Rockstar Baby (Crescent Cove 6)

“Son.” He didn’t ask me what I was doing here, or why I hadn’t called to warn them, just thundered down the stairs and pulled me into another bone-crushing hug. “You’re too thin.”

I had to laugh as we eased apart. “Is there a script?”

“No, we have eyes. You look good otherwise. Tired,” my mum declared after another inspection. “And you need a haircut. Don’t you have a barber in California?”

The way she pronounced it always made me smile. To her, LA might as well have been located on the sun. “I do. Haven’t had a chance to visit one recently.”

“Or eat.” My mum shook her head and waved me down the hall to the kitchen. “I just made lunch. You’re in luck.”

“You don’t have to go to any trouble—”

“It’s no trouble, boy. Didn’t you hear her say she just finished making lunch?” My father dropped his beefy arm around my shoulders. “Besides, it’s not often our oldest boy comes around. How long’s it been?

“Not more than a year.”

“Don’t lie to your father,” my mum admonished as she moved to the little stove and ladled out big stoneware bowls of soup. “Closer to two.”

“I think three. Maureen wasn’t even seeing Kevin then and she’s already pregnant with their first.”

“What? Maureen’s pregnant? She didn’t call me.” I scrubbed a hand over my face and tried to cut through the cobwebs enough to remember. Had she? I wasn’t the best at returning non-work calls. “I don’t think.”

“She called you. Six times.”

“No. That can’t be so.”

“She has the call log to prove it. She showed it to your mum.” My da jerked his thumb at my mother, and I hurried to help her with the bowls of stew. The smell of the rich, meaty soup made my stomach growl.

“I don’t think it was six,” I muttered as I carted them one by one to the cozy round table set by the windows. A sprig of yellow flowers sat in the middle of it, cheery and quaint.

“It surely was. It would’ve been more if she didn’t know better than to waste her coins on transatlantic calls you wouldn’t take.”

“I would’ve taken it had I known, but I was working—”

“You can’t take it with you. All your money and your gold records and your fancy house won’t keep you out of the grave.”

“Padraig,” my mum snapped. “Can you let the boy alone for an hour before you start in on him?”

“Start? I’ve been saying the same things since he flew out of here. Barely a man and gone to a country where he knew no one. Didn’t want his roots. Had no use for them. Now you’re back at our door.” He sat down heavily at the table and stabbed his spoon into his stew, splashing it. “Being happy to see him doesn’t change the fact I still have half a mind to paddle his behind.”

This was why I came home so readily. Five minutes in and threats of violence ensued.

And I hadn’t even had lunch yet.

I accepted the loaf of fresh bread my mother offered, but I didn’t sit. I couldn’t. “What would you have me do then? Stay here and beat my clothes on a rock and grow a vegetable garden?”

The quick flush in my mum’s cheeks made me rue the words. Yes, she did those things. Not out of necessity, but because they made sense to her. Air-dried clothes were so much nicer than those from the dryer. Homegrown vegetables tasted better in her stew.

When I stopped ranting long enough to taste it, I had to agree.

“You have talents we don’t. There’s a reason the world listens to you. You have something to say. Now sit if you’re going to eat my stew.”

I sat. And I ate like a starving man.

The next time I looked up, my mum was watching me from the other side of the table. I hadn’t even noticed her take a seat. I’d been too busy inhaling her stew and swallowing her glorious brown bread nearly whole.

“Padraig, go fish.”

My father’s head snapped up. Like me, he’d sucked down his stew and was breaking off another piece of bread. “Pardon?”