Temptation Ridge (Virgin River #6)(78)

Just as he was coming to accept it all, Luke’s well-organized life was derailed by a phone call from his brother Sean.

“So, you put in a no-show for the turkey,” Sean said. “What’s up with that? You’re stateside, you’re not that far away….”

“I have things to do here, Sean,” he said. “And I explained to Mother—I can’t leave Art and I can’t take him on a trip.”

“So I heard. And that’s your only reason?”

“What else?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, as if he did know what else. “Well then, you’ll be real happy to hear this—I’m bringing Mother to Virgin River for Thanksgiving.”

Luke was dead silent for a moment. “What!” Luke nearly shouted into the phone. “Why the hell would you do that?”

“Because you won’t come to Phoenix. And she’d like to see this property you’re working on. And the helper. And the girl.”

“You aren’t doing this to me,” Luke said in a threatening tone. “Tell me you aren’t doing this to me!”

“Yeah, since you can’t make it to Mom’s, we’re coming to you. I thought that would make you sooo happy,” he added with a chuckle in his voice.

“Oh God,” he said. “I don’t have room for you. There’s not a hotel in town.”

“You lying sack of shit. You have room. You have two extra bedrooms and six cabins you’ve been working on for three months. But if it turns out you’re telling the truth, there’s a motel in Fortuna that has some room. As long as Mom has the good bed in the house, clean sheets and no rats, everything will be fine.”

“Good. You come,” Luke said. “And then I’m going to kill you.”

“What’s the matter? You don’t want Mom to meet the girl? The helper?”

“I’m going to tear your limbs off before you die!”

But Sean laughed. “Mom and I will be there Tuesday afternoon. Buy a big turkey, huh?”

Luke was paralyzed for a moment. Silent and brooding.

He had lived a pretty wild life, excepting that couple of years with Felicia, when he’d been temporarily domesticated. He’d flown helicopters in combat and played it loose with the ladies, taking whatever was consensually offered. His bachelorhood was on the adventurous side. His brothers were exactly like him; maybe like their father before them, who hadn’t married until the age of thirty-two. Not exactly ancient, but for the generation before theirs, a little mature to begin a family of five sons. They were frisky Irish males. They all had taken on a lot: dared much, had no regrets, moved fast.

But one thing none of them had ever done was have a woman who was not a wife in bed with them under the same roof with their mother.

“I’m thirty-eight years old and I’ve been to war four times,” he said to himself, pacing in his small living room, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. “This is my house and she is a guest. She can disapprove all she wants, work her rosary until she has blisters on her hands, but this is not up to her.”

Okay, then she’ll tell everything, was his next thought. Every little thing about me from the time I was five, every young lady she’d had high hopes for, every indiscretion, my night in jail, my very naked fling with the high-school vice-principal’s daughter…. Everything from speeding tickets to romances. Because that’s the way the typical dysfunctional Irish family worked—they bartered in secrets. He could either behave the way his mother expected, which she considered proper and gentlemanly and he considered tight-assed and useless, or he could throw caution to the wind, do things his way, and explain all his mother’s stories to Shelby later. Including the story about Felicia.

It really didn’t make sense for Luke to expect his mother to be a prude. She was obviously much too with it for that. She was a beautiful, statuesque sixty-one-year-old woman who’d been widowed at fifty-three when Luke was only thirty, and remained single and devoted to her military sons. She still had her hair dyed the flaming red of her youth. With some ambivalence, he sometimes wished his mother would find a romantic interest that would take her mind off her boys and their personal lives.

Maureen Riordan was smart, energetic and funny. She was fearless; despite her commitment to her Catholic faith, she had some rebellious ideas. After five sons in ten years, the priest had told her to keep the faith and reject birth control, and she had told him to do something to himself that was never again repeated. But there hadn’t been a sixth child. Getting down to it, she didn’t have that many flaws—just this rigid set of principles she could be coerced into being quiet about if her demands were met. And there was her relentless dissatisfaction with her sons’ inability to marry successfully and bring her grandchildren. That was getting real old.

The boys ranked thusly: Luke, Colin, Aiden, Sean, Patrick. Ages thirty-eight to thirty, down the line. All bachelors. Maureen might be getting a little bewildered and desperate.

As it stood, they had a firm family law that had evolved through bitter fights—no one told embarrassing or family secrets to newcomers without paying, and paying dearly. Frankly, Luke thought the story about his mother standing up to the priest about birth control was hilarious—but she didn’t find it funny. And a trade was a trade. He could keep her quiet by respecting her principles and not telling stories on her. He could keep his mother’s mouth shut by not sleeping with Shelby while she was in town. For five nights.