Dylan figured he would only be able to carry enough for a few hours’ fire. There wasn’t much point. At the rate he was going, he’d die of hypothermia before he reached his house, anyway.
It was only a slight exaggeration.
He thanked his neighbor and noticed she didn’t press him to take wood or offer him a spare bedroom. “Thanks for stopping by,” she said politely, then shut the door quietly behind him.
He half skated back to the road, which was even more treacherous. What had his father been thinking, buying a house in this backwater little town? There couldn’t be lost treasure in Knights Bridge, or even clues to lost treasure. Impossible.
Then again, Duncan McCaffrey had been a man who relished taking on the impossible.
When Dylan arrived back at his inherited house, he examined the woodstove that was hooked up in a corner in the dining room. It looked like an oil drum. It couldn’t be that efficient, but it was better than a cold night in the dark. He found dry wood in an old apple crate in the kitchen and hit the stovepipe chimney with a log to warn any critters before he lit matches.
He wasn’t worried about a buildup of creosote. If the house burned down, so what?
The wood was dry enough that he needed little kindling and only one match to get the fire started. As the flames took hold, he checked his cell phone and walked around the house until he got a weak signal by the back door.
He dialed Noah in San Diego. “Tell me there’s been an emergency and you need me back there,” Dylan said.
“All’s well. What’s happening in New England?”
“Freezing rain. No heat, no electricity. I’ve turned into Bob Cratchit.”
“What’s the house like?”
“It’s a dump.”
“Have you met Olivia Frost?”
“I have.” Dylan pictured her pink cheeks and hazel eyes. “She’s warm. I wonder if she has a generator.”
“Not sharing her heat?”
It wasn’t a bad quip for Noah, who wasn’t known for that particular variety of verbal quickness. “She offered me cordwood. I’m not going anywhere for a while. We’re in the middle of an ice storm.”
Noah burst out laughing.
Their call got dropped just as the ceiling in the kitchen started to leak.
Dylan slid his phone back in his pocket and watched water pool on the wide-plank floor.
“Well, hell.”
What could he do? He was stuck here.
He hoped Grace Webster had left behind a bucket.
Four
Olivia’s house had come with a generator for nights just such as this one, but she only turned it on for an hour before she decided to wait out the power outage. She had little food to worry about spoiling, and she didn’t like generators. In storms, people too often misused them and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She had dutifully read all the instructions and had her father do a dry run with her, but the thing still made her nervous. She wanted to be positive she knew what she was doing before she ran it for any length of time.
As she snuggled under a soft wool throw in front of the brick fireplace, she told herself it was decent of Dylan McCaffrey to check on her. He hadn’t meant anything by his visit except to make sure she was all right in the midst of a nasty ice storm.
The wind picked up, and a spruce tree swayed outside the front window, casting strange shadows in the living room. She heard the crack of a branch breaking off in the old sugar maple in the side yard. Right now, the branches and power lines were weighed down with ice, but once the temperature rose above freezing, the ice would melt as if it had never been. Spring would resume its steady march toward daffodils, tulips and lilacs in bloom.
The fire glowed, the only light in the darkening room. A chunk of burning wood fell from the grate, startling her, but she quickly told herself it was nothing. She had lived alone in her Boston apartment, but she had to admit that living alone in her antique house in Knights Bridge was taking some getting used to. The creaks, the groans, the shadows, the dark nights—anything could fire up her imagination. At first, she’d slept with her iPod on, playing a selection of relaxing music, but she was beginning to develop a routine and was getting used to the sounds of the old house and country road.
Tightening her throw around her, she turned her attention back to her neighbor. Elly O’Dunn must have run into Duncan McCaffrey, Dylan’s father. When Olivia had written to Dylan, she hadn’t expected him to show up in Knights Bridge, and she certainly hadn’t expected to meet him the way she had, muddy, yelling in panic for her wandering dog.
She especially hadn’t expected the new owner of Grace Webster’s house to be a man close to her own age, with a sexy grin, sexy broad shoulders and sexy black-lashed deep blue eyes.
The McCaffreys had no ties to Knights Bridge that Olivia knew of. Because of the massive Quabbin Reservoir, her hometown was out-of-the-way, not an easy commute to any of the major cities in Massachusetts. The University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, Smith College and Amherst College—the Five Colleges—were a more reasonable commute. A number of people from town worked at the different schools. She had no idea what Dylan McCaffrey did for a living but supposed he could be a college professor.
She pictured him standing in the snow and mud.
He wasn’t a college professor. She knew some rugged-looking professors, but Dylan McCaffrey didn’t strike her as someone who could sit in a library carrel for more than ten minutes before he needed to get moving.
Olivia heard a gust of wind beat against the windows. The truth was, she hadn’t given her neighbor much thought once she wrote to him. She just wanted his place cleaned up. She had so much to do before her mother-daughter tea. She swore she had lists of lists of things to do to get ready.
She wished the power would come back on before nightfall. She didn’t look forward to sitting there in the pitch-dark.
Her landline rang, startling her. Buster barked but settled down, spent from his romp up the road. She reached for the phone on an end table, a flea-market find that she planned to paint. It was on one of her lists, she thought as she picked up and said hello.
“Hey, kid,” her father said. “You and Buster okay out there? Everything’s at a standstill but we’ll be through the worst of it soon.”
He didn’t sound concerned, and Olivia assumed that her mother had put him up to calling. “The power’s out but we’re fine here.”
“Are you using the generator?”
“I did for a while but not right now. It’s okay. Buster and I are nice and cozy by the fire.”
“Cozy. Right. If you need anything, call. I’ll find a way out there.”
He would, too. Olivia debated a moment, then said, “My neighbor’s here.”
“Neighbor?”
“Dylan McCaffrey. He’s the guy who owns Grace Webster’s old place.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“You did? I should have asked you about him. That was his father.”
“I met him a couple of years ago. Ran into him at Hazelton’s.” Hazelton’s was the general store in the village. “I didn’t ask why he wanted to buy a house in town. Why’s his son here?”
“I wrote to him about the junk in his yard. He lives in San Diego. I didn’t expect him to actually come out here. I