is probably hoping you’ll be marooned at the high school for the weekend. And is there anything the school board did before you were on it that meets with your approval? Like, how they signed me to an ironclad contract, which has really got to twist your tail? Cassandra thought those questions, but she only said, “That sounds like a good idea. I suppose.”
And then she said nothing at all, because simply driving the Jeep took all her attention—and she could only spare a small part of her brain to take in Sean’s closeness, the way his towel-dried hair made him look so boyish, so human.
Human? Oh, Cassandra, her inner self tweaked at her. Get a grip. Don’t let’s get carried away here….
And then it happened. Swiftly. Quietly. Without warning. The seemingly solid wall of rock and dirt to Cassandra’s left, the rock and dirt that made up the mountain drive, collapsed. Just fell.
Chapter Two
Boom, and the solid wall of mountain was gone. Like a sand castle undermined by an incoming tide.
One moment there had been a mountain wall safely straight and solid on the other side of the two-lane highway, and the next moment the Jeep was sliding sideways onto the wide gravel shoulder of the road, surrounded by a river of living mud and boulders, being swept along down the hillside as if the vehicle weighed no more than a feather.
The only thing that stopped the Jeep from moving as one with the mud and rock tumbling down the steep embankment was the strong guardrail at the side of the road, which caught and held the vehicle.
Many things happened in the first few seconds after the Jeep finally slid and bumped to a halt. For one, Cassandra realized that she was screaming, and she immediately stopped, slapping both hands over her mouth just to be certain a small, involuntary squeak couldn’t still escape.
Which was a pity, because she could have used one of those hands to prudently cover her wide-open eyes, so that she couldn’t look out the window and watch the whole mountain rushing past the Jeep’s headlights.
Then Sean took over, exchanging places at the wheel with a numb and clumsy but still pathetically willing-to-move Cassandra, and trying to use her four-wheel drive to extricate them from their precarious position before more of the mountainside gave way and they could be swept farther into disaster.
It didn’t take more than a few tense, gear-grinding, wheel-spinning minutes for Cassandra to be pretty certain that they were well and truly stuck. Hearing Sean Frame’s fairly eloquent if low-pitched string of profanity as he shoved the gear stick into park and turned off the ignition nailed it down for her. Still, when she could pry her hands from her mouth, it was to hear herself ask, “We’re stuck, aren’t we?”
“Yes, Ms. Mercer, we’re stuck,” Sean answered, running a hand through his hair, then exhaling his breath in an angry whoosh. “If it weren’t for the guardrail—but never mind that. Someone else from the meeting will be along soon enough, I’m sure.”
“I—I was the last one to leave the school,” Cassandra told him. “Smitty let me lock up.”
He sliced her a quick, angry look. “The janitor allowed you to lock the school? That’s not in your job description, is it, Ms. Mercer?”
Cassandra rolled her eyes, wondering if the man ever listened to himself speak. “No, Mr. Frame, it’s not. But there was no reason for Smitty to be late for his dinner because I wanted to get a few files from my office, now, was there?”
He lowered his head, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck. “No. No, I suppose not. I apologize. Sometimes I come on too strong, don’t I?”
Cassandra wanted to stick her little finger in her ear and give it a shake, just to clear the passageway. She couldn’t have heard the guy right. “You’re a businessman, Mr. Frame,” she said in reply, wondering how her parents had managed to instill such good manners in their only child, when that same only child was obviously harboring a second personality, one that wanted to say, “Strong, Sean baby? Do the words like a Mack truck mean anything to you?”
A clap of thunder equal to the decibel output of five Rolling Stones concerts playing at the same time shook the mountain.
Cassandra couldn’t help herself. She whimpered. “Oh, God,” she groaned, then pulled her feet onto the seat, wrapped her arms around her lower legs and buried her head against her knees. “Watch for the next lightning bolt, would you? Please,” she mumbled. “And then count one-one thousand, two-one thousand, until we hear the next boom, okay? I want to know how far away that lightning is.”
“How very scientific, Ms. Mercer,” Sean commented, then added, “or we could simply pretend that God is bowling, and the sound we hear is the pins going down? That’s the fairy tale they told us at the home.”
Cassandra turned her head slightly toward him and looked at him through the deepening dusk, forgetting about the storm raging outside. “The home? Are you an orphan, Mr. Frame?”
That would explain a lot. He was urbane and sophisticated, yes, but she hadn’t been able to help noticing that he had this edge to him. It was a slightly rough edge, as if he had one foot firmly anchored in the tough but civilized corporate world, and the other somewhere to the left of success, standing in a more human, fallible, even vulnerable place.
His smile revealed straight white teeth, with one top tooth just the slightest bit crooked, showing that he’d never had braces. “And here you were, Ms. Mercer, all this time believing I’d been hatched from an egg like the other reptiles. But, no, I wasn’t an orphan. Not in the ordinary sense.”
She frowned. “There’s an un-ordinary sense?”
“Actually, there is, and it’s becoming more frequent all the time. You see, my father abandoned us before I was born, and my mother had this habit of forgetting where she’d put me from time to time. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t give up custody so I could be adopted when I was still young and reasonably adorable.”
Cassandra didn’t hear the next clap of thunder, much less react to it. “That’s horrible!”
“It was all right, once I got used to it. I’d spend time with her, then in the home, and occasionally, in someone’s house as a foster child. It was an interesting childhood, and one I strove to overcome from the time I was old enough to know what I wanted. What I needed to do to get what I wanted. It was also a childhood I made certain Jason avoided. Three miles, Ms. Mercer.”
“Three—oh! The lightning is only three miles away? It might as well be on top of us!” Cassandra buried her head against her knees once more, then flinched as a tumbling boulder crashed into the side of the Jeep, mashing it more firmly against the guardrail.
To keep her mind occupied—to keep from screaming—she concentrated on the other things Sean Frame had said. She looked at him again, wishing it were darker so she couldn’t see his intelligent hazel eyes, his incongruously long, lush black lashes.
“Your own childhood must have made it doubly important for you to have Jason raised in a firm family situation,” she commented at last. “And yet, after allowing him to live with his mother since he was born, you’ve now taken total custody and moved him here to Grand Springs. How does that equate with this image of permanency you’re talking about?”
He looked at her for a long moment,
