Karen Templeton - Swept Away

Whatever. If nothing else, if she was elected, city council meetings would be spared an endless parade of deviled eggs made with ginger and horseradish and Cheez Whiz canapés topped with anchovy stars. But since she figured her winning was unlikely—Arliss was a good person at heart, even if she couldn’t cook worth spit, and this was a picayune Bible-belt town, after all—she was basically only going along with the whole idea in order to make her deluded but well-meaning friends and family happy.

“Campaign’s goin’ fine,” she finally lied, but Luralene had already moved on, her beady little eyes scanning the diner like radar. You could practically hear the bleep…bleep…bleep from underneath her bomb-shelter hairdo. Jenna Logan came in with her niece Blair, who was smiling like a goon at everybody until finally Ruby said, “Well, look who got her braces off!” and the out-of-towners—father and daughter, she was guessing—glanced over and smiled, which is when Ivy got a load of all the earrings marching up the outer rim of the gal’s ears, the number of rings on her long, thin fingers. She seemed a little old to be dressed that way, to tell the truth, but then, Ivy supposed she had no room to talk with her long, gray braid and embroidered East Indian tunic. Not to mention the Birkenstocks.

Hey. Being a cliché took a lot of effort. Just ask Luralene.

The man’s cell phone rang. He dug it out of his shirt pocket, said, “Uh-huh” and “I see” a few times, then clapped it shut (it was one of those fancy flip-up numbers) and frowned at the gal, mumbling something that made her mouth twist all up. She leaned over to get her purse off the floor while the man paid the bill and praised Ruby’s cooking, which earned him the black woman’s brightest smile. The two of them passed by Luralene and Ivy’s booth on their way out, the man surprising the living daylights out of Ivy by meeting her gaze directly, then nodding.

Luralene poked her. “Didja see that?”

But Ivy barely heard her for all the blood rushing in her ears.

Sam had promised the Stewarts he’d check in with them after he’d run his errands to see how things were going, so that’s what he was going to do. Because he was a man of his word, for one thing, and because it didn’t seem right, abandoning them if they were going to be stranded—which he suspected they were—for another. However, to say he wasn’t altogether comfortable with the prospect of seeing Carly Stewart again was one of the bigger understatements of the year. Why, he couldn’t say, exactly. Other than the obvious, which was that something about her was tickling awake things he’d just as soon stay asleep, thank you. He always had hated being tickled. However, by the time he got back to Ruby’s, they’d already left.

“And not lookin’ particularly happy about things, would be my take on it,” Ruby said, ringing up the breakfast burrito he and Travis were going to share. Setting foot in Ruby’s without ordering something violated a basic law of nature. Then the white-haired woman frowned. “How’d you know about them, anyway?”

“We were right behind them when their truck landed in a ditch. Axle’s shot, looked like.” He pocketed his change. “I didn’t have the heart to tell ’em it’s probably unlikely Darryl’s got a replacement lying around, which means they might be here for a while.”

Ruby gave him a speculative look, the kind that preceded a comment he doubted he wanted to hear, so he was more than grateful when Blair Logan suddenly appeared at his side, grinning up at him.

“Well, hey, Blair,” Sam said with a grin of his own for Libby’s best friend. Her calm, rational, normal best friend who, in jeans and a long-sleeved top that skimmed her slender figure rather than strangling it, wasn’t showing signs of going over to the dark side. At least not yet. “You got your braces off, huh?”

“This morning, yeah,” she said, handing the check and a twenty to Ruby, then scooping Travis up into her arms to give him a hug, her cinnamon-colored hair glimmering in the streak of sunlight angling through a nearby window. “So,” she said, setting his son on his feet again, “you know those people who were in here earlier?”

“Not really, no. I only stopped to help them out on the road.”

“Oh. The woman looked kinda cool. For someone that old, I mean.”

Then again, the dark side took many forms, he thought as Ruby handed the teenager her change.

Once back in the truck, now loaded down with enough fencing supplies to circle the state, Sam drove the three blocks to Darryl Andrews’s garage, turning a blind eye to Travis’s sharing his half of the burrito with the dog in the back seat. Sure enough, Carly and her father were standing out in front, backpacks and duffels strewn at their feet, looking like they weren’t quite sure what to do next.

A vague feeling of impending doom came over Sam, coinciding nicely with the sharp ping of sexual awareness as he took in a scrap of her springy hair toying with her long neck. And he thought of Libby and the hormone riots she was no doubt inciting these days and how Blair thought Carly was “cool” and how Libby would no doubt see in this woman a kindred spirit, and Sam marveled at his brain’s ability to produce so many thoughts simultaneously, not a single one of them reassuring in the slightest.

Except maybe for the briefly entertained idea of getting the hell out of there.

However. He pulled up beside them, and Carly leaned in the passenger-side window like she’d been expecting him and said, “Darryl said it’d take a week to get the axle, so it looks like we’re stuck,” and now he noticed just how full her bottom lip was and he thought This is nuts. He also noticed she wore that resigned expression of someone who was actually ticked but knew giving vent to those feelings would serve no useful purpose. “So I guess we need someplace to stay for a few days. Is there a motel around here?”

See, this is the part he was dreading. Because he’d known before she’d even opened her mouth what the options were, and what the outcome was likely to be, both of which tied nicely in with that impending doom thing. “There’s the Double Arrow out by me,” he said as if reading a script, “but it’s closed for the next couple of weeks while the owners finish up remodeling it.”

“No place in town, then?” her father put in from over her shoulder. “A rooming house or something?”

Here’s the funny thing: Any number of people could have been behind Carly and her father this morning when their truck went off the road. And any number of people would have made the offer he was about to make. But it hadn’t been any number of people, it had been him. He could practically hear Jeannie saying, “Nothing happens without a purpose,” although her voice wasn’t nearly as clear as it used to be.

Still, Sam shook his head, a gesture which apparently rattled loose the words he knew he was going to say all along. “No, the Double Arrow’s it. But if you don’t mind family living, you could bunk with us. Libby, my girl, has an extra bed in her room. And there’s a fold-out couch in the living room.”

“Oh, now,” Lane said, as Carly—Sam noticed out of the corner of his eye—simply stared at him as if not quite sure what to think, “we don’t want to put you out—”

“It’s no bother,” Sam said, because logistically, it wasn’t, really. “And besides, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of choice, does there?”

Father and daughter regarded each other for several seconds; then Lane said, “We insist on paying you for putting up with us, though,” and Sam laughed.

“You’re talking about a ninety-year-old farmhouse, six kids and one bathroom. Somehow, it wouldn’t seem right to take your money.”