Still, she wouldn’t mind getting to know him better. Not that there was much chance of that. He looked like a wrangler, and wranglers usually hung out at Sue Ellen’s Diner or Little Joe’s Café, which was actually more of a saloon. Sue Ellen had better food, except for the chili, but Joe had a pool table in the back room.
Priss ate at Antonio’s, when she ate out at all, which meant she probably wouldn’t run into the wrangler again, because wranglers didn’t patronize Antonio’s.
Before heading home, Pnss stopped by the hospital to drop off the toys she’d purchased at Faith’s boutique, in case any of the children were asleep when she came back after supper to read bedtime stories. Toys and stories would probably be too much all at once. She had learned a lot about children in the year and a half she’d been volunteering in the children’s ward.
Next, she went by the supermarket to pick up some frozen dinners she could microwave while Rosalie was away visiting her sister.
Finally turning off onto Willow Creek Road, she sniffed the air and decided someone must be burning stumps. Probably taking advantage of the rain that was about to come pouring down, if the sky was anything to go by. The lightning and thunder was almost constant now. Wouldn’t you just know? Priss thought. It was the crowning touch for a birthday that had gone wrong from the moment she had lost a fingernail trying to get a new tube of toothpaste out of the box.
Feeling a little bit sad, a little bit let down, Priss told herself that her birthday wasn’t over yet. She still had this evening and the children. Maybe next year she’d be reading stories to her own baby.
Seeing a fire engine coming toward her, she pulled over, even though the siren wasn’t sounding. Stump burning. She’d been right, then. Probably got out of bounds and started a grass fire.
Jake was halfway home, his mind partly on the upcoming sale in Dallas, partly on the haystack blonde, when a dispatcher’s voice on the scanner snagged his attention.
“Fire out at Willow Creek Arms is under control.”
Willow Creek?
“New Hope, head on over to a house fire at the corner of Matlock and Guntrum. Billy, stay there with the pumper truck to wet down any hot spots. South Fork’s sending—”
There was a burst of static and a few more remarks, but Jake had stopped listening. Pulling a U-turn in the middle of a two-lane highway, he downshifted and roared back toward town without giving a second thought to Petemoss and the rest of the crew, who were waiting for the concrete, re-bar and forming plywood in the back of the truck to get started on the foundation of the barn extension.
Priss was going a few rounds with a fireman when Jake arrived on the scene. Hair in ruins, her hands black with soot, she was gesturing wildly while the tired-looking volunteer fireman shook his head. “Ma’am, I sure wish I could, but I just cain’t.”
Thunder rolled overhead. The air had an eerie greenish look. “But it’s safe,” she argued. “You said yourself the roof wasn’t going 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