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He sighed. “Great.”
Naturally the house didn’t have a landline, and he couldn’t pick up a signal on his cell phone. He glanced out the front window and saw the power lines were drooping with the ice that had formed on them.
What about his neighbor? The power had to be out at her place, too.
Dylan wondered if he should check on her. Small towns looked after their own, didn’t they?
Olivia Frost’s family and friends wouldn’t be able to get out here. No one and nothing would be moving in these conditions.
Dylan buttoned his jacket and stepped back out to the porch. As far as he could tell, the precipitation was still freezing rain—it fell as rain and landed as ice, creating treacherous “black ice” conditions.
“Miserable,” he said, pulling up the collar to his jacket as he ventured down the slippery porch steps.
Slipping and sliding, Dylan made his way down the road to The Farm at Carriage Hill. Clear ice and a film of rainwater covered everything, including the sand that was supposed to help with traction.
He heard a branch snap somewhere in the woods, then nothing.
The silence was downright eerie.
He reminded himself he liked ice. He had been a natural on skates. These weren’t rink conditions, but he was good at keeping his balance, or so he told himself as he considered that if he fell, he was on his own. No one would find him.
Unless Buster sneaked out again, he thought with a grim smile, pressing on.
Smoke was curling out of the chimney of his only neighbor’s cream-colored house. An ice-and-rain-coated walk took him to a wide stone landing, and he knocked on the front door, painted a rich blue. There was another door to his right, to a newer addition. This was obviously the oldest part of the house.
“Miss Frost?” he called. “It’s Dylan McCaffrey.”
She opened the door. Her hair was still damp, and her cheeks were pink from the cold—or warmth, Dylan realized suddenly. Even from his position on the landing, he could tell that her house was toasty. She obviously had a fireplace or woodstove going. Hence, the smoke coming out of the chimney.
With his dripping coat and wet, muddy pants and shoes, he felt marginally ridiculous coming to her aid. It probably should have been the other way around. He was the unprepared stranger.
“I thought I’d check on you,” he said. “The power’s out at my place.”
“Here, too. I called the power company and notified them. Power’s out all over town. We’ll be among the last to get it restored.”
“The power company doesn’t like you?”
He was joking but Olivia gave him a cool look. “We’re on a sparsely populated dead-end road.”
“It’s just the two of us out here in the sticks?”
“I have my dog,” she said.
“Buster. He’s—”
“Asleep out by the fire at the moment. It wouldn’t take much to wake him.”
Dylan wondered if his presence was making Olivia nervous. That wasn’t his intention, but he could be thickheaded at times, or so Noah Kendrick, various hockey coaches, teammates and an assortment of women had told him. Often.
He attempted to look amiable and easygoing, not half frozen, hungry and out of his element. “If you need anything, I’m right up the road in the cold and the dark.”
“You weren’t expecting to spend the night in Knights Bridge, were you?”
“I thought I’d figure that out once I got here. I wasn’t counting on an ice storm.”
“Do you have food? I have homemade parsnip soup and oatmeal bread from lunch that I’d be happy to send back with you.”
Parsnip soup. He felt a fat, cold raindrop splatter on the back of his neck. “Thanks, but I brought some basic provisions with me, just in case.”
“I remember Miss Webster had a woodstove. Did she leave it behind?”
He hadn’t even considered a woodstove. “It’s in the dining room.”
“You’ll want to check to make sure a bat or a squirrel hasn’t taken up residence in the chimney.” Olivia leaned out of her warm house and pointed a slender finger vaguely in the direction of her garage. “You can help yourself to some dry wood if you’d like.”
Dylan figured he would only be able to carry enough for a few hours’ fire. There wasn’t much point. At the rate he was going, he’d die of hypothermia before he reached his house, anyway.
It was only a slight exaggeration.
He thanked his neighbor and noticed she didn’t press him to take wood or offer him a spare bedroom. “Thanks for stopping by,” she said politely, then shut the door quietly behind him.
He half skated back to the road, which was even more treacherous. What had his father been thinking, buying a house in this backwater little town? There couldn’t be lost treasure in Knights Bridge, or even clues to lost treasure. Impossible.
Then again, Duncan McCaffrey had been a man who relished taking on the impossible.
When Dylan arrived back at his inherited house, he examined the woodstove that was hooked up in a corner in the dining room. It looked like an oil drum. It couldn’t be that efficient, but it was better than a cold night in the dark. He found dry wood in an old apple crate in the kitchen and hit the stovepipe chimney with a log to warn any critters before he lit matches.
He wasn’t worried about a buildup of creosote. If the house burned down, so what?
The wood was dry enough that he needed little kindling and only one match to get the fire started. As the flames took hold, he checked his cell phone and walked around the house until he got a weak signal by the back door.
He dialed Noah in San Diego. “Tell me there’s been an emergency and you need me back there,” Dylan said.
“All’s well. What’s happening in New England?”
“Freezing rain. No heat, no electricity. I’ve turned into Bob Cratchit.”
“What’s the house like?”
“It’s a dump.”
“Have you met Olivia Frost?”
“I have.” Dylan pictured her pink cheeks and hazel eyes. “She’s warm. I wonder if she has a generator.”
“Not sharing her heat?”
It wasn’t a bad quip for Noah, who wasn’t known for that particular variety of verbal quickness. “She offered me cordwood. I’m not going anywhere for a while. We’re in the middle of an ice storm.”
Noah burst out laughing.
Their call got dropped just as the ceiling in the kitchen started to leak.
Dylan slid his phone back in his pocket and watched water pool on the wide-plank floor.
“Well, hell.”
What could he do? He was stuck here.
He hoped Grace Webster had left behind a bucket.
Four
Olivia’s house had come with a generator for nights just such as this one, but she only turned it on for an hour before she decided to wait out the power outage. She had little food to worry about spoiling, and she didn’t like generators. In storms, people too often misused them and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She had dutifully read all the instructions and had her father do a dry run with her, but the thing still made her nervous. She wanted to be positive she knew what she was doing before she ran it for any length of time.
As she snuggled under a soft wool throw in front of the brick fireplace, she told herself it was decent of Dylan McCaffrey to check on her. He hadn’t meant anything by his visit except to make sure she was all right in the midst of a nasty ice storm.
The wind picked up, and a spruce tree swayed outside the front window, casting strange shadows in the living room. She heard the crack of a branch breaking off in the old sugar maple in the side yard. Right now, the branches and power lines were weighed down with ice, but once the temperature rose above freezing, the ice would melt as if it had never been. Spring would resume its steady march toward daffodils, tulips and lilacs in bloom.
The fire glowed, the only light in the darkening room. A chunk of burning wood fell from the grate, startling her, but she quickly told herself it was nothing. She had lived alone in her Boston apartment, but she had to admit that living alone in her antique house in Knights Bridge was taking some getting used to. The creaks, the groans, the shadows, the dark nights—anything could fire up her imagination. At first, she’d slept with her iPod on, playing a selection of relaxing music, but she was beginning to develop a routine and was getting used to the sounds of the old house and country road.
Tightening her throw around her, she turned her attention back to her neighbor. Elly O’Dunn must have run into Duncan McCaffrey, Dylan’s father. When Olivia had written to Dylan, she hadn’t expected him to show up in Knights Bridge, and she certainly hadn’t expected to meet him the way she had, muddy, yelling in panic for her wandering dog.
She especially hadn’t expected the new owner of Grace Webster’s house to be a man close to her own age, with a sexy grin, sexy broad shoulders and sexy black-lashed deep blue eyes.
The McCaffreys had no ties to Knights Bridge that Olivia knew of. Because of the massive Quabbin Reservoir, her hometown was out-of-the-way, not an easy commute to any of the major cities in Massachusetts. The University of Massachusetts Amherst, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, Smith College and Amherst College—the Five Colleges—were a more reasonable commute. A number of people from town worked at the different schools. She had no idea what Dylan McCaffrey did for a living but supposed he could be a college professor.
She pictured him standing in the snow and mud.
He wasn’t a college professor. She knew some rugged-looking professors, but Dylan McCaffrey didn’t strike her as someone who could sit in a library carrel for more than ten minutes before he needed to get moving.
Olivia heard a gust of wind beat against the windows. The truth was, she hadn’t given her neighbor much thought once she wrote to him. She just wanted his place cleaned up. She had so much to do before her mother-daughter tea. She swore she had lists of lists of things to do to get ready.
She wished the power would come back on before nightfall. She didn’t look forward to sitting there in the pitch-dark.
Her landline rang, startling her. Buster barked but settled down, spent from his romp up the road. She reached for the phone on an end table, a flea-market find that she planned to paint. It was on one of her lists, she thought as she picked up and said hello.
“Hey, kid,” her father said. “You and Buster okay out there? Everything’s at a standstill but we’ll be through the worst of it soon.”
He didn’t sound concerned, and Olivia assumed that her mother had put him up to calling. “The power’s out but we’re fine here.”
“Are you using the generator?”
“I did for a while but not right now. It’s okay. Buster and I are nice and cozy by the fire.”
“Cozy. Right. If you need anything, call. I’ll find a way out there.”
He would, too. Olivia debated a moment, then said, “My neighbor’s here.”
“Neighbor?”
“Dylan McCaffrey. He’s the guy who owns Grace Webster’s old place.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“You did? I should have asked you about him. That was his father.”
“I met him a couple of years ago. Ran into him at Hazelton’s.” Hazelton’s was the general store in the village. “I didn’t ask why he wanted to buy a house in town. Why’s his son here?”
“I wrote to him about the junk in his yard. He lives in San Diego. I didn’t expect him to actually come out here. I offered to do the work. I figured he’d jump at the chance since no one’s touched the place in two years.”
There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the phone. “I hope he doesn’t mind freezing rain,” her father said finally.
After she hung up, Olivia got out a sketch pad and colored pencils and, curled up in front of the fire, worked on a color scheme for the interior of her house. She had narrowed down her choices to three different palettes. For each, she drew a large rectangle, then drew smaller rectangles of various sizes inside it. She filled in the large rectangle with her main color and the smaller rectangles with secondary colors and accents. She had decided against a traditional New England look, as much as she loved it. She wasn’t sure exactly what colors she wanted, but she definitely wanted a palette that was lively, vibrant and welcoming, with a touch of rustic charm.
Intrigued by the play of the flames in the fading natural light, she chose a golden yellow lightened with white for her first large rectangle. For the smaller rectangles, she used two shades of aquamarine, a watery blue, a creamy linen, a splash of red. She wanted to choose colors and paint finishes that worked with the sharp differences in New England seasons—from the frigid temperatures of winter to the hot, humid conditions of the dog days of summer. She would have to pay attention to the orientation of her different rooms. An eastern room that received the cool light of morning might need a different shade or tone than a western room that received strong afternoon light.
Buster rolled over, his back to Olivia, as if to tell her how boring he thought paint palettes were. She stayed in front of the fire and continued working. As darkness descended, she liked having him there, close to her, rather than in the kitchen or locked up in the mudroom. Soon the fire provided the only light in the house. She hadn’t lit any candles or turned on her flashlight. She put away her colored pencils and left them and the sketch pad on the floor.
The power still hadn’t come on.
More trees creaked and groaned in the wind. The fire flared in a backdraft in the chimney. She shuddered, a ripple of irrational fear running up her spine. She had locked the front door after Dylan had left and was positive she had already locked the other doors. She knew no one was in the kitchen and mudroom, or in the garage—or hiding upstairs.
She dreaded turning on her small flashlight and walking up to her bedroom.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked aloud. “Nothing’s up there with the power off that isn’t there with the power on.”
The living room glowed in a flash of lightning followed by a rumble of thunder.
It was an ice storm. Why was there thunder and lightning?
Never mind, Olivia thought, grabbing another throw off a chair. She wasn’t going anywhere. She curled up with the two throws on the thick rug in front of the fire, staying close to warm, mean-looking Buster. She had no reason to be afraid alone in her country house, but the occasional bump in the night nonetheless could get her heart racing and her mind spinning with possibilities.
She wondered how Dylan McCaffrey was doing up the road. Grace’s house wasn’t in good shape, especially after sitting empty for so long. People in town speculated that the new owner had bought it for the land, not for the house itself. After receiving the note about the yard, had Dylan decided to head east to check out his newly discovered inheritance and put it on the market? Olivia would love to have the seven acres to add to The Farm at Carriage Hill, but she couldn’t afford them right now and had her hands full getting her own house in shape.
Wrapped up in her warm throws, she noticed the wind was dying down and the one flash of lightning and rumble of thunder seemed to be all the storm had in mind. The power didn’t come back on, but she suspected it would soon now that the weather was improving.
She grabbed a pillow off the couch and placed it under her head. She doubted Grace had left behind blankets and sheets, never mind a bed, or if she had that any of them were usable. Was Dylan sleeping on the floor, too? He probably hadn’t planned to spend the night in a house on the verge of being condemned.
A run-down house, a yard filled with junk, a confrontation with a big dog, an ice storm and a power outage—not an auspicious first day in Knights Bridge. Olivia shut her eyes, imagining what her neighbor thought of her hometown and if he’d be there in another twenty-four hours.
The power came back on just after two in the morning, the floor lamp popping on, the refrigerator cranking into gear, startling Olivia out of a deep sleep. She left the lamp on, letting the glow of the low-wattage bulb settle her heartbeat. She didn’t go upstairs to bed and instead stayed under her throws. Buster got up and stretched as if he thought it was morning, then settled down again in front of the fire, just a few hot coals now.
By morning, the sun was shining and any ice from the storm had already melted. That, Olivia reminded herself, was one of the key differences between early spring and the dead of winter. In winter, the ice would still be there, with more on the way. She could safely hope that last night was the end of any freezing precipitation in her part of New England until next winter.
She switched off any lights that didn’t need to be on and went upstairs to shower and get dressed, figuring she’d head into the village after breakfast. The house, although not large, felt huge in comparison to her apartment in Boston. Back downstairs, she made coffee and toasted some of her oatmeal bread, spreading it with peanut butter. She ate at her table overlooking the herb gardens. Even without checking her palettes from last night, she knew she’d reject the watery colors. She wanted earthy colors that still felt light, inviting, vibrant.
Picking out colors, she thought, was the fun part of opening The Farm at Carriage Hill. The uncertainties and the sheer amount of work that needed to be done were the hard parts.
