he was talking about. “It” was Joe’s loose reference to the flash floods that they were periodically subjected to when Mother Nature decided to be too bountiful with her supply of rain and drenched the lands far too quickly to be of any actual benefit to anyone.
Mona twisted around in her seat, looking back at her vehicle. She knew she had no choice, but she really hated leaving it behind.
“My car,” she protested.
“We’ll find it once it stops raining,” Joe told her with an assurance that defied argument.
She turned back around and sat facing forward again. Mona watched as his car’s windshield wipers vainly battled the downpour, losing ground with every stroke they spasmodically made. To her dismay, the man beside her slowed down and began driving at a speed that would have brought shame to an arthritic turtle.
The fearless daredevil she’d once known would have laughed at the rain and gone full throttle into the storm.
But that boy was gone now and in his place was a cautious man who thought things through.
She knew that any faster and they risked driving off the road and landing in a ditch.
Or worse.
Another thought suddenly struck her. She turned to look at his profile. “We’re not going to make it into town, are we?”
If this had been anyone else in the car with him, he might have uttered some platitude meant to be reassuring, doling out a spoonful of hope to someone he knew was silently asking for it.
But this wasn’t anyone else. This was Mona. Mona, who took every white lie as an affront, every sugar-coated fib as an insult to her intelligence. So he said the only thing he knew she would tolerate.
He told her the truth.
“Nope.”
Chapter Two
“‘Nope’?”
Stunned, Mona repeated the single-syllable answer Joe had just uttered. If they couldn’t reach town, that meant the oncoming flash flood would cut off access to Forever.
But she knew Joe, knew him as well as she knew herself and her brother. Joe was not the type to merely give up or surrender, even if his adversary was Nature itself.
Still, the seconds ticked by and he wasn’t saying anything beyond the one word he’d already uttered. Mona felt herself growing antsy, in direct correlation to the force of the storm.
If they couldn’t make it to town, they would have to find shelter somewhere. They couldn’t stay out in the open. Flash floods were known to sweep vehicles away in the blink of an eye.
“Say something, already,” she ordered, then immediately added a warning. “I swear, Joe Lone Wolf, if I hear you say, ‘Today is a good day to die,’ you are going to really, really regret it.”
He stole a quick glance in her direction, taking care not to look away from the road for more than half a heartbeat. Visibility was next to impossible, but at this point, he was searching for something very specific.
“So much for my one dramatic moment,” he quipped. “How about, ‘Let’s hole up in the old Murphy place until this passes’? Will that get me beat up, too?” he asked.
“The Murphy place?” Mona repeated uncertainly. She hadn’t realized that she’d gotten this disoriented. She squinted as she peered through the all but obliterated windshield. Visibility was down to approximately twelve to eighteen inches in front of the vehicle, maybe less. “Is that around here?”
The “Murphy place” was little more than a three-room cabin that by urban standards hardly qualified as a vacation getaway, much less a regular home. It was more in the realm of a shack, really. More than three quarters of a century old, it had once been the center of a dream—and a budding cattle ranch—until an outbreak of anthrax had eventually killed both. The cabin, which should have been the beginning of a sprawling ranch house, had stood empty for close to twenty years now, after the last descendent of Jonas Murphy died without leaving any heirs, just a mountain of bad debts.
Somehow in all that time, the building, a veritable feasting ground for vermin, had managed to escape being torn down or even claimed. No one cared enough about the unproductive piece of land to buy it and begin building something from scratch again. So the decaying cabin stood, enduring the seasons year after year and, like an aging octogenarian with osteoporosis, it grew steadily more and more frail.
The last time he’d passed this way and actually looked at the cabin, Joe had thought that the only thing keeping the building up were probably the termites, holding hands.
He sincerely hoped that they were holding tight for at least one more night.
Instincts that were generations in the making guided him toward where he had last seen the cabin this morning on his way into town.
“It should be close by,” he answered Mona, then spared her a grin and added, “Unless those pesky tire spirits decided to move it just so that they could annoy you some more.”
She doubted that it was possible to annoy her any more than she already was, Mona thought. “Very funny.”
The grin on Joe’s face softened into a smile and then that faded, as well. He found that he had to fight not just the rain but the wind for control over his vehicle. He sensed Mona’s tension. She was watching him.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” he assured her quietly as he continued to stare intently through the blinding rain.
Mona bristled. “I’m not afraid,” she retorted, stopping just short of snapping at him.
She hated the fact that Joe could read her so well, that all he had to do was just look at her to sense what she was thinking. What bothered her most of all was that she couldn’t return the “compliment” and do the same with him. It just didn’t seem fair.
“Okay,” Joe allowed. “Then why are you about to rip off my dashboard?” he asked. Without looking, he nodded in the general direction of her hands which were gripping the aforementioned dashboard.
Mona gritted her teeth. Damn it.
She was completely unaware that she was gripping the dashboard. Swallowing a curse, Mona dropped her hands into her lap, trying hard not to clench them.
“Just bracing myself for the inevitable crash. You’re not exactly the best driver in the world,” she reminded him pointedly.
He knew what she was referring to. At thirteen, he’d been angry at the world in general and specifically at the absentee father he’d never known and his mother, who’d died suddenly three years earlier. He’d been passed around from relative to relative and raised by committee, which compelled him to steal one of the elders’ cars just to thumb his nose at everyone.
For the space of half an hour, he’d felt like his own man, free and independent. But the joyride ended when he lost control of the car and ended up in a ditch.
Miraculously emerging unscathed, he’d wound up working the entire summer and half the fall to pay off the repair
