The Baby Notion. Dixie Browning

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СКАЧАТЬ to fall in. Most of the damage to my apartment is smoke and water.”

      “Ma’am, rules is rules, and I’ve already done bent ’em right bad.”

      Jake noticed she was holding on to what looked like a small wooden chest, a leather case and several plastic bags bulging with various lumpy articles. “Where do you expect me to sleep? On the sidewalk?”

      “I reck’n if I was you, I’d start callin’ round to family. That, or get me a room at the hotel before they’re all booked up. Most folks are already gone.”

      “But I just got home! How was I to know—” It was then that she noticed Jake. “What are you doing here, did you get smoked out, too?”

      Jake shook his head, surveying the ruin all around him. Structurally, it didn’t look too bad, but it was going to take considerable cleaning before it was fit to live in.

      Even so, it was pretty swank. Definitely a cut or two above Shacktown. “Heard the fire call, came to see if I could help out.”

      “Miz Barrington,” the young fireman said earnestly, “I just cain’t let you go back inside again. Goin’ in for valuables, medicine and important papers—that’s one thing, but I cain’t let you haul out everything—if I was to let you do it, everybody else would be wanting to do it, too. Chief Clancy would be all over me like flies on a roadkill.”

      Barrington? As in old man Horace T. Barrington, king of the bigtime swindlers? Holy hell!

      “Ma’am, maybe you’d better start callin’ around for somewheres to stay tonight, else you might have to drive near ’bout to Dallas. Like I said, most folks have already gone, and there ain’t that many places to stay around New Hope.”

      Priss swallowed hard. She was beginning to feel sick in her stomach, as if her body had been violated instead of her home. “Um, what about the bathroom? Couldn’t I just go inside long enough to use the bathroom?”

      “I reckon you could use the one out there by the pool. Fire didn’t reach that far.”

      With a doleful glance over her shoulder at what used to be her home, Priss picked her way through puddles of filthy water, coiled firehoses and a few pieces of splintered furniture someone had tossed off a balcony.

      Evidently she wasn’t the only one who had sought refuge in the pool’s dressing room. The once-white plumbing was smeared with sooty handprints, and there wasn’t a clean towel to be found anywhere.

      Nevertheless, several minutes later, after splashing her face and throat, she felt marginally better. At least she wasn’t shaking quite so hard. Taking a deep breath, she faced herself in the mirror and groaned. Her lipstick was gone. Whatever blush remained was buried under layers of soot and streaked mascara. She looked like a speckled raccoon after a three-day binge, and as for her hair…

      She groaned again. Priss had never been vain. Her mother had seen to that, constantly harping on the fact that she must take after her father’s side of the family, because no one on her side had ever had freckles and such common, peasant-type bone structure.

      Nora Barrington, tall, reed-slender, with black hair and skin the color of a magnolia petal, had come from one of those Virginia families that was reputed to be older than God.

      Priss had been a disappointment to her father because she wasn’t a son, and to her mother because she wasn’t a beauty. After she’d graduated from Mary Washington, in a deliberate attempt to prove she didn’t care, she had patterned herself after the most outrageously feminine country singer she could think of.

      It had driven them both wild.

      Jake was waiting outside the pool house door when she emerged, her face scrubbed right down to the freckles and her own straw-colored lashes. She felt as if someone had carved out a great big hollow place in her stomach, and it was going to take more than a fresh layer of makeup to fix it.

      Priss tried and almost succeeded in ignoring the man. What she wanted to do was to run and hide, only there was no place to hide. She could barricade herself inside the bathroom again, but that wouldn’t solve anything. The best she could do was summon up the attitude her mother used to call presence.

      She tried. It was simply too much trouble. Besides, as much as she would like to find a scapegoat to pin all her troubles on, Jake Spencer wasn’t it.

      Her shoulders slumped. Jake stepped forward. She stepped back. If he touched her right now, she was going to come apart, and she knew as well as she knew her own name that once she did, not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men would be able to put her together again.

      Which reminded her of something else. She’d have to call the hospital to see if one of the other volunteers could read to the children—she’d never be able to make it now.

      “Well? What are you hanging around for?” she snapped. “Aren’t you through gawking?”

      He was just standing there, in his worn jeans, his sweat-stained work shirt and his pearl-gray Stetson with the mascara-stained brim, looking calm and tough and arrogant all at the same time. It was more than any woman could take under the circumstances. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

      Gratuitous rudeness had never been her style, but at this point, Priss was beyond caring.

      “Honey, are you sure you’re all right?”

      Her chin quivered. She tightened her grubby fists and tried to hang on to her attitude. “No, dammit, I am not all right! My apartment is ruined, and I’m late for an appointment, and…and I forgot to get my hair-dryer!”

      Jake eyed the jumble of parcels she’d parked on the poolside chaise longue. “What’s all that stuff?”

      “What it is, is none of your business,” she retorted.

      What it was, was her mother’s second-best set of flatware—the best set, a complete service for twenty-four, had been sold at the auction three years ago. With the fireman hovering over her every step of the way, she had only had time to dump her makeup drawer into a plastic bag, snatch up her hair rollers and a change of underwear, and grab her new Clint Black CD. She’d clean forgotten about her jewelry case and her hair-dryer.

      “Oh, for pity’s sake, it’s just some odds and ends I needed,” she muttered. “I asked you what you were doing here.”

      “Like I said,” he explained patiently, “I heard the call on the fire channel and thought you could use a hand.”

      Priss could have used more than a hand, she could have used a place to stay. She could have used her walk-in closet full of clothes, and she definitely could have used her best friend and housekeeper, Rosalie, who had practically raised her.

      What was Rosalie going to think when she got back and the apartment was such a mess? Oh, my mercy, she would have to call and warn her.

      Drawing in a deep breath, she willed herself to remain calm, but it wasn’t easy. One look at those steady, silver-gray eyes and it was all she could do not to throw herself into Jake’s arms and cry her eyes out. Which didn’t make sense, because in the first place, she didn’t even know the man, and in the second place, she never cried.

      Well…hardly at all. СКАЧАТЬ