a chair at the end of the booth rather than sliding into the vacant spot they’d left next to Michael.
“Pretty woman,” Ryan observed. “Is she someone special?”
“I barely know her,” Patrick said, forcing his attention to the three men seated opposite him like some sort of military tribunal. He should have slipped into the booth, he realized belatedly, made himself one of them, instead of an outsider. The symbolism was unmistakable. He wondered if they were aware of it.
Fascinated with the three men despite himself, he studied them. As Ryan had noted, there was no question about the family resemblance. All had the pitch-black hair and blue eyes of their Irish ancestors. He’d seen enough pictures of past generations—if not of this one—to know that Devaney men tended to be handsome rogues. Ryan’s hair was a bit longer than the others and had those few errant strands of gray creeping in. He also had a tiny scar at the corner of his mouth.
Suddenly, completely out of the blue, a memory slammed into Patrick’s head. There had been an argument, some sort of dispute between him and Daniel over a toy dump truck. Ryan had tried to mediate. Turning his temper on Ryan, Patrick had thrown the truck at him and split his lip. The image, obviously buried in his subconscious for years, was as clear now as if it had happened yesterday.
Tears swimming in his eyes, he swallowed hard and pointed at the scar. “I did that to you, didn’t I? I threw a truck at you.”
Surprise flickered in Ryan’s eyes, then amusement. “I’ll be damned. I’d forgotten that,” he said, touching the scar as if he’d also forgotten its existence.
“You planning on getting even at this late date?” Patrick inquired warily.
Ryan rubbed his face. “Too late for that. I’ve been living with this face for a lot of years now. I’m used to it.”
“Besides, Maggie thinks the scar’s sexy,” Sean chimed in with a grin.
“Maggie?” Patrick asked.
“His wife,” Sean explained. “How he caught a wonderful woman like Maggie is beyond me, but I think that scar played a part in it.”
Ryan laughed. “Could be. She does seem to be fond of kissing me, at any rate. I should probably thank you, Patrick, but I guess I’ll let my wife do that when she meets you.”
Patrick froze at the implication that they were here for more than some very brief get-acquainted meeting. This invasion of his turf was disturbing enough. He wasn’t ready by a long shot for wives and maybe even kids.
He regarded his brothers warily. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m getting married,” Michael explained. “That’s why we picked this particular time to come looking for you.”
“How long have you known where I was?”
Apparently, Ryan heard the tension in his voice. “Not that long. Honest. Besides, Michael was badly injured when Sean and I first found him. He wanted to be on his feet again before we came up here to see if we had the right man.”
Patrick remembered the noticeable limp. “What happened?”
“A sniper attack,” Michael said succinctly. “It ended my career as a SEAL. It’s taken me a while to come to grips with that. In the meantime, I’ve been a bear to be around.”
“That’s an understatement. He was being a total pain in the butt till his physical therapist badgered him into getting out of his wheelchair just so he could catch her,” Sean teased. “Talk about motivation. Kelly was damn good at it.”
“Very funny,” Michael retorted. “The bottom line is Kelly and I are getting married, and we’d all like you to come back to Boston next week for the wedding. That way we’ll all have a chance to get to know each other. Daniel, too.”
Patrick instinctively shook his head. As much as he’d thought about this moment, things were moving too fast for him. “I don’t think so,” he said, leaving aside the question of Daniel. The prospect of exchanging whatever tight-knit family ties they’d managed to forge for the ones he’d already broken held no appeal. Seeing them now was one thing. Exchanging an occasional Christmas card might be nice. But anything more was impossible.
Ryan regarded him with sympathy. “We’re not a bad lot,” he reassured Patrick. “And it’s not as if we’ve been plotting and scheming together against you because you stayed with the folks and we didn’t.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Patrick said. If only they knew how devastating it had been to learn that their parents weren’t the models of