crackle of the roasting fire was muted beneath the rain hammering on the barn’s tin roof but its orange glow flickered out across the darkened room, dancing. The flames writhed and twisted in the inferno of the stove, elegant and pure, the way the best of the performers in her company had been able to do.
The way she never had. Despite everything she’d done to be good enough, despite sacrificing her entire childhood to the God of Dance. Her entire body.
One particularly spectacular flame twisted in a helix and reached high above the burning timber before folding and darting back into itself.
Still her body yearned to move like those flames. It craved the freedom and raw expression. She hadn’t really danced in the nine years since walking away from the corps and the truth was she hadn’t really danced in the twelve years before it. The regimented structure of ballet suited her linear mind. Steps, sequences, choreographed verse. She’d excelled technically but, ultimately, lacked heart.
And then she’d discovered that one of her father’s corporations was a silent patron for the company, and what heart she had for dance withered completely.
The place she thought she’d earned with brutal hard work and commitment to her craft… The place she knew two dozen desperate artists would crawl over her rotting corpse to have…
Her father had bought that place with cold, hard cash.
Two air pockets crashed together right overhead and the little barn rattled at the percussion. Ellie didn’t even flinch. She shifted against the sofa cushions to dislodge the old pain of memory. She’d run from that chapter in her life with a soul as gaunt as her body, searching for something more meaningful to take its place. But she didn’t find it in the thousands of hours of charity work she put in over the past decade raising funds for Alzheimer’s research. And she didn’t find it in the company of some man. No matter how many she’d dated to appease her mother.
And—finally—she opened her eyes one morning and realised that her inability to find something meaningful in her life said a whole lot more about her than it did about the city she lived in.
The rolling thunder morphed into the rhythmic pounding of a fist on her door, though it took a few moments for Ellie to realise. She tossed back the blanket and hurried the few steps to the front door, taking a moment to make sure her hair was neatly back.
‘Are you okay?’
The sheriff stood there, water streaming off his wide-brimmed hat and three-quarter slicker, soaked through from the knee down. A bedraggled Deputy shadowed him.
Surprise had her stumbling backwards and man and dog took that as an invitation to enter. They stepped just inside her door, out of the steady rain, though Jed took off his hat and left it hanging on the external doorknob. He produced a small, yellow box.
‘Matches?’ she said, her tranquil haze making her slow to connect the dots.
‘There’s candles in the bottom kitchen drawer.’
‘What for?’
He looked at her like she was infirm. ‘Light.’ Then he flicked her light switch up and down a few times. ‘Power’s out.’
‘Oh. I didn’t notice. I had the lights out anyway.’
Maybe people didn’t do that in Texas because the look he threw her was baffled. ‘You were sitting here in the dark?’
Was that truly so strange? She rather liked the dark. ‘I was sitting here staring into the fire and enjoying the storm.’
‘Enjoying it?’ The idea seemed to appall him. He did look like he’d been through the wringer, though not thoroughly enough to stop water dripping from his trousers onto the brick floor of the old barn.
‘I’m curled up safe and sound on your sofa, not out there getting saturated.’ He still didn’t seem to understand so she made it simpler. ‘I like storms.’
Deputy slouched down in front of her blazing fire and his big black eyes flicked between the two of them. Jed’s hand and the matchbox still hung out there in space, so Ellie took it from him and placed it gently next to the existing one on the woodpile. ‘Thank you, Sheriff. Would you like a coffee? The pot’s just boiled.’
Colour soaked up Jed’s throat, though it was lessened by the orange glow coming from the stove. Had he forgotten his own woodpile came with matches?
‘Sorry. I thought you might be frightened.’
‘Of a storm…?’ Ellie swung the pot off its bracket and back onto her blazing stove, then set to spooning out instant coffee. ‘No.’
‘I’d only been home a few minutes when the power cut. I had visions of you trying to get down the stairs in the dark to find candles.’
Further evidence of his chivalry took second place to inexplicable concern that he’d been out there in the cold for hours. ‘Trouble?’
He shrugged out of his sheriff’s coat and draped it over the chairback closest to the heat. ‘The standard storm-related issues—flooding, downed trees. We’ve been that long without rain the earth is parched. Causes more run-off than usual.’
The kettle sang as it boiled and Ellie tumbled water into his coffee, then passed it to him. He took it gratefully. ‘Thank you.’
She sunk back into her spot on the sofa and he sat himself politely on the same chair as his dripping coat. Overhead, the storm grizzled and grumbled in rolling waves and sounded so much like a petulant child it was hard not to smile.
‘You really do love your weather, don’t you?’ he said.
‘I love…’ What? The way it was so completely out of her control and therefore liberating? No one could reasonably have expectations of the weather. ‘I love the freedom of a storm.’
He sipped his coffee and joined her in listening to the sounds above. ‘Can I ask you something?’ he finally said. ‘How did you know it was going to rain?’
She thought about that for a moment. Shrugged. ‘I could feel it.’
‘But you know nothing about Texas weather. And it was such a long shot.’
‘Intuition?’
He smiled in the flickering firelight. ‘You remind me a bit of someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Clay Calhoun.’
Her heart and stomach swapped positions for a few breaths.
‘Jessica’s father. That man was so in touch with his land he could look at the sky and tell you where a lightning bolt was going to hit earth.’
Awkwardness surged through her. Clay Calhoun was dead, just a legend now. Getting to know the man at the start of all her emotional chaos was not something she expected when she came to Texas. Yet, there was something intensely personal about discovering a shared…affinity…with the man that might be her father.
Was. She really needed to start digging her way out of denial
