“Hold on,” Grady answered gravely, leaving briefly and coming back with a bottle of beer. He screwed off the top and handed it to Dante. “It’s not exactly the healthiest thing for you to have right now, but I doubt it will do much harm.”
Tossing his head back, Dante took a gulp of the cold liquid, letting it slide down his throat, suddenly questioning the intelligence of doing so. The taste brought back a flood of memories, all of them about the many times over the years that he and Patrick had hung out together having a beer. He finished it quickly as Grady watched him pensively, handing the empty bottle back to his brother after he drained it. “Thanks.”
Grady took the bottle from Dante’s hand with an uneasy scowl. “Are you okay?” he asked again in a husky voice. “I know your wounds hurt like hell, but they’ll heal. That’s not what I’m asking. I need to know if you’re okay.”
Dante stared at his older brother, the concern on Grady’s face nearly breaking him. Although the Sinclair siblings had all scattered to different areas of the country after they’d left their hellish childhood and adolescence behind, the affection they all had for each other had never died. They might only get together on rare occasions, but they all still cared. He had seen it in every one of his siblings’ eyes at the hospital.
The anxiety and distress that was lodged deeply in Grady’s gray eyes finally made Dante admit for the first time, “No. I don’t think I am.”
Patrick was dead. Dante wished he had died in his place. His body was racked with pain, and everything inside him was cold and dark.
Right at that moment, as his anguished eyes locked with his older brother’s, Dante wasn’t sure he would ever be okay again.
CHAPTER 2
“Did you read my column today?”
Dr. Sarah Baxter bit her lip to keep from smiling as she looked at her elderly female patient, still sitting on an exam table after a routine visit. Elsie Renfrew was eccentric, but she was also a member of the Amesport City Council, and the biggest gossip in town, so she was far from demented. Sarah had grown very fond of the older woman, but she knew just how wily she actually was, and that Elsie knew the personal business of almost every resident in Amesport. Most people in town called her Elsie the Informer, but Mrs. Renfrew had enough power and clout locally that nobody would dare mention that moniker to the venerable woman face-to-face. Sarah rather admired the older woman’s spunk, but she found herself constantly and carefully monitoring anything she said to the chirpy, inquisitive woman. Even a casual comment about another Amesport resident was likely to end up in Elsie’s What’s Happening in Amesport column of the Amesport Herald if there was even a hint of juicy information. Sarah might admire the fact that her patient was over the age of eighty and still so active in the community, but she’d also readily admit that Mrs. Renfrew terrified the hell out of her sometimes. Just the slightest slip and the seemingly sweet woman would twist the information around and make it the subject of town gossip. Not that Elsie was mean-spirited. She just felt it was her duty to report any news in Amesport since her roots in the area went back to the time the town was founded.
“No, Mrs. Renfrew, I haven’t had a chance to read the paper today.” Sarah knew she was blatantly lying, but she quickly justified that fibbing was better than the possible alternative. She’d read the newspaper this morning at breakfast, including Elsie’s article titled “Another Sinclair Hottie Returns to Amesport Wounded.” If there was one thing Sarah definitely didn’t want Mrs. Renfrew to know, it was that she knew way more about that situation than anyone else in town—except for the so-called rich hottie’s family.
“Now, honey, I told you to call me Elsie ages ago.” The tiny gray-haired woman patted Sarah on the arm and hopped nimbly to the ground, her sneakers absorbing most of the impact. Amazingly, Elsie still looked elegant, even though she was dressed in white sneakers and a red sweat suit.
Sarah sighed as she snaked a hand out to catch the woman around her upper arm to make sure she was steady. She still wasn’t used to the informality around the friendly coastal town of Amesport. “You did tell me that. I’m sorry, Elsie.” Even after nearly a year of practicing here, Sarah still had a hard time calling her patients by their first names if they requested it, and had realized that she actually got to know them well enough that every one of her patients preferred it.
She’d done her residency in internal medicine and first year of practice in Chicago, rarely seeing a patient for very long before moving on to the next one. Her focus had been on hospitalized patients, so she’d rarely had a chance to get to know any of them personally, except for a few who required extensive hospitalization.
Sarah shuddered, a reaction she had every time she thought about even entering a hospital now.