Standing his ground, he crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at Tiffany as she climbed from the driver’s seat. Today’s sundress was red as a horned devil. Her smile was as wide as a bus. She’d tucked her hair up into a wide-brimmed sunhat and covered most of her face with designer sunshades—probably to mask her appearance.
“This is a new level of stupid, even for you,” he growled as she went around to the passenger-side backseat door.
“You really want to talk to me that way in front of Gavin?” she asked as she yanked the door open. “This is me being a good mommy.”
Before he could offer up an opinion on that score, Gavin’s feet dropped to the ground and Cole lost his voice.
“Dad!” Gavin said, beaming. Tiffany’s hand on his shoulder was the only thing that stopped the boy from running to his father. “I asked her to let me see you one more time, and she said yes.”
“That’s great, chief,” Cole said, unable to stop himself from smiling. The smile fled just as quickly, though, when he heard the door to the inn creak open behind him.
“Cole, is something wrong?”
Every inch of him seized up as Tiffany studied Briar. The hand that came to rest on his shoulder, soothing, made it all the worse. His voice grated low as he spoke. “You shouldn’t be out here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Briar said, raising her hand to greet the newcomers. Her eyes narrowed on Tiffany. “Do I know you?”
“I want to stay with you, Daddy,” Gavin begged.
“Daddy...” Briar breathed the word as her face fell into shocked lines.
Cole did his best to keep his fists from clenching. He wanted to growl, but he kept his voice as neutral as possible as he addressed Tiffany again. “There’s a storm coming. You should go.”
She ran a hand over Gavin’s hair. “Come on, baby.”
Gavin looked to him beseechingly. “I want to stay.”
“You’re not safe here,” she said, gripping his hand and tugging him along.
“I’ll see you soon, Dad?” he called back hopefully.
Cole nodded, though he wasn’t certain. No, with Tiffany, you never knew what to expect. She leveled a last look at them before she helped Gavin into the car. Moments later, she peeled out of the gravel parking lot, spewing dust in her wake.
* * *
DEAR GOD. COLE had a child. A child who looked so much like him, there was no denying it.
They stood together yet so far apart. The squeal of tires faded into silence, leaving her struck dumb and him stiff as a board.
Long after the dust settled, they stayed that way. Then he turned slowly to face her, hesitant, gauging her reaction.
She didn’t know what to think. Above all else, one fact kept creeping back to her.
He hadn’t told her. This man she’d thought of being intimate with, this man she was falling for so quickly, hadn’t thought to mention that he’d fathered a child. A child who obviously loved him. That had been all too clear by the longing expression on the boy’s face.
Why?
Shaking her head, she backed away to the inn’s door and fled through it, escaping the heat.
Olivia met her in the hall. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing important,” she replied, sidestepping her into the kitchen.
* * *
THINGS ONLY GOT WORSE AFTER the phone call from the couple who’d reserved the suite that Briar had cleaned the night before. A cancellation in light of the decisive wobble that Brett had made toward Mobile Bay.
She’d just replaced the phone in the cradle when Mrs. Josefstine walked into the entryway. “Briar, dear—”
“You’re leaving,” she surmised. When Mrs. Josefstine lifted her shoulders in a helpless gesture, Briar held up a hand. “You don’t have to explain. Do you need help packing?”
“I think we’ve got it.”
“After you load everything, I’ll have your bill ready.”
“We do appreciate it.”
As soon as she’d waved the family off, Briar went through the house, flipping on all the radios. Storm watch was under way on every local station. She listened to the coverage with half an ear as she mopped the kitchen floor, desperate to busy her hands and head.
She didn’t want to think about what she was going to do about the money she’d promised the county tax office before the July due date a few weeks away. Or the investors she was supposed to be gathering to save the inn from bank foreclosure. Or Cole.
Especially Cole.
Adrian stopped by to tell her they’d hired a couple local boys to board up the tavern and shop windows and asked if she needed them to do hers, too.
As if she had anyone else to nail them up. She handed over a fifty-dollar bill for their trouble and went back to work.
Opening the screen door half an hour later, she listened to the slap of hammer on wood. The wind was picking up, whipping the trees around the inn and churning the bay surface into a white-capped frenzy.
Cole didn’t bother her until she was nearly done with her clean sweep of the lower floor. As she scrubbed the last of the baseboards, she felt him hovering behind her. “Can I do something for you, Cole?”
“Why do you do that?” Cole asked in a weary voice.
She didn’t spare him a glance, only continued to work furiously. “What?”
“Why do you clean when you’re mad?”
“I’m not mad. I’m prepping for the storm.”
“That’s bullshit, Briar.”
Her eyes snapped up to his. “How would you know? You’re a stranger to me.”
“This is about Gavin.”
“Your son.”
His eyes darkened at her brusque tone. “My son,” he agreed. “The only good in my life.”
Her jaw tightened. She turned back to the baseboards and began to scrub again. “I see.”
With a sigh, he reached down and grabbed her by the elbow. “Get up.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“I can’t stand to see you on your hands and knees working like a slave day in and day out.”
“Why does it matter to you?” she asked. Tears spilled into her eyes. She blinked, but they didn’t recede. “This is what I do! If it bothers you so much then maybe you should just leave.”
The words echoed for a long, frightening moment. Then he said quietly, “Is that what you want? You want me to leave so you can get back to your tidy life, Briar?”
Tidy life? When had her life ever been tidy? “Everyone around here leaves eventually.” She pressed her face into her hands. “Better sooner than later, in this case. If you leave now, you’ll beat the weather.”
With a frown, he jerked his head in a nod. “Fine.”
She fought the grief building in her throat and kept working as hard as she could, almost thrilling in the punishing soreness of her fingertips that mirrored the mounting ache in her heart.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BRETT WAS SLATED to make landfall before dawn. Briar hated night storms. Nothing made the howling of the wind, the moan and creak of trees and the rattle of windows worse than total blackout. All it took to cut the power to the Eastern Shore was one felled branch. At Category 2 and strengthening, Brett would make sure her generator ran by midnight.
Just to be certain the front of her house was as weatherproofed as it could be, Briar staked a heavy-duty tarp over her vegetables, hoping it would hold up through the night.
Olivia offered to stay with her instead of with Adrian and Kyle in their cottage a block away. But as much as she didn’t care for nightly hurricanes, with Cole gone she needed to be alone with her thoughts.
She knew he’d hit the road after glancing out the window and finding the spot under the magnolia where he parked his Harley empt
y.
Maybe a long, vicious storm was just what she needed with her brood.
She set candles out in her rooms on the third floor and readied a portable fan and her den couch for sleep. If the power went out, the rooms of the old inn would get hot quickly. She needed to wear something that breathed so she changed into a short, thin nightgown.
Picking at a bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup, she convinced herself she could go about her day-to-day activities just as she had every day for the past year, and not think about Cole Savitt and what she’d shared with him.
Had she really thought he was the sort of man who would want to share the burdens that came with her?
Her thoughts circled back to the uncertainty of the inn. Where would she go if everything went belly-up? She had finished culinary school before her mother’s illness, but she had a feeling the head-chef job she’d been offered over a year ago in Atlanta was no longer a possibility. And one thing was for certain: there was no going back to Paris. She couldn’t bear to face her history there any more than she would be able to remain in Fairhope if she lost the inn.
Never mind her—she only had herself to fend for. When the property was seized by the state, what would the other girls do? Adrian had Kyle. How would she provide for him? And Briar wasn’t the only one who’d be losing a family business; Olivia doted on the tavern. It was her lifeblood. Would Roxie’s dreams of owning her own business recover or would she give up after losing the shop space she’d deemed “perfect” from the get-go?
Panic seized her as she shrank back into the couch cushions. Her mother’s legacy wasn’t the only thing riding on the inn’s dwindling success.
Branches tapped on the glass of the closest window. Their fingerlike shadows fell against the blinds, highlighted by the streetlamps below. A shudder raced through her and suddenly she wished that she’d asked Olivia to stay. No doubt, her cousin’s lively company would keep her mind off the damning heaviness she felt inside.
Pulling a blanket over her legs, she curled up and listened to the quickening tap-tap-tap on the windowpane.
One thing she knew for sure. She wouldn’t sleep a wink tonight.
* * *
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for the wind to start howling. First it came as a kettle whistle. Then it strengthened into a steady, wolfish wail, interrupted only by brunt gusts that tossed limbs against the side of the house. The inn began to groan loudly, as if the storm’s elements made it feel its age like never before.
Driving sheets of rain drilled the Eastern Shore in sporadic bands. One minute the wind was all that existed, the next stinging nettles of water pounded the roof.
As the night wore on, it escalated. Endless wind, endless rain coupled with several hotspots in the fast-moving clouds. Then the sky rumbled its fury and deadly bolts forked overhead, illuminating the hampered world with blinding, white light.
And finally, the hail. The clouds littered rocks of ice on the bay. As soon as Briar heard their chilling cacophony, she knew Brett was closing in.
The power lasted longer than she would’ve wagered, but when it shut down, it did so without a warning flicker. The house fell dead around her. There’d been no television or radio on, no noise inside the house. But without the fan spinning above her, without the drone of the air conditioner or the refrigerator, and without the comfort of light, she felt little between the storm and herself.
Lighting the line of candles she’d set on the coffee table, Briar pulled on a robe, grabbed a hurricane lamp and left her rooms.
The silence of the floors below warred with the scream of the storm, an eerie contrast. She hummed, trying to distract herself as she descended both flights of stairs, making her way to the laundry room. Through a half door in the room’s exterior wall, she entered the shed where she kept the generator. Setting the lamp aside, she worked to crank it to life.
It gurgled twice but refused to ignite. On the third pull, she gritted her teeth and willed it to life. The machine growled, hesitated then roared. Lantern in hand, she waited to make sure it would keep running. Satisfied, she picked up several lengths of ready extension cord and unraveled it as she made her way toward the kitchen.
It took a minute to wrestle the refrigerator away from the wall, but once she put her back into it, it scraped across the floor with a shriek. First cord in hand, she unplugged the fridge and fit the cable into the extension. A spark from the surge between the two zapped her palm and she dropped both with a clatter, cradling her numbed hand as the fridge hummed to life.
“Are you all right?”
Heart launching into her throat, she pressed her back to the wall, blood draining from her head as she glanced up into what she thought for a moment was the face of a ghost. Then she blew out a shuddering breath. “Oh, dear God, Cole. Where did you come from?”
“Upstairs,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling. At her blank look, he added, “I...never left.”
“Your bike’s gone,” she pointed out, puzzled.
“I moved it onto the side porch. I thought that would keep it out of the worst of the storm.”
As she struggled to her feet, holding her numbed hand in the other, she frowned at him. “Why didn’t you leave?”
He lowered his eyes, lifted a shoulder. “I couldn’t leave you here. All alone in this.”
She stared at him. All this time, she’d been convinced she was alone. She’d resigned herself to it. And here he was.
Unless that zap from the power cord had done more damage to her than she assumed, and she was hallucinating.
If anyone were likely to show up as part of her hallucinations, it would be Cole, wouldn’t it?
He moved forward. “Are you okay?”
She stepped back in blatant retreat. “Yep. Just a zap.” She heard the wall of hail harden and frowned. “We should put your bike in the entryway.”
“You sure?”
“In another hour or two, nothing will be safe out there. We better do it now before it gets worse.”
She found coats for both of them in the closet. Hood drawn in place, Briar unlocked the front door. The wind on the street side of the inn wasn’t quite as brutal as the bayside, but they still had to plant their feet on the porch boards to fight it as they made their way around to the side porch where the Harley hugged the wall.
Together, they rolled it into the entryway. After the door shut, Briar got two towels from the linen closet and helped him dry the bike off and dispose of the leaves plastered against its sleek body.
“Do you need help hooking anything else up to the generator?” he asked once they were done.
She shook her head. “Not really, just a portable fan upstairs that I need to hook up. I’ll get one for your room, too. It’s getting stuffy in here.”
“You’re going back upstairs?” he asked, voice dimming.
She sensed the concern behind the query and ignored it. In the storage closet she found the extra portable fan. “Take this. You’ll need it as the night wears on. Are you hungry? You haven’t eaten, have you?”
“I can find something in the fridge for myself,” he said, taking the fan with a frown. “Are you sure it’s safe up there?”
She brushed passed him. “I’m not Dorothy, and this house isn’t going anywhere.”
* * *
EVEN WITH THE fan cooling things somewhat in the bay-view suite, Cole couldn’t settle. He lay on top of the sheets in T-shirt and shorts, frowning at the ceiling and listening to the low-tuned, battery-operated radio he’d found downstairs.
The DJs promised to stay up through the night with listeners, providing the latest updates on Hurricane Brett, whose slanted eye was now staring straight down the watery barrel of the bay. The treacherous east side of the storm was already pounding the Alabama and west Florida coastlines. Several tornado warnings were
in effect. Early damage reports trickled in from cell phones.
One message was clear for those who’d not evacuated—don’t venture outside. Law enforcement officers and meteorologists stated imperatively: stay away from windows. In case of tornado, find a safe, windowless room in the lowest part of the house for cover.
With Briar upstairs, Cole didn’t feel at all comfortable drifting off to sleep.
Suddenly, a deafening crash outside launched Cole from the bed. It subsided quickly. In the dim silence that followed, he heard the quick patter of footfalls in the hall.
He crossed the room and peered out just in time to see the white tail of Briar’s robe disappear down the stairs to the first floor. Hot on her heels, he reached the landing as she ran to the back door.
When he saw her disengage the dead bolt, he rushed forward. “Briar, no!”
She didn’t stop or look back, yanking the door open.
“Don’t go outside!”
His voice was drowned by the banshee scream of the wind. The door sailed out of her grasp, crashing against the wall. She didn’t stop there. Gripping the doorjamb, she battled the wind, stepping over the threshold and moving out into the storm.
“Holy hell,” he muttered. It might have made him as crazy as she was, but he went after her without hesitation. Leaves scattered into the den as he made his way to the door and chased her onto the porch.
The clouds flickered with devilish light, illuminating the churning, rising bay—an animal all its own under the storm’s manipulation. The strobe quality helped him spot Briar at the far end of the porch, looking at the thick branch that had fallen over her vegetable garden and torn through the roof of the porch. Gripping the rail and driving himself into the sucking wind, Cole raised an arm to fend off the stinging slap of rain. Reaching out, he gripped Briar’s arm in a viselike hold and dragged her back.
It took forever to reach the door. Finally, he shoved her to safety and fought the wind again to wrestle the door closed. When it bolted, he whirled on her. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I had to see,” she explained, crossing her arms over her chest. Her voice sounded close to feeble. “I heard something break....”
A Place with Briar (Harlequin Superromance) Page 15
