“So sorry to have interrupted… whatever.” I pulled Annabelle with me as I tried to flee from the porch, but Chase stepped around the girl and called to me.
“I was going to tell you!”
“Oh yeah?” I said sarcastically. “When? At our dinner next week?” I picked Annabelle up and headed down the stairs, not caring that the rain would quickly drench us both.
“What dinner?” the redhead asked.
“The one where he planned to ask me to give him another chance!” I called up to her. I quickly opened the backseat and ushered Annabelle inside before she got too wet. I buckled her in record time and jumped into the driver’s seat. Whatever was wrong with the car would have to wait until I got to my parents’ house. I needed to get out of here immediately.
* * *
I took the turn out of the driveway onto the street a little too fast, my tires squealing, and for a second I thought the car would spin out, but I corrected my steering and we were on our way.
Stupid, stupid stupid, I told myself. And reckless. I couldn’t drive like a maniac in this rain, especially with Annabelle in the car. I took a deep breath and tried to slow my heartbeat, which was pounding out of control after the revelation on the porch. The redhead’s words kept echoing through my head – I’m not sharing him with you anymore.
I was an ignorant fool to think that Chase Dempsey loved or cared about me at all, if he ever had. He’d had a girl on the side probably the entire time, and I’d been too blind to see it. A sob hitched in my throat and my eyes filled. So much for being a good judge of character, or having a clear head when it came to relationships. I’d failed miserably on both accounts.
“Mama, where are we going?” Annabelle asked from the backseat.
I blinked twice to clear my vision and peered through the windshield. “We’re going to Grandma and Grandpa’s, baby,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.
“Is Chase coming too?”
“No, Annabelle,” I whispered. “Chase isn’t coming.”
This was okay. This was what I wanted. My raw nerves and leaky eyes had little to do with the actual loss of Chase. That decision had been made before tonight, and I knew it was the correct one. I was upset because of what had almost happened, what I’d almost given him. And what I’d almost given up because of him.
Stupid girl, my brain echoed again. After everything, still too quick to trust. My walls were up from the beginning with Chase, for good reason. The car chugged along through the rain, and I saw the familiar mile marker that indicated we were getting closer to the ranch house. I glanced at Annabelle in the backseat, taking my eyes off the road for a split second.
“Mama!” Annabelle pointed out the windshield.
I flicked my eyes back to the street and my heart leapt into my throat even as I slammed on the brakes. The car screeched and fishtailed a tiny bit before coming to a stop, the tires protesting loudly on the wet asphalt. A few yards in front of us, a telephone pole was down in the middle of the road, wires broken and occasionally snapping in the rain, sending sparks of light into the otherwise dark sky.
“Damn it,” I cursed under my breath. Could tonight possibly get any worse? The minute the thought crossed my mind, thunder cracked overhead and I winced. I put the car into park and kept the engine running as I contemplated my options.
The most appealing one was to turn around and head back to town, but the thought of Duke and the other dogs cowering in the rain was too much guilt to handle. I rested my head on the steering wheel for a moment, closing my eyes tightly as I shivered. My shirt was still soaking wet, but I couldn’t turn the heater on without fogging up the windshield. Thank God Annabelle was mostly dry and bundled in my jacket.
Thunder crashed and lightning flashed through the clouds again and I jumped. Sitting here in the middle of the road, just a few feet from a downed power line, with rain falling and electricity running through the sky wasn’t exactly the best plan. I made a move to put the car in reverse so I could turn around and find a different route when out of the corner of my eye I saw a spear of lightning strike an oak tree directly to my right. It sliced right down the center of the huge tree, splitting it nearly in half, and sparked a small fire in the branches that flickered and sputtered against the rain.
I froze, my heart hammering so hard I could hear it above the thunder. The wires from the downed power line were just a few feet from the tree, and I wasn’t a scientist, but I was fairly sure this wasn’t ideal. In fact, this was very bad and I needed to get us out of here immediately.
“Mama! That tree is on fire!” Annabelle cried.
“I know, baby,” I said, fumbling with the gears as I once again attempted to reverse and turn around.
“It’s on fire!” Annabelle repeated. “Mama, it’s a fire!”
“I know, Annabelle!” My voice broke on her name, and I shoved the car into reverse. “We’re leaving now!”
The car finally clicked into gear and surged backward a few feet before coming to a grinding halt. What the fuck? I frantically checked the position of the gearshift and tried to rev the engine but nothing happened. Slowly, all of the lights on the dashboard dimmed as I watched, panic filling my throat. I was not stuck out here, in an electrical storm, with a stalled car. I was not. It was not happening.
Annabelle hiccuped from the backseat and I turned around to see her sucking her thumb with tears in her eyes.
“It’s okay, Bells,” I said, trying to soothe her in a voice that didn’t sound like my own. This voice was higher pitched and slightly manic. This was a voice of someone who didn’t know what the hell to do now.
“Mama, the tree is still on fire,” she said in a whisper, pointing out the window.
I followed the direction her finger pointed and tried to stay calm. The tree was indeed still on fire. In fact, the fire was bigger than it had been before, and I watched as it snaked down the trunk slowly, inching toward the fallen telephone pole. The rain picked now to let up a bit, and the fire was spreading, the wind helping it along. The gusts shook the car, and Annabelle whimpered.
I pulled out my cell phone and saw that I had no service, as expected, but my stomach dropped when I saw the confirmation on the screen. We should stay in the car, I knew. Getting out and trying to go anywhere on foot was a bad option for multiple reasons. But the car was currently too close to the power lines and tree fire for my liking. Maybe I could push it farther down the road? I was already wet.
“Annabelle, Mama is going to move the car, okay? I’m not going anywhere, I just need to get out and push it for a minute so we can get away from the tree.” She nodded mutely, and I unbuckled my seatbelt in preparation.
A crack and a loud snap jerked my head to the right and I watched in horror as one of the power lines was lifted by the wind straight into the tree’s flames. Immediately, the fire jumped into overdrive and sent sparks into the air while the rest of the lines whipped and snapped freely in the wind. We were too close, too fucking close.
I shoved the gearshift into neutral and leapt out of the car, bracing myself against the door frame while I pushed with all my might. The car started to roll a little and I wanted to cheer. Just twenty feet, that was all I needed. The wind was working against me, and I kept losing my footing on the slick road. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the fire was still raging. This sporadic rain wasn’t helping anything; in fact, it was probably only aggravating the power lines.
I pushed the car another couple feet, and another, until the tires hit a small dip and I didn’t have enough momentum to carry them over. My boots slipped and skidded on the asphalt as I pushed with renewed energy, but I wasn’t strong enough. Glancing back again, I saw that we weren’t far enough from where we had started, and I put my head down on the door frame in defeat.
I wouldn’t cry. I had to be strong and upbeat for Annabelle. Her little face was pinched with worry, and she kept looking from me to the tree and back again.
“Mama?” she called,
her voice small.
“It’s okay, Annabelle,” I repeated, even though everything was decidedly not okay.
A flame-engulfed branch split from the tree and fell at that moment, landing on top of a couple power lines. The fire jumped from the tree to the pole, running along the side of the street and snaking out in different directions. The oil from the road must’ve been fueling it, spread out by the rain and encouraged by the wind. I watched, momentarily entranced, as the tendrils slowly crept closer to the car. I had to get us out of here.
I wrenched open the backseat and fumbled for the second time that night with the child safety buckle. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” I chanted under my breath.
Headlights flashed through the back windows, and I heard someone calling my name. “Avery! AVERY!”
My head jerked up and smacked the door frame. Shaking off the pain, I looked through the window and saw a familiar figure jogging toward the car. Fox ran up, breathless.
“What are you doing here?” I couldn’t believe it.
Fox glanced around, taking in the tree, the flames licking toward us slowly but steadily, the downed power line. “We’ll talk later.” He reached into the car, quickly unbuckled Annabelle, and hefted her into his arms. “Let’s go.”
We ran back down the street to where he’d left my dad’s four-wheel drive. I thanked my lucky stars that my parents had taken the diner’s pickup into Midland, and that my dad had a car seat for Annabelle in his SUV. Fox left me to buckle her in while he loped back to my car with a couple sandbags, which he split open with a knife from his belt and spread liberally on the road fire and over the power lines. I watched nervously as he navigated the flames, but he was completely in control.
“Get in the car!” he called back to me when he saw me standing there. I obeyed quickly, and in a few moments he was climbing into the driver’s seat. He put the SUV in gear and drove it up the side of the road, through some brush, and around the fallen pole on the opposite end from the tree fire. The four-wheel drive handled the off-road terrain easily and quickly, and then we were back on the paved lanes, speeding toward the ranch house.
The weather was still terrible, thunder cracking every few minutes, lightning streaking through the sky, and rain coming down in bursts and fits. And yet, I felt myself start to relax. Fox was at the wheel, a focused and alert look on his handsome face, and Annabelle was safe and dry in the backseat. This was a vast improvement over the events of the past hour.
If only my shirt wasn’t soaked through and my hair wasn’t a tangled disaster. If only I hadn’t found out what a gigantic asshole Chase actually was. If only I didn’t get stuck in a storm with my baby while I tried to keep my car from catching fire. I started to laugh and then choked on a sob. I glanced nervously out of the window. The poor dogs were outside in this. Maybe I wasn’t as relaxed as I thought.
“Are you okay?” Fox asked me, not taking his eyes from the road. He slipped a hand from the steering wheel and slid it down my forearm where it rested on my thigh, leaving a trail of goosebumps in his wake. “You’re ice cold.” He cranked up the heater, and the SUV responded immediately. There was definitely something to be said for keeping your defrost mode in working order.
I sucked in a breath and nodded, and then realized he couldn’t see me since his eyes remained firmly fixed on the road in front of us. “Yeah.”
“Fox came and got us, Mama,” Annabelle piped up from the backseat, as if I wasn’t present for that particular event. “Wasn’t that nice of him? Thank you, Fox. You should say thank you, Mama,” she parroted, repeating a phrase she’d heard many times before.
“Thank you, Fox,” I echoed.
He turned to me for a brief second, his eyes finding mine in the semi-darkness of the road, illuminated only by the dashboard lights and the occasional flash of lightning. Even in the low light, I could see the flash of green and the intensity within them, stronger than the storm. “Any time.”
Chapter 14
When we pulled up to the ranch house, the rain was coming down harder than ever. Fox got Annabelle out of the car and ran with her up the porch steps and I followed quickly, although I was reluctant to leave the warm sanctuary of the SUV.
I was so relieved to see two of the four dogs huddled on the porch, but my stomach dropped when I realized who was missing – the two older dogs. Missy probably tried to bolt and Duke went after her.
“Fox, I have to find Duke and Missy,” I told him, unlocking the front door and urging Annabelle and the animals inside. The dogs darted in and immediately shook their wet coats in the hallway before running into the dining room and curling up under the big rectangular dining table. Thunderstorms always spooked them.
I flicked the hallway light switch a couple times and groaned. No power.
“Where’s the generator?” Fox hovered in the doorway, the water dripping off him into a puddle on the doormat.
I frowned. “Out back, but it should’ve come on automatically.”
“I’ll go check it out and look for the other dogs,” he said. “Stay inside with Annabelle.”
I hesitated. I couldn’t leave Annabelle alone in the dark, but I was really worried about Duke. He didn’t know Fox, and I wasn’t sure if he’d come when Fox called him. What if he was hurt?
“I’ll be right back, Avery,” Fox assured me. “I’ll find them.”
I grabbed a slicker off the hook by the door and pushed it into his chest. “At least wear this.”
The eyebrow reminded me that he was already drenched, but he took it. “Find some candles or flashlights, just in case. I’ll build a fire when I come back.”
I rolled my eyes. “There you go again, underestimating me.”
Fox caught my chin in his fingers and held my gaze, the heat in his eyes enough to start an inferno. “Never.”
Okay then. Who needed the generator? I was feeling pretty warm right now. Fox backed away and shut the door, shrugging into the slicker. I turned to Annabelle and saw that she’d made herself at home on the couch in the great room, but I knew she didn’t like the dark. I snagged the bin of toys my parents kept for her and dragged it over.
“Here Bells, find something to play with for now, okay? Mama’s going to get us some flashlights and we can read books or do shadow puppets until the lights come back on.”
Annabelle dug into her stuff and unearthed a few My Little Ponies and a play doctor’s kit. Knowing that would keep her busy for a while, I headed into the kitchen to retrieve the flashlights. My dad still kept them in the same place as when I was a kid, in the junk drawer next to the sink, as well as the big torch lantern on the top shelf of the pantry. I grabbed everything, added a box of crackers for Annabelle, and made my way back into the great room.
After I started a fire in the fireplace and firmly locked the childproof grate, we ate crackers and played with her toys for about fifteen minutes before I felt an empty second of silence in the air and then a surge of energy as the generator kicked on and the house buzzed to life.
I jumped up and ran around flicking the light switches in every room on the bottom floor until the downstairs was lit up like a beacon in the darkness. A moment later I heard Fox come in the front door and stomp his boots in the foyer. I hurried over, hoping Duke and Missy were with him.
Fox swiped a hand through his wet hair. “I didn’t find them. I’m going back out, I just wanted to make sure you two were all right.”
My heart sank at his first sentence. “We’re fine,” I assured him. “But Fox, you’ve done more than enough. I’ll go. Duke and Missy know me. They’ll come when I call them.” I could hear the wind beating the branches of the trees, howling down the pastures. It would be hard for anyone to hear a shout, even a dog. But I wasn’t going to let that deter me. I grabbed another slicker and shrugged it on, sticking a flashlight in my pocket. “I can’t leave them out there.”
A crease of worry deepened between Fox’s brows. “Ten minutes. Then we switch, okay?”
&nb
sp; I nodded and headed out the door and down the porch. When I glanced back, I saw that Fox was standing in the doorway, arms crossed. Think, Avery, think. Where would Duke go? If he was trying to herd Missy, and the ranch house was too far, where would he take her?
Suddenly I knew. I ran down the driveway, past the working paddock to the tiny shed next to the main barn, almost a half mile away from the house. This was Duke’s favorite spot as he’d gotten older, because he could sit in the awning’s shade and look out over the property. I’d almost reached the shed when I saw that the door was slightly ajar like usual. My dad never thought there was a point to locking up a few rakes and lead ropes.
“Duke! Missy!” I called out. I heard an answering bark and relief made my eyes well up. Missy poked her head out of the shed and barked again. I ran inside and dropped down onto my knees next to Duke, who was lying in a corner of the small space. His tail thumped when he saw me and he struggled for a moment, trying to get to his feet.
“Duke! Are you okay?” I ran my hands over his coat and when I got to his left hip, he yelped softly. I pulled my hand away and saw that it was covered with sticky blood. “Oh no, oh Duke,” I cried. My eyes immediately filled with tears that threatened to spill over onto his matted fur.
Missy pushed her nose up against my arm and whined. I ruffled her ears with my clean hand. “Good girl, Missy,” I told her, sniffling. “Thank you for staying with him.”
I surveyed the situation quickly. I’d been gone more than ten minutes already, probably closer to twenty. I could run back to get Fox, but I was afraid Duke would try to follow me and hurt himself worse. I skimmed my flashlight quickly over the wound, but his fur was too thick for me to tell how bad it was. I’d have to wait until I got him inside. I slid my arms underneath him to test his weight. Maybe I could carry him back. I grunted with the effort. He was an older dog but still every bit of sixty pounds. I sat back in defeat, knocking my head on a wooden handle that protruded from the dark edge of the shed.
“Ouch,” I muttered. Damn it.
Hey Sunshine Page 16