Jennifer Greene - Snow Day - Heart of the Storm / Seeing Red / Land's End

“Except for a few incurable romantics who think you came back to sweep Delaney off her feet and carry her into the sunset, it’s pretty much a consensus.”

“Great.” He shouldn’t care what a bunch of people he hadn’t seen in years and wouldn’t see again in the near future thought of him, but it stung a little. Why did going out in the world and making something of himself make him a bad guy? And he wasn’t the first guy to break things off with a girl, either.

Brody wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he was so relieved to see his parents enter the gym he wanted to let out a cheer. The conversation with Sandy was over. He didn’t like having his relationship with Delaney poked at and prodded. He didn’t know what was going on himself, so he couldn’t very well explain it to anybody else.

After Sandy stood up, she took Noah, freeing him to stand. His butt hurt from sitting on the hard floor, but there were only so many places to sit and the women and older men had dibs by right. The floor was actually more comfortable than trying to sit on one of the cots, but it didn’t make getting up any easier.

His mom met him halfway across the gym and Brody hugged her so tightly, he lifted her right off the floor. “It’s good to see you, Ma.”

“Let me look at you.” She took a step back and cupped his face in her hands to get a good look. “I swear, you get more handsome every time I see you.”

“With a mother as beautiful as you, it’s inevitable.”

She laughed and swatted his arm. “Go say hello to your father.”

He hugged his dad, though the embrace was brief and he left the old man’s feet on the floor. “Looking good, Pop.”

“You, too, son. Glad you were here to take care of your sister and little Noah.”

“Sandy would have been fine, but I’m glad I was here, too. And, trust me, if I’d known you had no heat, I would have gone after you and Mom, too.”

John Rollins scoffed. “We were fine.”

“That’s why mom was warming herself over a stove burner?”

“Now you sound like your brother-in-law. I swear, you two nag like a bunch of women.”

“Hey,” his wife and daughter said at the same time.

Brody laughed and took their bags. “I guess we should get you two some cots. Squeeze them over by ours.”

“Delaney said she’d get them,” his mother said, and he saw the speculative gleam in her eye.

Damn. A growing audience to whatever—if anything—was going on between him and Delaney wasn’t helping matters any. “That’s good. Once you warm up, you’re probably going to sleep for hours.”

As if on cue, his mom yawned. “I gotta smooch on my grandson for a little while first.”

Another entry in the why babies were good column. They were excellent distractions when you needed to change the subject. “He’ll be glad to have another familiar body to cuddle with. He’s been passed around a lot.”

“I hope he doesn’t get sick.” She took Noah from Sandy, fussing over him as he waved a tiny fist at her.

“Brody’s been doing his best to keep that from happening,” Sandy said, her voice light with amusement. “You should see him in his rubber gloves, scrubbing things down with bleach water. It’s really cute.”

His dad gave him a skeptical look. “Rubber gloves?”

“There’s not a lot of call for splitting wood, changing motor oil or other manly endeavors, Pop. I help where I can.”

“Women love a man who’s not afraid to do a little housework,” his mother added, giving him a knowing look.

Please God, Brody thought, let the storm stop soon.

* * *

DELANEY WASN’T IN too bad a mood for a woman trapped in a school gymnasium. Maybe it was sleep deprivation, but nothing—not even painful memories of kisses or intense looks from the woman whom she’d always thought would be her mother-in-law someday—could dim the satisfaction of a job being done well. Even with the added stress of Brody and his family in the group, she’d received several compliments on how smoothly the shelter was running.

She even smiled at Brody as he approached her, fighting the urge to turn and run. Or at least hide behind something so everybody wasn’t watching for her reaction to him. “What’s up?”

He gave her the smile she knew was meant to charm her into doing his bidding. “Any chance we can go poking around the classrooms for a jar of buttons or something?”

“Why would there be jars of buttons in the classrooms?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Or... Oh, paperclips! Some boxes of paperclips would do.”

“The classrooms are locked.”

“You have the keys. At least you did when we got the bleach.”

Busted. “We’re not stealing office supplies from the school, Brody.”

“Borrowing. We’d be borrowing office supplies for the children.”

She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck, realizing he wasn’t going to leave her be until he got whatever he was after. “Why do the children need boxes of paperclips?”

“Because we have no poker chips.”

“Why do the children need poker chips? Just who is we?”

“The older kids. Some adults, too. Pop and I are going to teach them how to play poker. Everybody’s bored and my parents are starting to bicker. Most of them know how to play already, though, so we’ll have tournaments once the ones who don’t grasp the basics.”

He looked excited about it, so she refrained from laughing at him. “Don’t you think Go Fish would be more appropriate? Maybe Rummy? And we have about five hundred jigsaw puzzles.”

“Mrs. Palmer has laid claim to most of the puzzles and she gets really nasty if you don’t do all the outside pieces first.”

“It’s easier that way.”

“She slapped Mr. Bergen’s hand. He’s gotta be almost seventy. A kid could have nightmares for life.”

This time she did laugh, until he laughed with her and the warm sound tied her stomach in knots. “You’re trying to distract me from your plan to corrupt our kids by teaching them to gamble.”

His green eyes sparkled with amusement, so she focused on his mouth. That was a mistake. “As corruption goes, it’s fairly mild.”

“But why poker?”

“Because I’m good at it.”

Delaney sighed. She knew he was good at it. During downtime on the boats, the guys played poker and they learned young. He’d tried to teach her how to play a few times but she was so bad at it, even the incentive of winning her clothing piece by piece couldn’t overcome his impatience with her.

“Do you know how I made my money?” he asked, his tone serious now.

“When Sandy and Mike were buying their house, she said you answered a lot of questions for her because you flip real estate.”

“But I bought my very first flip property with money I won on the poker circuit. That’s how I got out of here and how I got my start.”

She hadn’t known that, but it concerned her even more than the possibility of gambling for paperclips raising some judgmental eyebrows. “Brody, don’t fill these kids’ heads with big dreams of gambling their way out of here.”

“What’s wrong with big dreams?” He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Nothing. But a lot of these kids will grow up and fish or work for little more than minimum wage and be just fine. The ones who dream big will either fight for their dreams or they won’t. Just because you got lucky doesn’t mean there are shortcuts.”

“Delaney, I’m not going to lure the adolescent population of Tucker’s Point away with me like some kind of poker-playing Pied Piper. It’s just something fun to do for the in-between crowd and the older folks who don’t want to play—and I quote, ‘baby games’—or risk getting their hands slapped by Mrs. Palmer.”