He looked back to find her still staring at him.
“If it doesn’t keep up like this too long, the creek’ll go down in a few hours,” she said. “Dickie—he’s the mechanic—will be back with my truck then, or the phones’ll come back on. Or we can find you a ride.”
She was talking as if this was her problem, too. For some reason, that stabbed him with a slice of hot hurt.
Wind blew a piece of her sunshine hair in her face. She brushed it out of the way, tucked it behind her ear. He could almost feel the small, soft curve of the shell of her ear beneath his fingertips…. And those eyes of hers. They were compelling, private yet vulnerable.
He forcibly reminded himself that he wasn’t interested. Period.
But he wasn’t getting away that easily. Not yet.
She waved him into the house. “Come on. Come inside. It’s getting cold out here, and you’re going to get wet. Wetter,” she corrected.
He was already plenty wet, but she was right about one thing. Rain was blowing sideways onto the porch. And was he imagining it or was there something beseeching about her expression? As if she wanted him there. Almost as if she was relieved that he was stuck there for some reason.
She was hard to read, even for him, and that was bugging him.
“I’m a complete stranger. You don’t know me from Adam.” He had the stupid urge to tell her not to trust people. At all. Ever. He could go inside her house, and do anything he wanted to her after that. Not that he would. But a woman like her, alone out in this godforsaken countryside, shouldn’t be asking strange men into her home. She seemed…nice. Genuinely nice, even if slightly annoying and nosy.
He felt an unexpected and uncomfortable sense of protectiveness toward her that he fought to shake off. It wasn’t his concern if she was hopelessly naive about human nature.
“You don’t look like a serial killer,” she said flippantly, even as her sweet chocolate eyes studied him. “You’re not in the big city now. You’re in Haven. We’re friendly here.” She shrugged. “The people at the store sent you over here. You’re not going to hurt me unless you’re stupid. You’re not stupid, are you? Anything happens to me today, my friends’ll be looking for you, not to mention my family. Especially with your car sitting right out front.”
His car that wasn’t going anywhere. She had a point, but it was unrelated to why he really didn’t want to go inside her house.
“I’ll fix you something to drink,” she said cheerily. “I owe you anyway for all the trouble of driving out here to get the keys, and if you hadn’t had to do that, you wouldn’t be stuck out here now with a tree trunk on top of your car.”
She was already walking into the house, leaving the screen door to bang behind her and the front door open. Her slim, sexy figure disappeared through the shadowed parlor even as she kept talking, seeming to simply expect him to follow. He opened the screen door and stepped inside in spite of himself.
“You want water or tea?” she called back to him. “Or I’ve got some Coke.”
He walked through the front room, a parlor with a slanted, scuffed hardwood floor. Rows of antique-looking photographs filled the room, solemn-faced eyes following him from the walls. The house smelled good, like cinnamon and sugar. Homey. Not that it was anything like the home he’d grown up in on the seedier streets of Charleston. Homey like…you saw on The Andy Griffith Show. He half expected to find Aunt Bea in the kitchen, pulling fresh-baked coffee cake out of the oven.
He arrived in the open doorframe between the kitchen and the parlor. She’d gotten down an amber-colored glass from a cabinet and was pulling every beverage known to man out of the fridge. Coke, iced tea, lemonade, milk…She’d probably offer him a cookie next.
And she was still talking.
“I’ve got sweet tea made, but if you don’t like sweet, I can make some unsweetened. I don’t mind.”
“I’ll just take some water.” He didn’t really care, truth be told. The whole scene suddenly felt terribly domestic. When was the last time he’d been in a kitchen with an attractive woman?
He didn’t want to remember, but of course he could. Sheila had lived with him for two years in their nice, newly-constructed, cookie-cutter condo in South Charleston. She’d wanted to get married. He’d been in no hurry. Maybe he’d known all along it wasn’t going to work out.
Sheila hadn’t wasted any time when things had gone bad. Sooner was better than later, he figured. He and Sheila would have never made it anyway. She’d just been…convenient, for a while. He’d scarcely looked at a woman since. He liked being alone, detached.
And yet he found himself watching Keely Schiffer with a sort of odd and uneasy longing. Ghost pain, he thought wryly, like a patient who felt sensation in an amputated limb. He didn’t think he missed Sheila, or her constant pressure.
He hadn’t realized till now that he’d been missing anything at all other than work.
“Please sit down,” she said when she finally gave him the glass. “Well, I hate to say it, but this rain is a good thing because we’ve had an awfully dry spring. I’m just so sorry about your car. Some welcome to Haven for you, huh?”
She pulled out a chair when he didn’t. He scooted it around a pile of broken pottery he noticed on the floor as he sat. He placed the glass on the table.
“I was just about to clean that up.” She disappeared for a minute into the next room then came back with a broom and dustpan. She bent down, picked something up, and he saw what he’d missed at first—some sort of small package. It was wrapped in silver foil and he read the label.
“Somebody’s birthday?” There, his contribution to chitchat.
“Mine.”
She glanced up from sweeping the shattered bits of cream and blue pottery. Her eyes looked huge in her slender face, and as he watched, she chewed on her full, unpainted lip. He looked away from her, to the box. Happy Birthday, Baby. She had a gift from somebody who called her Baby.
He carefully returned his gaze to Keely. “It’s your birthday today?” he asked, and told himself he was not going to look or even think about her nibble-on-me lips. Maybe she was married. He didn’t know why he’d assumed she lived way out here in the sticks alone. It didn’t matter to him anyway.
“Tomorrow. The present was inside the cookie jar. It fell down off the shelf.” She waved her hand vaguely toward the ledge over the cabinets. It was full of decorative glass items and various pieces of pottery. “I guess he was hiding it there. My husband, I mean. A branch must have hit the roof. I guess the jar was too close to the edge of the shelf. The house really shook and—” She stood, the pottery bits tidily swept into the dustpan in one hand. “I forgot. I need to get up in the attic and check it out. If rain’s coming in, I’m in real trouble.”
So she was married.
“You’ll be in trouble when your husband finds out you stumbled onto his surprise.” He was feeling suddenly much lighter, more in control.
She propped the broom in the corner of the kitchen and dumped the shards of pottery in the trash before replying. “He’s not going to find out. He’s dead. And he left me plenty of surprises. Most of them weren’t good.”
The look she gave him was flat and emotionless, then a shadow slid across her expression. She looked away quickly, as if afraid he had some kind of laser vision that would see something she didn’t want him to see. Jake felt more uneasy than ever, and he wasn’t certain if it was because she wasn’t married after all or because he wanted to know what her deceased husband had done to hurt her, and he shouldn’t want to know anything about her at all.
The muted patter of raindrops on the roof filled the kitchen. The storm was slowing down. Or at least, the rain was slowing down. Wind gusted against the house, strong as ever. The clapboard farmhouse creaked a bit in the storm.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She shook her head. “No, I am. I shouldn’t have said that. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.” She grabbed the wrapped box off the
table and turned away, pulled open a wide kitchen drawer, shoved it inside and slammed the drawer shut.
He heard a noise like thunder and suddenly the house shook so hard, he felt the floor move under his feet. The drawers in the kitchen banged open and Keely stumbled on her feet. Automatically, he shot up, grabbing hold of her upper arms. Glass hit the floor around them from the shelves over the cabinets. He heard pictures fall in the parlor.
“Oh, God, I knew I should have had that maple tree taken down.” She sounded panicked. “It’s too close to the house.”
“I don’t think that was a tree.” He hadn’t heard anything strike the roof.
There was no sound for a long beat, as if even the wind held its breath, and then came a roar. The house seemed to roll under them in waves. Jake fell against the table, still holding Keely, and together they crashed onto the floor. The sting of glass cut into his back. He could feel her breasts against his chest, her quivering belly and thighs, her breaths coming in shocky pants near his cheek. He stroked his hand down her spine, only meaning to soothe. She was soft—
The floor rocked violently beneath them. “We have to get out of the house,” he grunted, pulling her up with him, both of them staggering as if they’d been transported to the deck of a storm-tossed ship. At the same time he realized the roof was coming down over them, the floorboards beneath them ripped apart and all he knew were eerie flashes of blinding red light, then plunging darkness.
Chapter 3
Darkness closed in on her with terrifying completeness. Keely heard the boom of her heartbeat, the harsh sound of her breaths, in the sudden, awful quiet. Oh, God, oh, God. She waited for the rest of the kitchen, the rest of her house, to fall down on top of her.
Something shifted overhead, and crashed a foot away. She nearly jumped out of her skin.
Arms she hadn’t realized were holding her tightened, as if ready to shield her from anything. She couldn’t see a thing, not even the man she was clinging to. Fingers reached up, touched her face. She was on top of him, she realized. They’d hit hard, him protecting her with his body.
“Are you all right?” He was little more than a deep, disembodied voice in the terrible blackness.
“I think so.” Her voice wobbled. Was the world still shaking? She bit her lip to keep from hyperventilating.
Jake Malloy grunted in pain, and she scrambled off him, pulling him up with her till they sat on debris. She could feel nothing but debris surrounding them.
“Where are we?” he asked her. “We fell into some kind of basement. Is this a cellar?”
She nodded, swallowed thickly, realizing then he couldn’t see her.
“Yes. It’s the cellar.” Her head reeled. The kitchen ceiling had started coming down and the floor had opened up. The cold dampness of the cellar seeped through her then and she shivered. Shock. Maybe she was in shock. The cellar was low-ceilinged. They’d only dropped maybe seven feet.
And the ceiling boards from the kitchen must have covered the gap in the floor above. She felt as if her heart might pound out of her chest.
“There’s a door, over here.” She pushed to her feet, stumbling slightly on the uneven piles of wreckage she couldn’t see. “The ground slopes down this way and the cellar’s reached by a door below the rear of the house.” In the thick darkness, she felt him reach for her hand. His hold felt strong and warm on hers. Oddly safe. Together, they took baby steps across the debris, guided only by her sense of direction, which was, at the moment, rocky.
She reached out with her hand, feeling her way. Her fingers brushed against the rough, peeling paint of the wooden door to the cellar. She pulled her other hand from his, heart thumping as she grabbed the handle. Debris in the cellar made opening the door nearly impossible.
“Wait.”
She could feel the brush of Jake beside her, hear the sound of broken boards being tossed out of the way.
“Try now,” he said.
The door creaked as she pulled it inward, still scraping across smaller bits of rubble. She pushed around it, reaching forward into the pitch-black. And stopping short at the sensation of rough, jagged material blocking the way.
No, no, no. There had been no light around the door, it hit her suddenly. No light not because it was dark outside but because part of the house must have fallen this way!
And who knew how much weight there was in wreckage blocking them from climbing back up into the kitchen. “We’re trapped,” she whispered in horror.
“We’ll be all right. We’ll get out of here.”
He sounded so sure of himself, she almost believed him for a minute.
She swallowed hard. “How?”
“Rescue workers will be coming—”
“Do you know how long it will take them to get here, this far out of town?” If they even could. They’d have to wait to even try if the low water bridge was flooded. What was happening in the town? What about her store? What about her house? It was gone, clearly gone. And yet she still found that impossible to grasp. She loved her house in all its faded glory, from its American gothic farmhouse architecture to its walls teeming with family history. “Gemini” tea roses were her grandmother’s favorite, that’s why she was planting more of that specific variety. She was supposed to be planting roses right now. A normal day, planting roses, waiting for her truck to be done at the shop. She’d have fixed herself a sandwich for dinner, maybe a bowl of soup, and watched the news, followed by the latest season of her favorite amateur singing competition, and the new medical drama. She’d have gone to bed in her antique spool feather bed covered by a hand-sewn block quilt and read a magazine till she went to sleep.
Her life was boring, maybe, but she liked it. It was quiet and sensible.
Nothing made sense right now, especially how much she didn’t want this stranger to let go of her. She clutched blindly at his shirt as she felt him turn.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Did you cut yourself on anything?”
She felt his hands moving down her shoulders, her arms, as if checking. “No. I mean, yes. I’m all right. What happened? What could do this to my house?” She could barely stretch her mind around the horrifying reality of it. “Oh, God. That was—”
“An earthquake.”
We don’t have earthquakes in West Virginia. She hadn’t realized she’d said that out loud till he answered her.
“Not very often. But if we weren’t just at the epicenter of that one, I don’t know what it was.”
Her mind stumbled from the realization. That first time she’d felt the house shake and the cookie jar had fallen off the shelf had just been a precursor of what was coming.
There had been no tree hitting the roof at all.
“My house—”
One hundred years old, and it was in pieces over her head. Everything that had been in her family for generations—Her parents, Howard and Roxie Bennett, preferred their spacious home with all the modern conveniences and close to town. Her older sister and two brothers already had their own homes, too, by the time Granny Opal had died. Keely and Ray had needed a place, and so the farmhouse had gone to Keely, who had gladly accepted it. But now…What was she going to do without a house?
Another thought struck her. “What was that red light? Did you see it? Oh, my God. Was that fire?” No, it couldn’t have been fire. They’d know if the house was on fire above them. So what—
“I don’t know. Probably electricity snapping, who knows. Forget your house.” A beat stretched, taut. “I’m sorry,” he added, gentler. The unexpected kindness in his touch and voice sent her into a panic. She’d been hesitant to so much as ask him for a favor not too many minutes ago. Now she wanted to climb up his powerful, hard body and beg him not to leave her for a second in this pitch-black nightmare. He was the only other human being in her world, her touchstone to reality.
“You’re okay, and that’s all that matters,” he continued. “Come on. You can worry about your house later.”
; As if he sensed she was an inch away from royally flipping out, he stroked his hands up and down her arms again. His touch was warm and strong and she didn’t want him to stop. Probably, he didn’t want to deal with a hysterical woman. He hadn’t seemed this kind and patient earlier.
She was on fear overload, and she hated that. She was used to taking care of herself by now. She didn’t need anyone, especially not a man. Get it together.
“I’m okay,” she repeated back to him. The aching of her bones hit her, surfacing through the adrenaline. She was lucky she hadn’t broken anything in the fall, even as short as it had been. Lucky he hadn’t broken anything, either.
“You’re okay, too, right?” she asked, to be sure.
“I’m fine. Tell me what’s in here. Do you keep a flashlight somewhere?” He sounded steady, composed, organized.
“No such luck. But matches—maybe.” She worked to catalog the cellar in her mind, recall what was where. She had to be strong now. Not fall apart.
One wall of the cellar had been lined with glass canning jars. Some empty now, others still packed with the fruits of last summer’s gardening. Some old wooden stools. Boxes and antique trunks filled with forgotten items that had worked their way out of the farmhouse at one time or another. Tools that hadn’t been used in ages. A couple of old tables. Basically, junk. The cellar was full of junk. The wall on the other side was storage. There were some candles somewhere, stashed on one of those over-packed shelves….
Vanilla-scented. They’d been a gift from a Christmas exchange party at church last year. She hated vanilla candles and she’d stuck them in the cellar, not able to bring herself to just throw them out. If they were still here…
She’d absolutely love, adore and worship the scent of vanilla right now.
Hadn’t she left an old box of matches here somewhere? And a can of gasoline. She’d used the matches and gas to burn the brush pile last summer.
Secrets Rising Page 2