Not quite-dark-o'clock. Matt Kincaid rubbed the back of his
head and stretched as he peered out the living room window.
The lights were out, but he could see the flooded street.
The lights were out.
Great observation. If he'd been this observant while
on
this last op, he'd probably be dead.
Off the adrenalin high of work, his body begged more
sleep. A glance at his watch told him he'd forgotten to
reset it. It still read Abbottabad time, but he was too
fuzzy-headed to do the math.
Rain fell in sheets and rushed downhill to swirl into
an
overflowing drainage culvert. Good thing his mother's
Victorian era home sat high on brick piers.
His usual long flight home from an overseas op, along
with the debriefing from hell, had been punctuated by a
hair-raising flight from D.C. to Tallahassee and a nightmare
drive on slick two-lanes into Walton Springs. Exhausted
after thirty-six hours of travel, he'd collapsed onto the
couch sometime after midnight. Now the time was a total
mystery.
Coffee. He needed coffee. He walked into the kitchen
in
the semi-darkness.
A sudden gust of wind lashed rain against the windows
as
he reached into the cabinet for the coffee his mother kept
there.
Nothing. He reached right, then left.
What the hell? A creature of habit, his mother always
left the coffee next to the pot.
There was just enough daylight filtering in for him
to
see she hadn't…probably because she'd been in a mad rush to
meet her sister for their drive to the mountains.
Hell, what did it matter? There was no power. No
power,
no coffee.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
He really needed coffee.
With a deep sigh and a stretch that ended in a twist
at
the waist that popped his back and cleared his head, he
walked back into the living room and turned on the
battery-operated radio on the bookshelf.
"At nine a.m., the National Weather Service out of
Tallahassee issued a flash flood warning for residents of
all coastal Florida counties in the Panhandle. A low
pressure system that moved in overnight is expected to bring
five to seven inches of rain to the region in the next few
hours. All residents of low-lying areas should be on alert."
So, it had to be after nine. Matt listened a bit
longer,
then the warning claxon came on and he turned off the radio.
No coffee. No power. Floods.
What the hell else could happen? Earthquakes and
lightning?
A flash lit up the living room, followed by a boom of
thunder so close the house shook.
Yeah, lightning.
And he knew better than to tempt fate.
He looked at his watch, again. Judging from the time
in
Abbottabad, it had to be nine-thirty a.m. here.
He could use another couple of hours of sleep. Maybe
then he could straighten out his sleep patterns and enjoy
the next few weeks off. He'd promised his mother he'd take
care of some problems on her always-in-need-of-repair
one-story. And he'd promised himself some fishing.
He rolled his head and shoulders to loosen the kinks
of
sleeping on the too short couch, and made his way down the
hall to the bedroom he used when he visited, pulling off his
shirt as he went.
Thunder boomed, rattling the windows. The spare room
door opened and a person stepped into the hallway.
In one quick movement, he lunged forward and executed
a
chokehold that efficiently subdued the intruder. "Don't
move," he ordered, and instantly realized that his intruder
was small and soft and wore a too big shirt that shifted so
he touched bare skin.
Not his mother.
He recognized her just from the way she smelled,
fresh
and unpretentious and familiar. From that silky skin. From
the feel of her curves against him.
Hell, earthquakes and lightning were nothing.
Janey Blackmon was everything.