him long ago.
Frowning, she turned back to her daddy, who was watching her, his tightly pressed lips pulling downward. “Are you hurting?” she asked worriedly, forcing all thoughts of Logan Cooper from her mind.
“I’m thinking I should be asking you that question,” her daddy said.
She forced a smile. “I’m not the one lying in a hospital bed. Now stop worrying yourself over me.”
“No can do, honey,” he replied. “You’re my baby girl. It’s my job to worry over you.”
“Well, there isn’t anything to be concerned about,” she said, wondering if she was trying to convince her daddy or herself. Seeing Logan again, talking to him again, being so near to him, had left her thoroughly shaken. Pushing thoughts of him from her mind, she said, “And it’s my turn to worry about you. Not the other way around.” Standing, she reached out to dim the light over the hospital bed. “Now get some rest. We can talk more later.”
Jack nodded, his heavy-lidded eyes drifting shut.
Hope sat watching him for a long time, knowing how close she had come to losing him. The thought of no longer having him in her life had shaken her to the core. The Lord had already taken her mother away. A hurt that had only deepened when she’d learned she would probably never be a mother herself.
As it had so many times over the past nine years, a deep ache filled her at the thought. Her hand moved to smooth over her flat stomach, unshed tears filling her eyes. It would never grow round with a child. She would never feel the stirrings of life that came with carrying a baby of her own. Never find the true happiness she’d come so close to having before her life as she had known it came crashing down around her.
“Logan?” his brother said, concern knitting his brows as he studied Logan from across the door’s threshold. Boone, the bloodhound mix Carter had adopted from the pound for Audra’s children, stood faithfully at his side.
“I know it’s late,” Logan began apologetically as he reached down to give the dog a scruff behind his ear.
“It’s never too late for family,” Carter countered. “Come on in.” He stepped aside, Boone moving with him as he swung the front porch door open wider.
Removing his cowboy hat, Logan made his way inside, his gaze sweeping the entryway of the old farmhouse his brother’s wife had purchased when she’d moved to Texas from Chicago with her two young children. Carter, who co-owned Cooper Construction with their brother, Nathan, had helped Audra with renovations on her house and the two had ended up falling in love. Now married and on the verge of adding to their already existent brood, Carter was happier than Logan had ever seen him.
“Audra in bed already?” Logan asked with a glance toward the stairs. He knew the children would be for sure. They both had school in the morning.
“Not yet,” his brother replied. “She’s in the kitchen cleaning up after the finger painting session she had with our little artists in the making after dinner. Who knew my wife was such a messy finger painter?”
“Maybe Alyssa could give her finger painting lessons,” he suggested with a grin. Their oldest brother Nathan’s fiancée had a degree in interior design and had taught art classes to children at the rec center where she used to live while working part-time for an interior design firm. Not wanting to be so far away from his brother and his little girl, Katie, Alyssa had left the life she had built for herself in San Antonio and was now teaching art classes on weekends at Braxton’s newly built recreation center. She was also in charge of interior design for any of Cooper Construction’s projects that called for it.
His brother nodded. “Might have to consider that.”
Logan cast a glance toward the front door. He really should go. Not stick around to lay his problems at his brother’s feet. Carter already had his plate full with a new wife, helping to raise her two beautiful children, whom he’d recently adopted, and a baby on the way.
“I know that look.”
He looked back at his brother. “What look?”
“The one that says you’re considering making a run for the hills,” Carter replied.
When they were teens and something upset them, one or all of them would take to the hills where they’d hike and camp and work through whatever it was that was bothering them. There was just something about the peace and tranquility of being surrounded by nature, not to mention the feeling of being closer to God that being higher up in the hills gave a man. But when it came to his troubled thoughts where Hope was concerned, there would be no answers.
“I feel like it,” he answered honestly. If he thought it would help to clear his head, he’d be driving up into the hills right now. Instead, he’d come seeking his brother’s counsel.
“So what’s up?”
“Jack’s in the hospital,” he said with a heavy sigh, struggling to keep the tide of emotion from washing over him.
Concern immediately lit Carter’s eyes. Understandably so. They were all close with Jack Dillan. “What happened?”
Logan dragged a hand back through the thick waves of his hair. “He suffered a stroke at work this morning. I found him on the floor of his office when I stopped by to pick up an order.”
“Why didn’t you call? Nathan and I would have met you at the hospital.”
“I knew you were finishing up a job in the next town over,” he explained. “Figured I’d wait until we had some answers.”
“No wonder you’re not yourself,” his brother replied. “Is he gonna be okay?”
“He’s got a long road ahead of him until he’s fully recovered, but the good Lord’s seen fit to give Jack more time here on this earth.”
“Praise God for that,” his brother muttered. “Does Hope know yet?”
Logan nodded. “I called to let her know what had happened as soon as the ambulance pulled away with Jack. She caught the first flight out of San Diego and managed to get to the hospital a little after four.”
Carter’s assessing gaze studied him. “So you’ve seen her, then?”
“I was there when she arrived.”
“That also explains this mood that you’re in,” his brother acknowledged.
“It’s not what you think.”
“That she refused to enter the hospital until you left?” his brother surmised, not bothering to hide his irritation where Hope was concerned. “Because that’s what I expect happened.”
Nathan and Carter were none too happy with Hope for the way she had handled the post-breakup with their younger brother. With the exception of the tearful embrace she had given him at his parents’ and Isabel’s funerals, her intentional avoidance of Logan and the scant number of times she could drag herself back to Braxton to visit Jack had his brothers harboring more than a little resentment toward her.
Then again, Logan harbored his own fair share of that same emotion where Hope Dillan was concerned.
“It didn’t happen like that,” he heard himself saying in Hope’s defense. Though why he felt the need to stick up for her was beyond him.
“So you left before she got there?”
He probably should have. Then he wouldn’t be struggling over thoughts of the past and feeling things he’d spent years suppressing. But Hope had looked so lost when he’d looked up to see her standing in that hospital corridor. All he’d wanted to do at that moment was comfort her. Thankfully, he hadn’t followed through with what instinct had been pushing him to do. It would have undoubtedly