Love Inspired December 2014 - Box Set 2 of 2: Her Holiday Family\Sugar Plum Season\Her Cowboy Hero\Small-Town Fireman (70 page)

Chapter Sixteen

B
y the time he made the ten-minute trek to Karl's, Dylan might have walked into the GFVFD shower stall. He was soaked again, chilly from the whipping wind and already feeling tired. All he wanted was to know Karla was getting along fine, and to spend ten minutes sipping one of her steaming hot cups of coffee. The wind was driving the rain so hard it took a large amount of effort to pull the shop's front door open.

Still, he was instantly glad he came. As if to endorse his choice, the lights gave an ominous flicker as he shut the door and stood dripping onto Karl's welcome mat.

Karla looked brave but bedraggled, standing over a bucket in the middle of the room and staring up at a leak in the expanse of the ceiling that stretched beyond the shelter of the upstairs apartment. Surrounding her was the handful of customers he knew would be in the shop riding out the nasty weather. She looked desperately glad to see him, the relieved look in her eyes settling way down in his chest. He knew, in that moment, that he would have swum here if it came to that.

“Hi.” Her voice had an “I'm putting on my brave face” tightness to it that made his heart pinch.

“How's everything holding up?” He was almost afraid to ask her in front of everyone, but the people in the shop now were more like family than customers.

“You know Karl's,” she said, shrugging as she looked up at the dripping ceiling. “We're always open in a storm.”

“It's a Karl's tradition,” he said. He noticed the empty bucket beside the counter and picked it up, swapping it out from under the drip for her and walking with the full one toward the sink.

“I remember riding out a few storms with Grandpa at the shop when I was younger. Somehow it seemed a lot more fun back then.”

“I suspect it's a lot more fun to ride out a storm in Karl's than to be the one making sure Karl's rides out the storm.” He tipped the bucket into the sink. “Your grandfather okay?”

“He calls about every fifteen minutes.” She eyed him. “You're soaked.”

“Not too bad.” He didn't want her worrying about him right now. “Just in need of hot coffee.”

“That, I can offer.” She reached for the carafe he knew held her special, stronger brew. He liked that he had access to Karla's personal blend. “One sugar, no cream.” He liked even more that she knew just how he took his coffee.

One sip of the stuff sent warmth out to his fingertips. “Best cup in the county. Did you stay dry?”

“Mostly.” He watched her shoulders ease up a bit, and enjoyed the possibility that his mere presence helped ease her tension. “My commute is just down a flight of stairs.”

“I know Karl is glad of that. You can't stay open in a storm if you can't get here.” He tried to make the tradition sound like an adventure rather than a burden.

“Oh, he tried to make Dad bring him in, but no one is letting him out in this. I told Emily to stay home, too.” A blast of thunder rattled the front windows, and they both turned around. “Wow,” she said quietly, “look at it out there.”

“This is going to be a big one,” Oscar warned from his seat at the counter. “I'd better head to the store. We're liable to lose power soon.” As if they'd heard him, the lights flickered again. The old man drained his coffee and set his face in grim determination. “I'll get soaked.”

“Oscar, are you sure? You really will get soaked, and I don't think you'll have any customers today.” Dylan felt his wet shirt sticking to his back. At least it was warmer in here and he knew Karla was holding up okay so far.

The lights flickered two more times, causing everyone in the room to look up and groan in distress. Dylan heard a sound from the back of the shop, and turned at the same moment Karla did to see a dark puddle creeping from under the store shelves. “There's water coming in the back door.”

They both darted to the back of the shop, where a quick peek out the door revealed a steady stream of water sloughing off the slanted alley that backed up to Karl's rear entrance. It wasn't raised so that delivery dollies could roll up to the door. “That small drain can't keep up with all that water,” Karla moaned.

“Not for long,” Dylan agreed. He found a broom, and then reopened the door to sweep away the mound of debris piling up around the drain. It helped a little, but not enough, and he got rather wet in the process.

“I'll get some dish towels, and we can pile them up against the door,” Karla said. It was a good idea, but it probably wouldn't hold for long. If it kept raining, the runoff from the hillside above Tyler Street would just grow stronger.

Once they'd secured the back door, he followed Karla back into the front of the coffee shop. Although it was nearly 9:00 a.m., the sky was as dark as twilight. The streetlamps were on up and down the avenue, but even they had begun to flicker ominously as the power cut in and out. The worst of the storm was bearing down upon them.

* * *

Karla did not like the look on the policeman's face as he shook off his wet coat after walking in the front door. “The river's rising fast.” She flinched every time the lights blinked. Nerves were beginning to string tight amongst the customers, and it didn't look as if the rain was letting up anytime soon. “She's up two feet and she's not done yet.”

She wiped the last of the water off her hands with her apron. “Is two feet a lot?”

“Not yet, but the forecast said ten inches of rain,” Dylan said as he pointed to the television. The map on the screen seemed consumed by dire red patches indicating “extreme” rainfall. Her cell phone had warned the same thing, but she didn't need any technology to tell her this was no small storm; the roar from the rain hitting the windows hadn't let up in hours.

The police officer sighed wearily as she set a cup of coffee down in front of him. “Road closures are starting.”

She found his tone entirely too calm. It wasn't as if Karla was going to leave anytime soon, but somehow the knowledge that she might not
be able to leave
tightened the knot already growing in her stomach. She had to be in Chicago by Sunday night. Her brain told her that was still possible, but her stomach seemed eager to start panicking right now.

A glance at the television showed a crawler across the bottom of the screen advising “relocation to higher ground.” She looked at Dylan. “Are we ‘higher ground'?”

She did not like that he chose his answer carefully. “Depends.”

Karla looked out the window. “On what?” The river had crept onto the grassy banks, and pylons of the footbridge that could normally be seen were underwater. No question, the water was creeping toward the levee, but that's what the levee was for—to stop the rising water.

“Are we higher than the river? Yes. Are we high enough not to flood? Well, that depends on the flood.”

One of the customers ended a cell-phone call. “The underpass is flooded.”

To her relief, the customer didn't sound wildly alarmed. Underpasses in Chicago flooded all the time. “When do they close the floodgates? I mean, that's what they're for, right?”

Another customer piped up as Violet came through the front door. “Closed 'em a few years ago. Got eight feet then. Nasty stuff.”

“So now you get to find out what it's like to keep Karl's open in a storm,” the older woman said as she leaned her umbrella against the wall. Violet looked entirely too tiny to be out in anything like this. “Not the kind of goodbye you were looking for from the Gordon River, but it sure is exciting.” She came over and gave Karla a soggy hug.

“Have you ever seen them close the floodgates, Vi?”

“Like Rudy said, they closed 'em back in '96 when the river rose eight feet. My front door was underwater.” She shrugged. “It's what rivers do—rise.”

Karla tried not to reason that eight feet was taller than anyone currently in the room. The floodgates were something like twenty feet high and looked reassuringly strong. Grandpa had told her stories of downtown business clipping right along with a flood raging behind those floodgates. People came downtown to watch the floodgates in action, as if it were a spectacle instead of a safety precaution. No reason to worry, right? Still, a loud thunderbolt shook the glasses on the shelving behind her as if to say “don't be so sure.”

“I'm going to check in on Dad and Grandpa.”

Karla ducked back into the soggy office alcove and made the call on her cell. Everything was okay at the house, but she didn't like that the call dropped twice in the space of four minutes. She also didn't welcome the thought of Dad and Grandpa unable to call for help, or her having to hold down Karl's without being able to call for advice or instructions. Still, she had the landline. Those didn't cut out, right?

Dylan came into the back and poked at the makeshift dam of dish towels. “Everything okay?”

“For now.” She pushed up her sleeves. “Karl's stays open in a storm. I've known that my whole life. The promise just feels a bit harder now that I'm the one who has to make it happen.”

“If something happens, we can shuttle them over to the firehouse, but I don't think that will be necessary. Karl's is safe.”

She was surprised it hadn't occurred to her before. “What about your boats? The river is rising—are they safe?” She'd become surprisingly attached to those boats, for she had such wonderful memories of her time in them.

He scratched his chin, tawny stubble revealing he hadn't yet shaved this morning. “I went out and tied the big boat down special an hour ago. The little one is already on land—I pulled her out to do a little maintenance over the weekend.”

“So they'll be okay?” Dylan's whole life was tied up in those boats—he'd mourn their damage the same way Grandpa would grieve anything happening to Karl's.

“For now.” She didn't like the way his jaw worked when he said that. Just as she didn't like the way he was staring at the shop's back door.

“If you need to go check on them, go. I'll be okay.”

“Thanks, but there isn't much I can do right now. Let's get back up front so we can take care of the customers.”

Did he realize he'd said “we”? She did. The long morning ahead seemed a little easier with Captain McDonald by her side.

Chapter Seventeen

W
alking back out into the front of the shop, Dylan felt the air of camaraderie that seemed to help combat everyone's tensions. Karl knew what he was doing when he promised to stay open in town emergencies and storms. People needed a place to know they weren't alone.

“Did I ever tell you Yorky's story of how people actually slept in Karl's for two days during a snowstorm once? He said that...” The lights flickered again. All talk halted. Then, in the quiet pause that followed, they gave out and the room fell into the dim blue-green glow of a stormy morning.

Even though it made no sense, Dylan could hear Karla hold her breath. He could feel her hopeful prayer as if she'd spoken the words aloud. For a brief second the light returned, eliciting a cry of relief from Karla and all the gathered customers. Mere seconds later they cut out again, and even Karla seemed to realize what he knew—this time they were out for good.

She looked around, her face cast in pale shadow as she slowly set down the coffee carafe she'd been holding. Surely Karl had told her what to do in a power outage, hadn't he? She looked a little panicked.

“Did Karl show you how to run his generator? He must have one for the fridge and stuff.”

That snapped her to action. “Yes. Back here.” She started to head for the kitchen behind the counter, but then stopped and turned to face the room. “You all can stay here for as long as you need. Coffee's on the house for as long as it stays warm. Don't go out into this if you don't have to.”

At that moment, she sounded so much like her grandfather that Dylan felt his heart twist. She was more born to this than even she realized. She was all the best of Karl wrapped up in a small, lovely, just-the-right-amount-of-feisty package.

She called after Oscar as the old man put his hand on the shop's doorknob. “That means you, too, Mr. Halverson. You won't get far in this deluge.”

Oscar simply snorted, pulled his hat down farther and plunged out into the storm.

Karla grunted in worry after the man, exactly how her grandfather would have. Dylan touched her elbow in reassurance. “He'll be okay. He's got food to look after in an outage, too, and he's lived here his whole life.” He couldn't help but add, “It's sweet of you to worry. About all of them.” He hoped she took that for the compliment that it was. “You were showing me where the generator is?”

She led him back to the storage room and opened a utility closet. He was glad to see a large, sturdy generator—Karl was a sensible guy. “Gas?” he asked, starting to wheel the big contraption out toward the back docks.

“He said there's a full gas tank out on the dock. I'm just supposed to fill it and start her up.” She bit her lip and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “However you do that.”

She'd never done it, and had no idea how. He knew generators had to be run outside, which meant that unless he was going to stand there and watch Karla figure it out—which of course, he absolutely would not—he was about to get wet. Wett
er
. Oh, well. Before she could put up one syllable of an argument, he pushed open the door and headed out into the downpour.

Five sopping minutes later, Dylan shouted, “Take this in toward the freezer,” through the back door, shaking the rain from his eyes while he shielded the power cord from the worst of the torrent. Lightning cracked overhead and Dylan turned to watch the rain running in sheets down the alley toward Tyler Street. With one last check of the generator, he tucked the can of gasoline close to the shop and out of the rain and pulled open the door to come inside. More water gushed onto the storage room floor, and the wind sent papers and box lids tumbling everywhere. Grunting, he tucked the power cord under the weather stripping and shoved the door shut. Relative quiet greeted him as he stood dripping onto the floor. Karla stood up from plugging the chest freezer into the power cord, a look of pity on her face.

“You're soaked.”

She was wet herself, her shirt splattered dark with rain and hair sticking to her cheeks in gentle arcs. It wasn't as if he could deny his present state. “Um, yeah.” He fought the urge to shake like a dog. “But you've at least got power for now. It doesn't come right back on out here like you may be used to in the city, though.”

When another big crack of thunder announced the strengthening storm, she jumped.

She was trying very hard to hide her fear, but he could see right through the bravado. “Not a fan of storms, huh?”

“Not like this.”

“Part of life on the river.”

Karla found a dish towel and handed it to him. “Are you sure your boats will be okay?”

What he needed was a complete change of clothes—not a two-foot swath of cotton—but at least he could dry his face and hands. “I think so. Water and boats tend to get along.” He pulled his now-cold T-shirt away from his skin. “Better than me.”

“You're really soaked.” She began rummaging through boxes behind Karl's desk. “We've got to at least have a shirt in here somewhere, maybe in the lost and found.” After a second, she produced an old and rather small T-shirt. “You won't make any fashion statements, but at least you'll be warm and dry.”

Dylan wasn't in any position to argue fashion. He peeled his soaked shirt off over his head and reached for the one she offered.

* * *

All scraggly wet hair and rain-soaked arms, Dylan was incredibly attractive. Karla had always heard comments about how fit firemen had to be, but up close...well, stunning didn't quite cover it. He seemed unaware of how close he was to her, how droplets landed on her face as he rubbed the towel over his hair.

“Thank you,” she choked out, realizing he'd soaked himself on her behalf. She knew he probably had a thousand things to do right now—either for the department or his boats—but he'd chosen to come and see if she was okay. Practically, she was glad for that; she'd never fueled and started a generator before, and she'd likely have been swimming by the time she'd have managed to work it.

It was more than practicality, though. Far more. It was that tug, that pull between them that had started long before the tango. That unforgettable dance had only forced them to admit it. She had thought that getting it out in the open would defuse it.

Only it hadn't. It had done the opposite—made her aware of him whenever he was near. It made her notice how the tone of his words warmed when he spoke to her. It focused her senses on how he paid attention to others, how he looked straight at people when he spoke to them. There was something uniquely, compellingly authentic about Dylan McDonald. What she had first put down to a lack of drive turned out to be a gift for being “in the moment” with people and situations.

She knew plenty of people whose attention was always just the slightest bit divided between herself and the next conversation, the person behind her, the next task on their list. Dylan was always right where he was—paying attention and displaying a rare contentment that wasn't the opposite of ambition but rather the ultimate display of purpose. A purpose that was, at this moment, fully trained on helping her.

“Really, thanks,” she repeated, flustered by the realizations flooding her brain to distraction.

He pulled the towel off his head, his eyes bright and his hair sticking out in all directions. “Least I could do.” His words were calm and unassuming, as if service and assistance came to him naturally, like breathing.

Like the breaths that were currently escaping her. Who could take a deep breath with a handsome, dripping wet, grinning firefighter staring at you like that? After having done something so heroic—without even being asked? Really, any woman would have to have lost her pulse not to feel the buzz tingling through her chest at the moment.

She must have gasped or something, because it seemed to dawn on him at that moment how very close they were standing. And the fact that the tight fit of the too-small T-shirt only served to highlight his muscular physique. She'd always thought him handsome, but standing there he was downright jaw-dropping. Karla swallowed hard and pushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “We'll have to bring one of the coffee machines back here or we'll run out of coffee up front.”

He smiled at her. “Karl's has to stay open.”

“And it will, thanks to you.”

“I want to help.” He said it as if it meant so much more than keeping the power on. The words wrapped around her with a force she wasn't expecting. “A flood's nothing to take casually.”

“So it really is a flood?” she squeaked out. A power outage was one thing, but she wasn't nearly ready to deal with anything that sounded so catastrophic. Now she found herself slightly panicked that he might be called away and leave her to deal with this on her own.

Dylan touched her elbow, and Karla felt a spark as if the generator had just surged in her fingertips. “Hey,” he said reassuringly, “it'll be fine.”

“I don't know what to do in a flood.” When had the mantle of Karl's settled so fiercely on her shoulders? When had she started to care so deeply that she found the threat of tears tightening her throat?

He tipped her chin up, the touch sending a second wave of electricity through her. “Hey,” he said with enormous warmth in his eyes, “it's not just you. I'm here. And you're the future owner of the fabulous Rooster's, remember? You've got this.” Another bolt of thunder shook the building, a few yelps of alarm coming from the front of the shop. “We'd better go calm them down.”

Calm me down
, Karla thought, caught off guard by the surge of attraction to this man. She nodded toward the large refrigerator no longer humming behind them.
When in doubt, feed people
. “Grab whatever looks like good breakfast food out of there and meet me out front. Breakfast is on the house.” As she headed out, another thought struck her. “What about the guys across the street? Do the firemen need to eat?”

“I suspect they'll end up out on call soon enough, but I'll call them anyway.” He smiled. “That's nice of you.”

She put off the tingle in her chest with a forced laugh. “Hey, I might need them to save me in an hour or so.”

Karla walked back into the front of the store to find a dozen more people shucking off coats and murmuring about the storm. The words “big flood” poked up through the buzz of conversation far too often for her liking.

Violet put down her cell phone. “The church basement has started seeping water over there and at the library, too. The road to Karl's house will probably be underwater soon.”

Karla realized she hadn't received a call from Grandpa in over twenty minutes. “Oh, no. Have you tried calling over there?”

“Service is out. Landlines went down about ten minutes ago.”

It wasn't as if they were cut off from civilization—or even from cell service, but Karla felt her pulse go up a notch as she passed out towels to the other doused residents who stood dripping on the floor. Things were steadily getting worse. “I'll try to get Dad on his cell right now, okay?”

Dylan appeared, arms full of bread, eggs, cheese, sausage and a few other things. “Karla said breakfast is on the house this morning folks. Everyone pitch in and we'll do just fine.”

Violet winked at Karla. “You've got more of Karl in you than you know. It's exactly what your grandfather would have done.”

A month ago, those words would have sat uncomfortably on Karla's spirit. Right now, however, they rushed warm and welcoming through her veins. She looked at all these bedraggled people—so many of whom had become friends over the past weeks—and felt the urge to take care of them. She
did
have this. She did know what to do.

A minute later, she got through to her father's cell phone as she stood near the back of the shop. “Dad? Everything okay over there?”

He sounded tired. “The water's coming up the drive, but we're holding our own. You all right?”

“Power's out, but you can tell Grandpa the generator's up and running and we're making breakfast for everyone who's here. Vi's here, and Oscar was here but he was too worried about the store not to go check on it.” At that moment Dylan walked up to where she was standing, holding out a doughnut and a cup of coffee in an amusing role reversal of their first meeting.
My hero,
a grateful little voice in her head declared, and she smiled as she spoke into the phone. “Dylan helped me with the generator.” She felt a small swell in her chest as she added, “So yeah, we're actually doing all right.”

“Is that Karla? Is she okay?” Grandpa shouted into the phone from what sounded like the kitchen.

“She's doing just fine, Dad,” her father called, his voice turned away from the receiver. “Feeding the customers and she's got the generator running.”

“That's my girl!” Grandpa exclaimed. “Karl's stays open in any storm. Watch the back hallway—it leaks.”

He'd said it so loud even Dylan heard it. He nodded, grabbed a nearby bucket, and set off to play hero again at the back towel dam. How grateful she was to have him here.

“There's a big flood coming,” Dad said, soft enough that Karla guessed he was trying to hide the fact from Grandpa. “I'm glad you mother's safe at home. I will get Grandpa ready to evacuate, but let's hope it doesn't come to that.”

Karla didn't like the sound of that. “If you might have to evacuate, wouldn't it be better to just leave now?”

“Not yet. Another foot or two, though, and we won't have a choice. It wouldn't be smart to wait until the last minute with the way Grandpa is.”

“Don't wait. Come over to the shop now. Dylan says we're on higher ground, right?”

“I don't want to take your grandfather out in this if I can avoid it. If he fell on wet pavement, well, we'd be right back where we started.”