Chapter 5 #2
He went through the stuff in the shack anyway and came up with a machete and some rope.
“That might come in handy,” I mused.
He grunted out a reply and backed out. “Come on.”
I “came on,” following him at a pace that I knew was overly slow for him.
“What’s your last name?” I asked when I saw a frog jump into the river.
I hated frogs.
Gross.
“Reins.”
As soon as he said it, I remembered Eugene using his last name.
“Finnian Reins sounds like a historical romance name,” I teased, going for lighthearted when my entire being felt heavy.
“My mom was a big romance reader.” He chuckled as he stepped over a log, then held his hand out to help me over.
He kept hold of my hand as we continued to walk along the river.
“She loved historical romance. She was a big Julie Garwood fan. The day she died, she had literally been doing a reread of her favorite one, Saving Grace. I remember her having it in her hand when she’d boarded the plane. ”
“I love that book!” I cried. “I’m sorry to hear about your mom. Is your dad still alive?”
“No, but my grandfather is,” he muttered. “We don’t see each other much. He kind of broke down after Mom passed, and he’s severely agoraphobic now. Barely leaves his house. And since he lives in Alaska now, I don’t have the time to just pop by.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Alaska,” I admitted. “Where in Alaska does he live?”
“Near Fairbanks.” He pulled me to a stop. “Do you hear that?”
I paused with him, trying to hear anything over the thunder, and heard a soft squeaking cry.
“Is that a child?” I asked.
He paused and twisted around, trying to pinpoint where he could hear the sound coming from.
“Maybe that way,” I suggested as I pointed back the way we came. “Kind of anyway.”
He jerked his chin toward the way we’d come, and then said, “Let’s go check it out.”
We backtracked, stopping periodically to make sure that we were still going the correct direction, and ended up almost back where we’d come from.
Though, this time, we were perilously close to the river.
“There!” I pointed.
I could see a flash of red in the tall grass near the opposite bank of the river, and started to wade out.
“I’ll go…”
“No,” I said. “You hold the rope. If I start going, you at least have a chance of pulling me back. If you start going, you’re going until you can get out yourself.”
He grunted. “You have a point.”
“With the rain, it’s flowing pretty good,” I said. “I can get over there just fine, but I won’t be able to swim back holding anyone if a child is what I’m hearing. So you’re going to have to pull me.”
He jerked his chin. “Tie this rope around your waist.”
I did as he instructed, and he tied his own end into a loop before he pulled the loop up over his forearm. “Be careful.”
I took a running start and leaped into the river head first, swimming hard from the moment that my body hit the water.
I’d swam in high school, and though I hadn’t done it much since, the basics had stuck with me and my body and muscles knew exactly what to do.
When I crossed to the other side, I was way off course, but that was to be expected when you’re swimming across a flowing river.
I walked back up the shore and searched for the red I’d seen in the bushes, only to come up short when I finally got to the red.
It was a woman wearing a red hoodie and jeans.
Definitely not a baby.
I reached down and took her pulse anyway, though, just in case.
She was dead.
But the little crying whimper sounded again for a second time, and I gasped.
The woman’s hoodie wasn’t a hoodie at all, but one of those wrap things.
And the woman had the baby strapped to her chest.
The baby was most definitely alive, however, and I slowly untied it from the woman, almost terrified of what I’d find.
“Oh, aren’t you precious,” I breathed when I saw the little one.
He couldn’t be more than ten days old, max.
He was tiny.
Tiny, tiny.
No wonder the woman had him strapped to her.
I cursed anything and everything as I took the baby out and placed her on his dead mother’s chest for a short moment as I unwrapped the wrap from her body.
My hands hit something hard when I did, and I gasped when I saw the bottle tucked in the wrap where the baby had once been.
A full bottle.
Thank god.
I carefully removed the wrap from the dead woman, then did the unthinkable, and I checked her pockets.
I didn’t find a phone, but I did find a small iPad that had somehow stayed with her despite the devastation around her.
After wrapping up the baby in the wrap, stuffing the bottle and the iPad in with him, I looked over at Finnian on the other side and said, “You’re going to have to do all the work. This baby is too small to get wet, or he’ll get really cold really fast.”
He nodded. “I won’t let you go.”
And he didn’t.
With the baby held up high over my head, he pulled me back to him.
I did no work at all, and Finnian looked like he could do this all day, every day.
When my feet reached the shore, he moved to take the child from my arms and said, “Holy fuck. He’s fresh.”
“Very,” I said. “There’s a single bottle, and an iPad.”
His eyes lit up. “An iPad?”
“An iPad,” I confirmed. “You want to wrap that around you so you can carry the baby?”
“You…” He paused. “You’re too wet. Are you cold?”
I was freezing.
Absolutely freezing.
Yet, I didn’t tell him that.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “But you’re nice and dryish. So looks like you’re up.”
He looked at the baby, then grimaced.
I wondered about that for a short second, but then he was handing the baby over to me and wrapping the wrap around his body.
Expertly, might I add.
He didn’t hesitate even a little bit on getting the wrap into place.
He’d done this before.
I wouldn’t have had a clue how to get that wrap on if I hadn’t literally just unattached it from the baby’s mother.
“You have kids?” I asked curiously.
He looked up, and I saw the devastation in his eyes.
“Not anymore.”
Fuck.
That was an awful thing to hear.
I wanted to ask a thousand questions, yet I forced myself to ask none of them.
“I’m sorry,” I replied softly.
I chose to allow him to have his privacy and shut my mouth.
He reached for the baby when he was done and got him situated, the baby’s black onesie with, ironically, blue airplanes standing out starkly against Finnian’s mostly white shirt.
“How’s your leg?” I asked to distract him from the utter devastation of the baby strapped to his chest.
Because he looked worse now while holding that baby than he did when I’d ripped that sliver of wood out of his leg.
“It’s fine,” he said. “A minor nuisance, nothing more.”
I forced my gaze away from him and said, “I keep thinking that the sky will start to look a little better, but it’s just getting worse.”
It was a putrid green now with black interspersed in between. The clouds looked angry and intense, and if I’d had to guess what an imminent tornado sky looked like, it would definitely be what I was seeing now.
“What now?” I asked as we once again started walking.
“We hurry,” he murmured.
I agreed.
The walk back the way we came took a lot less time.
We passed the shed and kept going.
“This shed would normally indicate that there’s a house nearby.”
He grunted and looked to his left, jerking his chin. “All that exposed plumbing?”
I was scared to look, but I forced myself to. “Yeah?”
“That probably used to be a house.”
Now that he mentioned it, there was a lot of space with no trees everywhere. It looked fairly manicured, too.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“Yeah.”
He took my hand, and that was when I felt the rope still attached to him. “I should take this off.”
He looked at me then and shook his head. “Leave it. Just in case. We’ll tie ourselves together if we need to.”
I hated that he made sense.
I hated even more that we would even need to consider being tied together.
We walked for a long few minutes, and just when I was just about to give up hope that we’d ever see anything, I pointed ahead. “Look.”
The wind picked up even more, and a tree branch fell into the river with a loud crash a few feet behind us.
I ducked while flinching, my heart in my throat.
“Oh my god.”
“Hurry,” he said as he picked up his pace. “It’s better than nothing.”
The house looked like it’d taken a hit from the tornado, yet it was still standing.
The house itself was two stories, but the roof had been ripped off of the top floor.
Luckily, that meant there was still some structure.
“Do you think anyone lives here?” I asked.
“Likely not,” he grumbled. “There’s nothing personal about it. I’d bet it’s a rental or something. Summer house possibly.”
Great.
“Awesome,” I muttered. “Maybe they’ll at least have internet. We can try to hack into that iPad and connect to something.”
Just as I said that, the bottom dropped out of the sky and rain so heavy and cold fell from the sky like a bucket of ice water had been poured directly onto us.
The baby started to scream, as he should.
I was right there with him as we ran into the yard, ignoring the shingles in the yard as we moved toward the front door.
Finnian was nice and knocked.
I was ready to kick in the front door.
But he stilled me before saying, “If there does happen to be someone here, I don’t want to break in. I’ll at least ask nicely first.”
He had a point.
There was no doubt that we were in the south.
People down here had guns for their guns.
You didn’t just go barging into a random house and expect to be let inside all nice-like.
No one answered when we knocked, and I let out a relieved breath.
I didn’t want there to be anyone here.
Because if anyone had been upstairs when that tornado had come through, there was a likelihood that they were hurt.
Or gone.
“Now we can break and enter?” I teased.
Because it was either make light of this situation, or cry.
Plus, the baby’s cry was really getting to me.
“Yeah.” He tried the knob.
Locked.
He moved to the window next to the door and tried to lift it.
It stayed shut.
“Gonna have to break the window,” I admitted.
“Yeah.” He picked up the metal patio table that’d managed to stay put and threw it through the window.
The glass shattered, and the baby started to cry even harder.
“Shit,” he muttered.
I picked up the gnome that was next to the front door, knocked over and missing his hat, and used the remains of the garden statue to clear out the remaining glass.
Once it was all gone, I stepped over the windowsill and entered the home.
The walls were erect, but I could already see water starting to slide down the length of the walls.
“Great,” I muttered as I unlocked the door.
An alarm sounded.
“Shit,” I groaned.
“Good thing,” he said. “Means that they have power.”
The man had a point.
He walked to the alarm panel, ripped off the front faceplate, and did something internally to the alarm.
The alarm stopped, and we stood standing there for a long second as we tried to get our bearings.
“How do they still have power?” I asked as I reached out and flipped on a light switch.
“Might be power, but there’s probably a lot of exposed wires up top. We need to be careful about what we use,” he said. “We don’t want to inadvertently burn the house to the ground.”
“Good idea,” I said. “What do we do?”
He took the baby out of the wrap and handed him to me. “See if you can find any dry clothes. I’m going to work on getting into this iPad. Then see if there happens to be any internet here.”
I took the baby to the couch—a massive sectional that I fell in love with almost instantly—and laid him down.
I stripped him of his clothes, then used a blanket off the couch and wrapped him in it.
When he still didn’t stop screaming, I popped the bottle into his mouth, and he instantly quieted.
“That’ll work for a couple of hours,” he said. “But eventually, we’re going to need more than that.”
I knew that.
It was fucking scary to think about, too.
“Do you think they have a hard-wired phone line?” I asked as I walked around downstairs, checking everything.
“Check the kitchen,” he murmured as he did something on the iPad. “I’m in. Gonna search for a Wi-Fi signal.”
I didn’t bother to ask him how he’d gotten into a locked iPad so fast. I was just happy as fuck that he did.
I went into the kitchen and turned on the light, gasping when I saw water pouring in through a shattered window. “Whoa.”
“What is it?” he called.
“Lots of water in their kitchen,” I said. “No phone, though.”
“They have a Wi-Fi signal,” he said. “I’m contacting some people now.”
“Can you call 911 from an iPad?” I wondered.
“No,” he said. “But I’ll message someone who can.”
I got to the next room, what looked like an office of some kind, and gasped. “A phone!”
He showed up, heading straight for it. “Good. This’ll be faster.”
He picked it up, listened for a dial tone, and dialed 911.
He cursed and hung up. “It has a busy signal.”
I blinked. “Is that even possible?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Phone signal is likely to be out when you have a natural disaster like this. It could’ve easily taken out transmission lines across the area.”
“Plan B?” I asked.
“That friend that I was talking about earlier.” He paused. “My club president is already writing back.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “Can you tell where we are?”
He paused and did a couple of things on the iPad before saying, “Arkansas.”
“Kind of close to home,” I admitted.
The baby spit the bottle out and started to squirm.
“Burp him,” my male companion ordered.
I did as he suggested, but apparently didn’t do it good enough because the child was taken from my arms. “He won’t break.”
I watched as he transferred the baby to his shoulder and burped him expertly.
Just like he’d done everything else that pertained to the little boy.
Yeah, the man had definitely been a father once upon a time.
There was no denying that.
The real question I needed to ask myself was why did I find that so sexy?
Why was seeing a man—a scary one at that that seemed incredibly competent hacking into locked things that should be unhackable—holding a baby so damn hot?