Liam regarded his food with distaste. “You know Hump’s never accepted Vic. I don’t think he ever will after what he saw and heard when I fought with Athena that night.”
“It’ll get better, Li. Give it time. There’s no one who doesn’t meet Vic who doesn’t love him. Hump knows about Stone and accepts him, no?”
“He was too young to understand that, so no, he doesn’t know. Not really. Besides, the situations are completely different, Ric you know that. Hump accepting Stone is all Athena’s doing. She wouldn’t have stood for anyone not accepting Stone unless she wanted it that way. Humphrey would move a mountain if she asked him to. Just like he’ll hate his brother for as long as she tells him to.”
“So what’s your plan?” Nandi reared back in the wide, ladder-backed chair and folded his hands over his bulging stomach. “You going to have them work side by side until brotherly love triumphs?”
Liam shrugged. “Something like that. Sound naive?”
“No. Just parental. You want your children to get along.”
“It’s more than parental, Ric. I want to leave the business for my sons, but the business won’t have a chance if those at the helm are also at each other’s throats. Tesano won’t thrive being run by a bunch of judgemental hotheads.” Liam braced his elbows along either side of his barely touched plate of food and drew both hands through his hair. “Nothing good will come if hatred festers among them. I’d do better to leave it all to my firstborn grandson.”
Nandi laughed sharply and the gesture still held his words when he spoke. “You do realize your heaven-sent grandson will come by way of one of those judgemental hotheads, right?”
Liam held his head in his hands. “Pray for me, Nandi.”
Laughter resumed between the old friends.
***
“You should have told him.”
“The time wasn’t right. There was too much goin’ on in there. I wouldn’t have been heard.” Stone Tesano sat hunched over on the sofa, elbows braced to his knees. His expression was unreadable as he watched his hands rubbing one inside the other.
Zachary Billups nodded and yet his expression remained radiant. “At least you’re ahead of the game with your proposal. It’s all but complete.”
Stone drew a hand across his abundant dark waves. “It’s ambitious,” he sighed, resting back on the sofa, “and the expense...my dad might not go for it.”
“It’s not your father you have to convince, but your brothers.”
Stone regarded the other man who was one of Tesano’s newest and youngest shipping inspectors. A roar of quick humorless laughter ripped from Stone’s broad chest. “Good point, Zach. My proposal won’t even get to see the light of day if it depends on some of those fuckers.”
Zach chuckled. “Give ‘em the chance to prove you wrong, why don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Stone mopped his face in his hands. “I’ll have an easier time with mine than Pitch. Hump will never support anything he suggests.”
“He doesn’t even know what it is,” Zach marveled.
Stone’s vivid greens sparkled with resignation. “Doesn’t matter. It could be a guaranteed money maker and Hump would throw it on a chopping block.”
Zach looked horrified. “That’s insane.”
“That’s Humphrey.”
“But why?”
Again, Stone regarded the man occupying the armchair flanking the sofa. He and Zach had become fast friends the day Stone had joined his dad at the wharf for an inspection of the newest additions to the Tesano’s northeast fleet.
Much like everyone outside his family, Zach believed the Tesanos were the stuff of legend-rags to riches and all that bliss. Rubbish.
“Pitch has a different mother. She’s black.”
Zachary absorbed the news, nodding and smoothing a hand over square shaved jaw. “I heard that somewhere. Thought it was a rumor.”
Stone offered a slow shrug. “Well?”
“So Humphrey hates him based on that?”
Stone smiled sadly. “Such differences can’t be tolerated in the family.”
“The rest of you tolerate them.”
“That’s because the rest of us don’t listen to our mother’s rants- not all of us, anyway.” Stone thought of Vale then.
“That’s tough,” Zach said.
“And dangerous,” Stone put in. “Hump’s put the guy through sheer hell all our lives. Pitch lived with us a while when he was little. The hate...it was like my mother could’ve killed him. I don’t know if it was more about my dad playing around or that he played around with a black woman. Anyway, Pop didn’t dare leave Pitch home with Ma when he wasn’t there and he couldn't take us to where Pitch lived.”
Zach shook his head. “Why?”
Stone merely laughed. “Jeez, you’ve lived a fairytale life, friend. It would’ve been too weird. The kid had it almost as bad from the black side of his family.”
Zach hung his head and shook it again. “Would’ve been good if he could’ve hidden that part of himself.”
“Guess that depends on which side he hid. When he hid it and where.”
A sound caught the men's ears and they looked around to see Vale lurking in Zach’s office doorway.
