The Widow's Protector. Rachel Lee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ his voice to be heard, trying more distraction. “I’m not used to this.”

      “I’m not used to this, either,” she called back. “I’ve only been here a few months. I never expected this.”

      “Nobody does,” he agreed. “I bet even the people who live in Tornado Alley don’t expect it’ll hit them.”

      “Probably not.”

      But she was looking at the door again, as if she feared it might give way under the assault. He kind of wondered himself, although he’d felt its heft and weight and judged it to be sturdy. But he had no idea how it might react to a truly powerful tornado. Photos of heaped debris didn’t tell him much about the tensile strength of a door like that, just a lot about the tensile strength of the wood used in construction.

      “Do you work?” he asked as the elements beat on the door like an insane drummer.

      “What?” Her face turned back to him. “Oh. No. I didn’t need to, at least not until after the baby—” She broke off sharply as the storm’s giant fist pounded the door again.

      Who would have thought, Ryder wondered, that you might need ear protection in a storm shelter?

      Then, so suddenly as to be startling, the world fell absolutely silent.

      After a few seconds, she whispered in the silence. “It can’t be over yet. That was a big storm.”

      He agreed. “The tornado might have passed, but the weather still has to be threatening. I guess we should wait for an all-clear from the radio.”

      “I guess.” She wrapped her arms more tightly around her belly, protectively. “The house. It’s all I really have.”

      “Do you have insurance?”

      She shook her head. “We couldn’t afford it. My husband inherited it, and when he lost his job we moved out here. We figured we could make it on land leases until one of us found work.”

      “Then you lost him. So no income at all?”

      “Just from the leases. There’s a lot of land. We’ve leased it to grow hay, and some as grazing land. It’s not a lot, but it was enough for the basics.”

      She glanced at the door again as the drumming resumed.

      “Everything may be okay,” he said pointlessly. Although it was easy to tell someone not to worry about things they didn’t know, and they certainly didn’t know if anything had happened to her house, worry seemed to be a natural human state.

      He hated sitting here like this, unable to do anything but wait, and if he hated it, so must she. She had a lot more at stake. But if he’d learned anything at all from his marriage to Brandy, it was that sometimes no amount of effort could solve a problem.

      Of course, he still wasn’t sure which lessons to take from that. It didn’t seem to have improved his patience any. But Brandy had tested his patience for years. He’d learned to roll with the punches and deal with each day as it came. Maybe that was the maximum patience a man could learn.

      The radio crackled and a voice came back, telling them the tornado warning had been lifted for Conard County.

      Then Marti reached out to switch the dial, and a staticky news station came on. The sheriff reported that damage to Conard City appeared to be minimal, but they were still awaiting reports from outlying areas. Power and telephones were out, and some cell towers seemed to be down. The station pleaded for folks to check on their neighbors and find a way to report emergencies to the sheriff’s department.

      Marti looked at the closed storm door again, and Ryder could read the anxiety in every line of her. She needed to look but was afraid to.

      Finally, despite the drumbeat of what he assumed to be rain, Ryder realized that nothing heavy was battering them any longer, and the wind had stopped wailing. Time to check.

      He climbed the stairs, unlocked the bolts and threw the door back.

      “Oh my God,” he heard Marti say on a breath right behind him.

      If it hadn’t passed right overhead, the tornado had certainly come close. He saw a cluster of debris around the shelter opening, and beyond it he could see her house.

      Part of the roof was gone and some of the trees had come down, although not on the house, the only mercy he could see. The tree trunks looked like splintered matchwood, giving him some idea of the power of the storm that had just passed them.

      He shoved debris aside, making a clear path for the woman behind him. He didn’t want her tripping on anything.

      Then he climbed out and turned to offer her a hand. Steady rain fell, although not heavily, and the sky had lightened to a deep gray. The inky green was gone.

      But so was part of her life.

      Marti stood there staring at her house, the one thing she had counted on to get her through, taking in the corner of the roof that had been stripped of its covering, leaving rafters bare. The rain would get in, she thought numbly. It would ruin everything.

      The downed trees didn’t shock her as much, though it troubled her to see them. They had provided protection in the winter from the wind and then shade as spring had deepened. Now they were just kindling.

      Then, feeling as if every muscle in her body had turned to lead, she pivoted to look out over the fields that had been planted with hay.

      “Oh my God,” she said again, clapping one hand to her mouth. The hay had been mown right down to the bare earth as if by a giant scythe, along a line so clearly marked she could have believed a surveyor had laid it. It told her how close that tornado had come, missing her buildings by a couple of hundred feet. And the slash was so wide.

      “My God,” she said helplessly. There went her income. Nobody was going to be able to pay up on those leases if they lost their crop.

      Her knees started to weaken, and she was grateful when Ryder gripped her elbow, steadying her.

      “It’s gone,” she whispered hollowly. “It’s all gone.” What was she supposed to do now?

      “Do you have any decent tarps?” Ryder asked her.

      Slowly her gaze tracked to him. Any other time she would have thought him a fine-looking man, with his chiseled, slightly weathered face, his lean, hard build. Those gray eyes of his were filled with compassion, and the compassion almost made her weep. How long had it been since anyone had given a damn about her?

      Not that it mattered. He was a stranger she had picked up along the roadside only because she couldn’t leave another human being out in this storm. He’d probably resume his trek in a matter of minutes.

      “Tarps?” she repeated blankly.

      “I need to cover that hole in your roof before the rain does too much damage.”

      “You don’t have to….” She had trouble grasping that he was offering to help in some way. The idea didn’t want to penetrate the haze of total despair.

      “I have to,” СКАЧАТЬ