But he damn straight couldn’t convince his brother to share Hope if James wouldn’t even look at him.
“Doc says I’m not very far along,” Beth said, digging into the meal she’d heated up. There were now a ton of casseroles in the freezer. Rachel Harper made a mean lasagna. How long had it been since a woman had cooked for him? Ally hadn’t even wanted to order takeout. She’d been dedicated to keeping herself as slender as possible, even going so far as to nag him about his weight because he wasn’t being supportive.
Hope didn’t seem to have the same problem. She took a healthy portion of lasagna. “I don’t know how much I’d trust Doc. He’s amazing if you get shot and need emergency field surgery. Don’t laugh, James. You know it comes up more than you would think.”
James smiled her way. “I wasn’t arguing with you. I totally agree. Bliss should be declared a hazard zone. Doc’s had to stitch up Alexei more than once. And he saved Logan’s life a few weeks back.”
“What the hell?” Noah felt like he’d been dropped onto a different planet. “What’s going on? Bliss has never been violent.”
James finally looked his way. “You’ve forgotten a lot of our childhood then. What about the time when Marie shot Teeny’s ex-husband after he tried to kidnap Logan? Or the bank robbers who tried to hide out on Mel’s land and found themselves taken out one by one?”
Yeah, maybe it hadn’t been the bastion of safety and peace he remembered it to be. “Or the bear who tried to mate with old Hiram. Hi did not take kindly to his near molestation. Does he still have that bear’s head over his mantle?”
James’s lips curved into a smile. “He still curses it every day. Says it’s part of his daily ritual. We should just be glad we have a people doc at all. Even if he can’t read a sonogram.”
Trev took a long drink of his coffee. “I’m grateful. I would be a little nervous knowing that something could go wrong with Beth or the baby and the nearest doc is thirty miles away.”
“The ski lodge has a nurse and a couple of guys who are trained paramedics,” Hope pointed out. “We’ve used them before.”
Beth grinned. “Are you talking about Ty? I met him in town a few days back when I was ordering some curtains.”
Hope flushed slightly, nodding. “God, that man is hot.”
“Who the hell is Ty?”
The question came out in stereo. Noah looked at James, who had said the exact same thing at the exact same time Noah had.
Hope shrugged, a secret little smile on her face. “He’s just a guy from the ski lodge. He came down to the station house to meet Nate. Apparently he carries concealed and wanted to inform the sheriff and let him know he’s got all his documentation. I could have told him that Nate just expects everyone is carrying concealed. So Bliss hasn’t changed in all these years, huh?”
She’d turned to Noah, her big brown eyes pulling at him. He would do just about anything to keep her staring at him like that. “Apparently not. Although having a people doc makes a difference. Back when Jamie and I were growing up, we had to take care of ourselves.”
James groaned. “There’s a reason he’s a vet.”
“Hey, you’re still alive.”
“No thanks to you.” James shook his head, obviously lost in memory a bit. “When we were kids, we would stay out at the east cabin for weeks and weeks during the summer.”
Noah felt his face light up. He hadn’t been there in forever. “The Man Cave. No girls allowed.”
“Except for Callie.”
“Callie wasn’t a girl. She was a Callie, and if I recall the incident you’re discussing, she was just as responsible as I was.” It felt so good to talk to him. Noah had known he’d been lonely for a while, but sitting and talking to his brother, reminiscing, made him achingly aware of just how lonely he’d been. He’d been without family, without anyone who deeply understood the forces that had created him. He’d been utterly adrift without his roots. He so wanted his roots again. “We were lucky Mom let us go back out after that incident.”
“What happened?” Hope asked, leaning forward. That deep anxiety that had plagued her seemed to flee as she listened to them.
“Yeah,” Bo said eagerly. “I love a good ‘broken bones’ story.”
Trev’s eyes rolled, but even he seemed to want to hear the tale.
James put his fork down. “Our dads bought us this dirt bike when I was thirteen, and Noah had just turned twelve. You’ve got to understand. We come from an incredibly frugal family.”
“Two bikes would have been an extravagance.” Noah could still remember how he’d felt when he’d seen that shiny dirt bike.
James took up the story. “So we’re up in the Man Cave, had been for about a week. We kept in touch with our mom and dads with walkies, and the hands would check on us from time to time. Mom came up once, walked in and nearly gagged. She said the whole place smelled like feet. She never came back.”
They hadn’t exactly been concerned with cleanliness. “We were kids. We didn’t have discerning noses.”
“So I took the bike out,” James continued. “Max told me I couldn’t get the bike up the mountain.”
Bo laughed. “You tried to take a little dirt bike up that huge damn mountain?”
James’s smile spread across his face like the Cheshire cat’s grin. “Oh, I did. I got to the top. It was getting back down that proved troublesome.”
Noah let his head fall to his hand. “He got down that mountain a hell of a lot faster than he got up.”
His brother grimaced. “And the bike came down with me. I was torn up and bleeding. That mountain shaved off layers of skin, I tell you. It was awful.”
Hope gasped. “Is that why you have those scars on your chest?”
James winked her way. “It sure is. It’s why I have scars on my chest, back, shoulders. Everywhere. It took my Indiana Jones T-shirt, too. I loved that T-shirt. So I’m half-dead, but I manage to walk two miles back to the cabin, pushing that bike along. And would you like to know what my dear brother said as I walked in bleeding?”
“I ran to get you,” Noah said, knowing where James was going.
“He yelled, ‘What did you do to the bike!’ He grabbed the bike, and Callie had to come out and help me into the cabin. Asshole. Then he and Callie cleaned me up with alcohol and put gauze over all my wounds just so we wouldn’t have to go home. Well, you can imagine what happened.”
Noah winced. “He scabbed over the gauze. It was horrible. It really is why I became a vet. Dogs don’t howl the way Jamie did that day. Mel was there, luckily. He said the same thing had happened to him during an abduction. I guess the aliens aren’t any better at first aid than Callie and I were. He took Jamie back to his cabin, made him soak in a hot tub, and the gauze sloughed off. Mel was a pretty damn good medic.”
James laughed. “Hey, I didn’t get an infection, and no alien death rays have come for me.”
“Damn, I miss the Man Cave. I want to go up there.” Noah wanted to see it again. Maybe if he could touch that place that had meant so much to him, he could start to feel right again. It was why he’d come home. He wanted to find the boy he’d been so that maybe the man he was could start healing.
James’s face shut down, all his joy fleeing in an instant. The rest of the table got quiet.
“What?” Noah wasn’t sure what he’d said wrong.
“The east cabin burned down when a wildfire burned off near five thousand acres. I got scars from fighting that, too.” James went back to eating.