“Insufferable.” Ford picked up his beer and took a swig of the lager that was so flat and warm that he immediately regretted it. “That’s a big word for a firefighter.”
“There you are.” Frankie grinned down at him. “I knew you were lurking in there somewhere. Now get your scrawny ass up before I pick you up and embarrass you in front of your little buddies in blue.”
Scrawny? What the fuck? “I’m six two.”
“Exactly. Scrawny. Now get a move on, baby brother. Finian is on shift tonight, and Fallon and the rest of our lovely sisters still aren’t talking to you, so that means knocking some sense into your thick skull is up to me.”
Ford didn’t want to go. He wanted to sit here at Marino’s and glare at his shitty room-temperature beer and snarl at anyone who had the balls to try to talk to him. But he knew Frankie. He’d known him his whole life. And never in all those years had the eldest Hartigan sibling ever backed down from a single solitary thing.
His brother had two speeds: full throttle ahead and dead asleep, which meant that if his brother was all in for making Ford come with him then he really was all in. At six feet six inches tall, Frankie was big enough to throw Ford over his shoulder and haul him out of Marino’s. Ford couldn’t let that happen. He might be a complete idiot, but he still had his pride.
“Fine,” he said, adding enough distaste to the word to make sure his brother knew his exact thoughts on the matter, and then stood up and walked out of Marino’s.
If he’d thought Frankie would be any more chill when they were both sitting out on his deck looking at the grass that Finian had painstakingly planted and watered for months, then he was wrong. Frankie was even more of a pain in the ass in his own environment, where he’d pulled out every detail of the Gina fiasco with the subtlety and gentleness of a Mack truck skidding across an ice sheet and smacking into a snowman.
“So, let me get this straight,” Frankie said while staring at Ford like he’d never seen a dumber human being in his life, which, since he worked with firefighters, was really saying something. “First, there was the thing at the hotel, which you fucked up.”
“I didn’t know Gallo and Ruggiero had set her up, and when I mentioned I hadn’t been expecting her, she ran.”
“Yeah, because—newsflash—chicks have egos, too.” Frankie took a drink of his beer. “And then when, by the grace of some benevolent force in the universe, you get the opportunity to hang out with her again, you fuck that shit up by not being honest.”
“I didn’t lie, regulations kept me from being able to tell her the complete truth.”
“You went to the same Catholic school that I did. Do you really think Sister Mary Helen would say that a lie of omission didn’t count if it was work-related?”
“Fuck you,” he grumbled and flipped his brother off.
“That’s what I thought.” Frankie returned Ford’s middle-finger salute with one of his own. “And then, because you’re not a big enough asshole already, you don’t do whatever the fuck it takes to make Gina understand that you’ve seen the error of your ways after the disaster of epic proportions at Mom’s house, and instead slink away back to your cop shop until you go over to her house under false pretenses again and snoop around for evidence of her brothers committing a crime.”
“It was for her own good. If someone else had gone in there and found something, they wouldn’t have been able to protect her against the fallout like I would.”
“So, you’re the hero in all of this, is that what you’re saying, baby bro?” When Ford didn’t answer, Frankie went on. “Because you sure as shit look like the heel to me.”
“Thank you, Professor Hartigan. I wasn’t aware of how badly I’d screwed everything up.”
“Well, it’s a good thing she was just a piece of temporary ass and not someone who actually mattered.”
The world turned red. Ford shot up and bum-rushed his brother, wrapping his arms around his waist and taking him down in a picture-perfect tackle. After that it was total chaos, complete with jabs, elbows to the ribs, and a flipped deck chair. They wrestled for control, delivering as many punches as possible before they were both laying side by side on the deck, surrounded by chairs that had been knocked over—or in one case, broken in half—and breathing so hard he would have thought they’d just tangled with a pack of elephants. Well, judging by the feel of his jaw, he might have.