Read Love Brewing (Love Brothers #3) for Free Online Page A

Whiskey
    Batch #1 .
    Dom clenched his jaw. “You can’t,” he blurted out. “It’s not
    any good.”
    Anton pulled out a bottle and held it up to the afternoon
    sunlight. “This will be our new focus for the fall.” He plunked the bottle on
    the table, making a point not to look at Dom. “I already have the marketing gal
    working up press releases and the graphics kid making labels.”
    “You can’t do that,” Dom repeated. But the words
    sounded like they came from someone else’s mouth. Dizziness, like he’d been on
    bender but without the bonus of actual drinking washed through him. His mother
    touched his arm, but he shook her off without thinking. In the time it took for
    him to blink, his father had him out of his chair and pressed up against the
    sliding-glass door, a huge, dark-skinned forearm pressed against his windpipe.
    “I get to do whatever…” He pressed harder with every word,
    his spit peppering Dominic’s fevered skin. “I fucking well please. And you will
    not ever, ever disrespect your mother like that.”
    His brothers were arrayed around Dom’s peripheral vision,
    tugging and making noises he barely heard. Dom didn’t protest or even move. He
    welcomed it. He wanted the last thing he ever saw to be his father’s dark,
    furious eyes. The world went gray at the edges. His mother’s terrified scream,
    calling his father’s name, echoed through his rapidly darkening brain. His
    vision registered her scratching at Anton’s arms and shoulders. But his father
    never wavered, not once.
    Do it , he thought. You’ve been wanting to for
    years . He sucked in the last remaining bit of air he could find, forcing
    his arms to go limp, not to defend himself, even though his fight instinct had kicked in hard.
    A strange vision appeared to him then, even as the yelling
    and screaming faded. A small boy with golden-blond hair ran across the yard,
    clutching a balloon and a water gun. He laughed, but Dominic couldn’t hear it.
    A woman scooped him up, kissed his cheek, then set him down so he could run
    again.
    The pressure on his throat increased, but Dom barely felt
    it. The boy in his vision whirled and looked straight at him and he knew, in
    that split second, it was his son, the one he’d let go when he’d allowed Gina
    to run off to New York and out of his life. Just as he welcomed the encroaching
    darkness, he stumbled forward, dropping onto the patio concrete.
    The air rushed into his lungs fast, so fast it hurt. His
    throat ached like someone had whacked him in the throat with a baseball bat.
    Something pounded his side. The something came at him again, like a bull goring
    him over and over. He groaned and tried to escape the animal attacking him. He
    sucked in more air, trying to blink away tears of pain clouding his vision.
    “You are not my son, do you hear me?” His father loomed over
    him, blotting out the sun and sky. “Get the fuck off my property.”
    Dom rolled over onto his hands and knees onto the grass
    between the patio and the pool deck. People clutched at him, trying to pull him
    up, but visions of the boy suffused his brain again. The kid regarded him with
    those eerie, dark-brown eyes, accusing him. Dom focused on it as he crawled
    from the scrum of brothers, sister, sisters-in-law, his mother…oh, God, his
    mother.
    He leapt up, then dropped to one knee when the earth buckled
    beneath him. “Mama,” he croaked out, reaching for whichever brother was
    closest. “Get Mama for me.” He managed to get to his feet with Kieran’s help.
    “I’ll be in the driveway.” He half-ran, half-stumbled, forcing the kid out of
    his brain.
    By the time his mother appeared, he had his breathing almost
    back to normal and sat on the bike, head bowed to the increasing late-summer
    heat. The empty sensation in his chest had expanded and filled his body,
    suffusing his limbs with lethargy. He wanted to go to sleep for days, maybe
    weeks.
    Lindsay put a cool palm on his arm. Her