Snow Day: Heart of the Storm / Seeing Red / Land's End

Probably making little tsk sounds under their breath. Poor Delaney. That Rollins boy broke her heart once and now she’s going to let him do it again. Foolish girl.

That thought finally ignited the anger and resentment his kiss had cooled and she held on to it throughout the rest of the day. Even when he helped her clean up after they’d served supper to the crowd, she managed to be polite and appreciative, but decidedly detached.

But when they dimmed the lights and everybody around her started drifting into restless sleep, Delaney lay awake, staring at the ceiling because every time she closed her eyes, she relived that kiss again.

And ached for another.

CHAPTER FIVE

TUESDAY MORNING CAME early, thanks to the kids who couldn’t sleep in when away from their homes. Or maybe kids never slept in. Brody didn’t have a clue, but he knew these kids were up and at ’em like a horde of two-legged, overeager roosters.

Brody sat on the floor, his back up against the wall. He felt trapped and restless and, from all reports, the freak storm wasn’t abating any. He’d already powered up his phone to deal with some email, including responding to the message from his office manager, who thought her boss being stuck in a school gym was the funniest thing that had ever happened.

He’d helped serve breakfast, with nary a word from Delaney. Then he’d suffered through watching her lead the kids in a fun but energy-burning morning exercise. It had been torture, watching her bounce and shimmy, but it would be worth the physical suffering if the kids napped later.

Brody was nodding off himself, his head against the hard gym wall, when Sandy nudged him with her foot. He took Noah and, after nestling him in one arm, used his free hand to help guide his sister into a sitting position.

“I turned my phone on for a few minutes and I had a voice mail from Mike.”

Her voice had a serious undertone that immediately concerned him. “He’s okay, right? Did he go off the road?”

“No, he’s fine. But I had asked him to stop by and check on my parents—our parents, I mean—and their power went out Sunday night shortly after ours did. Ma had the burners on the stove lit, trying to stay warm.”

“They’ve been without heat for two nights?”

“Yeah, but you know how Dad is. He can’t smoke in here, so he didn’t want to come.”

Brody shook his head, not surprised by their stubbornness, no matter how stupid it was to use your gas cookstove for heat. “I hope Mike gave them a stern lecture.”

“He did. He also made them pack a bag and they’re on their way here. I just missed his call, so they should be here any minute.”

Great. His parents were just what this involuntary group reunion was missing. Though seeing them here was better than having to step foot in the house he’d grown up in. “I’m surprised he got them to leave. They can be pretty stubborn.”

“He said he told them I was having a hard time here because he couldn’t be with me and Noah.” She paused to smile. “And he told Ma you were stuck here and couldn’t get away.”

“Smart guy.” He paused, debating on how best to phrase his next question. “Did he tell her anything else?”

“You mean that you got caught making out in the janitor’s closet with Delaney Westcott?”

His sister wasn’t known for being subtle. “We were not making out.”

“Not what I heard.”

“We weren’t.” He cleared his throat. “I kissed her, though. Just a kiss.”

“Just a kiss because that’s all there was to it, or just a kiss because Alice walked in on you before it was more than just a kiss?”

“Leave it alone, San.”

“I’ve known you my whole life, so I know you can be an idiot sometimes. I didn’t know you had a mean streak, though.”

That pissed him off, but he forced himself to stay relaxed. He’d figured out pretty quickly babies were sensitive to the emotions of the people holding them. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? I didn’t force the kiss on her. Trust me.”

“You’re playing with her emotions and that makes you a jerk.”

“Is that just your opinion or did the fine people of Tucker’s Point discuss it and come to a consensus?”

“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.”

“I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll help you scrounge up fake poker chips, but you have to get permission from parents for the younger kids.”

“Deal.”

“One of the first grade teachers is a good friend of mine. We’ll forage in her classroom.”

She knew even as she led Brody through the doors into the main hallway that tongues would start wagging the second they closed behind them, but it couldn’t be helped. Sending another volunteer to accompany him wasn’t really an option because she wasn’t totally comfortable rummaging around the classrooms and she was personally responsible for the big ring of keys. Only the fact Patti Worth was a personal friend made it okay.

The squeak of their shoes on the waxed floor was the only sound as she led him down a maze of hallways to the door marked by a sign reading Miss Worth in colorful, hand-drawn letters. Delaney felt slightly naughty as she unlocked it and slipped inside, but she wasn’t sure if it was being in the classroom, or being alone with Brody.

And they were very, very alone.

“It’s so quiet here,” Brody said, kicking the door closed behind him. “Makes me want to grab a pillow and blanket and hide under the desk until the storm’s over.”

“I wish we could use the rooms, especially for Sandy and Noah, but there are rules and most of them boil down to insurance and liability.”

“You wouldn’t even sneak down here for a power nap?”

She gave him a stern look, and then glanced around the room to find the most likely hiding spot for boxes of paper clips. “It’s against the rules.”

“You always were a good girl.”

The way he said the words—the warm timbre of his voice—had flashbacks rolling through her mind. Stolen kisses. His hand sliding up under her sweater for the first time. Making love in a borrowed boat under an endless sky. “Not always.”

“No. Not always.” He was closer and, when she turned, she found himself close enough to touch.

This time he kissed her swiftly, with no time for deliberations. His mouth was demanding and she surrendered to him, tired of fighting her feelings. The kiss went on and on, until her knees were weak and it seemed as though his hands on her back were all that were keeping her from falling.

When he broke it off, he kept his face close to hers, his arms wrapped around her. She liked being in his arms. She felt safe there, and treasured. The world had always seemed right when she was in Brody’s arms.

His breath was warm against her cheek and she closed her eyes, inhaling the scent of him. Reality seemed to shift between the present and their past. His subtle, expensive aroma and the feel of fine wool were strange, but the feel of his body against hers and the way he touched her was so familiar her heart ached.

When his hand cupped the side of her face, she turned into it, savoring the feeling of his thumb brushing her cheekbone.

“Your skin is so soft,” he said in a quiet voice. “Every time I touched you, I hated my hands. They were rough and callused and you deserved to be touched by somebody whose hands didn’t scratch like sandpaper against your skin.”

“I loved your hands. Strong and capable. You worked hard and you loved hard. That’s what your hands meant to me.”

“I want to make love to you again, Delaney.”

Words clogged in her throat. Reasons why they shouldn’t. Confessions of just how badly she wanted that, too. But none of them came out.

“I don’t have any protection,” he said after a long moment of silence.

“And this is my friend’s first-grade classroom. I can’t have sex on her floor.”

“Or her desk?”

“Oh, God no.” She laughed, burying her face in his sweater. “I’d never be able to look her in the face again.”

“So we have to stop.” He paused, as if waiting for her to argue, but she was silent. “I don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to, either.” She took a deep breath. “But we have to.”

“Then we need to stop touching now.”

Very reluctantly, she backed away from him. Her face felt hot and flushed, and he looked a little hot and bothered himself. “Let’s find some paperclips and get you back to your poker buddies before they come looking for us.”

Brody held her hand for the walk back to the gym, and Delaney couldn’t help but feel things had changed between them. The hurt that had flared up when she saw him again had faded away and they were falling back into their old passionate but comfortable relationship.

She needed to remember that relationship she’d been so comfortable in had ended in pain and tears, though. Five years ago, Brody had kissed her and held her hand, and then he’d taken off in the night. No matter how good it felt to have him back, Delaney couldn’t forget he was only there because he couldn’t leave.

He released her hand before going through the doors into the gym, but not before giving her a quick kiss. Then he looked into her eyes for a few seconds. “I’d ask if you want to play with us, but now I remember just how bad your poker face is.”

She wanted to ask him what he saw in her eyes, but before she could work up the courage, he’d opened the door, brandishing the boxes of paper clips as though he’d been foraging for food and returned with a bounty.

Delaney watched as a group of kids swarmed him, their excitement obvious. But then she noticed Camille watching her watch her son and turned away. She was going to have to work on that poker face.

* * *

“HARD TO BELIEVE you made a living out of playing poker, son.”

Brody snorted, but it was hard to deny the fact his pile of paper clips was significantly smaller than the old man’s. “Maybe it’s strategy. Sucker you in and make you feel safe so you start betting large.”

“Or maybe you’re spending too much time watching that girl and not enough time watching your cards.”

If Delaney had been in the casinos and back rooms, fussing over people and checking things off her clipboard, Brody would probably have about two dollars to his name and be living in his car. If he still had one. She was one hell of a powerful distraction.

“What girl?” one of the kids asked. Jason, he thought his name was. He was the son of the guy who’d been a mouthy punk in school but was now, as Sandy had said, just a dad stuck in a room with his two boys waiting for the storm to end.

“No girl. My dad thinks he’s funny.” But he couldn’t keep himself from glancing in Delaney’s direction.

She caught him looking and smiled. He smiled back. The awkwardness between them had eased up and she wasn’t dodging his gaze anymore. He liked that. A lot.

“Much more of this and I’ll take everything you own,” Donnie Cox said, laying down his cards and sweeping the pile of paper clips into his own growing pile.

“Dammit.” Brody tried to force his attention back to the game.

“That’s a bad word,” Jason said. Really loudly.

“Sorry,” Brody said in the general direction of all the heads that swiveled to glare at him.

Most of the younger kids had grown bored with all the thinking that went into playing poker and were, probably much to Delaney’s delight, off playing Go Fish along with some game that seemed to consist of the kids slapping each other’s hands every time a jack turned up in the pile.

Once Jason moved on, probably lured away by the idea of slapping his brother, the guys played a few more hands before they lost interest. Brody shuffled the cards, strangely comforted by the familiar feel and motion in his hands, but he didn’t deal again.

“Becks is after me to pump you for information, you know,” Donnie said. “Took you guys quite a while to find paper clips considering every room in this building is, you know, a school room.”

“Delaney wasn’t comfortable taking them from just anybody’s classroom. One of the first grade teachers is a friend of hers, so we had to walk all the way to her room. And back.”

“Not judging. I wouldn’t mind a little alone time with my wife right about now.”

Brody wanted to point out he and Delaney hadn’t had that kind of alone time, but he figured it would go in one ear and out the other. People seemed to have made up their minds they were a couple again and nothing he said was going to keep the speculation down. It would only make them more determined to be right.

Maybe they were. He really wasn’t sure what was going on with them, but whatever it was felt right to him. It felt natural to kiss her and hold her hand in the hallway. What hadn’t felt natural was ending things in the classroom before it got any more physical. He’d wanted her badly—hell, he still did—but he hadn’t packed condoms for his less-than-two-days trip back to his hometown.

He glanced up again and caught Delaney looking at him. She was pretending to listen to the women around her talking, but the steamy look in her eyes almost made him flub his shuffle and blow cards everywhere.

“You two have to stop making eye contact,” his dad said, “or your mother’s going to get all kinds of ideas in her head.”

Brody jerked his attention back to the cards and dealt them out, without even asking if his dad and Donnie wanted in. He needed the distraction because he was starting to get ideas of his own in his head.

And those ideas were going to get him into nothing but trouble.

CHAPTER SIX

THINGS WERE QUIET in the gym on Wednesday morning. Nobody was sleeping soundly and it was starting to take a toll on people. And the sense of adventure was wearing off for the kids. They wanted their video games and favorite foods and their freedom. Everybody was doing their best to stay upbeat, if only for the children, but spirits were flagging.

Even if it came with an air of depression, Delaney was thankful for the quiet. She’d seen so much of Brody from a distance. He played with the kids and talked with the adults. Helped out wherever he could. Nobody would ever guess he’d been dragged back into the community against his will.

But she liked sitting on the floor with him in a quiet corner, on small cushions he’d made by folding up their blankets. They were side by side, and he had a sleeping Noah cradled in his left arm and the fingers of his right hand were laced through hers.

She’d be lying if she said it didn’t tug at her heart, the way they were sitting there like a little fake family. He was so good with Noah—and with the other kids—and she’d done a lot of thinking about what a good dad he’d be. Way too much thinking, actually. Images of him as a dad were getting all tangled up with her increasingly ticking biological clock and leading her down an imaginary path to heartbreak.

He’d been telling her about his early days on the poker circuit, when he was scrimping and saving every dollar he could make at odd jobs to pay his way into tournaments. It didn’t sound as glamorous as she’d first imagined, and she wondered how she would have fared if he’d taken her with him. Probably not very well. She wasn’t much of a risk-taker and never had been.

“I thought about you a lot in those days,” Brody said. “Correction—I still think about you a lot. I’ve missed you.”

“Not enough to pick up a phone and give me a call?” It was hard for her to reconcile all the times he’d told her he missed her and thought about her with the fact he’d never reached out to her.

“Sandy’s never forgiven me for the way I left, so she never mentions you on the phone and I was too proud to ask, but whenever I thought about you, I wanted to imagine you married, with some cute kids. A dog and a picket fence and a minivan.” There was a hint of sadness and maybe regret in his voice.

“Haven’t gotten there yet. Seems a little odd, though, if you missed me so much, that you’d imagine me living happily ever after with somebody else.”

“I needed you to be happy in my head, Delaney. If you were happy and had a good life, it made missing you worth it.”

She leaned her head against the wall and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around them. “You felt less guilty, you mean.”

“That, too. But mostly I’d picture you living a life I couldn’t give you and know I made the right decision.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I think you’re right.”

“Tell me about your life now,” she said, because she was tired of rehashing the past. Maybe it was a little like rubbing salt in old wounds, but she wanted to picture him in his world.