“Yes, I can find it. And yes, they’re in a waterproof case. But it could take forever to reach the crash site, Jonathan. The weather’s bad, and the terrain is rugged.”
He turned to her. “Does this town have any equipment we could use? Snowmobiles, maybe? Something that can travel in these conditions?”
Grey’s snowcat immediately came to mind, but Grace would not even consider asking his assistance.
Not after the scenes she’d just endured, first at his house and then at the Bigelows’. Ellen had actually had tears in her eyes when Grace had told her that she hadn’t been able to get any help for their trees.
“Well?” Jonathan asked, walking back to her.
“Nothing that I can think of. Most of the people have snowmobiles, I guess, but the power’s gone out,”
she said, waving at the darkened, silent room around them. “They’re not going to want to head into the mountains. They have to stay close to home to keep watch over their fires, their neighbors, and their property.”
He gave her a laconic grin. “Not even for twenty thousand dollars? You don’t think somebody in this rundown town could use that kind of money?”
She could only stare at Jonathan. “You could buy several snowmobiles with twenty thousand dollars,”
she said finally. “Why not just do that?”
“We don’t have that kind of time. Don’t you understand? Our entire future is sitting up on that mountain.”
“Where it will have to stay until this storm is over.”
“But we need those disks now. AeroSaqii’s men are probably already here in Pine Creek.”
“I’m just as frustrated as you are, Jonathan, that the transmission won’t download properly. But those men are having to deal with the same weather we are. And I doubt they’re here. Ellen Bigelow told me that the main road coming up from Greenville will likely close soon, and that’s the only way into Pine Creek. Several trees have fallen, pulling miles of power lines with them. That should buy us some time.”
Jonathan slapped the table in frustration, then picked up his briefcase and stormed into the living room.
Grace fed Baby, burped him, changed him, and set him back down to sleep in his cradle by the fire. He was tuckered out, sound asleep before his head even hit the mattress. Ellen and John must have spent the entire time playing with him.
After making sure Baby was covered up warmly, Grace went about preparing her home for the long winter siege ahead. While she worked, Jonathan sat in the overstuffed chair in the living room and alternated between talking on the phone—which had somehow escaped the wrath of the ice—and working on his computer.
Grace was glad he was occupied elsewhere and no longer bothering her. She drained what water was left in the holding tank into several jugs and set them on the counter to reserve for drinking. She filled pots with broken icicles she chopped from the eaves and put them on the stove to melt. She dug out the kerosene lamps that had been around since before she was born, and it was just as she placed them on the sideboard that she found Mary.
The Oreo cookie tin was sitting in the middle of the sideboard. Grace picked it up. There were two small dents in the front of the can, and she slowly spanned her fingers over them. They were placed exactly where two large, strong thumbs would have gripped the tin tightly in grief.
Michael must have slipped out of the house after following her to the Bigelows’ in his truck and brought Mary back here. Michael had left the house while Grace had a quick lunch with Ellen and John before she returned home with Baby.
Grace hugged the tin to her chest, glad to have her sister back and sad beyond words for Michael. It must have been hard for him to have spent the last five months wondering where Mary was and if she would return and the last twenty-four hours coming to terms with the fact that he would never see her again.
Grace wiped at the tears that kept leaking from her eyes. It seemed she cried at the drop of a hat these days.
“Oh, Mare. What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “I love Baby. I can’t just give him away.”
She didn’t get an answer. Nor did she wonder about the sudden sensation of warmth pushing against her chest. She simply hugged the tin more fiercely against her aching heart.
“The fire’s going out,” Jonathan said, walking into the kitchen. He stopped suddenly, a look of annoyance hardening his features.
“You’re still talking to her, I see,” he said, nodding at the tin in her arms. He took a step closer. “Are you crying?”
She set the tin back on the table and wiped her tears completely away with the palms of her hands. “I do that sometimes, Jonathan. When people lose someone they love, they grieve.”
His face flushed to a dull red, and he seemed at a loss for words. He walked out of the kitchen, then turned around and came back. “The fire. It’s going out, and I don’t see any more wood in the box. Do you have some?”
“It’s in the attached barn, just outside the door.”
He stood there looking at her. “Should I get it?” he asked, finally realizing that she had no intention of doing it herself.
“You’ll probably want to fill the woodbox,” she told him, returning to her chores. “It burns better if it’s warm.”
She began going through the refrigerator to make room for a pot of icicles to keep cold all of the food that had magically multiplied while she was gone. The modern machine was being demoted to an old-fashioned icebox.
While she worked, she thought about her promise to Mary, Michael’s remarkable story, Grey’s offer to raise Baby, and the monumental step she had taken this afternoon in the summit house. She didn’t know if it had been a step backward or forward, but it had certainly changed the direction of her life.
No matter how mad she was at him now, Grace knew in her heart that she would never leave Greylen MacKeage. Not after what had happened this afternoon on the top of TarStone Mountain. Pine Creek was her home now, and she was standing firmly in the center between two warring men. Possibly three, if she counted Jonathan, who would keep pulling with all his might to get her back to Virginia.
Grace felt a twinge between her legs when she knelt down to move the food on the bottom shelf of the fridge. She was still tender from their lovemaking, but it was a warm, welcome kind of tenderness. It reminded her of their time together. The nice time, anyway.
The only thing that nagged at her conscience was the fact that they hadn’t used protection. A sixteen-year-old knew enough to carry a condom in her purse, but Grace had never even purchased such a thing. She hadn’t needed to. She was waiting for marriage.
So why hadn’t she waited?
It was simple, really, once she thought about it. She hadn’t been saving herself for marriage; she’d been waiting to meet a man she could love for the rest of her life.
And she had, if he ever crawled out of his cave—or, rather, his castle—long enough to see the problem from her point of view.
She couldn’t commit herself to a man who wanted her to live a lie by the next twenty years. Grey had sorely disappointed her by even suggesting such a thing.
Grace conveniently dismissed the fact that she had been seriously considering that very same lie herself.
Because, in all fairness to her principles, even though it would be so easy simply to run away with Baby and never see any of them again, her promise to Mary was still firmly in place in her heart.
It was such a mess. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t. How would she feel if, say in three years from now, Michael MacBain took a wife and began a new life for himself? And they had children? Where would that leave Baby? How could she walk up to Michael ten or fifteen years from now and say, “Oh, by the way, I’d like to introduce you to your son”?