Honey Pie (Cupcake Club) - By Donna Kauffman Page 0,31
and calmly about meeting Lani, Alva, and Barbara Hughes, too. Maybe it was just men—which meant, he belatedly realized, it was highly likely at least one of his gender had done some not-so-nice things to her. In the recent past perhaps? Who the hell knew. He was an auto mechanic. He fixed engines, not people.
Still, he felt a bit bad for being so pissed off about it all. He should have figured it out sooner. He remembered the way she’d stared at him when she’d said, “I’m not crazy,” as if willing him to believe she really wasn’t the loony tune she’d seemed back in his garage.
“I-I’m . . . s-so . . . s-sorry,” she said, stuttering the words, trembling even harder, jerking his complete attention back to the present. “About . . . the fire. That’s terrible. Who’d do that? Only . . . no, it was electrical. The storage place, next door? It was so windy. And your garage—” She gasped. “You ran in! You ran in when it was burning. Why, why would you do that? What was worth saving that you’d risk—oh no! Poor Lolly. Poor baby. Oh my God. If you hadn’t gone in—”
She was talking and looking right at him, though it was as if she could see straight through him. Or straight into him. She clearly wasn’t in the here and now, anyway, nor was he quite sure she even knew what she was saying. It was as if she was a million miles away in some other reality only she could see. Except the things she was talking about were very real and specifically about him. She had the details exactly right.
“It’s okay. Lolly is okay.” He thought if he responded rationally, calmly, maybe it would calm her. He wanted nothing more than for her to snap out of it. He honestly didn’t know what the hell was happening or what might have happened to her in the past, but at the moment, all he wanted to do was get back to the business of moving her things over to the B&B and getting her out of his personal space. Permanently. He’d pay to expedite the parts for her car, whatever, but this was way more than he wanted to deal with. “It was an electrical fire,” he told her, firmly, if gently. “Wiring shorted out in one of the storage units, and yes, wind carried the sparks and set my garage on fire. It was an accident.”
“Everyone is okay? Lolly—she’s trapped!”
“Honey,” he said, a bit more sharply than intended, but he had to snap her out of this . . . trance, or whatever the hell she was in, and he wasn’t about to risk touching her to do it. “I got Lolly out. We’re both fine. You know that, you’ve seen it with your own eyes. Remember?”
Her gaze sharpened on his. “You almost weren’t. You could have died.” Her voice was a hushed whisper, laced with trembling horror as if she were there, in the moment, watching it all happen. “That beam, the second one, caught the back of your shirt. If you’d been one second later, getting to Lolly—oh, Dylan, you’d have both been lost!”
Okay, that stopped him dead. He gaped at her, stunned, and not a little freaked out. No one knew about the second beam. Not the fireman, not the local EMT, not the vet. He’d never told anyone about the burns on his back. He’d spent the night at the vet’s with the dog, had shrugged off—rather firmly—suggestions that he should be looked at for smoke inhalation, at the very least. He’d been fine. The dog had not.
He also knew, in retrospect, that it had been a lot easier to focus on what the dog needed than to think about the total loss of the business his grandfather had started, and the wildly varying emotional responses he was likely to have about that once reality began to sink in. So he’d put off thinking, as long as he could, anyway, and focused his attention where it could do some good.
He wished he could do the same with whatever the hell was happening right that very moment.
“Honey.” He barked it this time. “Look at me, dammit. Look. At. Me.” Sometimes when Dylan’s father had gotten really wasted, he’d have these waking nightmares about losing his dad, his wife, about Mickey. The only way Dylan could get him out of it was to jerk his attention in