The Trouble with Andrew Read online

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” She heard the fervent, feminine cry as a soaked crewful of people swarmed into her house.

  The men shouted and pitched themselves against the door to close it once again. Katie was soaked from the rain that rushed in along with the people.

  There was one woman, two men and a rain-soaked, panicked child of about six.

  “My God, you’ve saved our lives!” the woman cried. “I thought we were dead, another few seconds and we wouldn’t have been able to hold on. My God! The trees! You can’t imagine! Even the big ones are falling, crashing all over the place. They’re ripping up the sidewalks. Oh, my God …”

  Even as she spoke, something fell against the house with a horrible crash. The phone began to ring. The little girl started to cry. “There’s the hallway,” Katie told her sodden, frightened, unexpected guests. “I’ll be right there. We’ll get towels.” She grabbed her living room extension. “Hello?”

  “Katie! It’s Wanda. I’m in panic, absolute panic!”

  Wanda, a friend she worked with frequently, was fairly new to the area. She’d survived a number of blizzards in Montana, but she’d never seen a hurricane before. Katie, close to panic herself, tried to speak reassuringly. “Wanda, get into the bathroom you fixed up—”

  “Oh, Katie! Part of my roof has already ripped off! And I’m in the bathroom, but I’m in the wrong one! I got so scared when I heard the ripping sound—now I’m in my bedroom bathroom, and my flashlight and radio and Twinkies and diet soda are in the hallway bathroom!”

  “Wanda, you’re going to manage without the Twinkies—”

  “Katie, the storm is in my house!”

  “It’s in mine, too. Listen, Wanda, get your mattress into the bathroom with you.”

  “I have it.”

  “Then hang in tight! I’ve got wet strangers in my hallway. I’ve got to go. Be careful, stay put, keep that mattress over your head, okay?”

  “Oh, Katie! I thought the wind would blow—I thought we’d have a rough night, but I never imagined I wouldn’t have a home left.”

  “Hey, we’ll get through it. Keep that mattress with you, and watch for the bathroom roof, all right?”

  “Right, Katie.”

  Katie hung up, more worried than she wanted to be. She hurried into the hallway, finding the four wet strangers awaiting her there, wide-eyed as her flashlight hit their faces.

  “Come on in here,” Katie said quickly, leading them to the bathroom. “I’ll get towels.” She did so quickly. Jordan had the big flashlight on and the battery-operated radio going in the bathroom. He seemed pretty cool at the moment, lying in the tub, reading a Dracula comic.

  “Mom?”

  “Some neighbors lost their house,” she said.

  The talkative woman stuck her head in the bathroom door and saw Jordan. “Hi!” she said, calmer now. “I’m Susan Keogh. I live—I lived two houses down with my daughter, Amy, and my husband.” She came in and sat on the toilet seat, and her daughter quickly followed her. Katie handed out towels. “I don’t believe this!” Susan said. “I just don’t believe this.” She was a pretty young woman, Katie realized. It had been hard to tell at first because she was so wet.

  “It’s more than I remember,” Katie admitted. As she handed a big, fluffy towel to the little girl, she was grateful that the bathroom was large.

  One of the men came in. Tall, thin, balding, but with a great smile, he offered his hand to Katie. “I’m Ted Barlow. I live on the other side of the Keoghs.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Katie murmured, getting another towel.

  “Wow, listen to this!” Jordan told them. He turned up the radio. People were calling in from all over the county.

  The dome from the hurricane center in Coral Gables had blown away; places on the highway were devastated. Roofs were flying off right and left, and many desperate people were fleeing for their lives.

  “I got in my car in the garage and started moving it out slowly. My sister said, ‘Floor it, Donna!’, and I did. Then the whole building caved in as we shot out!”

  “I live in one of the old guys, made right after that big blow in ’26. My home is standing fast, and anyone is welcome to seek shelter here.”

  “The window blew, the glass shattered everywhere, and once that happened, the roof was gone!”

  There was a sudden, horrible grating sound. Susan looked at Katie with alarm.

  “It’s the roof!” she whispered. “I know the sound.”

  “My roof can’t be going!” Katie said. “This is a Hunnicunn home.”

  She broke off, hearing the sound again. A few seconds later the other man, Seth Keogh, stepped into the bathroom. “One of your bedroom doors just blew in. If there was a broken window—”

  “There was. My bedroom.”

  “I think your roof is going, too.”

  “I’ll get more mattresses,” Katie said.

  “I’ll help,” Seth told her.

  “Why don’t you stay, and we’ll go,” Ted suggested.

  Katie laughed. Gentlemen! In the middle of the storm. “I know where the mattresses are,” she told him.

  She started out with one of the small flashlights, the two men behind her. Before she had gone down the hall, she heard the horrible wrenching sound again.

  Almost directly above her, the roof suddenly caved in. Water poured down on them.

  “Ma’am,” Seth said, “I think we’ve all got to run. This whole place is going to come down!”

  He turned back, anxious to reach his wife and daughter. “There’s another two houses that seem to be standing all right,” he told Katie, “straight across the road.”

  She aimed her flashlight at the roof in the hallway. Well, what remained of the roof. The rain was blowing in on her. The wind was howling. She couldn’t believe it.

  There was another violent crash. “Mom!” Jordan cried.

  “Jordan!” Katie screamed as she rushed back, not caring that she dropped her flashlight.

  The Keoghs and Ted were already on their way, moving down the hall. Jordan came bursting out of the bathroom. “Mom, the roof—”

  More of it caved in behind Katie. “Come on!”

  She put her arms around her son’s shoulders and started running down the hallway, feeling chunks of roof fall behind her.

  She passed through the living room.

  The room with all her painstakingly refinished antiques. With all those special little baby mementos of Jordan’s.

  Her cameras were in her bedroom. They were her livelihood. They were insured, and they were replaceable. The pictures were not. Or the ribbons, the newspaper clippings, the baby shoes …

  “Mom?”

  Jordan was the only thing that really mattered. “Let’s go, baby!”

  Her door was standing open. Seth Keogh was standing there, his whole weight against it, trying to hold it for Katie.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Coming!”

  She was out of her house with Jordan. She followed Seth as he set his hands on his wife’s shoulders and started to run with her.

  They had said that it wasn’t a wet storm. You could have fooled Katie. The water was pouring down on them, the wind so fierce that she could barely walk.

  “Crawl!” someone shouted.

  She did so, dropping to her knees with Jordan, trying to protect him with an arm.

  Things were flying everywhere. Palm fronds, chairs, pieces of cars, tiles from roofs. If they were struck by such an object…

  She didn’t dare think about it. They had to keep moving.

  Something landed with a thud at her side. She stared. It was all that remained of someone’s cat.

  “Mom—”

  “Don’t look!” she told Jordan. “Keep moving, follow the Keoghs.”

  “Mom, I can’t see them anymore.”

  “Oh, God!” Katie gasped. She tried to look into the driving wind and rain. The world was spinning, everything flying, moving. It was so dark,
so wet, and she was cold, shivering, terrified.

  Then she saw a light.

  “There! Jordan, there—that way.”

  She struggled onward. Inch by sodden inch. Things hit them. Jordan cried out once. “Don’t look, don’t look, just keep moving!” Katie warned.

  “I can’t breathe, Mom!” he cried out. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I’m not going to make it—”

  “Oh, dear God!” she cried. She rose, dragging him with her. She tried to run, tried to see the light, tried to run toward it.

  She stumbled and fell. Her foot was trapped in something, she couldn’t tell what.

  “Mom!”

  “Go!” Katie ordered him. “Go to that light! You can get help! Go now.”

  “I won’t leave you!” She could hear the tears in his voice. She could barely see her son’s precious face, but she knew that tears joined with the rain sliding down his cheeks.

  “Jordan, get help,” she began, but then she screamed, for something big and dark was looming over her son.

  Her scream abruptly halted. It was a man. A towering man in a huge slicker, coming around Jordan. His hair seemed ink black, slicked back by the rain. He was fairly young—in his thirties, Katie thought—with a strong face and handsome features. Stern features, she decided. She trembled.

  She might well be dying, she thought, and she was staring at her rescuer and analyzing him.

  He started to reach for her. His eyes were gold, she thought.

  Wonderful. She was being rescued by the devil.

  She was losing her mind.

  “I’ll get you up!” he said, his voice deep, harsh, thundering against the wind and rain.

  “My foot!” Katie cried.

  It was a root, she realized. She had tripped over the stretching root of a fallen banyan, and now she was caught by another root.

  He reached down. She noted his hands, long-fingered, broad, very powerful.

  He wrenched the root out of the ground.

  Katie tried to stand. She started to fall again. He let out an impatient sound and swept her off her feet, pointing across the darkness and grass and uprooted trees and flying debris. “That way, boy! Careful, hurry!”

  Jordan turned as he was commanded.

  And Katie was carried by her strange, rescuing demon, through the blinding, driving wind and rain and tempest.

  Chapter 2

  The door to the stranger’s house nearly blew from its hinges as he struggled to hold Katie and open it. He shouted a warning to Jordan to watch out as the door slammed hard against the side of the house. Jordan scampered into the house quickly, ahead of the man and Katie.

  The man followed Jordan, set Katie down and reached in the blinding wind and pelting rain to get his hands on the door. With an enormous effort, he managed to push it closed.

  Her ankle still somewhat sore, Katie stood in his entryway, dripping. Jordan was directly in front of her, dripping as well, and she set her arms around his shoulders, shivering as she waited for their unknown rescuer to turn to her again.

  After sliding the bolts on the door, he asked, “Anyone behind you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I saw others.”

  “They were ahead. They must have made it to another neighbor’s house. They had come to mine when they lost their roof, and then mine began to go, too,” Katie told him.

  Jordan stepped forward suddenly, causing Katie’s arms to fall from around his neck. He offered a hand to the man. “Jordan Wells, sir, and this is my mother, Katherine. Thank you very much for coming to our rescue.”

  Somewhat humiliated that her ten-year-old son would have thought of such a courteous statement when she still felt herself doing nothing other than staring blankly and shivering, Katie echoed the sentiment swiftly. “Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. You might have saved our lives. I had thought we were safe. We bought a Hunnicunn home…” Her eyes widened as she looked around for the first time.

  This house was similar to hers, but different. It was a beautiful house, with cathedral ceilings. A Mexican-tiled, expansive living room was to her left, and across the entry, next to the upper landing on the stairway, was a loft, with a boarded skylight above it. The picture windows in the front of the house were covered with automatic shutters, but the living room was bright, lit by powerful, battery-operated lanterns, one set in the center of a glass-topped coffee table before a deep brown sofa and one on the floor just within the doorway.

  She loved her house—had loved her house, she corrected herself—but this one was grander, not more elegant, because there was something very masculine and comfortable about what she had seen so far, but grander. It was a spectacular yet warm and inviting home.

  “This must be a Hunnicunn home, too,” she said with alarm. “We should get mattresses and hurry into a bathroom.”

  “This roof isn’t going,” the man said firmly.

  “But—”

  “My house will stand.”

  Katie straightened her shoulders. “That’s exactly what I would have said about an hour ago,” she informed him with dignity.

  He tensed, and she found herself staring at him, frightened by the anger she seemed to have aroused in him. She forgot the house and assessed the man. He was six feet two or three, at least, she thought. Broad-shouldered and probably well-muscled—he was still dripping in a big trench coat. His slicked-back hair was very dark, and his features were arresting, handsome and rugged. His chin was firm and squared, his cheekbones were set wide, and his eyes were not gold but hazel—they merely seemed to burn with a golden fire. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties—perhaps he was closer to forty.

  Her words seemed to linger on the air for several moments, then he replied firmly, “My house will stand.”

  “But how—”

  “I was here every day while it was being built,” he said. “It will stand.” His eyes roamed up and down the length of her, and she realized she was wearing a nightgown. It was white cotton, and although feminine, it was extremely chaste—when it was dry.

  Now the garment was sticking to her like a second skin, and the material that had once seemed opaque was all but sheer.

  She reached for Jordan again, drawing him against her so she could protect him, or he could protect her, she wasn’t sure which. But the hazel-gold eyes of her new acquaintance didn’t linger on her body long. They met her eyes again almost immediately.

  “I’ll find something for you two to put on,” he said softly and started toward the stairway, plucking up one of the battery-operated lanterns. Then he paused and turned back. “Perhaps you’d like to come up. The electricity is gone, but there’s probably a little hot water left. You—you may want to shower.”

  Maybe that was why his inspection of her had been so fleeting, Katie thought. She wasn’t just covered in water—she was covered in mud. Her hair was plastered against her face, her once-white nightgown was dirty brown, and, of course, she wasn’t just dripping on his floor—she was making a filthy mess of it.

  Yet, in this storm, who could care about such things? Her host obviously did not. He didn’t seem to notice that his floor was being mud slimed. And yet he had noticed her discomfort and shivering. He might have the eyes of a devil and a temper to match, but at least he was courteous.

  Katie kept her hands firmly on Jordan’s shoulders. “I’d love to—rinse off,” she admitted awkwardly, starting up the carved wood stairway with him. “But—” She broke off, wincing as the wind suddenly rose again, shrieking with a greater vengeance than it had before. She heard the pelting of the rain against the house. “I’m not sure such a thing would be wise. The storm is getting worse and worse. We must be right in the height of it.”

  “Mrs. Wells, I assure you again, this house isn’t going anywhere. And I wasn’t suggesting that you jump into the Jacuzzi and run the jets for an hour, but the storm may last some time, and you both must be very uncomfortable. I think you’d be safe hopping quickly in and out
of the shower. But you certainly must suit yourself. I’ll show you to the guest room and bath, and you may shower or take your mattress into the bathroom. Truly, it is your choice.”

  He listened, Katie thought. He had remembered her name from Jordan’s quick introduction. And his confidence was contagious. She could still hear the awful howl of the wind, but oddly, she felt protected here. She felt safe. Why should she? Her house had crumbled. He said he had been here every day when his house had been constructed, and that implied he knew something about building. She could hear the drone of a battery-operated radio or television from somewhere, so he had to be aware of the extent of the storm.

  “Come on, Mom.” Jordan started to step away from her. Not at all sure of what her bedraggled gown and mud still covered of her body, Katie hurried behind him up the stairway, following their host as he led them to the first door off the loft landing.

  The lantern illuminated an exquisite room. The floor was hardwood, with a beautiful Persian carpet set at the foot of the bed. There were all kinds of intricately carved built-in cupboards, an entertainment center, bookcases and curio stands.

  There were French doors at the rear of the room-boarded over now—but she was sure they would look over a pool and patio area. And there was another door, leading to the right, off the room.

  Their host led them to an elegant guest bathroom, much like the master bathroom in her own home. There was a huge, black sunken tub with whirlpool jets and gold fixtures. The floor was red, black and white tile, and the commode and sink were also black. There was a shower in the corner to the left of the tub, and bloodred towels and washcloths hung from a rod nearby.

  He set the lantern on the floor between the bedroom and bath and strode to one of the dark wood doors of a walk-in closet. He pulled out two terry robes, both adult sized, and tossed them on the bed, which was covered with a plush comforter that continued the colors of the bath—red, black, gold and white—in plaid.