wet against her head and neck. “That’s the only medicine you’ll get from me right now, Bret McGowan. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? Were you thinking of running away? Do you want to sign your death warrant? You promised to contact your lawyer and turn yourself—”
A whiplash crack of lightening snapped across the dark sky. The horse reared, yanking the reins free of her hand. It turned and bolted back down the street toward the beach. She yelled and ran after her horse. “Chestnut!”
Bret coughed and rubbed the rain out of his eyes. The crash of booming thunder was the final hard, sobering jolt that shook him to the core.
A force inside his soul pushed him off his cloud and he fell, fell hard, hitting the earth again, but landing this time on his feet. He tensed, his wound muscles ready to react to whatever came next. “Stop Gabrielle! Let him go!”
Gabrielle stopped and flung her arms up in frustration.
Bret looked up again at the smoky, churning billows in the air. He looked across the wet street. A driver was running toward a hansom cab, the kind preferred by tourists for a night out on the town.
Bret’s single, lucid thought—focused on the gathering wind and water around them—froze into a chilling certainty excluding all others. “Driver!” Bret yelled and grabbed Gabrielle’s hand. “Wait!”
CHAPTER 23
Saturday, September 8, 7:43 a.m.
Gabrielle turned her knees from the water splashing against the door of the hansom cab. She peered over the edge. The water was higher than when they first entered the cab.
She leaned back from the sight of the water level having inched its way up from the crushed shell road toward the cab’s footboards as it approached the corner of Bret’s street. She had lost track of time. How long had it taken to travel this distance through the rising floodwater?
The cab veered to the right. Following the gradual descent of the road, it slowed to a sluggish halt as the water swiftly rose up the sides and near the hub of the wheels. The horse neighed, snorted, and kicked the water.
The trap door on the roof slid open. “That’s it, folks,” the driver said, peering down at them from his perched rear seat. “Lizzie won’t go any further. Ride is on me but you’re on your own now. Best we all hightail it out for higher ground.”
He looked up at the blackened sky. “Maybe them Cubans was right after all. Sure looks like a bad one rollin’ in.”
Bret grabbed Gabrielle’s hand and squeezed. “We’ll be fine now, darlin’. We just have to wade through it like everybody else.” He opened the door and stepped down into the flowing, knee-high water.
For a few moments there was a lull in the wind and Gabrielle felt a numb, heart-sunken silence fall between the sky and the flowing water.
She didn’t want to move from her dry seat, hoping that Lizzie would have a change of heart and take them safely to Bret’s home.
As Gabrielle hesitated she heard the cracking and crashing of falling wood coming from the direction of the beach.
She turned around and looked south toward the Gulf. The sky and water seemed to rumble toward them from the distance, murky and swift, in a rushing sound of flying debris and shattering planks of timber.
“Don’t be frightened,” Bret said. “It’s only small cottages right on the beach.” He waded around the cab. “Only fools and tourists build there. It never takes much to blow them down.” He held his hands up toward Gabrielle.
“Bret?” Gabrielle turned around, looking back up the street toward the center of town. “My house is north where the ground is higher. Don’t you think it would be better—”
“What are you afraid of?” He stared at her. “After the last bad one in ’86 I had the house raised twelve feet. It lasted then and it sure as hell will get through this.”
The driver disconnected the horse from the cab and was wading through the water leading Lizzie back the way they had come. He stopped and waved one last time before turning the corner. A moment later a door mat-sized piece of broken roofing bumped against the spokes of the cab’s front wheel, paused, then floated by.
Gabrielle looked anxiously around at the people struggling through the streaming water amidst the rising yells of men, women, and children calling out to each other. “I’m . . . I’m not sure.”
Bret lowered his arms and made a few