Maybe it was because J.D. had always been competitive to the point of being considered cutthroat. Maybe it was because he’d always vied with his brother for his family’s attention. Maybe he just hadn’t liked being second-born. The fact that Philip had been a screw-up made it worse.

When Philip had dumped his first wife and kids, J.D. had been furious. He’d nearly beaten the living tar out of Philip, for all the good it had done. In J.D.’s opinion, Philip had failed his wife and kids by getting involved with another woman, and then he’d started to gamble more than he should. It was as if he’d given up all sense of responsibility and jumped feetfirst into a raging mid-life crisis. As soon as his divorce was final, Philip had moved on from that woman and zeroed in on Tiffany, who, in J.D.’s opinion, was far too young and naive for his older brother.

His family considered her a gold digger, and maybe she had been, but she’d stuck by Philip, given him another couple of kids, and, to J.D.’s knowledge, had never run around on his brother.

And J.D. had wanted her.

From the get-go.

Badly.

“Forget it,” he snorted, as he heard Stephen tuning up his guitar. Discordant music rose from the room below. Tapping the edges of his real-estate reports on the table, J.D. stuffed them into his briefcase where he spied the deed to the house. Now, there was a problem. One he couldn’t solve. His father owned most of the place. It was J.D.’s unenviable job to determine if the apartment house Tiffany ran and called home was worth the time and effort of keeping it. The old man didn’t necessarily want to cut the mother of his grandchildren out of what was rightfully hers, he just wanted to know if the property was a viable investment. It was Carlo’s contention that Tiffany and the kids could live closer to the family in a more comfortable home. As Carlo was estranged from the grandchildren from Philip’s first marriage and it didn’t seem that J.D. would ever have children, the old man was deeply interested in Stephen and Christina.

But he didn’t give a damn about Tiffany. He’d made that clear on more than one occasion.

Rubbing the area of his thigh that still bothered him, J.D. decided to call it a night. It was after ten and he was beat.

He gulped the last of his coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The thrum of guitar chords had stopped and the house was quiet. He went to the window and stared through the clear panes.