exasperation. “That’s my daughter,” he announced unnecessarily. “She didn’t stay home.” He turned to Nate. “I didn’t really think she would. But I hoped. She does have some medical training. She’s been a volunteer firefighter for eight years now—since she was twenty. She’s as passionate about her hometown as I am. She’s good with people.”
The credentials petered out as Jolene disappeared into the main room. They could hear a chorus of cheerful greetings as she introduced herself to Dana, Cheryl and Amy.
“She’s pregnant.” Nate stated the obvious. “Her volunteerism is commendable, but she doesn’t need to be here.”
Mitch nodded. “Yep.”
“Isn’t her husband worried about her being on the road by herself?”
“She hasn’t got one.” That bit of news finally seemed to shake Mitch free from the lingering effects of Hurricane Jolene. “She’s been a widow four months now.”
A knot of compassion twisted itself in Nate’s gut. He knew more than he wanted to about losing someone he loved. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s probably a good part of why she worries about me so much. She lost her mother years ago. And now Joaquin.” Mitch led the way down the hall. “Probably why I can’t say no to her, either. I don’t want her to lose anything else. I don’t want her to hurt anymore.”
Nate supposed he could understand a father wanting to protect his daughter. Still…“You might not be doing her any favor by letting her work today. Does she have a friend’s house where she can stay to ride out the storm?”
“You don’t know my daughter.” Mitch muttered a frustrated curse that was more of a growl than an actual word. “I’m beginning to think you four might be the only thing standing between us and…oh hell, I’m not even going to say it.”
He didn’t have to.
No doctor. No EMT. Not enough supplies. No volunteers except for one pregnant, widowed woman with more energy than sense.
And one powerful, unpredictable storm that could turn a routine evacuation into disaster.
CHAPTER TWO
JOLENE SAT AT THE DESK in the dispatcher’s office, licking the sticky sweetness of her second cinnamon roll from her fingers and drinking her carton of milk.
She’d dashed in to answer the phone twenty minutes ago and wound up with a full-time job. Ruth, their regular dispatcher, hadn’t made it in yet, so Jolene had redirected the inquiry about Hurricane Damon’s projected path to the weather bureau. Then she stayed put to field three more phone calls from volunteers reporting in with their ETA’s, and one from a Corpus Christi resident asking for directions to the high school evac site.
Answering phones rated at about a negative two on the excitement scale—she’d much rather be doing than sitting. But as she’d told her father, she was here to do whatever needed to be done. The people of Turning Point were her family as much as Mitch was.
Needing to fill the temporary lull, she swiveled the chair around to watch the gathering meeting through the glass window that separated the dispatch office from the station’s commons area. A handful of locals had arrived for the briefing and had quickly dug into rolls and coffee, greeting their out-of-state guests.
The town’s resident hot-shot pilot and fellow volunteer firefighter, Micky Flynn, had swaggered in a few minutes ago and was already trying to make time with the three female medical personnel from California. Jolene was slowly revising her opinion of the sun-in-the-fun crowd she’d expected her Dutch uncle, Dan Egan, to send from the Golden State. Cheryl, Amy and Dana were definitely babes, she supposed. Each woman was pretty in her own way. But they seemed friendly and competent and unafraid of hard work.
The man who’d flown in with them, Nate Kellison, was definitely more standoffish. Taking a swallow of milk, she searched the perimeter of the commons area. As she peered over the rim of the carton, she spotted him on the far side of the room, discussing something with short and squatty Doyle Brown.
Or rather, Doyle was talking and Kellison was nodding his head.
He didn’t have a handsome face—the nose was a little too crooked, the jaw a little too square—but it was undeniably compelling.
A smile would help ease the tension bracketing his mouth. But she got the feeling Nate Kellison didn’t smile much. Not recently, at any rate. A sprinkling of lines beside his eyes indicated smiles and laughter had once come easily to him. But there was something almost Atlas-like in the gravity surrounding him. For a man who couldn’t be more than thirty, he seemed to carry a heavy weight of responsibility on his shoulders.
“What’s your secret, Kellison?” she mused out loud.
He’d taken off his ball cap, giving her a better view of his ultrashort crop of coffee-dark hair and a chance to gauge the color of those unsmiling eyes. They were a dark, golden-brown, reminiscent of the fine sippin’ whiskey her father liked to drink from time to time.
Those brown eyes blinked. When they opened again, they were focused on her. Dead on. Staring with an almost psychic intensity that said he’d known she’d been watching him. Startled at being caught, Jolene swallowed an entire mouthful of milk, forcing the liquid down her throat in one gulp.
There was something coiled and canny and downright unsettling in those whiskey-colored eyes.
But she couldn’t look away.
Why was California Boy staring at her?
Jolene defiantly tipped her chin and held his gaze, ignoring the inexplicable clutch of nervous energy tightening her chest. She knew she didn’t turn the heads of too many men—they were more likely to call her to set them up with a friend or bemoan their woman troubles than to ask her out herself. And she was okay with that. She had plenty of friends of both sexes to fill up her time. She had other people to give her heart to—her father, her baby, her hometown. They would always need her.
Joaquin had needed her. In some ways, he was the only man who ever had. And even with his big, generous heart, her husband had never given her more than his trademark bear hug or a platonic kiss.
Of course, he’d been so sick.
They hadn’t even made their baby in the traditional way.
Automatically Jolene slid her hand down to cup the gentle swell of her belly, protecting that most precious part of her from any hurts the world tried to throw at them. Kellison’s brown gaze dropped to follow the movement of her hand. Jolene flattened her spine into the back of the chair, instinctively putting distance between her baby and those probing eyes.
He blinked again and turned his attention back to something Doyle had said. Freed from the mesmerizing spell, Jolene expelled a sigh of unexpected relief.
What the heck had just happened? She didn’t think Kellison had been scoping her out as a pretty woman or potential conquest. He was judging her for some reason. Judging her and deciding she’d come up short, even though they’d done nothing more than exchange names.
And some seriously intense eye contact.
With a grunt of exasperation, she turned
