At times they seemed to be the only thing father and son shared.

“You want to watch that mouth of yours, boy.”

“Ever think about watching yours?” Brody felt the band tightening around his head. A temper headache. A Bob O’Connell headache.

Bob tossed down his wrench, got to his feet. He was a big man, but had never run to fat. Even at sixty he was mostly muscle and grit. “When you got the years I got of living and working in the trade, you can say your piece as you please.”

“Really.” Brody muscled another sheet of drywall onto the sawhorses, marked his measuring cuts. “You’ve been saying the same damn thing to me since I was eight. I’d say I’ve got enough years behind me by now. This is my job—sited, designed, bid and contracted. It goes the way I say it goes.”

He picked up his scoring knife, lifted his gaze to meet his father’s. “The client gets what the client wants. And as long as she’s satisfied there’s nothing to discuss.”

“From what I hear you’re doing a lot more than satisfying your client on the job.”

He hadn’t meant to say that. Holy God, he hadn’t meant to say that. But the words were out. Damn it, the boy always riled him so.

Brody’s hand clenched on the knife. For a moment, too long a moment, he wanted to punch his fist into that hard, unyielding face. “What’s between me and Kate Kimball is my business.”

“I live in this town, too, and so does your ma. People talk about my blood, it washes over on me. You got a kid to raise, and no business running around with some fancy woman stirring gossip.”

“Don’t you bring Jack into this. Don’t bring my son into this.”

“Jack’s my kin, too. Nothing’s going to change that. You kept him down in the city all that time so you could do your running around and God knows, but you’re here now. My home. I’m not having you shame me and that boy in my own front yard.”

Running around, Brody thought. To doctors, hospitals, specialists. Then running around, trying to outrace your own grief and do what was right for a motherless two-year-old.

“You don’t know anything about me. What I’ve done, what I do. What I am.” Determined to hold his temper, he began to score the drywall along his mark. “But you’ve sure always managed to find the worst of it and rub it in my face.”

“If I’d’ve rubbed it harder, maybe you wouldn’t be raising a kid without his ma.”

Brody’s hand jerked on the knife, bore down and sliced it over his own hand.

Bob let out an oath over the bright gush of blood and grabbed for his bandanna. His shocked concern came out in hot disapproval. “Don’t you know better’n to watch what you’re doing with tools?”

“Get the hell away from me.” Clamping a hand over the gash, Brody stepped back. He couldn’t trust himself now. Wasn’t sure what he might do. “Get your tools and get off my job.”