The MacKades Collection: The Return of Rafe MacKade / The Pride of Jared MacKade / The Heart of Devin MacKade / The Fall of Shane MacKade

He looked back at Rafe. There was temper, hot and ready. Recklessness worn like a second skin. “But you’ll do. Always figured you for the biggest loser of the lot, Rafe.”

“That so?” Rafe crushed out his cigarette, lifted his own beer. He drank as they completed the ritual before battle, and customers shifted in their chairs to watch. “How’re things going at the factory, Joe?”

“Least I get a paycheck,” Joe shot back. “I got money in my pocket. Ain’t nobody going to take my house from over me.”

“Not as long as your wife keeps putting in twelve-hour shifts working tables to pay the rent.”

“Shut your mouth about my wife. I earn the money in my house. I don’t need no woman paying my way, like your mama had to do for your old man. Went through her inheritance like it was water, then up and died on her.”

“Yeah, he died on her.” Anger and guilt and grief welled up inside him. “But he never laid a hand on her. She never had to come into town hiding behind scarves and dark glasses, and saying how she took a fall. Only thing your mother ever fell over, Joe, was your father’s fist.”

Joe slammed his beer onto the bar, shattering the glass. “That’s a lie. I’m going to ram that lie down your throat.”

“Try it.”

“He’s drunk, Rafe,” Jared murmured.

Those lethal green eyes sliced toward his brother. “So?”

“So there isn’t much point in breaking his face when he’s drunk.” Jared moved a shoulder. “He’s not worth it.”

But Rafe didn’t need a point. He just needed action. He lifted his cue, studied it, then laid it across the table. “You want to take me on, Joe?”

“Don’t you start in here.” Though he knew it was already too late, Duff jerked a thumb toward the wall phone. “You make any trouble in here, I’m calling the sheriff, and the lot of you can cool off in jail.”

“Keep your damn hand off the phone,” Rafe warned him. His eyes were hard enough to have the bartender backing off. “Outside,” he said simply.

“You and me.” Curling his fists, Joe stared at the MacKades. “I ain’t having your brothers jumping in on me while I whip your butt.”

“I don’t need any help with you.” To prove it, the moment they cleared the door Rafe pivoted to avoid Joe’s swing, rammed his fist into Joe’s face and felt the first satisfying spill of blood.

He couldn’t even have said why he was fighting. Joe meant less to him than the dust in the street. But it felt good. Even when Joe got past his guard and connected, it felt good. Fists and blood were the only clear solution. When he felt the satisfying crack of knuckles against bone, he could forget everything else.

Devin winced, then tucked his hands philosophically in his pockets when blood spurted from his brother’s mouth. “I give it five minutes.”

“Hell, Rafe’ll take him down in three.” Grinning, Shane watched the grunting opponents wrestle to the ground.

“Ten bucks.”

“You’re on. Come on, Rafe!” Shane shouted. “Whip his sorry butt!”

It took three minutes, plus thirty nasty seconds with Rafe straddling Joe and methodically pumping a fist into his face. Since Joe’s eyes had rolled up white and his arms were limp at his sides, Jared stepped forward to drag his brother away.

“He’s finished.” To decide the matter, Jared rammed Rafe up against the brick wall of the bar. “He’s finished,” he repeated. “Let it go.”

The vicious rage drained slowly, fading from Rafe’s eyes, uncurling his fists. Emptying him. “Let go, Jare. I’m not going to hit him again.”

Rafe looked to where Joe lay moaning, half-unconscious. Over his battered body, Devin counted out bills for Shane. “I should have factored in how drunk he was,” Devin commented. “If he’d been sober, it would’ve taken Rafe the five.”

“Rafe would never waste five full minutes on a punk like that.”

Jared shook his head. The arm that was restraining Rafe slipped companionably around Rafe’s shoulders. “Want another beer?”

“No.” He glanced toward the window of the bar, where most of the patrons had gathered to watch. Absently he swiped blood from his face. “Somebody better pick him up and haul him home,” he called out. “Let’s get out of here.”

When he settled in the car again, the aches and bruises began to make themselves known. With half an ear, he listened to Shane’s enthusiastic play-by-play of the bout and used Devin’s bandanna to mop more blood from his mouth.

He was going nowhere, he thought. Doing nothing. Being nothing. The only difference between him and Joe Dolin was that Joe was a drunk on top of it.

He hated the damn farm, the damn town, the damn trap he could feel himself sinking into with every day that passed.

Jared had his books and studies, Devin his odd and ponderous thoughts, Shane the land that seemed to delight him.

He had nothing.

On the edge of town, where the land began to climb and the trees to thicken, he saw a house. The old Barlow place. Dark, deserted and haunted, so it was said. It stood alone, unwanted, with a reputation that caused most of the townspeople to ignore it or eye it warily.

Just as they did Rafe MacKade.

“Pull over.”

“Hell, Rafe, you going to be sick?” Not concerned so much as apprehensive, Shane gripped his own door handle.

“No. Pull over, damn it, Jared.”

The minute the car stopped, Rafe was out and climbing the rocky slope. Brambles thick with thorns and summer growth tore at his jeans. He didn’t need to look behind or hear the curses and mutters to know that his brothers were following him.

He stood, looking up at three stories of local stone. Mined, he supposed, from the quarry a few miles out of town. Some of the windows were broken and boarded, and the double porches sagged like an old woman’s back. What had once been a lawn was overgrown with wild blackberries, thistles and witchgrass. A dead oak rose from it, gnarled and leafless.

But as the moon wheeled overhead and the breeze sang chants through the trees and tall grass, there was something compelling about the place. The way it stood two hundred years after its foundation had been laid. The way it continued to stand against time, weather and neglect. And most of all, he thought, the way it stood against the distrust and gossip of the town it overlooked.

“Going to look for ghosts, Rafe?” Shane stood beside him, eyes gleaming against the dark.

“Maybe.”

“Remember when we spent the night there, on a dare?” Absently Devin plucked a blade of grass, rolled it between his fingers. “Ten years ago, I guess it was. Jared snuck upstairs and started creaking doors. Shane wet his pants.”

“Hell I did.”

“Hell you didn’t.”

This incited the predictable shoving match, which the older brothers ignored.

“When are you leaving?” Jared said quietly. He’d known it, saw it now in the way Rafe looked at the house, into it, beyond it.

“Tonight. I’ve got to get away from here, Jare. Do something away from here. If I don’t, I’m going to be like Dolin. Maybe worse. Mom’s gone. She doesn’t need me anymore. Hell, she never needed anybody.”

“Got any idea where you’re going?”