Sierra Rose, their dispatcher, PEAK team administrator, and all-around big sister. Although, he had to wonder if Sierra would be there, especially if Ian planned to show up. It seemed that the gulf between them had widened after the mysterious call from Esme Shaw, Ian’s missing niece, confirming she was still alive. Sierra seemed to think that Ian should heed his niece’s request not to look for her.
Ian never heeded anyone’s request. Maybe his billions of dollars told him he didn’t have to.
That’s what money did—made people belligerent. Stupid.
Reckless.
If the entire team was there, it also meant that Jess and Pete would be in the same room, playacting the too-bright courtesy between them. Gage still remembered the cryptic conversation with Pete from last summer, when Pete had asked Gage’s advice about women.
Or, as Gage deduced later, one woman.
“So, what if,” Pete had asked, “hypothetically—you had a friend who you liked, but you weren’t sure she liked you back—what would you do? Go for it?”
Gage had guessed, only after he advised Pete to go out with Tallie Kennedy—not their coworker, Jess Tagg—that Pete had wanted a different answer. Or rather, maybe Jess wanted a different answer, found out about Tallie, and put the kibosh on anything they had going between them.
Then again, maybe Pete had gone for it and . . .
Naw. Jess wasn’t the type of girl to be wooed by Pete Brooks and his lazy smile, that country-boy charm.
Whatever the case, spending the evening with his less-than-bonded team seemed only slightly better than watching reruns on Ty’s extra-large flat screen he’d purchased for their duplex. No, er, Ty’s duplex, one in which he so generously let Gage rent a room at a reduced cost.
Ty was ordering a couple large supreme pizzas, and Gage didn’t bother to remind him to keep off the mushrooms. He wasn’t hungry anyway.
He turned through the little town of Whitefish, past the quaint shops, then out to the highway, before looping back along Whitefish Lake to his parents’ home, one that the two doctors rarely spent time in.
They’d barely missed him when Gage started spending every hour on the slopes. Then again, they were probably thankful he wasn’t getting into trouble with “that crowd,” a group of people his orthopedic surgeon father had met plenty of. But Gage had never been on the slopes to party.
“Do something with your life. Make it matter.” Only, his dad had probably meant that he should follow in the family footsteps and go to medical school. Spend summers working with Doctors Without Borders or donating his hours in some small-town clinic.
Not becoming the poster boy for harrowing mountain runs.
“I’ll wait in the car,” Ty said as Gage pulled up to his parents’ home, a beautiful yet not ostentatious rambler set back under towering lodgepole pines overlooking the lake.
Gage nodded, got out, and headed through the garage inside.
“Ma?” He stood in the kitchen. Granite countertops, stainless steel, hardwood flooring, and the two-story attached great room that opened to a view of not only Whitefish Lake but also the glittering lights of Blackbear Mountain.
Gage turned away from it. Called again.
The silence had his gut clenching, and he headed for his mother’s office, located at the end of the hall in one of the former bedrooms and across from his own.
A light shone out from the bottom of the door, and he knocked.
“It’s open,” his mother said, and he pushed the door in to see her sitting at her desk, her laptop computer open, her reading glasses down on her nose. She’d freshly dyed her dark hair, washing away the white, and still wore her hospital administrator attire of a pair of soft wool pants and a cashmere sweater, looking every inch the award-winning neurosurgeon she’d once been.
Still could be, if she found the right case. But she’d seemed to lose her fire back when he’d returned home, defeat in his wake.
Now, she only took the most selective of cases, and aside from a few consults, she sat on the board of the hospital and tried to keep it in the black.
His gaze fell on a glass, mostly drained, of her daily cognac, and he hoped it was just the first.
She looked up from her work. “Gage,” she said, and he noticed a softening around the consonants. That, and her smile, not forced but a little wobbly. Nope, not her first glass.
“I was on the mountain. Sorry I missed your call—thought I’d check in on my way home.”
“So nice of you,” she said and pushed her chair away from the desk. “I wanted to ask you if you’d stop by the hospital.”
Gage’s eyes darted to a bottle of acetaminophen near the computer. Must have been a rough day fighting bureaucracy.