Gathering dignity, he lifted his chin. “So go on with you while I go about my work.”

“What have you done to yourself?”

“The devil cat caught me hand.” Forgetting his work, Shawn lifted a hand to scowl at the red gashes. “Oh, but I’ve plans for him, you can be sure of that.”

“At the moment, I’d lay odds on the cat. Do you know anything about putting fish cakes together?” Aidan asked Darcy.

“Not a bloody thing,” she said cheerfully.

“Then go and call Kathy Duffy, would you, and ask if she can spare us an hour or so, as we have an emergency.”

“An emergency?” Shawn looked glassily around. “Where?”

“Come with me, boy-o.”

“Where?” Shawn asked again, and Aidan hooked an arm around his waist.

“To pay the piper.”

“If you’re taking him upstairs,” Darcy called out as she reached for the phone, “I’ll thank you to clean up whatever mess is made during the sobering.”

“Just call Kathy Duffy and mind the bar.” Aidan took Shawn’s weight and dragged him upstairs.

“I can cook, drunk or sober,” Shawn insisted. “I don’t know what you’re in such a taking over. It’s just fucking fish cakes.” And he pressed a noisy kiss to Aidan’s cheek.

“You always were a cheerful drunk.”

“And why not?” Shawn hooked an arm around Aidan’s shoulder, stumbled. “My life’s in the toilet, and it looks better through the whiskey.”

Making sympathetic noises, Aidan half carried him into Darcy’s tidy little bathroom. “You had words with Brenna, did you?”

“No, but with everyone else in God’s creation. I spent the night making love to the woman I want to marry. I tell you, Aidan, it’s a different matter altogether being inside a woman when you love her. Who knew?”

Aidan considered the trouble of getting Shawn out of his clothes, and the mess that would be made if he didn’t. So he propped his brother against the wall. “Just hold this up for a bit,” he said.

“All right.” Obligingly, Shawn braced his weight against the wall. “She thinks it’s just sex, you know.”

“Aye, well . . .” Working as fast as he could, Aidan crouched to take off Shawn’s boots, which, he noted in disgust, had been tied into nasty little knots. “Women are the oddest of creatures.”

“I’ve always liked them myself. There’s so many varieties. But this is like having a lightning bolt smash right into my heart so it’s all hot and bright and shaky. I’m not letting her go, and that’s the end of it.”

“That’s the spirit.” He got the boots off, and the jeans, and working briskly as a man with experience in such matters, efficiently stripped his brother down to the skin.

Knowing what was to follow, he shrugged out of his own shirt and tugged off his pants. “In you go.”

“I can’t go anywhere. I’m naked. I’ll be arrested.”

“I’ll post your bond, not to worry.” And not without sympathy, Aidan turned the shower on full cold and shoved his beloved brother under the heartless spray.