfully blind.
“We figured we should start a kind of tradition,” Finn said, not letting too much of a pause build up. “If the Lisles are open to it, the Patricks would like to institute a weekly gathering.”
Tennessee might have been exhausted. He might have Matilda Stark’s Viking braids in his head in a way he could not explain or seem to get past. Still, he understood immediately what Finn was doing with this. It was smart.
He wasn’t really sure why it hadn’t occurred to him to do it first.
Maybe he’d put that on the night’s sleep Matilda had stolen from him too.
“I like it,” he said. “What were you thinking?”
“I think it should be something informal,” Finn said, with that grin of his that was nothing but pleasant, yet Tennessee found himself thinking about the fact that this man had been running a cattle ranch in Colorado that he’d expected to own one day.
And that got him thinking that where he tended to wear his responsibility like a hammer, according to his siblings when they were unhappy with him, Finn clearly preferred to cloak it in a little bit of velvet.
“I’ll take that to mean we’ll leave our mothers out of this gathering,” Tennessee said. Dallas frowned, but Finn nodded.
“Exactly. It’s clear our mothers have a lot in common, and I’m glad they’ve spent some time getting to know each other.
” Finn moved his Lisle-blue gaze from Tennessee to Dallas and back again.
“It’s my opinion, and I hope yours too, that we might benefit from some getting to know you time that’s just our generation’s.
To keep us on track with making sure we’re the happiest family that ever was. ”
“There’s never been and never will be a family happier,” Tennessee said at once, making himself smile. A big, wide smile.
Then he kicked Dallas’s chair when he stared, his mouth open. Asshole.
“How about dinner tonight?” Finn asked, his gaze gleaming with what Tennessee was pretty sure was laughter of his own. “That pizza place across the street looks good.”
“It is good,” Dallas said then, still eyeing Tennessee like he’d gone a little rabid. “If you haven’t been already, you’re missing out. Those Bennett sisters know what they’re doing.”
“You don’t know Dallas well enough to know that’s high praise,” Tennessee said.
“And you really don’t know Tennessee well enough to know that he doesn’t normally speak this much,” Dallas retorted at once. “So yeah. We’ll rustle up Cat and convene the family. And I personally will dive face-first into all that family bonding.”
“That sounds uncomfortable.” But Finn grinned. “I’m here for it. Let’s choke ourselves on those ties that bind.”
And they were all kind of being dicks, Tennessee thought.
But somehow, they all found themselves grinning at each other anyway, and that was something.
Or it was the start of something, he thought.
It had all been a little much last week, all of them stiff and formal and staring at each other in varying degrees of shock and discomfort across the old living room with its fussy, historic settees that their father had once tried to sell out from under them. Literally.
But that was the whole point. They had a unifying theme. Their father sucked. He’d hurt their mothers, lied his face off, had disappeared, and had been declared dead seven years after that disappearance.
No one missed him, as far as Tennessee could tell.
Therefore, the families he’d left behind would be best friends if it killed them. It was clear they were all unified on that. It was impossible not to think that this was a good thing, no matter how they’d made it here.