Jenn McKinlay - Due Or Die

Ann Marie grinned. “What? You didn’t like that sad parade of guys she trotted in front of you when you first moved here?”

“I know she meant well, but I wasn’t even ready to think about dating,” Lindsey said.

“And a guy who still lives with his mother and is obsessed with alien abductions didn’t work for you?” Ann Marie tsked. “Imagine that.”

It was true. When she first moved here, Beth had so wanted her to like Briar Creek that she brought forth every single male she could find in a parade of losers that still lived in infamy to all who worked in the library and had been witness to the freak show.

“How about that guy who smelled like rancid olive loaf?” Ann Marie said. “He was a keeper.”

“You can stop now,” Lindsey said.

“Or how about the one who wanted you to be a mother to his twelve-year-old daughter?” she added. “With his receding hairline and potbelly, now he was a catch!”

Lindsey tapped in the alarm code and led the way out the back door.

“Or that middle-aged pizza delivery guy,” Ann Marie said as they stepped into the cold. “Free pizza for life. Really, you should have at least given him a chance.”

“The one with fifteen cats?” Lindsey clarified.

“I think he only has twelve.”

Lindsey groaned and glanced up at the falling snow. “Drive home safely. If this is as bad as they say, I doubt we’ll be opening tomorrow, but I’ll call everyone and let them know for sure.”

Sully was waiting at the curb; the hot exhaust from his pickup puffed out the back like a steam engine. Lindsey unlocked her bike and hurried toward the warm cab of his truck, feeling very grateful that she hadn’t embarrassed herself so much that he no longer gave her a lift.

He hopped out and opened the door for her, and she scooted in while he put her bike in back. She felt the snow that covered her head and shoulders start to melt immediately.

He climbed back in on his side and they waited while Ann Marie started her car and drove out ahead of them with a wave.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve really been a life saver this past week.”

“No worries,” he said as he slipped the gear on the steering wheel into drive and set off on the road. “I was in the Blue Anchor helping Ian storm proof the place when Jason Meeger and Candace Collins came in and said the town offices were closing. I figured that meant you, too, and that you might need a lift. In these conditions, you don’t want to be walking or bicycling.”

“Do you think it’s going to get as bad as they say?”

Sully was quiet for a moment. She noticed his eyes strayed toward the islands in the bay, and she wondered if he was worried about his parents.

“It feels like it’s going to get bad,” he said. “I was stationed on a warship in the Barents Sea when I was in the service. We saw a lot of blizzard conditions and this has the same feel.”

“The Barents Sea? That’s near the Arctic Circle, isn’t it?”

Sully looked impressed. “Yeah, we were just off the island Svalbard, which is Norwegian. Not many people know where the Barents Sea is.”

“My older brother, Jack, is quite the globe-trotter,” she said. “He’s the adventurous one of the two of us. I spend a lot of time studying maps to figure out where he is. He was in Hammerfest, Norway, for a summer, and I remember seeing the Barents Sea on the map.”

“Beautiful area,” Sully said.

“Do you miss it?” Lindsey asked. “The traveling?”

“Sometimes,” Sully admitted. “But then I think about it being fifteen degrees below zero in the Arctic or one hundred and six degrees above zero while stationed in the Persian Gulf, and I’m okay with Connecticut.”

They turned onto Lindsey’s street and a gust of wind buffeted the truck and the snow took on a ferocity that resembled ice bullets and not the whirly twirly flakes that had been falling just minutes before.

“Looks like you closed just in time,” he said. He pulled up in front of the house, and Lindsey fished her new key out of her bag.

They put her bike in the garage and he walked her to the porch and waited while she unlocked the door.

“Thanks again,” she said.

“Anytime,” he said. “If you need me, just call the Blue Anchor.”

Another gust of wind whipped around the side of the house and almost knocked Lindsey to her knees, but Sully caught her by the elbow. She stared up at him and saw snowflakes coating his eyelashes and the dimples that bracketed his mouth when he smiled like he was now. She felt that same zip she always did when he was around, and she just couldn’t resist. She leaned up and gave him a quick hug.

Without hesitation, he hugged her back, and when they separated, she noticed his smile had deepened.

Then he leaned close and said, “You know, I think I’m glad this storm hit.”

“Why’s that?” she asked.

“Because it’s keeping you from dating the wrong man,” he said.

With a wink, he spun her toward the door and gently pushed her inside, closing the door behind her.

Lindsey leaned against the door and tried to slow the pounding inside her chest. Did he really say that? Did he mean that? Did he mean it like she thought he meant it?

It was a good thing she was leaning against the door, trying to get her mental faculties to function, because Nancy’s door opened and a wriggling black ball of fur came at her as if she’d been gone for weeks instead of hours.

He stood on his back legs and wrapped his paws around Lindsey’s leg as if he was determined not to let her go now that she had come back.

Lindsey leaned down and ruffled his ears. He licked her hand and she glanced up to see Nancy enter the foyer.

“He has been looking out the window for you for the past hour,” she said. “I swear it’s like he knew you’d be home early. I heard the town is shutting down.”

“Yeah, they’re saying it’s going to be a bad one.”

“Well, I went out to the grocery store this morning and stocked up. I had to throw a few elbows in the soup aisle to get the good stuff, but I should have enough supplies to get all three of us through this storm.”

“How is Carrie holding up?”

“Better today. Her son called. He and his sister have been really good about calling her every few hours since she telephoned them and told them the news yesterday. He was on his way down from New Hampshire, stopping in Rhode Island to get his sister, but I think they’re going to have to wait out the storm at her place. There’s no sense in them getting stranded in a whiteout somewhere.”

“Have the police been by today?”

“No,” Carrie said as she came out of Nancy’s apartment and joined them. “I think they may actually have run out of questions for me.”

She was dressed in a thick turtleneck sweater and jeans over fleece-lined slippers. She was pale and looked as if she hadn’t slept, but still, she looked better than she had two days ago when they’d found Markus dead.

“Well, come on in.” Nancy pulled Lindsey into her apartment. “We’ve got hot chocolate and fresh macaroons and the fire is crackling. If we’re in for a blizzard, we may as well settle in.”

“Heathcliff missed you,” Carrie said as they followed Nancy inside with the puppy dancing between them.

“I doubt if it’s me he missed,” she said.

“Oh, it’s definitely you,” Nancy said. “He gets the same moony look as Sully when he’s around you.”

“Sully does not look at me that way,” Lindsey said as she unwrapped her scarf and took off her coat and hung them on a hook in the hall.

“I hate to disagree, but, yes, he does,” Carrie said.

“Oh, don’t you start,” Lindsey said. She sat on the ottoman by the fire and Heathcliff-rather, the puppy-sat with her, resting his head on her feet. If there was an award to be given for cuteness, she was pretty sure he’d win it paws down.