Chapter Six
Belle
Beau Jones had a right to his bad attitude, since he was the one who’d been wronged, so Belle overlooked it. How well he cleaned up wasn’t as easy to ignore.
A worn, baggy sweatshirt with Guitar Players Fret on the front, and butt-molding jeans, suited a low-key but successful musician.
Shaggy blond hair, damp from his shower, parted above blue eyes that defaulted to a natural smile.
Formerly straight nose, marred by a slight bend and a pale scar at the bridge, that added interest. Square, solid jaw.
High cheekbones. Full-lipped mouth. Features that lined up in equal proportions on both sides of his face to make him a photographer’s dream.
Or they might if it weren’t for the scrape on his forehead and the ugly bruising that had started to spread. Belle focused on those. Being a doctor was easier than being a woman. And better than being a kidnapper by far.
“Dinner will be along shortly. But first, I need to tape up that ankle,” she said. “Then you can eat.”
He’d skipped socks and shoes for obvious reasons. The ankle in question was shiny and purple, and not in a good way, although she remained confident it wasn’t broken or otherwise too seriously damaged. He had a good range of motion.
She’d brought bandages and clips from the clinic downstairs, and he sat on the edge of the bed while she worked. A quick check said his eyes, an amazing shade of sky blue, seemed normal enough, although continuing to rest them would do him good.
“I liked the song you were singing,” she said, mostly to make conversation, because kneeling at his feet and touching him felt more awkward than it should. “But isn’t singing like that, and making those sounds, hard on your vocal cords?”
He swiped his hair from his eyes with a flick of his fingers. “Short answer, Doctor Belle? Yes. But I was classically trained until I was fourteen. That’s when I discovered heavy metal. You’re taught to rely on your diaphragm and how to push air. Shifting to falsetto helps protect your cords, too.”
A classically trained country singer who liked heavy metal.
Belle, for her part, couldn’t carry a tune.
She’d enjoyed the Monday and Tuesday night gatherings when Burning Scrub’s residents met up at the town hall and watched Diss Cord on the big-screen TV, but for the social aspect, not the entertainment.
She didn’t like the show’s premise. It was too mean.
She’d watched the finale, of course. By then Beau had caught her attention.
She hadn’t, however, paid a whole lot of attention to his performance.
“Why didn’t you sing like that during the competition?” she asked.
“The coaches and the network didn’t want anyone else thinking they’d needed to try it to compete with me and run the risk of damaging themselves. We were going to pull it out for the finale, but by then my coach and I were confident that I could win without it.”
He stated it with no hint of ego. She wondered what it must be like to go through life with that level of confidence—although he’d won, so his confidence hadn’t been misplaced.
“What made you switch to country music?”
“My agent.”
The terse response held enough heat to make her think there was more to the story. “Your agent sounds like he knows what he’s doing. You’ve been pretty successful.”
“That same agent is the reason I’m here.”
She felt the tension in the calf muscles under her hand.
Heard the undercurrent of bitterness in an otherwise light tone.
Her heart tweaked with sympathy. She loved being a doctor.
He clearly loved music. And they both found themselves caught up in a situation that didn’t entirely align with their ambitions. She wasn’t a kidnapper by choice.
She tried to steer the conversation in a more positive direction. “What would you rather be singing?”
“I was into heavy rock before I auditioned, but it’s hard to break into. Plus, I’d need a band, and at the time, all I had was me and my guitar. I was busking in subways.”
“Why can’t you perform both? Rock and country?”
“Because the market for heavy rock country is pretty niche, and I like to eat.”
He was laughing at her, but she didn’t mind because it was better than anger. She hated conflict. It made her palms sweaty.
And she did love his smile. “There’s no such thing as heavy metal country. You’re making that up.”
“I swear I’m not.” He crossed his heart. “But it’s not for me. I’m a singer. I play the guitar and a little piano. I don’t have any live backup, and I can’t bring myself to resort to the computers and synthesizers that are a big part of country metal.”
“You’re a household name now. You should have no trouble putting a band together if that’s what you want.”
“Mm,” he said.
Her face heated up. She’d pointed out the obvious to a professional musician. She ducked her head and returned to her task.
Someone knocked on the front door as she finished wrapping his ankle.
“That will be dinner,” she said.
Belle’s kitchen was true to the period, meaning she had no clue how to use it. She’d taken one look at the icebox, imagined the overgrowth of bacteria, then taken Pearl up on her offer that she eat her meals with them.
Tonight, however, she and her patient were under quarantine, and since the Lovetts were overseeing the church potluck, they’d offered to drop dinner off.
She found Jayce outside her front door instead. He carried a battered red toolbox and wore a bright smile. Did he ever get tired of being upbeat? If so, she hadn’t seen any signs.
“I’m here to install a lock on your bedroom door,” he said.
A lock might be nice for privacy’s sake. Except no one had asked if she wanted one. Four hundred thousand dollars might have bought the town her professional skills, but her personal life remained hers. Didn’t it?
“Sorry, we’re under quarantine until further notice. No one’s allowed in.”
“I am. Adam and I have been exposed to the avian flu, so we’re under quarantine, too.” Jayce winked at her as if they were in on a shared joke. “The dead bolt was Benny’s idea. He wants you to feel safe with a strange man in your house.”
She doubted if the idea had been Benny’s, but no matter. A lock on her bedroom door should be a nonissue. And it might have been, if she wasn’t detecting a pattern with Jayce that involved territorial rights. She was not property.
“First door on the left at the top of the stairs,” she said.
Jayce trundled past her with toolbox in hand. She imagined taking that toolbox from him and tossing it out the front door, with him right behind it. There was no harm in plotting. Acting on it, however, was where things went wrong.
The door was still open, and as she was about to close it, she caught sight of Grady Lovett approaching. He hauled a child’s wooden wagon behind him.
Grady was a living, breathing throwback to the 1960s era when communes were in vogue.
He was tall and thin, with thick, shaggy brown hair, and round, wire-framed spectacles that magnified absent-minded brown eyes.
He wore a white linen shirt with long sleeves and baggy brown woolen trousers as if he’d been born when these mountains were settled and not a mere thirty years from the present.
He reminded Belle of her father when she was a little girl.
The wagon rattled to a stop at the foot of her steps.
“Hey, Belle,” Grady said. “Heads-up. A Chinese diplomat is flying in for the weekend and he’s bringing his wife. Her great-grandfather’s younger brother worked on the transcontinental railroad, and he wants to give her a taste of what his life would have been like.”
Belle had taken a few American history courses as an undergrad, and of the three Burning Scrub events she’d participated in, not one had shown up in her textbooks. Fortunately, most of Burning Scrub’s clients weren’t interested in real history. They wanted a fantasy experience.
“What did he ask for?”
“Not much. Two days of fishing and hiking. Two nights of glamping. A diet of rice, lake trout, and tea—I can fancy those up easy enough.” Not much bothered Grady. “All he really wants is for his wife to have a few nights under the stars, seeing what her great-uncle might have seen.”
In other words, his wife wanted to learn about the magic—the hopes and the dreams—that had brought her ancestor here.
She didn’t want to hear about the cold nights, the rain and the snow, and the poor working conditions he most likely endured.
Or the explosions. The landslides. The racism …
because who would pay good money for that?
Grady handed her a small crockpot of piping-hot stew and another basket of bread. An apple pie peeked out from beneath it. “How’s our guest doing?”
“I’m cautiously optimistic he’ll make a full recovery.”
Kind brown eyes sympathized with her plight.
“Hang in there, Belle. It’s only for a few days, just until he settles in and is mobile again.
Adam has plenty of ideas lined up for his two months of training, and he’s off to buy safety stirrups so he can give him riding lessons this weekend.
” Safety stirrups would break away if Beau fell and help protect his bad ankle.
“Pearl’s altering some clothing for him.
Benny wants him out of the way while the diplomat and his wife are here,” Grady added.
She could see how the presence of an Asian couple in a former ghost town in the Montana mountains without any context might confuse him. Or how his tale of a kidnapping might concern them if they somehow crossed paths.
Grady departed, and she took the pot and the basket inside to the kitchen.
Upstairs, she could hear Jayce moving about, rattling tools as he worked on her door.
The two men were talking but she couldn’t make out any words.
She imagined what Beau must think about her sudden need for a lock on her bedroom door and her face heated up.