Carolina Girl (20 page)

She wanted to do a whole lot more than dance around the
bonfire that was Clay McCloud. He looked as if he could go up in flames at any
moment.

“You’ll have to persuade the committee that you
can bring in business without high-density zoning,” Clay insisted,
looking like a Hollywood star but talking like the genius he claimed to be.

“I don’t want to hear about it.” She
dismissed his practicality in favor of celebration time. “I want a malt
and happiness, and if you’re going to be a downer, I’ll do it
without you.”

She really didn’t want him to go away. Right now she
didn’t care about the Terry Talberts of the world. She wanted to explore
the excitement spilling through her, discover how much of it was over winning
and how much was the man beside her.

“I am your bluebird of happiness,” he agreed
solemnly, accepting his coffee and sipping.

She raised her eyebrows at him, but busy slurping the first
malt she’d enjoyed since high school, she refused to take the bait. She
hoped the shiver down her spine was from the cold ice cream and not from
anticipation of the night ahead, but she could feel his vibrations as certainly
as her own.

Others from the audience drifted in, pounding them on the
back or congratulating them, depending on proximity. Glowing with triumph,
Aurora accepted the praise, knowing it could turn to scorn just as easily but
not afraid. That much had changed since high school. She no longer feared
disapproval.

Then maybe she should be brave enough not to fear the man
who led her out of the café after they finished their celebratory snack. Clay
was an intelligent adult male, after all, not a high school kid salivating to
get his hands on her breasts.

Her sister might think it was the student council election
that had soured Rory’s attitude toward men, but that had been only the
tip of the iceberg, the part people could see. Only Rory knew that Jeff had
decided to run against her when she’d swatted him for trying to remove
her swimsuit top. More than once. They’d ceased to be a couple when
he’d called her a prick teaser.

Her other encounters with men had pretty much been fast-lane
sex-and-runs, leaving her heart battered. She didn’t know if she was
prepared to risk it again, not when her life was already in a precarious
position.

“Is your silence ominous?” Clay asked, handing
her into the truck.

“Nope. Maybe.” Sitting this close to him in the
small cab, their knees nearly brushing, Rory was entirely too aware of him. She
would have to be dead to not know that he had sex on his mind.

She simply couldn’t decide if it was her brains or her
body that attracted Clay. And why should she care, since she wouldn’t be
around long enough to become involved? She’d be leaving here as soon as...what?

The original plan had been to see her family on the road to
recovery. She could do that next week when she cashed in the bottle cap, knock
wood. But now she’d opened a whole other can of worms. She couldn’t
leave this zoning thing hanging unresolved while she pursued her career.

“Am I that boring?” Clay asked warily when she
didn’t expand upon her answer.

“Hardly. But you could be that terrifying.”

“All right, that sounds promising.” The pickup
soared across the bridge and onto the island. “Is it the biker thing?
Should I admit I never rode a Harley until I got here?”

Rory laughed and turned her attention more fully on him.
“Really? You looked born to it.”

“I like things with motors, and I always wanted a
bike. Figured a place like this was a golden opportunity to change my
image.”

“Then let me congratulate you on your success. Must be
living near Hollywood rubs off. Your acting is excellent.”

“It’s not an act,” he insisted. “I
like Harleys. Just because I can work computers doesn’t mean I have to be
a geek.”

“I can assure you, geekdom is not what women think of
when they look at you. I’d feel safer with a geek.”

“No adventure in your soul,” he griped.
“You have to look outside the silk-necktie crowd once in a while, take a
chance.”

“I’m not a gambler.” Maybe she should be.
After all, she’d won a million dollars without even trying. “I
prefer known quantities, and there’s nothing certain about men and
relationships,” she added to remind herself as much as warn him.

He wiggled his shoulders inside his jacket as if it had
become too tight. “I’m not good at discussing
‘relationships.’ My parents taught us it’s bad manners to
gossip, rude to talk about bodily functions in public, and feelings are best
kept behind closed doors. Want to talk politics?”

Rory considered that a moment. He’d obviously been
brought up in a much more sophisticated environment than her emotionally
charged one. Grinning, she couldn’t resist replying, “Ah’ve
heard tell Yankees don’t admit to needing pots to piss in, but Ah purely
loathe
speaking poorly of the uneducated.”

In the light of the dashboard, Clay stared at her until his
active brain kicked in and he laughed. “Gossip, bodily functions, and
feelings all in one sentence. I want to introduce you to my mother.”

At his warm laughter, interest flared so brightly she almost
cringed.

Not until Clay exclaimed did she realize it wasn’t her
thoughts flaring brightly, but a roaring shower of flames against the night sky
ahead.

The car shot past the drive leading to Jared and
Cleo’s. The fire soared brighter and closer, flinging sparks high into
the heavens.

“Look at the top of that tree!” Aurora watched
through the windshield in horror as the tip of a towering pine burst into
flame.

“Pine sap burns like crazy,” Clay muttered.
Traffic slowed to a crawl, and he had to ease up on the accelerator. “Can
you tell where it is?”

She didn’t want to contemplate it. It was impossible
to judge distances on flat land. She could hear sirens screaming from behind
them, which meant the island’s volunteer fire department had already sent
out a call for reinforcement.

“The wells are unusually low.” She murmured her
fear aloud, as if that would dissipate it. “We’ve been in a drought
for three years.”

“Swell, surrounded by ocean and swamp and still dry.
Surely they can pump it from somewhere. That marsh out there should stop
it.”

The cynic trying to be reassuring would have been amusing at
any other time. Right now Rory grasped his encouragement and hung her prayers
on it. “Pine straw,” she murmured, hoping he could counter her
fear. “All the houses out here use pines for shade and the dead needles
for mulch.”

“That stuff burns too fast to hurt anything
else.”

She nodded, not wanting to argue with that optimistic
assessment, even if he was saying it just to shield her. His calm outlook gave
her strength, forming a bond she didn’t want to break.

They crawled past the peach stand at Iris’s turnoff.
Before they reached the road for home, police barriers blocked the highway.
Behind the barriers the fire soared to new heights—in the direction of
the trailer.

“Mandy,” she whispered, trusting him with her
worst fears. She waited for Clay to blow it off, but this time he had no
reassuring words, and the terror multiplied. “Pops is in a cast. They
only have the motorcycle.” Would Cissy be home yet? Or was she still at
Iris’s, maybe stuck in this traffic, too?

His mouth forming a grim line, Clay jerked the steering
wheel to one side, pulling the pickup off the road at a reckless angle between
two other trucks. He turned off the ignition and leaped out. “Come on,
we’ll walk.”

Relieved that he understood and acted, Rory jumped out to
follow. Pushing through the mob of spectators, they dodged vehicles and
questions to reach the corner. A policeman ran up to halt them, but Clay
didn’t slow his stride. “Her family is down there,” he
shouted as he shoved past. “You’ll have to shoot us to stop
us.”

Rory didn’t know if she could have argued with an
officer of the law, but Clay didn’t seem to have any qualms about it. He
shoved past the police officer and kept moving. She could learn to love a man
who acted with confidence instead of hesitation in the face of emergency.

Another treetop burst into flame, and they broke into a run.
Smoke choked the humid night air, concealing the fanciful mailboxes and
colorful flower gardens in the yards along the road.

By the time they reached the curve in the long, flat
pavement leading to home, bits of ash tore at Rory’s lungs. Ambulances,
fire trucks, and spectators littered the blacktopped lane, but Clay stayed
outside the crowd, tramping through the grass and bushes. She wished
she’d worn something more practical than high-heeled pumps and a business
suit.

Clearing a path through a wax myrtle hedge ahead of her,
Clay abruptly stopped. Turning, he grabbed her arm and steered her back toward
the road. “Not this way.”

He was bigger, heavier, and stronger than Rory, but she was
far more terrified. With a burst of adrenaline she broke from his grip and
raced back to the thicket. Pushing past a head-high shrub, she glimpsed the
crumpled front fender of a powder-blue car.

Scorched ground and smoking trees surrounded it.

She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Her
knees weakened, and she grabbed the branches ripping at her suit, trying to
reach the car to see what was inside it.

“Don’t, Aurora.” Clay caught her by the
waist, preventing her from tearing herself apart. “Let’s go back to
the road and talk to the policemen.”

Heart racing, Rory ignored his admonition, elbowed him, and
jerked free again.

Scraped by thorns and blackened branches, she forced her way
past the shrubbery to stare at the fire-blackened remains of her pride and joy.

The convertible top was down. The front end was totaled.
Cissy wasn’t in it.

Clay laid a comforting hand on her shoulder, but if she
turned to him she would melt down into a helpless puddle. Instead she stiffened
her spine and pulled free.

She and Cissy might never agree on anything, but she
didn’t want a world without her sister in it. Shaking, Rory stumbled in
the direction of the road, determined to find her. Their ties ran root deep.
Cissy was mother and sister and best friend. She couldn’t lose her.

The fire had destroyed the car and everything around it.
Cissy had a pin in her hip and couldn’t run, even if she’d survived
the crash.

Panic surged through her, giving her the strength to keep
moving.

This time Clay didn’t stop her. Using his body as
shield, he held aside branches, clearing a path to the road and the onlookers
staring horror-struck at the night sky. Silence reigned as friends and
neighbors watched the fire blazing down the road, spreading rapidly into the
empty acreage of the Bingham swamp—roaring toward the trailer and the
concrete factory.

Ignoring the fire, Aurora scanned the crowd for some sign of
Cissy, praying her sister had somehow escaped. The fire must have started here,
with the car Cissy was driving. Maybe there had been time...?

They’d left Mandy home with Pops. Why weren’t
they out here?

Thoughts whirling incoherently, she fell upon the first
person she recognized when they reached the road. “Erly, where’s
Cissy?”

The elderly man, lined face creased even more with worry,
glanced at her with dawning recognition. “Rora. I ain’t seen her,
hon. The firemen been goin’ house to house. They’ll get her
out.”

“That’s her car back there.” Panic rising,
she turned from Erly to other neighbors, who heard the fear in her voice and
turned to look. “Anyone seen Cissy? She was driving my car, and
it’s off the road back there.”

“Ambulance took someone out,” one woman shouted.
“Didn’t see who.”

“I heard it was a car crash started this,” a
teenager called. “They took the driver into town.”

“If she’s walking, she headed home to check on
Mandy and Jake,” Clay murmured against her ear. “If she’s in
the ambulance, she’s in good hands. Let’s get closer.”

Nodding because her tongue was suddenly too thick to talk,
Rory followed his lead through the crowd. She needed his confidence to get her
through this. She’d lost her own back there in that thicket. She clung to
his hand, let him use his size to bully his way through the crowd, and prayed
frantically.

Police stopped them at another roadblock, so Clay led her
back into the shrubbery again. The fire had flashed so hot across the dry
tinder, it had moved on without doing more than burning off the underbrush,
carried by the east wind off the ocean. The stench of charred pine and wet
charcoal choked the air.

“It’s almost under control,” he said,
glancing upward at silver streams of water coursing into the trees.

He sounded positive and reassuring, but Rory figured that
was for her benefit. Flames roared through the tree-tops close to her home.
Every twig around them smoldered and leaped into small fires with the slightest
breeze.

Sheer terror had replaced her ability to plot a course of
action. She simply trailed in Clay’s path, praying as she’d never
prayed before. She made wild promises to God as their feet found a grassy
hummock barely touched by fire. Ahead, flames soared from two different wooded
areas.

“There’s not enough on the ground to feed it,”
Clay promised. She stumbled over the rough terrain, and he caught her waist and
held her up. “The humidity is holding it in check over the marsh.
It’s only burning higher up where there’s a breeze.”

Maybe he fought forest fires in California. Maybe he knew
what he was talking about. Maybe she wouldn’t ask because she’d
rather believe than question.

Where was Cissy? And Pops? And Mandy?

She broke into a run when she saw the weather vane on top of
the house through a line of burned-out trees. Clay grabbed her, hauling her off
her feet.