Ian studied the medallion. “Maybe this is a clue, too. It’s in some kind of different language.”

“Maybe it’s Irish,” Dec suggested.

Ian gave him a shove. “Jaysus, Dec, you are a smart lad.”

“We need to keep this a secret,” Dec said. “We can’t tell anyone, not even Nana.” Dec wrapped the medallion around the paper and tucked it back into its hiding spot. “We’ll come back later to study it.”

They all crawled down from the haymow. Ian slipped his arm around Marcus’s shoulders as they walked to the door. Marcus leaned into him, desperate for any reassurance that he still had a family.

“You’re a clever lad, Marky,” Ian said.

Marcus smiled. “If I were to ask Nana real nice, I bet she’d take us to see Aliens.”

Ian chuckled, and Dec reached out to ruffle Marcus’s hair. “Now there’s an idea,” Ian said. “Pretty damn smart for a seven-year-old.”

“Eight,” Marcus corrected.

“Yeah, right,” Ian replied. “I guess you’re a big guy now. Just like us.”

A wide grin broke across Marcus’s face. They were brothers and no matter what happened along the way, that would never change. Maybe now that he was eight, they would forget that he was the baby of the family. “I’m smart enough to know a treasure map when I see one,” he said.

“That you are, Marky,” his brothers said. “That you are.”

1

“DO YOU EVER WONDER whether they’re worth it? Women, I mean.”

Marcus Quinn glanced up from the bucket of varnish he was stirring to see a gloomy expression cloud his brother Ian’s face. “I don’t know,” he replied with a slight shrug.

“I guess I can’t imagine what it would be like without them,” Ian said. “They’re nice to look at and they smell good. And sex…well, sex wouldn’t be the same without them.” He sank back into the battered couch, staring at his beer bottle as he scraped at the label with his thumbnail. “It just seems like it never gets anywhere. I remember the first girl I kissed like it was yesterday. And since then my life has gone straight to hell. You can’t do with ’em and you can’t do without ’em.”

A chuckle echoed in the stillness of the boathouse, and they both looked over at Declan, who sat amidst the awls and chisels on Marcus’s workbench, his legs dangling. “I remember that day. You looked like you were about to lose your lunch all over her shoes.”

“You weren’t even there,” Ian challenged.

“I was,” Dec replied. “Me and my mates used to watch you guys all the time. We were trying to pick up tips. The older lads were so smooth with the ladies. Except you, of course.”

“Hell, you get French kissed when you’re twelve years old and see if you can handle the shock,” Ian snapped back.

Dec jumped down from the workbench and tossed his empty beer bottle in the rubbish, then strolled to the small refrigerator in the corner to fetch another. “She was a flah little scrubber all right,” he said, thickening the Irish accent that still colored the Quinn brothers’ voices. “By the time Alicia Dooley got around to you, she’d already kissed half the boys in your form at school. She even let a boy feel her up for a bag of crisps and a candy bar.”

Ian’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t.”

Dec twisted the cap from the beer and took a long swig. “I was supposed to refuse? She was thirteen. And she had the nicest knobs at St. Clement’s. I’d have been off my nut not to take advantage of a deal like that. Besides, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

Ian turned to Marcus, sending him an inquiring look, but Marcus shook his head. “Don’t look at me.”

“By the time Marky was old enough to have those thoughts, Alicia had got herself knocked up by Jimmy Farley and closed up her little schoolyard enterprise,” Dec explained.

A comfortable silence descended over the boathouse. The Friday-night ritual between Marcus and Ian and Declan had begun. Usually they’d meet for a few beers, sometimes at a pub, sometimes at Ian’s place in town and sometimes in the old boathouse at their father’s boatyard. They’d catch up with the week’s events, the talk centering on work or sports. But occasionally they talked about women.

Marcus grabbed the bucket of varnish and climbed the ladder he’d propped up against his newest project, a twenty-one-foot wooden-hulled sloop that had been commissioned by a Newport billionaire for his son’s sixteenth birthday. He’d been designing and building boats for three years now, working out of the old boathouse and living upstairs in a loft that was half studio and half apartment.

“Considering the number of women we’ve collectively been with, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’d shared a few others,” Declan murmured.

“There’s a code among brothers,” Ian countered. “You just don’t mess with your brothers’ girls, current or ex.”

“You’re right,” Dec said. He crossed the room and held out his hand to Ian. “Sorry, bro. Won’t happen again. You’ve got my word.”

Marcus smiled to himself. The three Quinn brothers had formed an unshakable bond at an early age. After their mother’s illness had been diagnosed and they’d been shipped off to Ireland to live with their grandmother, they’d learned to depend upon each other. From the moment they’d arrived in Dublin, they’d been outsiders, wary Americans forced to live in a culture whose rules they didn’t understand.

And after they’d returned from Ireland, they’d become known as “those” Quinn boys, with their odd Irish accents and their independent ways, young men who could string curse words together like seasoned sailors and beat the stuffing out of men twice their size in a fistfight.

Ian had been eighteen when they’d returned and had immediately enrolled in college, anxious to get a start on his adult life. When he was accepted into the Providence Police Academy, he’d continued his education at night, graduating with a degree in criminal justice. Two years ago, he’d left the Providence PD and taken the job as police chief of their hometown, Bonnett Harbor, a picturesque Rhode Island village on the western shore of Narragansett Bay.

A year younger than Ian, Declan returned in time for his senior year in high school, bringing his grades up so he could apply to MIT. Four years of college, a knack for electronics and a stint with naval intelligence had paved the way for a job in corporate security. Declan’s security consulting firm was the favorite among corporate bigwigs and multimillionaires along the East Coast.

Marcus had made the most difficult transition. He’d spent the majority of his childhood on Irish soil, away from his parents from age five to fourteen. He’d come back to a country that was as foreign to him as Ireland had been nine years before. School had been hell, and he’d avoided it whenever possible, retreating into solitude and avoiding close friendships. His brothers had been his only friends.

But his talent in art, especially carving and sculpture, had set him on an odd career path-first art school and then a few years working as a wood-carver with a boat-design firm in Boston. He’d been recruited as an instructor at a small school for boat restoration in Massachusetts. Now he ran his own show, doing commissioned wood carvings and building pretty wooden sloops based on vintage designs.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Dec suggested, flopping down next to Ian on the sofa and kicking his heels up on the battered crate that served as a coffee table.

Marcus glanced up from the cockpit combing he’d been varnishing. “I’m the only one doing any work here, unless you call drinking my beer and eating my food ‘work.’”

Dec grabbed the can of peanuts from Ian. “I was talking about women. We should take a break from women. You know, step back and try to gain a little perspective. We can’t see the feckin’ forest for the trees.”

“What are you saying?” Ian asked.

“He’s saying, in order to understand women, we should give up women,” Marcus translated.

Giving up women would be impossible for Ian. He lived on his charm, able to navigate the most difficult situations with ease. While Marcus had few friends, Ian knew everyone and they loved him. Dec, on the other hand, was more focused. He was the thinker in the family, the one guy who was driven by the need to succeed. Any challenge, whether it was in his professional or personal life, was met with unrelenting resolve.

“We should study them,” Declan suggested. “We’re three relatively clever guys. If we put our heads together, we should be able to figure women out. But you can’t figure them out while you’re sleeping with them, I know that. I’ve been sleeping with them for years and I’m no better off than I was the night I first did it.”

Ian nodded. “The more women I know, the less I understand them.”

Marcus rested his arms across the top of the ladder. “Maybe they’re not the problem. Maybe we are.”

“Speak for yourself,” Dec said. “I know what the hell I’m doing in the sack. No one’s ever complained.”

Marcus shook his head. “I mean with…relationships. Isn’t that what you’re talking about?”

“And what the hell would I do with a relationship?” Dec asked. “I don’t have time for that.”

Marcus chuckled. “I rest my case.”

“He’s right,” Ian said. “We want what everyone else wants. To get married. Start a life. Have a family. Look at our cousins, Uncle Seamus’s boys. There are six of them and they’re all married now.”

“So we’ve got issues,” Dec said defensively.

Ian straightened, as if offended by the comment. “What issues? If I had issues, I’d know about it.”

“Not necessarily,” Dec continued. “I once dated this psychology grad student, and after she heard about our childhood, she said it wasn’t any surprise that I had an attachment disorder. She was right, because after I listened to a few more hours of her psychobabble, I detached her from my life.”