Free Love Brewing (Love Brothers #3) by Liz Crowe

smoking
    again.”
    “Just a thought.”
    “Here’s another one—go get a shower.” She pointed to the
    downstairs bathroom. “You can sleep on the couch tonight. I’m going to bed.”
    Stomping upstairs, she had to acknowledge that her skin was
    on fire with remorse over how much of her life she’d wasted on the man in her
    kitchen right now. The man she’d give almost anything to kiss again—right now.
    Halting halfway up the stairs, she fought the urge to tell him to get the hell
    out of her kitchen, her house and her life.
    “I’m goin’ back up to the hay mow. It suits me better. Don’t
    ya think?”
    Diana clenched her eyes shut, then opened them and turned to
    find him standing at the foot of the steps, gripping the banister. “Don’t come
    to me fishing for compliments, Love. It’s a dry pond.”
    “Yeah, guess so. Listen, is it all right if I hang for a few
    more days? Until I….” He ran a hand around the back of his neck. She remained
    quiet. “You know, I gotta find a new job now, I guess.” He flopped down onto
    the bottom tread.
    “A new job?” She got a few steps closer to him, then backed
    away, cursing her Dominic-shaped weakness. “I mean, why?”
    “I would call me ‘fired.’ Permanently.”
    “Oh.” She dropped onto the step next to him in spite of her
    better instincts, keeping about a foot of air between them. “But it’s your
    family.”
    “Not anymore.” He kept his gaze trained on his shoes. “I’ve
    been disowned, stricken from the Love family record books.”
    “Oh,” she repeated, cursing internally for sounding like an
    unhelpful dolt.
    “Yeah. That.”
    “So, um…you told him?”
    “Didn’t have to. Anton is pretty quick on the uptake. I
    guess Kent….” He glanced over at her, a strange expression on his face. “That’s
    his name, the guy I was…with for a while. Anyway, my father figured it out,
    kinda in front of a church full of people there for a wedding. Remember Cara
    Cooper? Kieran’s ex-girlfriend from high school? She was supposed to marry him,
    Kent, that is. It was Love family drama at its highest and best, I assure you.”
    Dom threaded his fingers together, elbows on his knees. “So, that went over
    about as well as you might think. My daddy is nothing if not a hide-bound,
    dyed-in-the-wool heterosexual—the homophobic kind who believes that anyone who
    isn’t is a freak of nature. Hence, the final, Dominic-disowning scene
    yesterday.”
    “Oh, surely he just has to cool down, you know? Y’all never
    did get along, at least until recently.”
    “Not sure that’s gonna happen.”
    She reached out to touch his clenched jaw, like she used to,
    when he’d show up after the latest Dom and Anton blow out, red-faced furious
    and eager to work his frustration off between her legs. She hesitated, but he
    caught her with her arm dangling in the air between them. Before she could
    blink he had grabbed it, tossed it over his shoulder and had her close, his
    lips hovering over hers.
    “Quit it,” she ground out, shoving him away and nearly
    coming apart at the seams at the familiar heft and contours of his body.
    “I can’t,” he said so softly she barely heard him. “I’m an
    idiot, I know it. I should never have left you.”
    She struggled, but admittedly not with her full strength. He
    felt too good to her and now that temptation hovered, her resistance was
    toppling in slow motion, like so many dominoes one by one by one.
    “Which time?” she ground out, using everything she had to
    rally, to shove him to the floor, step on his busted nose, kick him out. “Oh,”
    she gasped before he kissed her, blotting out everything else in her mind.
    She opened her lips to him, gripped his hair, and let him
    enter her soul, a place he’d never truly exited. As he started to sneak his
    fingers up under her shirt, she gasped and jerked away from him, still gripping
    his biceps. Mesmerized for a split second by the tattoo stretching up one