it felt like one. Hurricane Adam, first of its kind along the West Coast.”
“I like that. Even though Luke reminded me why hurricanes don’t happen here, something about warm water and ocean currents.”
“That sounds like an opportunity to bring up Pacific hurricanes over a happy hour one day this week and argue about who’s right. Over the years, there have been a few.”
“No kidding? I can’t wait to tell Luke that. Sometimes the doctor can be a real know-it-all.”
“Uh-oh. I’m sensing trouble in paradise.”
“Sometimes, that man can be so infuriating,” Lianne confessed. “Just because Luke Bonner is a doctor doesn’t make him smarter than me about everything.”
Gemma thought of her brother-in-law and how much alike Luke was to Lando. “I agree. They are brothers, triplets at that, who shared a womb. It makes them more alike than they care to admit. What’s my brother-in-law done now?”
“We got into an argument about, of all things, how to run the washer.”
“You’re fighting over laundry. That’s never a good sign.”
Lianne sputtered out a laugh. “Luke has this annoying habit of trying to tell me how to do stuff better, more efficiently.”
“Like we don’t know how to do laundry,” Gemma grumbled with a roll of her eyes. “Men can be infuriating when they try to butt in and correct the way we’ve been doing something for years. All on our own. As if they willingly take our help when they’re lost and need directions.”
“Exactly. Like Luke trying to tell me how to load the dishwasher properly.”
Running on fumes from the last several hours and stressed, a worn-out Gemma found that funny. She let out a string of giggles and didn’t seem to be able to stop. For the first time in hours, she slid down into a chair and put her head on the table.
“I’m not sure you’re laughing or crying,” Lianne pointed out. “It wasn’t that hilarious.”
“I’m so tired I’m not sure either,” Gemma said, turning her head to look at Lianne. “You and Luke aren’t about to call off the wedding next month, are you?”
“No, it’s not that bad. I don’t think so anyway. But we are still wading through some personal issues. Day to day stuff that drives us both crazy and invariably leads to heated discussions, which, in turn, leads to little puddles of quicksand if we let them.”
“I hate to tell you this, but minefields like quicksand are always gonna crop up no matter what you do about them.”
“It’s like whack-a-mole, isn’t it? You knock down one issue, and another pops up.”
“Exactly. A perfect analogy of married life. Whack-a-mole.”
That got Lianne laughing.
At the back of the shop, the Westie named Rolo popped his head up out of a storage bin. Rolo whined as he nudged Rufus, the chocolate Labrador, into a standing position. The bigger dog stretched and yawned. With his nose, the Lab pushed Rolo toward the main room.
Still roaring with senseless laughter, Lianne turned her focus on the dogs. “They don’t look too worse for wear. Did the thunder scare them?”
“Like two little babies, they were. Those two hid in the cupboards when the thunder and lightning showed up. To be honest, I would’ve crawled in there with them, but somebody had to stay out here and assess the water situation so we all wouldn’t drown.”
“Was it really that bad?”
“Felt like it,” Gemma noted as she got to her feet again. She went over and scooped out dog food from a small emergency bag she kept under the back counter. “Now I know why our main street is named for water. Sometime during the last century, it had to overflow through downtown, and some genius decided to memorialize the event by naming it Water Street. We lost power around midnight. Telephones were still working, though, because people kept calling me to do something about it. I called the power company and they gave me a timeline as to how long the outage would last. Imagine my surprise when the electricity came back on about thirty minutes ago.”
“It pays to be mayor.”
Gemma grinned. “I guess it does.”
After feeding the dogs and putting out fresh water, Gemma turned to load the coffeemaker with freshly ground beans. Instincts had her touching the pendant she wore around her neck. The silver chain held her four energy stones—turquoise, moonstone, lapis, and a smaller carnelian marble—joined together in an ornate, wire-encased amulet. Turquoise for protection. Moonstone for truth. Lapis for power. Carnelian for knowledge.
Still clutching her necklace with one hand, she used her