Полная версия
Healing the Boss's Heart
“I wouldn’t know if it was verbatim,” he said. “I never went to church much after my mother died.”
“That’s too bad.”
“It didn’t do her much good.”
Touched, Maya gave him a barely perceptible hug. “We won’t know that until we get to Heaven.”
Although he didn’t answer, she was glad she’d spoken her mind. Gregory Garrison might not claim to be a believer at present, but since he’d gone to church in the past, there was a chance he’d eventually come around again. She certainly hoped so because she couldn’t imagine the suffering he might have to go through if he continued to deny his faith. Especially if the destruction from this storm turned out to be as bad as she thought it was going to be.
Everyone had doubts at times, even the most devout Christians. It was those who continued to believe, in spite of outward circumstances, who coped best.
And as far as she was concerned, any man who would risk his own life to save a child he didn’t even like still deserved to share in the Lord’s daily blessings.
Greg held tight to the two he was guarding and listened to the battering on the floor and walls above. He desperately wanted to venture out, yet he wasn’t willing to endanger Maya or the boy merely to satisfy his curiosity.
Tommy had stopped sobbing and was now hugging Greg’s neck as if he never intended to let go, while Maya seemed to be holding her breath.
Finally, as the thudding and banging upstairs lessened perceptibly, his impatience won out. “I’m going to go take a peek. You two wait here. I’ll tell you if it’s safe to follow me upstairs.”
When he pried the child’s arms loose and passed him to Maya, Tommy began to sob again.
“We’ll go up in a few minutes,” Maya said soothingly, patting the little boy’s back through his damp T-shirt. “I promise. We have to let Mr. Garrison look around first to see if it’s safe.”
“I w-want Charlie,” Tommy wailed. “I want my dog.”
“I know you do, honey. Just be a little patient. I’ll help you look for Charlie soon.” She looked in her boss’s direction. “We both will, won’t we?”
“Yeah. Sure.” He had started to cautiously edge his way toward the stairway. “Sounds like the wind is still pretty strong. No telling how much is blowing around up there but I suspect the worst is over.”
“I hope so.”
He put one hand on the railing of the stairway and paused. “So far, so good. You’ll have a little light once I open the door. Are you going to be all right down here by yourself?”
“I won’t be alone,” she replied, sounding more assured than before. “I haven’t had to face anything on my own since I came to Jesus.”
Greg didn’t comment. He’d grown up in a household where his mother had professed Christianity and his father had made light of it every chance he got. There weren’t many things he agreed with his dad about, but that was one of them. Any God who would take his mother from them in the prime of her life, in spite of all the prayers for her healing, was no God for him.
Easing open the door at the top of the stairs, he had to push its leading edge through a pile of refuse on the floor. The office was a shambles, thanks to the wind that was still whistling through the gap left by the shattered plate-glass window. The front door was hanging partly off its hinges, too. Considering the fact that his building was still standing, he figured he was one of the lucky ones. Especially if the upstairs suite where he currently lived still had a roof over it.
Stepping through and around the rubble, he proceeded far enough to peer through the space where the window glass had been. All his breath left him in a whoosh. He’d never seen anything like it. Parked cars had been upended like matchbox toys. Lumber, pink insulation, broken furniture and who knows what lay strewn from one end of Main Street to the other. Some of it was even stuck in trees. What was left of them.
Behind him, he heard Maya call, “Is it okay for us to come up?”
“Not yet.” There was no way he could deny her the eventual right to look, nor was there any way he could soften the blow of seeing their beloved town in such sad shape. He simply wanted to put it off as long as possible and keep her from dashing into the still unsafe street.
“Give me a few seconds to run upstairs and check my apartment first. We need to be sure there’s no real structural damage before you chance it. I don’t want the roof caving in on us.”
“Hurry.” He could hear the barely controlled panic in her voice.
“I will. Stay put till I call you. Promise?”
“I promise.”
Greg dashed up the interior stairway. To his relief the roof seemed intact and he’d had only one small window cracked in his apartment, so the place was relatively dry and undamaged.
Hoping that Maya had obeyed, he quickly returned and found her peeking through the partially ajar cellar door.
“Well?” she asked impatiently.
“It’s safe enough. At least in here. But watch your step and don’t put the boy down unless you have to. There’s broken glass everywhere.”
He braced himself, not sure how Maya would react when she saw everything that had happened. If she got hysterical, the way she had earlier, he’d have to be ready to intervene.
For the first time in the few weeks she’d worked for him, Greg looked—really looked—at his executive assistant. Her dark eyes were wide and expressive, set in a lovely oval face. Her short hair was tousled more than usual. And her cheeks were flushed. She not only impressed him with her natural beauty, she suddenly looked much younger than the twenty-five years he knew her to be. She had an innocence, an appealing naïveté, that made her seem so vulnerable that he wanted to rush to her and once again hold her close for her protection.
Maya’s jaw gaped. Then she began to pick her way carefully across the wet, littered office floor to join him near the window.
“The church?” she said breathlessly. “Can you see if the community church is still standing?”
“Yes. It looks fine,” Greg replied. “But the old town hall that was next to it is gone.”
“Gone? It can’t be gone.”
“I’m sorry.” He stepped aside and took Tommy from her so she could lean far enough to see the area where the old church stood as he said, “The preschool annex looks untouched, too.”
“Praise God! I have to get Layla.”
“You can’t go out there yet.” He made ready to grab and restrain her again if it became necessary. “Look. There are power lines down and the wind is still blowing stuff all over. If you don’t get electrocuted, you’re liable to get your head knocked off.”
“It’s my head. Get out of my way. I’m going.”
“No!” He reached for her arm but she dodged his grip so he resorted to more reasoning. “You’re the only parent your daughter has. Are you really willing to risk making her an orphan?”
“Of course not.”
“Then wait. Think of her.”
“I am thinking of her. She needs me. You can’t force me to stay here.”
“I’m not forcing you to do anything. Be sensible. We can see that the church is okay and that’s where she was. Right?” Greg had placed himself between her and the door in the hopes his presence would be enough added deterrent.
Maya ignored his logical argument and tried to edge around him.
He sidestepped to continue to block her exit.
“Move,” she demanded.
“Okay. Just take a deep breath and listen to me for a second. We’re safe here and Layla is safe there. She needs her mother alive and well, not lying in the street unconscious.”
“I’m calling the preschool.”
“Now, you’re being smart.”
He watched her struggle to pull herself together emotionally and tiptoe cautiously to where her desk had landed, pushed up against the far wall. She found the telephone beside it on the floor and lifted the receiver. It didn’t surprise him when she reported, “No dial tone.”
“Try my cell if you can find it,” Greg said. “It was in my top, center drawer.”
Maya circled his heavier mahogany desk, yanked open the drawer with difficulty, found the cell phone and did as he’d suggested.
Dejected, she grimaced, sighed and shook her head. “No service on that, either.”
“I suppose the relay towers are down.”
“That settles it. I’m going over to the church and nobody’s going to stop me.”
“Then we’ll all go,” he countered.
“That’s ridiculous. You can’t take Tommy out in this awful wind. He’ll get hurt.”
“Point taken. Now, you were saying…?”
“All right, all right.” Maya pressed her lips into a thin line. “You win. For now. But the minute the storm dies down enough that we can safely chance it, I’m going after my little girl. With or without your support.”
Even if Greg had been able to come up with a more valid argument, he wouldn’t have used it. Maya was like a mother tiger protecting her cub, and he was not about to get between her and her daughter.
Still, he knew without a doubt that his instincts were on target. She must be prevented from risking her well-being. He didn’t know why he felt so protective of her all of a sudden but he did. And he was stubborn enough to insist on getting his way. This time.
In the next war of wills they faced, maybe he’d let her win, or at least think she had. In this case, however, he was not about to back down. Lives hung in the balance.
As Maya stood beside her boss and stared at the havoc the storm had wrought, she was speechless. Breathless.
The town gazebo had become a scattered mass of wood that looked like a carelessly tossed handful of splintered matchsticks.
The usually pristine, well-manicured green grass of the park that paralleled Main Street and bordered the High Plains River on the opposite side was strewn with all kinds of materials, including puffy, pink shreds of fiberglass insulation that had apparently been torn from houses nearby. To release that kind of interior construction, Maya knew that roofs and sidewalls of homes had to have been ripped apart.
And the formerly beautiful trees. She was astounded. “What a shame. Look at the poor cottonwoods.”
“All the more proof that you wouldn’t have made it to the church in one piece,” he reminded her.
She hated to agree but he was right. Many of the trees that had lined the riverbank had been toppled, with nearly their entire root balls sticking out of the ground. Those that were still standing had limbs broken away or their whole tops twisted off. The remaining leafless branches were draped with black tar paper and other flexible materials that flapped frantically like ugly, misshapen flags.
Sheets of corrugated tin had been ripped from roofs and bent tightly around the windward side of the more substantial portions of some of the trees, as if squeezed in place by a giant, malevolent hand. If no one in or around High Plains had been killed in this storm it would be a wonder.
Raising her gaze to the horizon across the river, she gasped. Her hand flew to her throat. The danger wasn’t over. Her boss had been right about that, too. A wall cloud lay just above the northern hills. And it looked as if it was located directly over her brother Jesse’s Circle L Ranch!
As she watched, the solid line at the bottom of the black horizontal wall fractured. Dark masses began to drop lower into the lighter sky in several places. At first they just looked like more clouds.
Then, one of them became a finger of spinning chaos and snaked downward, moving as if it were a double-jointed talon with a razor-sharp claw at its base, ready to tear at the land below. To rip everything it touched to shreds. To kill anything—anyone—in its path.
Dear Jesus. Maya prayed, pointing, trembling. “Another tornado!”
“I see it.” He slipped his free arm around her shoulders and gave her a supportive squeeze. “Don’t worry. That one’s a long way from here. Judging by the direction everything is moving, it won’t come anywhere near us.”
“I know,” Maya replied, having to fight the lump in her throat in order to speak. “But my oldest brother and his family live out there.”
“Where?”
She shivered, glad he had hold of her as she took a shaky breath and made herself say, “Right at the base of that funnel cloud.”
Greg wished he could control nature, make the storm go away for good. Fortunately, the overall turbulence didn’t seem as if it was going to last much longer.
As they stood and watched, the snaking cord of the latest funnel cloud thinned, broke into sections, then retreated back into the ominous ebony cloud cover until there was no more sign of it.
The worst of the local wind and rain had tapered off, too, leaving stifling humidity. Greg wasn’t sure whether he was still soggy from his trip outside to rescue Tommy or if he was beginning to perspire, now that there was no electricity to run the air-conditioning. Probably both.
He looked Maya up and down, ending his perusal at her feet. “You’ll need some sensible shoes if we’re going to hike to the church from here. Are those all you have?”
“They’ll be fine. I’m used to wearing heels.”
“I know you are. The problem is the mess in the street, not your shoes.”
“I used to keep an old pair of sneakers in the trunk of my car. Unfortunately, I took them out last week.”
“I doubt it matters. Have you checked our parking lot?” He had not done so, either, yet judging by the damage to Main Street, the area at the rear of nearby stores and offices was probably just as big a disaster. If her car happened to be drivable, which was doubtful, there would still be no safe routes in or around High Plains, at least not for a while.
“You know I haven’t.” She made a face at him. “Is there anything else you’d like to ask? Because if you’re done criticizing me, I want to get started.”
“I wasn’t criticizing you, I was being rational. We obviously can’t drive through all this debris, so we’ll have to walk. And the easiest way to get hurt is to not be sure-footed enough. You may have to climb or jump.” He studied her tailored outfit, making note of her slim skirt. “Do you think you can do that?”
“I can do anything that will get me to my daughter,” Maya said emphatically. “I’m going now, whether you come or not.”
Tommy wiggled in Greg’s arms so he lowered him to the floor, keeping hold of his thin wrist so he wouldn’t run away.
“Let go,” the child whined. “I have to go find Charlie. He might be hurt.”
Lots of people might be, Greg thought. He said, “We’ll all look for your dog while we walk over to the church to get Ms. Logan’s little girl. Maybe Charlie went there to guard all the other kids.” He could tell by Maya’s grim expression that she wasn’t buying his theory but as long as Tommy did, that was good enough for Greg.
“O-okay. But if we see Charlie he gets to come, too.”
“Absolutely,” Maya told him, taking his hand and bending to look him in the eyes. “You have to be really good for Mr. Garrison and me, okay? It’s very dangerous out there and if you got hurt, you couldn’t keep looking for Charlie. Do you understand?”
The child nodded soberly, amazing Greg with his sudden acceptance of adult authority. Apparently, if there was a valid reason to obey, Tommy was capable of controlling himself enough to do so. He just wished Maya had interceded in that sane and practical manner before the wild kid had splashed mud all over the sidewalk.
Realizing how trivial his thoughts were in light of the disaster that had just descended upon High Plains, Greg began to chuckle quietly.
Maya arched her eyebrows and gave him a withering look. “What in the world is so funny?”
“I am,” he said, shaking his head and following with more self-deprecating laughter. “I was just thinking about not wanting mud splashed on my office. Right now, I’d willingly settle for a little mud on the outside if that was all that was wrong.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “But if you keep me standing here wasting time for one more minute I’m going to scream. Are you ready to go?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
He left Tommy in her care as he shouldered the damaged front door to force it partway open. Then he motioned and held out his hand.
When she took it to let him assist her and the boy through the narrow opening, he noticed that her slim fingers were clammy and trembling. Considering how scared she must be, especially in regard to her daughter, she was handling her feelings pretty well.
Greg hadn’t been a praying man for a long, long time, but under the circumstances he was tempted to try it, just this once. All he wanted to ask was that Maya’s bravery be honored by a safe reunion with her child. If her God really existed, really cared, she deserved that much at the very least.
Chapter Three
Maya would have run all the way to the church if there had been any way to safely do so. Stepping gingerly and wending her way through the rubble, she was awestruck. So many loose building bricks littered what had once been the sidewalk they had to take to the center of the street in order to pass.
Whole structures had collapsed, and many of those that hadn’t actually fallen had been stripped of portions of their facade, making them barely recognizable.
Broken glass lay everywhere. Cars were smashed, some lying on the sidewalks and lawns where they’d been dropped like discarded toys. Since she couldn’t see any occupants inside the wrecks she could only hope their drivers had sensibly run for cover before the worst of the storm had overtaken them.
Piles of jagged refuse were heaped against the windward sides of anything solid, not to mention the rubbish floating in the High Plains River, near where the lovely, quaint gazebo had stood mere minutes ago.
Greg put out his hand and stopped her. “Wait here with Tommy a second. I think I see movement inside the pie shop. They might be trapped.”
There was no way Maya could bring herself to argue with him when he was bent on doing a good deed. All she said was, “Hurry.”
She knew without a doubt that people could be hurt all over town. Dying. Suffering. That thought cut her to the quick. Many of her friends and neighbors might be in dire straits—perhaps even worse—not to mention her brother Jesse. For the first time since the onset of the tornado, Maya thought of the Garrison family, too.
As soon as he returned and reported that the folks in Elmira’s diner were all right she asked, “Do you think your father is okay?”
“Probably. He’s too mean to die.”
“What an awful thing to say!”
“Just quoting him,” Greg answered, continuing to lead the way east along Main Street. “He’s been saying that for years. Besides, the estate is pretty far out of town. I don’t imagine it was in the storm’s path. At least not this time.”
“I wish I could say the same for the Logan ranch,” she replied. “I suppose there won’t be any way to tell how Jesse and Marie are until communication is restored.”
“Maybe we can hitch a quick ride out that way later and you can see for yourself.”
She shook her head, then pointed. “Not unless that bridge is in better shape than it looks from here. The whole roadway is blocked up by big pieces of houses and goodness knows what else.”
“You’re right. That probably means the rescue units from the other side of the river won’t be able to get to us without going miles out of their way, either.”
“I know.” She sighed. “It’s going to take us weeks just to dig out, and that will be only the beginning. No wonder so many people are just wandering around in a daze. It boggles my mind, too.”
“I can help with the rebuilding,” Greg told her, leading their little group in a circuitous path that avoided loose wires that were dangling between battered telephone poles. “My lumber yard and hardware wholesale can supply resources, even if they’ve sustained some damage.”
“That should be profitable, too.”
Maya knew she shouldn’t have taken his offer so negatively but she’d worked for the man long enough to know that he was fixated on the bottom line: net gains. It wasn’t his fault that that was the way his mind worked, but she did see it as the reason he’d been so successful when he was barely thirty.
He sobered and glowered at her. “This isn’t about business, it’s about survival. I’m not going to try to make money from the misfortunes of others, even if my father’s opinion of me suffers as a result.”
“He wouldn’t understand?”
“No. That old man has never approved of anything I’ve done, which is the main reason I told him I was leaving High Plains for keeps, years ago.”
“It must have been hard for you to come back.”
“Yes, it was. If my cousin Michael hadn’t phoned and told me Dad was terminally ill, I’d still be enjoying my studio apartment with a view of Lake Michigan, instead of standing in the middle of this horrible mess.”
“With me,” Maya added, giving his strong hand a squeeze. “I’m really sorry you have to go through all this but I’m glad you’re here. If you hadn’t been, who knows what would have become of me in this storm.”
“I hope you’d have had the good sense to duck.”
Maya nodded. “Yeah. Me, too. But I doubt it.”
Reverend Michael Garrison, Greg’s cousin, was also pastor of the largest house of worship in town, the three-story High Plains Community Church.
By the time Greg, Maya and Tommy arrived on the church grounds, Michael had his shirtsleeves rolled up and was standing outside the historic, white-sided wooden building, offering solace and sanctuary to passersby.
Tall, slim and darker-haired than Greg, he greeted everyone with open arms, then shook Greg’s hand as Maya left with Tommy and hurried toward the annex where the preschool was located.
“How does it look over here?” Greg asked Michael. “Are the church and preschool okay?”
“Fine, fine,” the pastor answered. “Maya’s daughter is a wonder. She came through the storm like a trooper. All the kids did. The last time I looked, Layla was helping Josie and Nicki comfort the most frightened little ones.”
“Sounds tough and capable, just like her mama,” Greg said proudly. He scanned the church. “I can’t believe those big stained-glass windows survived.”
“They have safety glass over them, thanks to our insurance company’s insistence.”
“How about the parsonage out back? Do you still have a place to live?”
“Yes. It’s fine, too.”
“Good. Well, if you don’t need me right now I’ll go see how Maya’s faring. Is there anything else I can help you with first?”
“Not that I can think of,” Michael replied, looking weary and old far beyond his twenty-eight years. “I’m still trying to get my head around all this. We lost the carriage house, right down to the foundation, so we can’t use it for temporary housing the way we used to.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Move survivors into the fellowship hall in the church basement for the time being. I’ve already got half a dozen women working in the kitchen, preparing food as best they can without electricity.”
Greg brightened. “There are a few generators in stock at my hardware store. If we can get to them and they still work after all this, they’re yours.”
“God bless you.” Michael clapped him on the back with affection. “I knew we could count on your help. I’m glad you were here.”
“Yeah. I’ve been told that same thing once already. I’m not sure I should be happy about it but it does seem advantageous.”
“The good Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“Well, maybe. Just don’t start trying to tell me I’m back in High Plains because it’s God’s will, okay?”
Grinning and looking a lot better than he had when Greg had first walked up, Michael said, “Perish the thought.”
Greg was still digesting his cousin’s last comment when he reached the door to the preschool. Its handmade sign was hanging by one edge and flapping in the breeze, but other than that and some deep dings in the paint on the lapped wood siding, it looked unscathed.