Love Lost & Found (Surfside Romance Book 2)
Page 27
“Then I’d strongly suggest you go inside. And for Pete’s sake, take me with you.” His voice was so soft and low she knew they were in for something extraordinary.
Upstairs in her dark bedroom, the hurricane from the east and the hurricane from the west created a once-in-a-lifetime meteorological event known as an intergalactic-inverted-expanded vortex.
And Hurricane Matilda experienced an orgasmic event that spawned tornadoes from coast to coast.
Two days later, Hurricane Wilbur arrived at her doorstep in his red plaid lumberman’s shirt and tight jeans. The scar on his scalp was barely visible under his thick auburn hair. The beard was growing back; the nose looked new and improved. His eyes burned bright and he smiled like a kid with a perfect report card. He swept her up in his arms, balancing her carefully as he stepped over the threshold—both of them ready to wipe out every last shred of their unfinished business.
COMING SOON FROM BLACK CAT BOOK CO.
A sneak peek of:
I DO, I DON'T
EVERYTHING SEEMED brighter, happier and more magical with her old high school crush back in her life. For the first time in forever, Alexa Boswell had stopped swimming against the tide and let the flow take her to new heights of sexual pleasure—a vortex of bodily emotions that she’d never experienced before. But now that Rick Harlow had returned home to Oregon, and the synapses that had been firing on all cylinders began to wind down, she was forced to take a serious look at the very real hurricane bearing down on the beach community where she and her daughter lived in South Florida. She was sick to her stomach being so ill-prepared.
Last summer there were no major storms or threats so this was all brand new. Hurricane Molly was a Category Two, a 300-mile-wide monster headed right toward them. Of course it could zigzag in any direction, be upgraded to a Five or down to a One. It could fizzle out before it hit landfall and be nothing more than heavy wind and torrential rain. Or it could veer north to the Carolinas, south to Cuba, or stall over the Caribbean islands. Basically every hurricane was a crap shoot. But the threat was real and had to be taken seriously.
If this was as terrible as predicted, it could knock out the power for days or weeks and it was coming—that was the only thing for certain. Although forecasters had been warning everybody for a week or more, Alexa had her lips locked with Rick’s and had not only ignored the dire predictions, she had tuned out her daughter Hannah as well.
“Mom, a big storm is coming,” she said the night before Rick flew home, her voice rising an octave. “You need to do something.”
Alexa had patted the fourteen-year-old on the head and said, “Don’t worry, sweetie. Everything’s cool.”
At the office of Comet Communications, a niche book publishing company where she worked, nobody could concentrate as the collective panic began to rise. Three television sets, suspended from the ceiling, were tuned to the weather channels for minute-by-minute updates. The tension was thick. Alexa stood next to senior editor Zev Humphries, her writing coach and mentor. “The last one blew most of my roof off,” he said. “We had a tarp for almost a year while we hassled with the insurance company only to hear they wouldn’t pay.”
“That sucks.”
“Do you own or lease?” he asked.
“Lease.”
“I hope you have renter’s insurance.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t want you to worry, but if there’s serious damage, the management company may ask you to pony up for repairs.”
“But, but, but.” She couldn’t even calculate how much it might cost as the blood drained from her pretty freckled face and her hazel eyes turned to stare at the projected path of Hurricane Molly.
“I’m just saying check your insurance policy.”
“Sure,” she said, knowing full well she didn’t have one. Her knees felt weak as the solemn-faced weather lady said Key West evacuations had begun.
“Of course, it could easily veer north,” said the forecaster. “So I hope all of you out there are prepared. You don’t want to be caught short,” she warned. “Here’s the list again. Check it twice and make sure you have everything.”
Studying the “must-have” items, Alexa realized she was woefully unprepared. “I have nothing,” she whispered to Zev.
“Nothing at all?”
She shook her head. “Maybe some chips and beer, half a gallon of water.”
“A gallon per day per person,” he intoned. “You’d better get to Publix now. They’ll be closing the office soon. Nobody’s getting any work done.”
As if on cue, Lana Cox stepped into the middle of the room. “We’re closing shop. Everybody stay safe in the storm. Hopefully, we’ll be back at work on Monday, business as usual. I’ll email everyone Sunday night.”
Long lines of cars snaked along the roadway using precious fuel to reach the pumps, many of which had signs indicating they were dry. The Publix parking lot was a zoo, but someone pulled out and she zipped in. The usually pristine supermarket looked as though a tornado had torn through it. Shelves were stripped; trampled packages littered the floor. Most of the refrigerated cases were empty. All the ice was gone. A sign scribbled in Magic Marker read, new delivery @ 3. Either it was late or the bags had been delivered and snatched up. Without a cooler it was a moot point.
Pulling up the hurricane-preparedness app on her phone, she pushed the cart down the aisles shocked that nearly every item was gone: drinking water, dry cereal, canned fruits, canned veggies, canned juice, soups and pasta, batteries, flashlights, car phone chargers, dust masks, plastic bags. She freaked out totally when she saw the shelves for water jugs. Empty. Empty. Empty. Ignoring the hurricane warnings and thinking about a future with Rick had been just plain stupid. Fishing around on the top shelf, her fingers touched two bottles of Pellegrino that had fallen over. She grabbed them. The snack aisle looked as though a terrorist bomb had exploded, but she found a few bags of honey-mustard pretzels and a dented can of Pringles. The produce section had been ravaged, only one brown banana sat forlornly on the shelf as though begging her to rescue it. The checkout lines reached almost to the back of the store, everyone edgy, talking in hushed tones, as though Hurricane Molly had ears and could decide the path of most destruction. The heavyset woman in front of her turned around, peering into her cart with its pathetic contents. She smiled kindly. “That’s not much if this thing slams us.”
As Alexa inched her way toward the cashier, thoughts of her mother slipped into her head and the bombshell she and her new boyfriend laid on her: Sari wasn’t her real mother! Her mother, they told her, was a country singer who lived in Nashville and went by the name Vicki-Lynn Keel.
Alexa vowed to meet the woman who gave her life and then gave her away. She wasn’t sure if Vicki-Lynn would welcome her or deny her existence. But she had to find out—even if it was the last thing she did.
As she pushed her cart through the increasing wind outside, she prayed: Please don’t let me die in this storm. I need to find my mother!