Van grinned. “I’ve been isolated at the resort. I thought it was crazy up there with the occasional BDSM party. This place is way cooler.”
At least he was open to the experience. She cleaned off a booth and glanced out the windows. Trio was located in Bliss’s downtown area, as the mayor liked to call it. Of course the downtown area consisted of three blocks of one road, though they’d recently put in a second light. She was fairly certain that Nate Wright had talked the town council into it because he wanted a new desk. “It has its advantages. Do you like the resort?”
“I do.” Van started wiping down the laminated menus. “It’s well run, and the owner is pretty cool. Some of the guests are total assholes, but they’re mostly the ones who stay in the villas. The hotel guests tend to be okay. I actually prefer it when Mr. Roberts has his private parties. I thought it was weird at first, but those kink people are nice and polite and don’t act like massive asses when you mistakenly give them a lime instead of a lemon in their drink.”
The Elk Creek Lodge was just outside of Bliss proper. It was a ski resort and housed a good portion of the tourists who poured into the area for skiing during the winter. Van worked there as a bartender in addition to his duties at Trio. “Is it really bad?”
Van stopped and stared for a moment. “Ah, now I know who they offered the job.”
Lucy looked around as though worried someone might overhear. She didn’t want to hurt Zane’s feelings. He’d given her a job when no one else would. “It’s nothing more than a test drive. I’m coming in for the party this weekend. No one knows I might take the supervisor position, and you have to keep that quiet.”
“My lips are sealed,” Van promised. “And I should be good at keeping secrets. My brother is pretty much a spy. Well, he was at one point. Now he mostly complains about the unholy amount of poop his kids can make. He’s the reason I have the job out at the resort. He knows the owner and when I needed a job, he came through. I was kind of hoping he’d bring me on at his company, but I suppose we haven’t been close in a long time.”
She heard a note of wistfulness in his tone. “Are you close to any of your family?”
“I wouldn’t say close, but I also don’t have ill will for any of them,” he replied, paying close attention to every menu. “My parents are ‘live in the moment’ kind of people. They ramble through life. I wanted some roots.”
“And your siblings? Do you have more than your brother?” She was also interested in how other families worked. It was probably because her own had been so deeply dysfunctional.
“I have a bunch of siblings. Most are like my mom and dad. They travel a lot, take odd jobs. I wanted something different. I’m not actually close to my brother, but he’s a good guy and when I needed help, he was there for me. The only person I’m close to is Hale. He’s pretty much my brother.”
And he was also the reason why Sylvan might fit in perfectly here in Bliss because she’d been told they liked to share. “I’ve got friends like that. River and Ty. We grew up together.”
“I’ve heard you talk about River. She’s been gone for a while?” Van seemed perfectly happy to steer talk away from his family.
The mere thought of River Lee returning home brought a smile to her face. “Yes, she’s been on the…” She’d been about to say on the run, but she didn’t know how much River wanted the world to know about what had happened to her and her husband. “She’s been in Europe with her husband for a little over a year. Long honeymoon.”
“Wow, that’s sounds spectacular.” Van settled the menus onto the hostess stand. “Although I’m going to admit I drifted a lot of my childhood. I like staying in one place, and I like the resort. I was worried we would be stuffed into dorms, but on-site staff has apartments. It’s probably the nicest place I’ve ever lived in.”
“What does Hale do?” She was curious about the latest duo in town. Mostly they’d stayed at the resort, but apparently Van and Alexei had been in a couple of classes together at the community college, and the big Russian had coaxed him down the mountain to help out until they found a permanent extra bartender.
“He’s the handyman. He can fix anything. Cars, plumbing, heaters. He can do it all, and I can fix him a martini afterward,” Van said with a grin. “Now tell me about Ty because I do know him and I don’t think he considers himself your brother.”
Ty worked at the resort during the tourist season. He was a certified EMT and was used to providing backup to the nurse on site. During the summers when he wasn’t on call with Bliss’s only ambulance, he guided nature tours with River’s company. He’d been her friend since that first day their moms had put them on a bus to kindergarten. It had been the three of them. River and Ty and Lucy. They’d stuck together because they’d always been those weird kids. “Cousin, then. The three of us all grew up together. Technically we’re from Creede, which is north of here, but we didn’t live in town. We were all on larger tracts of land. Well, River and Ty were. My dad inherited his dad’s whole two acres, and we lived there in a couple of trailers. River’s house was nicer. Ty’s was the nicest though because Ty’s mom loved to cook, and she never thought twice about feeding the grubby kids who came home with her son.”
“That’s cool, but you have to know that dude is totally into you.”
Everyone got confused by that. She and Ty hung out a lot, but there had never been anything between them. Oh, there had been that time in high school that she’d asked him out and made a complete idiot of herself because she’d thought it was a date and he hadn’t liked her that way. But he’d been super nice about it. He’d gone away to college, and she’d found a boyfriend. That had been a truly heartbreaking relationship, and Ty and River had helped her through it. “Like I said, we were childhood friends, and now we’ve been around each other so long, we can’t imagine life without the other. That’s why we’re so happy to have River coming home. It was a rough year. I worried about her.”
Van’s raised brows told her he didn’t buy what she was selling. “Okay. Maybe I’m reading that all wrong. I’m still getting the lay of the land down here in town. So is it the crazy mountain guy you’re into?”
“He’s not crazy.” She hated it when people said Michael was crazy.
“He lives in a cabin without indoor plumbing and he’s got the cra…uhm, he has a strange look to his eyes that can make one think he’s perhaps attempting to intimidate those around him.” Van proved he could be tactful. Sort of.
Michael didn’t have crazy eyes. He had perfectly lovely eyes, and the fact that they’d seen some pain didn’t mean they were a reflection of insanity. “He’s been through a lot. I’m not sure how much you know, but it’s a long story.”
“His fiancée tried to kill the person they were supposed to protect. She drugged him and Holly Lang shot her in the parking lot of the Movie Motel,” Van surmised.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t such a long story. “Yes, and that traumatized him.”