Page 52 of The Distiller's Darling

This time when he arrived at Naomi’s, he didn’t bother pussy-footing around. Hearing loud shouts coming from inside, he slammed his car door shut and bounded up the front steps. He turned the handle and let himself in.

And came to an abrupt halt.

Naomi was standing in between his dad and her mom, her hands out as if she was holding each of them back from one another. Iain did a double take. His dad might be an asshole sometimes, but he wasn’t a violent man. He’d never seen him raise his voice to a woman, much less turn a mottled shade of red and have spittle flying out the sides of his mouth when doing so. Judith Klein was returning the favor with daggers flying from her eyes with her hands on her hips. Both parents were shouting, leaning past Naomi’s restraining hands to accuse each other of all sorts of things.

This was bad. Very, very bad.

When Naomi cast him a grateful glance, her eyes full of apology, it looked like he’d arrived just in time. He took a step into the room, and she let her arms drop to her side, her shoulders hunching in on themselves as she stepped away from him and spoke to his father. “Your son is here.”

All at once, his dad quit ranting and turned to face Iain. “You!”

Iain raised an eyebrow. “Me?”

“Yes, you! I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

He snorted. “Clearly that’s not true.”

His father took a step forward and raised his hand to tick off items one by one on his fingers as he spat out words. “The bakery, the restaurant, the winery, the bed and breakfast. Each and every one of the people I spoke with said I would find you here. Care to explain yourself?”

Iain planted his feet shoulder width apart and crossed his arms over his chest to give himself a few seconds to absorb that not-so-small nugget of information. He couldn’t believe his friends had ratted him out like that. He thought they liked him, that he was one of the gang now, as they were so fond of saying. But friends did not rat other friends out to their parents. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it was a bit like Fight Club that way.

His mood was growing darker by the second. And when that happened, he had a tendency to turn into a bit of an asshole—just like his father. He notched his chin in the air defiantly. “No, not particularly.”

All at once, Cathal Brennan’s bluster evaporated. He sighed and slumped into the nearest chair. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, shaking his head. “You looked exactly like your mother just then.”

The statement didn’t come as a surprise to Iain.

While physically he favored his father’s side of the family, both he and Maeve had gotten their personality from their mother. So it wasn’t much of a shock when his sister had cheerfully joined him to strike out on their own—much as their mother had done once upon a time. More than forty years ago, Colleen O’Brien had left her family behind in Detroit to follow a blue-eyed Brennan back to Ireland, where she’d lived happily ever after since. It was because she was an American citizen—and her children by birth were as well—that any of what Iain had done was possible. Without that dual citizenship, he never would have been able to stay in the U.S. as long as he had, let alone make a serious offer on a piece of commercial real estate

“How is Mom?” he asked, relaxing his stance. It was the one topic he and his father could speak about without raising their voices. Probably because both men loved the woman dearly.

His dad waved his hand. “You know your mam. She’ll outlive us all.”

Except, she probably wouldn’t. His parents weren’t getting any younger.

Studying his father intently, Iain realized the vibrant man who’d dominated his life was actually old. His hair was much grayer than it had been at Christmas, and the paunch around his belly was growing more pronounced as the months passed. But most telling of all were the lines bracketing his eyes and mouth. Before, they’d only been evident when his dad scowled—which, admittedly, was frequently—but now they were a permanent fixture on his face. Iain suspected he’d been the cause of many of them.

But Iain had changed, too. Over the last six months, he’d sprouted several gray hairs at his temples that hadn’t been there before. The stress of making Whitman’s a success rested heavily on his shoulders, and it hadn’t been lightened any by the nonstop grief he’d been given by his dad and his brothers along the way.

Which brought him back to the reason for his dad’s visit in the first place.

He sighed and dropped down into the chair next to his father. It felt strange to have this conversation in front of Naomi and her mother, who wore identical frowns as they watched—especially considering this was Naomi’s house and not really the place for it—but he needed to nip this in the bud once and for all.

“What are you doing here, Dad?”

“John told me you were selling your shares in Brennan’s.”

Behind him, Naomi gasped, and he turned to look at her over his shoulder. She opened her mouth, no doubt to ask what his dad was talking about, but her mother shushed her before she could get the question out. Judith Klein made a ’go-on’ motion with her hands, and Iain dragged his gaze back to his father, briefly wondering just whose side Naomi’s mother was on.

He nodded once. “I am. Yes.”

His father’s eyes turned sad. “Why, son? That’s your birthright.”

“Right. My birthright. Not Maeve’s, even though she’s more talented than all of us put together.”

Cathal let out a weary sigh. “We’ve been over this before, Iain. This company was built by Brennan men.”

Iain snorted and crossed his arms over his chest. There was the father he knew. “How very eighteen hundreds of you.”

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