him out. She’d even offered to cook him breakfast. But he’d declined because he was worried about Dylan.
In a role reversal, he found himself sneaking around like a teenager, trying to keep his suddenly intimate relationship a secret from his thirty-year-old son. But the inevitable confrontation was waiting for him this morning.
“Where have you been?” Dylan demanded as Jim came through the door to the mudroom.
Dylan was standing in the middle of the kitchen, his hair wet from the shower and a look of disapproval on his face.
Busted.
“Uh…well…” The words dried up in Jim’s mouth. This was damned awkward, wasn’t it?
“Never mind. I know where you’ve been.” Dylan paced to the coffeemaker and began to savagely scoop grounds into the brew basket.
“Um, look—” Jim began.
“Have you lost your mind?” Dylan turned and threw the coffee scoop across the room. “People are going to gossip about you. You know that, don’t you? I mean…really?”
Of course they were going to gossip. But Jim didn’t care. Why did Dylan?
The question nagged. Jim had a hard time accepting that his son was that concerned about public opinion. No, something else was bugging him. What the hell?
Jim straightened his shoulders. “I’m sorry. I should have told you I wouldn’t be home until early in the morning. I didn’t mean for you to worry.”
“I wasn’t worried.” Dylan stalked across the room to pick up the scoop he’d just thrown.
“Okay, I get it. Brenda isn’t the woman you’d choose for me. But here’s the thing: It’s not your choice. I care about her. A lot. I’m…” He let the words fade out because he wasn’t quite ready to tell Dylan that he’d fallen in love. Especially since he hadn’t told Brenda that yet.
It was on his to-do list. But he was in no rush. Saying the l-word would probably scare the crap out of her.
“I can’t believe you,” Dylan said, stalking off through the door to the garage without turning on the coffee maker. A moment later, the garage door opened, and Dylan headed out on his motorcycle.
Well, that hadn’t gone well, had it?
Jim sucked back a few choice cusswords before starting the coffeemaker and then heading into his bedroom, where he turned on the television and tuned into the local news. He took three steps toward the bathroom when the weather report froze him.
“The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm warning for Georgetown County,” the local weatherman said.
Jim turned back toward the TV as the local weather expanded right into the news hour. The weatherman was standing beside a map of the East Coast, which showed an ominous weather front with a big L located just off the coastline. The animation showed the classic track of a nor’easter—the kind of storm that could flood the island, but which might do something much more unexpected this time.
“We’ve got lots of cold air in place,” the weatherman said. “Last night the citrus growers in Florida experienced the lowest temperatures since 1989—the year of the Christmas Blizzard.”
The news anchor asked, “Are we expecting a storm of that magnitude?”
And the weatherman replied in a somewhat gleeful tone of voice that confirmed him as a Yankee, “All the models suggest that this could be a repeat of that storm. People should take precautions now, because in 1989, coastal portions of Georgetown County got fourteen inches of snow. We could see totals that big with this storm. The Weather Service is predicting that snow will start sometime around three this afternoon and continue through the night. Here’s a map showing the expected snowfall totals.”
They flashed a map, and Jonquil Island looked as if it sat in the middle of a multicolored bull’s-eye.
An urgency coursed through Jim. Fourteen inches of snow was serious business anywhere, but in Syracuse, New York, where Jim had grown up, they got more than a hundred inches of snow every winter. Folks up there knew how to deal with fourteen inches of snow because snowstorms like that happened multiple times a year. But down here, a dusting was enough to scare people half to death.
Even worse, the community had no resources or budget for snow removal, and snow wouldn’t stop people from getting sick. Worse yet, idiots would go out in it and hurt themselves trying to shovel it or drive in it or walk down a slippery street.
And then he remembered Brenda’s father.
Damn. They might even get themselves killed.
* * *
At seven thirty on Monday morning, Brenda stood in her front room, drinking a cup