Dawg lifted his gaze from Cranston, only to realize the four girls were watching him suspiciously, fearfully. There wasn’t one of them who didn’t expect him to turn them away.
“Doc’s here,” Christa stated as a vehicle pulled up in front of the door. “He’s early. He must have already left the office.”
Dawg nodded. “Let’s get your mother taken care of,” he told the girls. “Once we have her checked out, we’ll talk.” His gaze dropped to Cranston’s again before lifting back to the girls. “But have no doubt: You’re family. And we stick by family.”
“One of you killed your cousin,” the eldest stated. “I heard one of the agents talking about it after we arrived at Tim’s. Is that how you take care of family?”
She might have resembled Dawg enough to be his kid, but it was Natches’s emerald eyes she stared at him from.
“Eve.” Her mother gasped, obviously shocked by her daughter’s rudeness.
Dawg just gave Eve a mocking smile as his hand tightened at Christa’s hip once again. “Only those who betray us and have a gun trained on the someone we love,” he assured her. “Then, Eve, trust me, it didn’t matter who he was then; Johnny was dead.”
Eve’s nostrils flared before she finally relaxed enough to simply nod her head.
“Mackays don’t betray one another.” Cranston tore his gaze from their mother long enough to stare back at each girl with a glint of steel in his eyes. “Remember that, girls. You stand for who you are, what you are, and for family. That’s what your mother’s taught you, and that’s what you live by.”
“Only if you stand for us first,” Lyrica spoke up warily.
Dawg nodded. “Understandable. And we’ll show you our good faith.” He glanced to Natches and Rowdy. Each of his cousins nodded in turn. “We’ll take care of you and your mother, because you’re family, and that’s what families do. Whatever treatments your mother needs, whatever care, she’ll have it. Just as you’ll return to school and do your part.”
“In return for what?” the other girl asked suspiciously.
“In return for being part of the family,” Dawg growled back at her. “I just told you that. Loyalty begins somewhere, and I’ll make that first step. From here on out it’s up to you. But betray us or yourselves, hurt us, yourselves, or another of the family, and you’ll risk all of it. Come to us, talk to us, and we’ll help you the best way we can. But you don’t lie to us, you don’t cheat us, and you don’t dare betray one of us.”
What the hell was he supposed to do with four sisters?
Each girl nodded before the door opened, heralding the doctor and his nurse. Within an hour an ambulance arrived and, with Cranston riding with her, whisked Mercedes Mackay to the hospital and left four clearly suspicious, frightened, and exhausted young women in his keeping.
And Dawg would soon learn, along with Rowdy and Natches, just what they might have to face in another decade or so.
With their own daughters.
ONE
It was after two in the morning before Eve Mackay stepped into her bedroom and closed the door behind her quietly. Staring around the small suite, it was damned hard to believe how her life had changed in five short years. From destitution to security. From paralyzing fear of what the future would bring, to looking forward to each day as it arrived.
From losing the meager roof over their heads to partial ownership in the business her mother now owned.
Luckily, her room was on the more private side of the large house her mother had turned into Mackay’s Bed-and-breakfast Inn. The two-story sprawling farmhouse had been completely renovated and redecorated with the private residence on the second floor, the eight guest suites, large chef’s kitchen, and open television and game room on the main floor.
A wide porch wrapped around the house, allowing guests easy access to the balcony doors into their rooms when the main entrance was locked after midnight.
Eve had taken the smallest guest room at the back of the house for herself, rather than one of the bedrooms in the upstairs residence, as her sisters had done. She’d needed the privacy, whereas her sisters had still needed the closeness the upstairs rooms provided to their mother.
Now she was thankful for it. Arriving home after two in the morning and going through the main residence would be guaranteed to alert her mother, and her mother’s lover, that she’d arrived home.
Living upstairs would have enabled her mother to keep tabs on her, too, and as much as she loved her mother, she had no wish for that.
Opening her eyes and drawing in a deep breath, Eve reached back and rubbed the tense muscles of her neck before moving to the bathroom and a hot shower.
Releasing the heavy weight of her long, straight black hair and massaging at her scalp with her fingertips, she wondered why she had gotten none of the curls that her younger sisters had in abundance. Zoey’s hair fell to her waist in soft corkscrew curls that Eve used to threaten to cut off out of pure jealousy.
No matter how hard she’d tried, Eve had rarely been able to get her hair to take curl for more than a few hours. A few days at the most only after a trip to the salon when she had a chemical wave put in it.
It hadn’t been worth it.
She’d learned to live without the curl her other sisters had in varying amounts. Piper’s hair was wavy. It fell to her shoulders, thick and heavy as it framed her aristocratic features and gave her exotic sea green eyes a lush shimmer.
Lyrica kept her hair to a length that fell just below her shoulder blades. The deeper waves in her hair bounced and gleamed with a blue-black sheen that went perfectly with her summer green gaze.
Zoey’s hair fell below her waist, clear to her h*ps in those long, corkscrew curls that were impossibly soft and silky and made other women want to kill for them. Her hair was just as exotic as her eyes, which were the same celadon as their brother Dawg’s, that pale, ethereal color that always drew second and third looks.
Eve’s hair was more like Natches’s: straight and thick. It was impossible for her to do much in the way of styling it. She pinned it up, put it in a ponytail as she had tonight, or just left it long to the middle of her shoulders.
Her eyes were the same emerald green as Natches’s, but her looks, like her sisters’, were closer to Dawg’s.
Big, bold, and as familiar in Pulaski County, Kentucky, as the mountains themselves, Dawg and his cousins—her cousins—Rowdy and Natches had been all that had saved her and her family at a time when they’d been certain life as they’d known it was over.