Loved Either Way, page 4
But it was never enough.
“Is it piss off Lucas day?” came a holler from outside Lucas’ office.
Followed by that booming laugh.
“Fuck my life,” Lucas muttered under his breath.
Forgetting his place for the moment.
The phone conference was still live.
“My apologies, Mr. Dalton. Could you repeat that? It was a bit low.”
“No need, something came up,” he told the head of human resources who had him on a three-way call with the team of managers at the call center. “Can you finish this without me this week, Oliver?”
Never missing a beat, the man on the other end said, “Sure, absolutely. I’ll debrief you in an email.”
“Great, goodbye.”
He didn’t have time to consider if his reply had sounded as short to the others on the call as it did to his own ears before he cut it off entirely. Lucas barely had the chance to posture his body toward the opened doorway to brace for the oncoming visitor before the barrel of a man with energy that instantly filled the room darkened the space.
His little brother—by a whole decade—grinned wide and slapped the frosted glass door with his palm. “Did you miss me, fuckhead?”
Lucas tried, but the pulse of pain between his eyebrows had him pinching the spot to relieve the sudden tension. “Jacob, just try to give a shit when you’re inside this place, okay? Try, that’s all I’m asking.”
“I give a shit.”
Glaring at the twenty-five-year-old in the doorway who clearly didn’t notice the giggles and jokes filtering down the hallway from the other offices, Lucas offered to Jacob, “Then get better at showing it, maybe?”
Defensive in a blink, Jacob straightened a bit with hunched in shoulders as he folded his once-beefy arms over his broad chest. Despite all the time his brother proclaimed to put into the gym, he’d yet to gain back a lot of the muscle mass that he’d lost in his earlier twenties.
“Jesus, man—why do you gotta sound so much like Dad, huh? I haven’t seen you in like a week and a half, so I come all the way across the city when all I’ve got are trash morning classes, and you’re being a prick. Whose talking about getting better at showing shit between us again?”
Goddammit.
Like a dagger to his heart, Jacob knew right where to hit Lucas when it really counted. A weakness in the older Dalton brother that only his younger sibling could latch onto because while a lot of differences separated the two, the things that mattered were exactly the damn same.
“I’m not like Dad,” Lucas spat back.
Then, he did a double-take of the door, and his brain decided to remember the people just beyond his office.
“Close the fucking door,” he snapped.
Jacob did, but he put in no effort to look happy about it. In fact, his arms remained crossed, and he refused to look at his older brother sitting behind the desk, opting to inspect the wall of shelves showing off the company’s many awards.
“Not like Dad, right?” Jacob asked, oozing sarcasm. “Fuck, you’ve barely even changed this office. It all looks the same to me.”
Then, he glanced Lucas’ way. Sometimes, when Jacob got that mean gleam twist to his mouth, Lucas found himself thrown back to harder times with his younger brother. When Jacob had been all too willing—and quick, without even a thought—to hurt the one person who cared the most about him just to hide the demons in his own life.
Those moments scared Lucas.
That meanness in Jacob’s expression worried him even more.
“What?” he asked Jacob.
“Not much about you looks different, either,” he brother muttered, moving in for the kill.
“Shut up.” Lucas knew good and well he sounded like a child, but sometimes, things couldn’t be helped. He forced his tone to be playful because despite the tense situation with his brother, Lucas didn’t want to set Jacob off by saying something that might cross the lines. His brother learned early on from their parents’ behavior that the quickest way out of anything was to run—and fast. “It’s been a long few days, okay?”
Jacob scoffed, shoving his fisted hands into the pockets of his white hoodie with the maple leaf logo of his favorite hockey team. The two of them couldn’t be more different with Jacob in distressed, acid-wash denim and laced up Doc Martens while Lucas wished he could breathe a little easier in his three-piece suit. One of them had the chance to live a little and take time to grow up while the other one never gave himself the opportunity to do the same—Lucas tried to keep that in mind when his baby brother was concerned.
After their pappy died, they only really had each other. The boys learned young not to expect comfort or help from their father who thought showing even conditional love for his child was the same as a handout to a beggar on the street. He’d been lucky enough to be the first grandchild of his grandfather, a man he’d been named after, and he’d doted on Lucas accordingly, and earned him shares in the brewery that had been held in trust. Something his father couldn’t stand, and didn’t share with Lucas until after his grandfather was dead and the will came to light.
Jealousy was a terrible monster.
Lucas did exactly what he had to so that Jacob didn’t have to when it came to the family business. Including the family bit. Neither of the Dalton sons were particularly liked or needed by their father, and once they reached adult age, got cut off financially. Lucas chose to step up and help Jacob, so he didn’t have to lower his morals to lose dignity crawling back to their father.
Besides, Lucas had to do that bullshit once a month—at least—whenever Dalton Brewery’s CEO decided to leave his office downtown and came over to the east side to play boss now that he had returned to the city a few weeks earlier to spend the winter. A tyrant on the warpath, Ronald could leave real devastation in his wake.
Thankfully, that happened less and less with his father handling the company’s business on the other side of Canada. Well, when the bastard stayed there.
“It’s January,” Lucas said, trying to keep the parental tone to a minimum because that never went off well with Jacob, “don’t you have anything warm to wear other than that hoodie?”
Jacob rolled his eyes behind the rectangle-rimless prescription sunglasses his brother liked to wear in the winter months when the overwhelming white made everything seem brighter. Despite not being totally opaque indoors, Lucas couldn’t get a good look at Jacob’s eyes beyond their movement. Specifically, his pupils and their size. It bothered Lucas. Both that he couldn’t see them, and that he wanted to at all. Not to mention, that he’s already noticed the hoodie seemed looser on Jacob’s tall frame. Lucas didn’t want his mind to go to that bad place with his brother at all, but given the lack of quality time he had to spend with Jacob lately, he had to trust that everything was fine.
Especially when Jacob said so.
“Now, you sound like Mom,” his brother muttered.
Not fucking likely.
“Get real. Mom was too drunk to care if you had something warm to wear.”
That was their nanny’s job.
The drinking got worse for their mother after Jacob came along although, at the time, Lucas was too young to understand why. Back before he knew what sex was and how babies got made, he couldn’t put together why his mother’s stomach grew and grew into a balloon. Overnight, he became the caretaker for a little brother he didn’t even know existed until the day his parents brought the baby home. At least then, he finally had something to love him back.
“The sweater’s fine,” Jacob said after a minute of stillness between the two. “But seriously, bro, what crawled up your ass? It was like walking in on Dad for a sec—”
“Would you stop saying that?”
Jacob’s jaw snapped audibly shut.
A part of Lucas hated that Jacob might be right—it got under his skin to have people constantly compare him to his father. More than anyone else in the world, Jacob knew it, too. Lucas considered bringing the conversation back to what currently concerned him about his brother, but he stopped himself. His defence against Jacob’s comments didn’t have to be to look for something equally bad or worse in his brother to point out.
That was the type of shit their dad would do.
Really, Lucas didn’t mean to be so harsh. “Sorry,” he muttered fast, “but you can’t holler and swear down the hall when people are trying to work here, Jacob. People are working—they’re making calls and doing meetings.”
He gestured at the triangle base for his phone in the middle of the desk. “I was on a damn call!”
His brother had the nerve to look sheepish. “My bad?”
The problem with having a brother who didn’t have a lot of responsibilities or expectations was that he also had yet to grow up. In a lot of ways. Lucas had a bad habit of excusing Jacob’s shortcomings because of his biases. He knew the reasons why Jacob was the way he was—flighty and indifferent, and so he tried to give Jacob grace.
Sometimes, to his detriment.
Giving his brother grace didn’t change the fact that they had already had quite a few hard years together. By Jacob’s own actions, too.
Jacob had yet to find something he cared about except for his dog, a Mastiff rescue named Purdy that had passed from age-related illness a few months ago, his truck, and the quad on the back. Even the three-year degree in business had been stretched out for another two because his brother found too many other things to do except go to school. Before changing his direction in the last year to something else entirely. A bachelor’s in exercise science.
Truly, that was a better fit for Jacob.
“It was just the head office for the call center in Freddy, but still,” Lucas tacked on a little sharper at the end, “just think when you walk in here, all right? It’s not a place to party.”
Jacob grinned in the direction of the windows overlooking the factory line below. “Actually, there’s enough liquor in this building for the whole city to have a party.”
“That’ll never happen, and aren’t you the one who says sober means sober?”
“Fun sucker,” Jacob bitched under his breath.
Lucas wished that was his problem. “Tired, is more like it, man.”
He flattened his palms over his face, scrubbing hard to get a bit of blood flowing. Trips to Freddy every other week for a day here and there to be on hand for the recent management changes implemented at the head office for the call center left Lucas exhausted. He took the company helicopter back and forth because he wasn’t built for long car drives on dark highways that seemed to stretch on endlessly.
He also wasn’t sleeping in his bed as much as he would like. The bigger issue in his life. The real one.
“You need to relax a bit,” Jacob said, his brows rising high like they did whenever he had a bright idea. “Oh, like go out with me this weekend—and by go out, I mean meet me at the gym where we can put on helmets and gloves and beat the hell out of each other.”
Lucas chuckled, former memories of doing just that with Jacob over the past few years filling his mind. Those moments between the two almost always led into deep conversations about their lives and circumstances; or to confessions they might not have shared with anyone else.
“We never do that anymore, you know?” Jacob asked quieter.
“This weekend isn’t great for me.” Lucas blinked through his fingers. “I have the mayor’s dinner and ball this weekend. You wanna go to that?”
A charity event thrown every winter.
A cringe pulled at Jacob’s face. “Nobody wants to go to that, bro.”
“Dad does. He’s making me go, too.”
And would likely ignore his oldest son all night, as well.
Lucas couldn’t wait.
He got two and a half weeks of silence from him father, and had been stupidly hoping for longer. He should have known better.
Ronald continued to find interesting ways to punish his adult sons despite the men making every effort to give him distance and silence. Work and handling his father’s responsibilities—without the actual title on his desk that he deserved—for the brewery made that harder for Lucas, obviously. Things had gotten more tense over the last twelve or so months.
He honestly believed that was because his father had started to face his harsh, stark reality. The loneliness awaiting him in his coming years. All the effort he put into making everyone else around him miserable had finally started catching up to the bastard.
Lucas wished he cared less than he did.
Ronald wasn’t even worthy of that.
“I hear Mom’s back in the area,” Jacob noted.
“Living somewhere in Rothesay with her new husband,” Lucas confirmed.
A realtor with whom she’d been having an affair for the last decade or more. Not even Dalton money and all the bubbly in the world had been enough to make Penelope stay when Ronald finally stopped pretending like he wanted her.
It was a messy thing … their family.
“Are you gonna meet up with her? They’ve been down in Florida since last winter, right?” Jacob questioned.
Lucas did his best to act busy with the papers on his desk, before shuffling them into a drawer where they didn’t belong. Anything to drag out how long it took him to answer that question. “She did stop drinking.”
Jacob sighed loudly. “Yeah, so she says.”
“There was a time when she was a decent mom,” Lucas added.
A hard scoff echoed. “When?”
Lucas would never be the bastard to tell his brother the truth: before you.
“I don’t really want to see her,” Lucas said, needing to get the two away from dangerous waters. “But I might if she reaches out and asks. What would it hurt?”
“A lot,” Jacob answered immediately, “she’s like an emotional leech, Lucas. She sucks the good right out of you.”
All of them, really.
With parents like theirs, the two didn’t have a chance at making emotional connections outside of their close circles. It contributed a lot to their close bond and guarded nature.
“If you do see her,” Jacob said, taking one of the two leather bucket chairs across from Lucas’ desk as a seat, “don’t even hint that I want to speak to her.”
“I won’t.”
An easy task, really.
Their mother rarely asked about her youngest son. As if they needed more proof about her missing maternal instinct.
Jacob huffed a hard breath, shoved his sunglasses high on his head, and then glared at a spot on the one that had once held a portrait of their parents. One of the few things Ronald did take.
“Just talkin’ about them drains the good out of ya,” Jacob said sadly.
“That’s the truth.”
Sometimes, they just needed to hear someone else say this shit they experienced was fucked up. Children didn’t need a lot to grow up into decent human beings, and money counted for practically nothing when a home had no love.
Jacob cleared his throat, and his familiar dark gaze swung back to Lucas with less emotion than before after he dropped the aviators back down on his face. “How was Freddy this week?”
“Busy. It’s settled now, though. I’ll go back in six weeks for a check and to do a run through with the new people, but …” Lucas trailed off with a shrug. “I’m back home for a while.”
While their main home office for the brewery remained in Saint John, the seaport city of New Brunswick situated on the Bay of Fundy, the call center for everything from their distribution lines to truckers had been relocated two hours away just outside of Fredericton. The relocation was new because the growth of the company demanded it in the last decade. What had started as a small enterprise for his great-great grandfather turned into an empire for his family.
An empire Lucas had started to hate.
Resentment could do that to a person.
Lucas didn’t want Jacob to ever feel the way he did, and perhaps if the young man found a place to focus his energy and passions, he wouldn’t. On the other hand, Lucas would always be stuck right here.
“So … that’s a hard no for this weekend?” Jacob asked, his shaggy brunette hair a far cry from the short cut that his older brother kept trimmed neat.
Jacob never had to listen to Ronald bitch about it.
“Yeah, that’s a hard no,” Lucas replied. “Sorry, man.”
Jacob shrugged and lumbered out of the chair to stand at his towering six-and-a-half-foot height. The age difference meant nothing when the two brothers stood toe to toe and looked one another in the eye. Not once had they come to blows despite sometimes coming close.
“We can figure out another time,” his brother said, but he didn’t sound particularly happy about it. “Do you have a date for the weekend thing, at least?”
Instantly, a black-haired, hazel-eyed pretty face flooded Lucas’ mind before he could stuff the memory of Delaney’s sweet smile away. Her reflection seemed to haunt him every time he looked in a mirror as if she was going to suddenly turn up behind him to say hello. It was a joke how fast she came to his mind first considering he didn’t even have the woman’s number to call her at all let alone ask for a date to a formal event that was sure to be stuffy and boring. He blamed his incessant thoughts of her on the fact that she’d been on his mind from the moment he left that walk-in salon in Freddy without knowing if she was okay.
“Well?” Jacob demanded, still waiting for an answer. The hopeful note to his question was about to get deflated faster than the birthday balloons the two brothers never had year after year.
“No on a date, too,” Lucas admitted. “Frankly, I wouldn’t punish a woman with a night alongside Dad and his friends, so …”
“Fair enough, but aren’t you tired of this yet?”
Lucas didn’t understand. “I’m tired of a lot of things, man.”
“Clearly not, you’re still here. Doing what he can’t be bothered to, Luke. I mean, it’s up to you if you want to work yourself dead in this stuffy fucking office that smells like Dad,” Jacob said, cutting across the floor for the door.
