LITMIR.BIZ

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small smile relieved the strain around her mouth. “Eight weeks yesterday.”

      It was now mid-July, Justin thought. That meant she’d been alone when the baby had been born.

      He didn’t like the way that bothered him. He didn’t much care for the way she confused him, either. He’d still been trying to figure out the soap-opera reference when she’d hit him with the reason her husband wasn’t around.

      He’d figured the guy had simply taken a hike. He hadn’t expected her to be widowed. But that little jolt had just been replaced with a decidedly skeptical curiosity over how someone who’d farmed all of his life would know so little about farm equipment.

      It wasn’t like him not to seek an answer when one was readily available. But he had no desire to chip any deeper at the brave front she wore. With her slender frame, her translucent skin, and that pale-as-cornsilk hair, she looked as delicate as spun glass. When he thought about how desperately she’d been trying to save her plants, and the work she had waiting for her when she returned to her house, he was quietly amazed that the front hadn’t already shattered.

      Ignoring his curiosity had another advantage. He hated tears. Granted, the only women he’d ever seen cry had used them either to get something from him, or out of fury when they didn’t. And he suspected Emily to be far stronger than she looked. But he didn’t want to push any buttons that would crack her composure. He’d never been around a woman who honestly needed comfort before. He wasn’t sure he’d even know what to do.

      “You can see the Clancy place up there,” she said, relieving him enormously when she shielded her eyes against the sun and looked up the road. “Oh, good.” She sighed, smiling at him. “It didn’t hit their house.”

      It had hit something, though. Just ahead of them, an untouched section of cornfield opened up to a wide stretch of gravel and an overgrown sweep of lawn. From that same general direction came the deep-throated and distant bawl of something that sounded large and undoubtedly four-legged.

      What the Clancy place lacked in architectural interest, it made up for in simple appeal. Approaching from the side, Justin scanned the boxy gray house with its lacy curtains and window planters overflowing with pink petunias. The deep green grass was dappled with the first rays of sunlight filtering through the cottonwoods. Standing sentinel over the home’s steeply pitched roof, a huge aluminum grain silo gleamed like a giant silver torpedo against the clearing sky.

      The bawling grew louder as they headed toward the brick red barn. Damage was more evident here. So was the path of the storm. From atop the gentle rise, it looked as if a giant scythe had taken a swipe across the earth.

      The tornado had sliced across a pasture, leaving a path of debris and flattening most of the windbreak on its way. It had wiped out a section of the big barn, uprooted a few more trees, taken out a huge section of fence, then veered right toward the bottom land, missing Emily’s place by little more than a couple of city blocks.

      “There he is.” Emily headed for a gnomelike little man pulling at a pile of boards and scattered straw by the barn. “And there’s his wife,” she muttered, spotting a flash of movement by the hay bales to her left. “What is she doing out here?

      “Mrs. Clancy?” she called, disapproval etched firmly in her brow. “You shouldn’t be outside. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

      “That’s what I’ve been telling her,” the barrel-chested farmer shouted across the distance, tossing aside a board with a muffled clatter. “Get her back to the house for me, will you, Emily? I got me some animals trapped back here.”

      The woman with a head full of pink-foam curlers in her salt-and-pepper hair balanced herself on a chrome cane and lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Her rose-print house dress flapped around the knees of her white pressure stockings, her expression bouncing between Emily and Justin in open curiosity.

      “Are you all right, child?”

      “We’re fine. I only lost a tree and door. And a porch post. No one got hurt.”

      “Then let me sit down and take that baby so you can help Sam.” Her sharp hazel eyes cut to the man who slowed his stride, letting Emily hurry ahead of him. When Emily stopped beside her, the older woman’s voice dropped like a rock. “Who’s he?”

      “A lawyer. He was fishing and needed a…jump. His car isn’t working. I said maybe he could use your telephone.”

      The late-fifty-something Connie Clancy ran a considered glance from Justin’s meticulously cut dark hair to the tips of his expensive hiking boots. “You’d be welcome to use the phone,” she called out over the frantic bawling coming from the damaged building, “but the storm took it out.”

      “I figured as much,” Justin replied, dubiously eyeing the pink things protruding from the woman’s head. He’d already noticed the phone and power lines dangling from the utility pole near the downed fence. Considering the damage, he wasn’t about to ask for help with his car.

      He glanced toward the barn. At the near end, the siding had been peeled off as neatly as the skin from an apple. The far end looked rather like a bomb had gone off in it. Wires and roofing dangled over a gaping hole. Beams and posts slanted every which way. The man in coveralls wrestled one of those beams, his bulky body straining as he tugged and jerked on the unyielding timber. All the while a chorus of low-pitched and pitiful bawling pierced the air.

      The cacophony was joined by a piercing squeal.

      Even from forty feet away, the farmer’s sense of urgency was obvious. On either side of his back coverall straps, sweat stains darkened the man’s worn white T-shirt from the strain of lifting the heavy boards. His face was the color of the barn. With the extra thirty pounds the farmer was packing around the middle of his banty-legged frame, he looked like a heart attack waiting to happen.

      Justin swore, softly and to himself, but the terse word pretty much summed up how he felt about the course the day had taken. He’d gone looking for escape and landed smack in the middle of Oz. If he’d wanted to deal with dilemmas, he could have stayed in Chicago and gone to the office.

      “You stay here and take care of the lady,” he said to Emily. One crisis a day was enough. There was nothing to do but step in and make sure he wasn’t faced with another. “I’ll go help him.”

      “There’s a cow and calf trapped inside,” Mrs. Clancy explained as Emily’s baby began to make little squeaking sounds. “The weaner’s in there, too.”

      “The dog?” he asked, thinking ‘dachshund.’

      Mrs. Clancy hesitated. “The pig,” she replied, looking as if she were speaking to the daft. “Dogs don’t sound like that.”

      “I know what a dog sounds like. You call a pig a weaner?”

      “You do one that’s recently been weaned from its sow.”

      The baby squeaked again. Because she’d started getting fretful, her mom held her closer, moving with a gentle rocking motion. The movement wasn’t what she seemed to want. With her little head turning from side to side against her mother’s swollen breast, her face screwed up, transforming her features from cherubic to prunelike and her fussing into an impatient, hiccuping squall.

      The older woman leaned more heavily on her cane. “I’d say she wants to nurse.”

      “She does.”

      “Well, I can’t help you there, dear.”

      Emily’s voice was soft, her soothing tone lacking any trace of exasperation as she ducked her head toward her child’s. “She just wants her mom. But this isn’t the best time, you know, Anna? I need to help Mr. Clancy.”

      “I said I’ll help your neighbor.” Justin took a step back, not entirely comfortable with the course of the conversation, trying not to look it. “You can take care of her now.”

      “It sounds

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