“And you’re wrong,” Noah interjected. He slid out of the passenger seat and held out a hand. His green eyes pierced through her. “I don’t care what you did. You must have had good reason.”
“You’re just not going to see it until I tell you.” Why did they have to make this harder? She knew what the outcome was, but they insisted on playing it out to the end.
Noah didn’t let her feet hit the ground. He put an arm under her knees and hauled her close. They seemed to like to carry her around. She gave in and put her arms around his neck, inhaling his clean, masculine scent. She wanted to kiss him, to feel his tongue against hers until he turned her toward his brother and it was James’s mouth on hers. She wanted that one moment when she was trapped between them, surrounded and coveted. Beloved.
One moment.
“Make love to me,” she said to Noah. She could have them together once before it was all over and she was alone again. She could make it last. She could hold on to it for as long as she needed to. Tomorrow she would go back to Atlanta and begin to make things right again.
“Oh, baby,” James said as Noah walked them up the porch steps. “We’re going to make love to you. All night long. I told Nate that unless it was an emergency, I better not see another goddamn Bronco coming up my drive. The Circle G is closed for the night to anyone who doesn’t live here.”
She relaxed slightly. She was safe here. No one could sneak up or in. She’d have one perfect night.
Butch walked in from the porch, his tail wagging. Hope looked down at the dog. She would miss the mutt.
Noah sat her on her feet and kissed her long and hard. When he pulled away, there was a soft smile on his face. “We’re going to show you what it means to be our woman tonight, darlin’.”
“Yes.” She wanted to experience it once.
“After you talk,” James said flatly, sitting down on the overstuffed sofa in the living room. He sat back and crossed one booted foot over his knee. “So talk.”
Noah joined him, their solidarity evident. Even Butch sat, thumping his tail as though waiting for something to begin.
“Now?” She didn’t want to talk now. She wanted to make love, and afterwards she would find the courage to completely kill the relationship with the truth. “Let’s go to bed, and we can talk in the morning.”
“Not on your life, darlin’.” Despite their differences in physical appearance, the brothers looked very much like each other as they sat on the couch staring at her. They both sported identical frowns of disapproval.
“Why? I thought you wanted to make love.” They didn’t want her?
“Get over it, baby. You know we want you. We’ve been fighting like two dogs over you, but all that stops here and now. This is the way it works. No more lies. And don’t give me crap about how you didn’t lie. You withheld some deeply important truths. Now, who is this asshole?” James wasn’t going to be moved.
Tears welled again. She pulled her sweater around her as though she could block them out.
“It won’t work, Hope,” Noah said, his voice a bit of honey in the gloom. “We’re not going anywhere. Tell us everything, and then we’ll take you to bed and make love to you until you believe us. This is your home now, here with me and Jamie. Nothing you say is going to change that.”
“I didn’t think you were naïve, Noah.”
“And I didn’t think you had so little faith,” he shot back.
“I did.” She said it with a humorless laugh, thinking back to the idiot girl she’d been. “I had a lot of faith, and it got me in so much trouble.”
“When did you meet him?” James asked.
Hope began to pace, her feet shuffling along the hardwood floors. She felt caged. She should have done this back in Bliss. “I ran away when I was almost seventeen. My mother and I had a terrible fight, and she told me to get out.”
“I doubt she meant that,” Noah said.
Hope shrugged. “Her boyfriend had hit on me. He’d scared me, but she didn’t want to hear it. She threw a fit and ordered me gone. I left that night with nothing but my backpack and a hundred and fifty dollars I had saved up from babysitting.”
“Did you go to your dad’s place?” Noah asked.
“My dad didn’t stick around after my mom told him she was pregnant.” Hope had a name, but not even a photo. She’d never tried to look him up. He wouldn’t welcome her, and she didn’t want to know if he’d ever settled down, if he had a couple of kids and was happy, if it was only her he hadn’t wanted. “Mom didn’t talk to her sisters, so I didn’t know them. I got on a bus and went to Atlanta. I was a dumb kid.”
She talked in a monotone about those first days. She’d found a motel and lied about her age. She’d tried to find work, but didn’t have the proper papers. She’d been alone and terrified and too stubborn to ask for help.
And then she’d met Elaine.
“Was she your age?” Noah asked.
“A little older.” She could still see Elaine with her henna-dyed hair and hippie clothes. Her laugh had been like a little wind blowing through Hope’s misery. When Elaine had walked in a room, everyone looked at her. “I met her right after I got kicked out of the motel. I had gone back to the bus station. I have no idea what I was thinking. I didn’t have the money for a ticket, but I was scared of everything. It seemed like a safer place to be than just walking the streets.”
“You were a child, baby. Of course you were scared.” James watched her, his eyes filled with compassion now that she’d started talking.
“Anyway, Elaine was meeting someone. Or she said she was. I know now that Christian recruited people at bus stops. I guess it makes sense. Desperate people take the bus. Not everyone, of course, but enough for him to get what he needed.”
“She recruited you?” Noah asked.
“Christian ran a small company called Nature’s Coalition. He had a small office in Atlanta that functioned as a charity, but he had bought a large tract of land outside Atlanta. There he had a farm that supposedly experimented with greener farming practices.”
“Con artist,” James said, shaking his head.
“Worse. He had about fifty people living on the farm. His family.” She winced because they were going to make the leap.
James laughed, the guffaw spitting out of his mouth. “You were in a cult?”
Noah smacked his brother. “This is serious.”
James held his hands out in an apologetic gesture. “I know. I know. I’m just trying to see Sister Hope. I mean, wow. I thought Mel was the only one who had been in a cult.”
Hope’s eyes widened.
Noah shrugged. “It was a long time ago. It was the Church of the Immaculate Abduction. Mel left when he found out they actually worshipped aliens. He thought they were a crack alien-fighting team. I’ve often wondered what the sixties were like for Mel.”
James slapped a hand on his knee. “We’re wrong. Teeny was a Hare Krishna for a while.”
Noah shook his head as though remembering a time. “Oh, and do you remember when Callie tried selling Amway? It was the same thing. And, hell, Nell is a cult in and of herself.”
“Don’t forget what Max used to call the Naturist Community,” James said with a laugh.
Both James and Noah spoke at the same time. “The Cult of the Overly Hairy Potbellied Penis.”
Hope took a deep breath, trying to find her patience. “I’m glad the two of you are having a nice trip down memory lane. It’s not the same.”
James stared at her, his laughter fleeing. “The point wasn’t that it was the same, but that we all try some crazy-ass stuff when we’re young. So this guy was all ‘save the earth, line my pockets,’ I take it?”
At least they understood that much. “Yes, but he was very believable.”