The Baby Quilt. Christine Flynn

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      Chapter Two

      Justin’s first thought when he stepped onto the wet lawn was that the rain had apparently stopped as abruptly as it started.

      His second thought was of his car.

      With a sinking sensation, he moved beyond where Emily stood clutching her baby and glanced toward the road. Beneath the heavy clouds, he could barely see the tops of the trees near the little bridge and the curve of the road leading down to it. But the trees were still there, as thick and tall as when he’d parked his car beneath them. Closer in, under a sky that was opening with streaks of brilliant blue, the verdant land remained untouched.

      The frustration he’d prepared himself to feel over hassles with transportation and insurance adjusters never materialized. His biggest problem—at the moment, anyway—was still his dead battery. Emily Miller, he was sure, hadn’t fared as well.

      When he looked from the coop where the chickens were pecking the ground, he found her staring at the walnut tree. What was left of it, anyway. All that remained was a short, jagged spike that had been blasted clean of its bark. The bulk of the sizable trunk was nowhere to be seen—though Justin figured it a safe bet that the branch poking out of the cellar had once been attached to it. So had the even larger branch that had been stuffed through the back porch. That massive limb had taken out the porch’s center support, but the house itself was still standing. By some miracle, so was the greenhouse. Even the windmill, its blades now turning with laconic ease, appeared unscathed.

      He’d expected to see nothing but rubble.

      “Are you all right?” he asked, since she’d yet to move. He pulled a white sheet from where it had tangled around an upright water pipe. Tossing it over the T of the clothesline pole, he cautiously scanned her profile. “It’s too bad about your tree. And your porch,” he added, since that was actually the bigger problem. “But it doesn’t look like you lost anything else.”

      “No. No,” Emily repeated, responding to the encouraging note in his deep voice. “I don’t think I did.” Her own voice lost the strength she’d just forced into it. “It could have been much worse.”

      Brushing her lips over the top of Anna’s soft, sweet-smelling head, she stared at the mass of leaves and branches obliterating her back door. She’d immediately noticed that the greenhouse and chickens and the fields had survived, but she hadn’t let herself breathe until she’d turned to her house.

      It really could have been worse. And losing a tree and a cellar door and having to patch her porch was nothing compared to what could have been. There was always some good and some bad. The sweet balanced the sour, her mother and her aunts had always said. That was life. It didn’t matter that her own life had swung wildly out of balance. She was to take with relief and thanks all that had been spared. And take in stride and with grace that which hadn’t.

      That was how she’d been raised. It was all she knew to do, though she was the first to admit that she’d never mastered the easy acceptance part. As she stood hugging her child, the thought of the extra work it would take to cut up the tree was enough to bring her to tears. There weren’t enough hours in the day as it was. But she didn’t dare let herself cry. She was afraid that if she did, she’d never stop. And she had to be strong for Anna.

      At the moment, she also needed to check on her neighbors.

      The rows of corn nearest her little plot of land swayed in the diminishing breeze. Where the land gently rose a couple of acres away, she saw nothing but churned-up earth and a chunk of red-and-white siding that looked suspiciously like part of a barn.

      “I need to see if the Clancys are all right,” she said, uncomfortably aware of her rescuer’s eyes on her. “Mrs. Clancy just had a hip replaced and their son and his family are away for a few days. There’s no one there to know if they need help.”

      Justin stood with his hands on his lean hips, his broad shoulders looking as wide as the horizon. He stared right at her, his wide brow furrowed. He was very direct with his stares, she’d noticed. Not at all subtle the way the few men she knew were when they looked at her. But then, he seemed very direct about his needs and opinions, too. “You wanted to use their phone. Come with me and I’ll show you the way.”

      “Thanks, but I think I’ll head on in to town. From the looks of things over there,” he said, nodding toward the cornfields, “the lines are probably down.”

      She lifted one shoulder in a shrug, the motion not nearly as casual as she wanted it to be. “I understand tornados are strange. The way they pick and choose what they destroy, I mean. I’ve heard of walls being ripped off, but nothing in the room being disturbed. I think that’s part of Mr. Clancy’s barn,” she said, pointing ahead of her, “but their phone could still be working.”

      She was telling him he might be able to save himself some time by coming with her. Whether she knew it or not, she was also making it as clear as the raindrops clinging to the grass that he disturbed her. Her wary glance would barely meet his before shying away, as if she were embarrassed at having been up close and personal with a perfect stranger. He was pretty certain, too, from the strain that had settled into her delicate features that she was more upset than she was letting on about the damage. Yet, even as unsettled as she had to be, she sounded unbelievably calm.

      As he watched her kneel to tug a piece of denim from beneath the baby carrier’s thickly padded mauve liner, he couldn’t believe her attitude, either.

      He didn’t know a single soul who would walk away from their own crisis to help out someone else with theirs. The fact that she remembered he still had a problem caught him a little off guard, too. After the way he’d jumped on her about leaving her kid outside, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d left him to fend for himself.

      She carefully tucked the baby’s little legs through two holes in what looked like a denim tube and slipped her own arms through its two long straps. As she did, his glance strayed down the thick braid lying against her back to the fabric covering the sweet curve of her slender hips.

      “Even if the phone’s out,” he said, wondering how all that hair would look unbound and spilling over her body, “maybe he can give me a jump.”

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