“Hamburger slathered in grease.” Since he had no idea where she was going, Clay didn’t attempt to steer her, but followed along, all his senses zinging with anticipation. She was on a high, and they weren’t fighting. Those had to be good signs.
“What did Timid Talbert have to say to you before the meeting?” That had been bothering him since he’d watched Aurora’s expression go stone cold after that little discussion. She’d refused to tell him earlier under the excuse that she’d wanted to listen to the meeting. Maybe now that she’d won, she’d be a little less closemouthed.
“Timid Talbert?” she inquired with a lift of her eyebrows, diverting the question.
“All I have to do is growl, and he backs away as if I’m about to eat him alive. He made you angry. Why?”
Rory wasn’t certain she was comfortable with Clay recognizing her anger, or in his feeling familiar enough to question her about it. But she was on a roll tonight, and he was part of the reason. Maybe she should experiment with being less controlling. “He fired me,” she said with insouciance, stopping at the café.
Clay guided her inside with a proprietary hand at the small of her back. She decided she liked that old-fashioned side of him. Much too aware of heads turning, watching her with this striking man, Rory tried to look unselfconscious taking a place at the counter of her old high school haunt. Once upon a time she’d thought it the most important thing in the world to be sitting here with a hunk like Clay. Or Jeff. Surely she’d advanced a few stages of maturity since then.
“How could Talbert fire you?” he demanded. “You weren’t being paid.”
She shrugged and nodded at the approaching waitress. “Not now,” she whispered. “We’re celebrating our victory,” she reminded him in a louder voice. “Your statistics were fabulous. Now, if we could find the mayor’s fabled U-boat treasure, we could give the city their funds and never worry again.”
“Don’t tell me you believe that story.” Stella slapped the menus down in front of them. “Maybe the mayor’s daddy shot those German spies like they say, but he spent every penny they carried buying up half the town.”
“Not according to Brother Tim,” Clay objected. “He thinks the late mayor died before he spent it all.”
“And the town’s sitting on gold?” Stella snorted inelegantly.
“Maybe he buried it in the swamp and Jeff thinks he can dig it up,” Rory suggested.
“That’s more like it. How did the petition go?” Stella switched the subject. “Are they paving the path to hell or not?”
“Not yet. Chocolate malt, please.” Realizing they were attracting attention, Rory tried not to gloat, but she figured she was beaming from ear to ear.
“Delaying the zoning isn’t the same as stopping it,” Clay warned after ordering coffee. “Short of striking gold, we have no chance of convincing them to keep wetlands.”
“Spoilsport.” She pouted, and thrilled a little at the way Clay’s gaze immediately diverted to her mouth. She was playing with fire here, but that was what celebrating was about, wasn’t it? Dancing around a big old bonfire?
She wanted to do a whole lot more than dance around the bonfire that was Clay McCloud. He looked as if he could go up in flames at any moment.
“You’ll have to persuade the committee that you can bring in business without high-density zoning,” Clay insisted, looking like a Hollywood star but talking like the genius he claimed to be.
“I don’t want to hear about it.” She dismissed his practicality in favor of celebration time. “I want a malt and happiness, and if you’re going to be a downer, I’ll do it without you.”
She really didn’t want him to go away. Right now she didn’t care about the Terry Talberts of the world. She wanted to explore the excitement spilling through her, discover how much of it was over winning and how much was the man beside her.
“I am your bluebird of happiness,” he agreed solemnly, accepting his coffee and sipping.
She raised her eyebrows at him, but busy slurping the first malt she’d enjoyed since high school, she refused to take the bait. She hoped the shiver down her spine was from the cold ice cream and not from anticipation of the night ahead, but she could feel his vibrations as certainly as her own.
Others from the audience drifted in, pounding them on the back or congratulating them, depending on proximity. Glowing with triumph, Aurora accepted the praise, knowing it could turn to scorn just as easily but not afraid. That much had changed since high school. She no longer feared disapproval.
Then maybe she should be brave enough not to fear the man who led her out of the café after they finished their celebratory snack. Clay was an intelligent adult male, after all, not a high school kid salivating to get his hands on her breasts.
Her sister might think it was the student council election that had soured Rory’s attitude toward men, but that had been only the tip of the iceberg, the part people could see. Only Rory knew that Jeff had decided to run against her when she’d swatted him for trying to remove her swimsuit top. More than once. They’d ceased to be a couple when he’d called her a prick teaser.
Her other encounters with men had pretty much been fast-lane sex-and-runs, leaving her heart battered. She didn’t know if she was prepared to risk it again, not when her life was already in a precarious position.
“Is your silence ominous?” Clay asked, handing her into the truck.
“Nope. Maybe.” Sitting this close to him in the small cab, their knees nearly brushing, Rory was entirely too aware of him. She would have to be dead to not know that he had sex on his mind.
She simply couldn’t decide if it was her brains or her body that attracted Clay. And why should she care, since she wouldn’t be around long enough to become involved? She’d be leaving here as soon as...what?
The original plan had been to see her family on the road to recovery. She could do that next week when she cashed in the bottle cap, knock wood. But now she’d opened a whole other can of worms. She couldn’t leave this zoning thing hanging unresolved while she pursued her career.
“Am I that boring?” Clay asked warily when she didn’t expand upon her answer.
“Hardly. But you could be that terrifying.”
“All right, that sounds promising.” The pickup soared across the bridge and onto the island. “Is it the biker thing? Should I admit I never rode a Harley until I got here?”
Rory laughed and turned her attention more fully on him. “Really? You looked born to it.”
“I like things with motors, and I always wanted a bike. Figured a place like this was a golden opportunity to change my image.”
“Then let me congratulate you on your success. Must be living near Hollywood rubs off. Your acting is excellent.”
“It’s not an act,” he insisted. “I like Harleys. Just because I can work computers doesn’t mean I have to be a geek.”
“I can assure you, geekdom is not what women think of when they look at you. I’d feel safer with a geek.”
“No adventure in your soul,” he griped. “You have to look outside the silk-necktie crowd once in a while, take a chance.”
“I’m not a gambler.” Maybe she should be. After all, she’d won a million dollars without even trying. “I prefer known quantities, and there’s nothing certain about men and relationships,” she added to remind herself as much as warn him.
He wiggled his shoulders inside his jacket as if it had become too tight. “I’m not good at discussing ‘relationships.’ My parents taught us it’s bad manners to gossip, rude to talk about bodily functions in public, and feelings are best kept behind closed doors. Want to talk politics?”
Rory considered that a moment. He’d obviously been brought up in a much more sophisticated environment than her emotionally charged one. Grinning, she couldn’t resist replying, “Ah’ve heard tell Yankees don’t admit to needing pots to piss in, but Ah purely loathe speaking poorly of the uneducated.”
In the light of the dash
board, Clay stared at her until his active brain kicked in and he laughed. “Gossip, bodily functions, and feelings all in one sentence. I want to introduce you to my mother.”
At his warm laughter, interest flared so brightly she almost cringed.
Not until Clay exclaimed did she realize it wasn’t her thoughts flaring brightly, but a roaring shower of flames against the night sky ahead.
Chapter Fifteen
The car shot past the drive leading to Jared and Cleo’s. The fire soared brighter and closer, flinging sparks high into the heavens.
“Look at the top of that tree!” Aurora watched through the windshield in horror as the tip of a towering pine burst into flame.
“Pine sap burns like crazy,” Clay muttered. Traffic slowed to a crawl, and he had to ease up on the accelerator. “Can you tell where it is?”
She didn’t want to contemplate it. It was impossible to judge distances on flat land. She could hear sirens screaming from behind them, which meant the island’s volunteer fire department had already sent out a call for reinforcement.
“The wells are unusually low.” She murmured her fear aloud, as if that would dissipate it. “We’ve been in a drought for three years.”
“Swell, surrounded by ocean and swamp and still dry. Surely they can pump it from somewhere. That marsh out there should stop it.”
The cynic trying to be reassuring would have been amusing at any other time. Right now Rory grasped his encouragement and hung her prayers on it. “Pine straw,” she murmured, hoping he could counter her fear. “All the houses out here use pines for shade and the dead needles for mulch.”
“That stuff burns too fast to hurt anything else.”
She nodded, not wanting to argue with that optimistic assessment, even if he was saying it just to shield her. His calm outlook gave her strength, forming a bond she didn’t want to break.
They crawled past the peach stand at Iris’s turnoff. Before they reached the road for home, police barriers blocked the highway. Behind the barriers the fire soared to new heights—in the direction of the trailer.
“Mandy,” she whispered, trusting him with her worst fears. She waited for Clay to blow it off, but this time he had no reassuring words, and the terror multiplied. “Pops is in a cast. They only have the motorcycle.” Would Cissy be home yet? Or was she still at Iris’s, maybe stuck in this traffic, too?
His mouth forming a grim line, Clay jerked the steering wheel to one side, pulling the pickup off the road at a reckless angle between two other trucks. He turned off the ignition and leaped out. “Come on, we’ll walk.”
Relieved that he understood and acted, Rory jumped out to follow. Pushing through the mob of spectators, they dodged vehicles and questions to reach the corner. A policeman ran up to halt them, but Clay didn’t slow his stride. “Her family is down there,” he shouted as he shoved past. “You’ll have to shoot us to stop us.”
Rory didn’t know if she could have argued with an officer of the law, but Clay didn’t seem to have any qualms about it. He shoved past the police officer and kept moving. She could learn to love a man who acted with confidence instead of hesitation in the face of emergency.
Another treetop burst into flame, and they broke into a run. Smoke choked the humid night air, concealing the fanciful mailboxes and colorful flower gardens in the yards along the road.
By the time they reached the curve in the long, flat pavement leading to home, bits of ash tore at Rory’s lungs. Ambulances, fire trucks, and spectators littered the blacktopped lane, but Clay stayed outside the crowd, tramping through the grass and bushes. She wished she’d worn something more practical than high-heeled pumps and a business suit.
Clearing a path through a wax myrtle hedge ahead of her, Clay abruptly stopped. Turning, he grabbed her arm and steered her back toward the road. “Not this way.”
He was bigger, heavier, and stronger than Rory, but she was far more terrified. With a burst of adrenaline she broke from his grip and raced back to the thicket. Pushing past a head-high shrub, she glimpsed the crumpled front fender of a powder-blue car.
Scorched ground and smoking trees surrounded it.
She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Her knees weakened, and she grabbed the branches ripping at her suit, trying to reach the car to see what was inside it.
“Don’t, Aurora.” Clay caught her by the waist, preventing her from tearing herself apart. “Let’s go back to the road and talk to the policemen.”
Heart racing, Rory ignored his admonition, elbowed him, and jerked free again.
Scraped by thorns and blackened branches, she forced her way past the shrubbery to stare at the fire-blackened remains of her pride and joy.
The convertible top was down. The front end was totaled. Cissy wasn’t in it.
Clay laid a comforting hand on her shoulder, but if she turned to him she would melt down into a helpless puddle. Instead she stiffened her spine and pulled free.
She and Cissy might never agree on anything, but she didn’t want a world without her sister in it. Shaking, Rory stumbled in the direction of the road, determined to find her. Their ties ran root deep. Cissy was mother and sister and best friend. She couldn’t lose her.
The fire had destroyed the car and everything around it. Cissy had a pin in her hip and couldn’t run, even if she’d survived the crash.
Panic surged through her, giving her the strength to keep moving.
This time Clay didn’t stop her. Using his body as shield, he held aside branches, clearing a path to the road and the onlookers staring horror-struck at the night sky. Silence reigned as friends and neighbors watched the fire blazing down the road, spreading rapidly into the empty acreage of the Bingham swamp—roaring toward the trailer and the concrete factory.
Ignoring the fire, Aurora scanned the crowd for some sign of Cissy, praying her sister had somehow escaped. The fire must have started here, with the car Cissy was driving. Maybe there had been time...?
They’d left Mandy home with Pops. Why weren’t they out here?
Thoughts whirling incoherently, she fell upon the first person she recognized when they reached the road. “Erly, where’s Cissy?”
The elderly man, lined face creased even more with worry, glanced at her with dawning recognition. “Rora. I ain’t seen her, hon. The firemen been goin’ house to house. They’ll get her out.”
“That’s her car back there.” Panic rising, she turned from Erly to other neighbors, who heard the fear in her voice and turned to look. “Anyone seen Cissy? She was driving my car, and it’s off the road back there.”
“Ambulance took someone out,” one woman shouted. “Didn’t see who.”
“I heard it was a car crash started this,” a teenager called. “They took the driver into town.”
“If she’s walking, she headed home to check on Mandy and Jake,” Clay murmured against her ear. “If she’s in the ambulance, she’s in good hands. Let’s get closer.”
Nodding because her tongue was suddenly too thick to talk, Rory followed his lead through the crowd. She needed his confidence to get her through this. She’d lost her own back there in that thicket. She clung to his hand, let him use his size to bully his way through the crowd, and prayed frantically.
Police stopped them at another roadblock, so Clay led her back into the shrubbery again. The fire had flashed so hot across the dry tinder, it had moved on without doing more than burning off the underbrush, carried by the east wind off the ocean. The stench of charred pine and wet charcoal choked the air.
“It’s almost under control,” he said, glancing upward at silver streams of water coursing into the trees.
He sounded positive and reassuring, but Rory figured that was for her benefit. Flames roared through the tree-tops close to her home. Every twig around them smoldered and leaped into small fires with the slightest breeze.
Sheer terror had replaced her ability to plot a course of action. She simply trailed in Clay’s path, pray
ing as she’d never prayed before. She made wild promises to God as their feet found a grassy hummock barely touched by fire. Ahead, flames soared from two different wooded areas.
“There’s not enough on the ground to feed it,” Clay promised. She stumbled over the rough terrain, and he caught her waist and held her up. “The humidity is holding it in check over the marsh. It’s only burning higher up where there’s a breeze.”
Maybe he fought forest fires in California. Maybe he knew what he was talking about. Maybe she wouldn’t ask because she’d rather believe than question.
Where was Cissy? And Pops? And Mandy?
She broke into a run when she saw the weather vane on top of the house through a line of burned-out trees. Clay grabbed her, hauling her off her feet.
Rory kicked and squirmed, but this time he wouldn’t let her go. Wildly, she fought his greater strength, not believing he could stop her if she’d made up her mind to go.
“Give it a rest, Aurora,” he said with implacable finality. “We can’t just run in there until we know if it’s too hot to walk.”
Too panicked to be reasonable, too frightened to fight, she collapsed against his chest. She could feel the heat, breathed the ashes and smoke, and she couldn’t look. Clay’s arms held her, his strength supported her, and she simply burst into helpless tears.
“I see your father.” Holding her upright, he spoke above her head. “We should go in by the road. He’s turned a hose on the house, but everything else is scorched. Let me take his place, and you get him out, okay?”
Overwhelmed with relief that all might be well, she nodded against his chest, wiped her eyes, and tried to stand. Clay kept his grip on her waist as she pushed forward to observe the scene. She looked for blazing embers in the darkness, sought a clear path through the smoldering pine needles, but saw only her father in his purple cast, defiantly spraying any spark daring to alight in his vicinity.
Carolina Girl Page 15
