Carla Neggers - Secrets of the Lost Summer

He heard a branch snap somewhere in the woods, then nothing.

The silence was downright eerie.

He reminded himself he liked ice. He had been a natural on skates. These weren’t rink conditions, but he was good at keeping his balance, or so he told himself as he considered that if he fell, he was on his own. No one would find him.

Unless Buster sneaked out again, he thought with a grim smile, pressing on.

Smoke was curling out of the chimney of his only neighbor’s cream-colored house. An ice-and-rain-coated walk took him to a wide stone landing, and he knocked on the front door, painted a rich blue. There was another door to his right, to a newer addition. This was obviously the oldest part of the house.

“Miss Frost?” he called. “It’s Dylan McCaffrey.”

She opened the door. Her hair was still damp, and her cheeks were pink from the cold—or warmth, Dylan realized suddenly. Even from his position on the landing, he could tell that her house was toasty. She obviously had a fireplace or woodstove going. Hence, the smoke coming out of the chimney.

With his dripping coat and wet, muddy pants and shoes, he felt marginally ridiculous coming to her aid. It probably should have been the other way around. He was the unprepared stranger.

“I thought I’d check on you,” he said. “The power’s out at my place.”

“Here, too. I called the power company and notified them. Power’s out all over town. We’ll be among the last to get it restored.”

“The power company doesn’t like you?”

He was joking but Olivia gave him a cool look. “We’re on a sparsely populated dead-end road.”

“It’s just the two of us out here in the sticks?”

“I have my dog,” she said.

“Buster. He’s—”

“Asleep out by the fire at the moment. It wouldn’t take much to wake him.”

Dylan wondered if his presence was making Olivia nervous. That wasn’t his intention, but he could be thickheaded at times, or so Noah Kendrick, various hockey coaches, teammates and an assortment of women had told him. Often.

He attempted to look amiable and easygoing, not half frozen, hungry and out of his element. “If you need anything, I’m right up the road in the cold and the dark.”

“You weren’t expecting to spend the night in Knights Bridge, were you?”

“I thought I’d figure that out once I got here. I wasn’t counting on an ice storm.”

“Do you have food? I have homemade parsnip soup and oatmeal bread from lunch that I’d be happy to send back with you.”

Parsnip soup. He felt a fat, cold raindrop splatter on the back of his neck. “Thanks, but I brought some basic provisions with me, just in case.”

“I remember Miss Webster had a woodstove. Did she leave it behind?”

He hadn’t even considered a woodstove. “It’s in the dining room.”

“You’ll want to check to make sure a bat or a squirrel hasn’t taken up residence in the chimney.” Olivia leaned out of her warm house and pointed a slender finger vaguely in the direction of her garage. “You can help yourself to some dry wood if you’d like.”

Dylan figured he would only be able to carry enough for a few hours’ fire. There wasn’t much point. At the rate he was going, he’d die of hypothermia before he reached his house, anyway.

It was only a slight exaggeration.

He thanked his neighbor and noticed she didn’t press him to take wood or offer him a spare bedroom. “Thanks for stopping by,” she said politely, then shut the door quietly behind him.

He half skated back to the road, which was even more treacherous. What had his father been thinking, buying a house in this backwater little town? There couldn’t be lost treasure in Knights Bridge, or even clues to lost treasure. Impossible.

Then again, Duncan McCaffrey had been a man who relished taking on the impossible.

When Dylan arrived back at his inherited house, he examined the woodstove that was hooked up in a corner in the dining room. It looked like an oil drum. It couldn’t be that efficient, but it was better than a cold night in the dark. He found dry wood in an old apple crate in the kitchen and hit the stovepipe chimney with a log to warn any critters before he lit matches.

He wasn’t worried about a buildup of creosote. If the house burned down, so what?

The wood was dry enough that he needed little kindling and only one match to get the fire started. As the flames took hold, he checked his cell phone and walked around the house until he got a weak signal by the back door.

He dialed Noah in San Diego. “Tell me there’s been an emergency and you need me back there,” Dylan said.

“All’s well. What’s happening in New England?”

“Freezing rain. No heat, no electricity. I’ve turned into Bob Cratchit.”

“What’s the house like?”

“It’s a dump.”

“Have you met Olivia Frost?”

“I have.” Dylan pictured her pink cheeks and hazel eyes. “She’s warm. I wonder if she has a generator.”

“Not sharing her heat?”

It wasn’t a bad quip for Noah, who wasn’t known for that particular variety of verbal quickness. “She offered me cordwood. I’m not going anywhere for a while. We’re in the middle of an ice storm.”

Noah burst out laughing.

Their call got dropped just as the ceiling in the kitchen started to leak.

Dylan slid his phone back in his pocket and watched water pool on the wide-plank floor.

“Well, hell.”

What could he do? He was stuck here.

He hoped Grace Webster had left behind a bucket.

Four

Olivia’s house had come with a generator for nights just such as this one, but she only turned it on for an hour before she decided to wait out the power outage. She had little food to worry about spoiling, and she didn’t like generators. In storms, people too often misused them and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She had dutifully read all the instructions and had her father do a dry run with her, but the thing still made her nervous. She wanted to be positive she knew what she was doing before she ran it for any length of time.

As she snuggled under a soft wool throw in front of the brick fireplace, she told herself it was decent of Dylan McCaffrey to check on her. He hadn’t meant anything by his visit except to make sure she was all right in the midst of a nasty ice storm.

The wind picked up, and a spruce tree swayed outside the front window, casting strange shadows in the living room. She heard the crack of a branch breaking off in the old sugar maple in the side yard. Right now, the branches and power lines were weighed down with ice, but once the temperature rose above freezing, the ice would melt as if it had never been. Spring would resume its steady march toward daffodils, tulips and lilacs in bloom.

The fire glowed, the only light in the darkening room. A chunk of burning wood fell from the grate, startling her, but she quickly told herself it was nothing. She had lived alone in her Boston apartment, but she had to admit that living alone in her antique house in Knights Bridge was taking some getting used to. The creaks, the groans, the shadows, the dark nights—anything could fire up her imagination. At first, she’d slept with her iPod on, playing a selection of relaxing music, but she was beginning to develop a routine and was getting used to the sounds of the old house and country road.

Tightening her throw around her, she turned her attention back to her neighbor. Elly O’Dunn must have run into Duncan McCaffrey, Dylan’s father. When Olivia had written to Dylan, she hadn’t expected him to show up in Knights Bridge, and she certainly hadn’t expected to meet him the way she had, muddy, yelling in panic for her wandering dog.

She especially hadn’t expected the new owner of Grace Webster’s house to be a man close to her own age, with a sexy grin, sexy broad shoulders and sexy black-lashed deep blue eyes.