He arched a brow. “Not likely, Sticks. Craig needs to get home to look after his family before Hannah hits, and I need to go down the mountain to help out. My neighbors are more important than your fuel line.”
“Did I say they weren’t?” Fire sparked in her eyes. A hot-tempered redhead. So what else was new?
“No. But I’m giving the reason before you ask. Some of the older folks are going to need help boarding up. So if you’ll excuse me….”
“I’m going with you.”
His jaw dropped. He didn’t need this. “Now look….”
“I know how to use a hammer,” she argued stubbornly. “And I’m in decent shape. If people need help, I’m going to help.”
Buck looked at Craig, as if he might find help there, but the coward just shrugged.
Which was how Buck came to be driving down the mountain behind Craig, with Hannah Lamont perched firmly in the passenger seat of his pickup truck…resisting every urge to acknowledge her generosity.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HANNAH CHANGED back into her flight suit, it being the most rugged piece of clothing she’d brought with her, and endured the lumpy, bumpy ride back into town.
“Doesn’t anyone work on the roads around here?” she finally asked.
He gave her a look that said she was being a pain. “You try living on an island where storms keep washing them away. Fixing roads takes time and money.”
“With a casino….”
He glared at her and rotated his unlit cigar to half-mast. “The only person making money off that casino is Anstin. He doesn’t care about anything that doesn’t help the casino.”
She blinked. “What about taxes?”
“Who pays taxes?”
Truly she had fallen through the rabbit hole. “But how does anything get done?”
“We get together and decide we need to do it. That’s how we built the school that doubles as a storm shelter. By our own sweat and people supplying the materials they could afford to buy.”
Hannah thought about that. “Rock soup.”
“Basically. It works. But these aren’t the kind of people who want a government or taxes. Except Anstin, anyway. He seems all kind of interested in having a government. Mainly because he doesn’t want anyone gambling outside his casino. So we’ve got a mayor now. What a joke.”
“Why is it a joke?”
“Because the guy couldn’t organize falling out of a tree, let alone run a government. He doesn’t have any power because nobody’s stupid enough to listen to him.”
“Oh.” She peered at him curiously. “You don’t think a little bit of government could help?”
“Why? Most of us here came to get away from all that crap.”
“But…but what about police? Fire department?”
“We have a volunteer fire brigade, and who needs police?”
Most everyone, she thought, wondering if she had flown into total anarchy. But before she could pursue the subject, they were in town, driving down a residential lane, swerving to avoid potholes.
“Look,” he said, “when something needs doing, we have a referendum.”
“Oh, so you vote?”
“Hell, no. We play poker. That’s what I was doing last night. The island is pretty much split on whether Anstin should be able to build his fancy high-rise casino. So the council said it should be decided by a poker tournament.”
Hannah blinked. “Okay. But you vote for a city council, right?”
“No. We have a tournament for that, too. Top six finishers get the job.”
“That hardly sounds like winning.” She turned in her seat to look at him. “I hear you’re a pretty good player. So why aren’t you on the council?”
“Because that’s one tournament I’m not stupid enough to play in.”
Hannah faced forward again. An island where everything was decided by poker. Now she was certain she’d landed in an asylum. On the other hand…. She smiled to herself. It would be kind of fun.
Buck changed the subject. Pointedly, she thought.
“These older homes,” he said, waving out the window at white-painted clapboard-sided houses with green shutters already closed against the coming storm, “were built shortly after Hanratty came here. Men who knew a lot about ship-building put them up, and they’ve withstood everything nature has thrown at this island. The strongest winds just make them bend and creak. It’s the newer homes we have to worry about.”
She could see why. Even low cinder-block structures, of which there were few enough, didn’t look especially strong. Other homes appeared to have been built on the cheap, and it was into that neighborhood that Buck steered the truck. People were out, trying to board their windows with plywood that had obviously been used before. Some appeared to be getting on in years, and it was these people Buck stopped to help.
They greeted him warmly. It was obvious everyone knew him and liked him. Hannah wondered just what it was about him that they liked. She certainly hadn’t seen much to recommend him, other than rugged good looks and a set of narrow hips that awoke something primal in her.
Funny, she thought, that she had never before noticed how sexy a man’s hips could be.
Buck introduced her as a pilot who was laying over for the duration, and called her Sticks. Not that it mattered. Everyone on the island seemed to already know that she was “with Buck,” that she’d awakened with Buster, and that she’d fallen for Horace’s slick patter at the grocery. It was as if she were living in a fish bowl.
The third elderly couple they helped were Joyce and Dil Fenster. Hannah judged them to be in their eighties, and only too glad to allow Buck and Hannah to lug plywood and screw it over windows.
“Been here forty years,” Dil said as he “supervised.” He apparently wanted Hannah to know all about him and Joyce. “I worked as a shrimper out of Destin, Florida, but me and Joyce got tired of me being away for six weeks at a time. So we saved up to buy our own boat we could live on and fish from at the same time.”
“Yeah,” said Joyce, who still looked as if she could haul in a net. “Then we found this place. Been stuck here ever since.” She laughed, as if it were an old joke. “Now our son runs the boat and our grandkids turned coat and went to work at the casino. What kind of job is that, I ask you? Taking hard-earned money away from other people.”
“Now, now,” Dil said to her as if he’d said it a thousand times, “those people come to the casino knowing what the odds are.”
“Still
