Chapter 30 Sebastian #2
She wasn’t very good—Sebastian was pretty sure she hadn’t hit a single note, and she missed half the words as the speed of
the lyrics got away from her. Her smile lit up the entire room, though, and every time she messed up she beamed bigger and
bigger as her friends laughed with her. Orly sat on the edge of the stage holding the laminated sheet of lyrics for her—his
camera had been abandoned long ago—and she studied the words diligently, but she knew the chorus by heart. And by the time
she got to the second verse, she seemed as surprised as anyone to realize she knew the words to that too.
The hoots and hollers of support spurred her on, and she plucked the lyrics sheet from Orly’s hands and dropped it to the
ground and strutted and shook her hips and line danced through the rest of the song. By the end, everyone was singing along
with her, but she was still the center of attention, exactly where she deserved to be. There was no denying she was a star,
even if her voice didn’t exactly give Dolly Parton a run for her money.
“I just remembered another quote I saw at Maxine’s,” Cole said from over Sebastian’s shoulder. “It went something like, ‘If
a classic country karaoke dork is lucky enough to find a woman who can look that cute and be that irresistible while singing
that badly, he’d be a fool to let her get away.’”
Maxine’s cross-stitching was very wise.
Sebastian stepped into the dining room, and Brynn’s attention snapped to him. The smile was still on her face, though it softened
as they stared at each other. She was surrounded by her adoring public, but she was completely focused on him. He raised his
hand in greeting and she mouthed, “Hi,” in response.
“Hey, Sebastian? Did you hear—”
“Sorry, Fenton.” He addressed his friend sitting at the bar, but he didn’t take his eyes off Brynn. “Can we talk later?”
“I was just wondering if you’d heard about the avalanche up at the Gulch?”
Well, okay... that got his attention away from her. “What? No. How bad is it?”
Fenton pointed up at the television. And it was telling him pretty much nothing. It was tuned to a national news channel,
and the ticker across the bottom was reporting nothing except that a group of high school students up from Phoenix on a ski
trip hadn’t been heard from in two hours. All the images were stock photos of various mountain passes and avalanches—not even
the correct mountain range.
“They don’t have anyone there?” Sebastian asked just as Brynn came up behind him.
“What’s going on?”
“Alpine Rescue Team’s on the way, but they aren’t exactly sure where they’re heading, from the sound of it.” Fenton turned
on his stool to face the gathering spectators. “And if they’re coming from Denver, no one’s going to get there too quickly
with all that construction on I-25.”
“They’ll copter someone in,” Doc contributed. “It won’t be too long until rescue is on the ground.”
“But what about media?” Sebastian asked, turning to face Brynn.
She nibbled on an apple slice. “If they’re coming from Denver, they can just hop on... what is it? Highway 285?”
Fenton shook his head. “Sections are still closed from the mudslides. They’re rerouting through US-50.”
Jo whistled through her teeth. “That won’t be speedy.”
Sebastian watched Brynn for another few seconds as she kept her eyes on the television, reading the ticker, taking a bite out of her apple slice.
Then he looked over the crowd and found Orly in the back, his camera rolling again.
Of course it was. Orly had felt the change in the air as much as Sebastian had.
And though the camera was most likely focused on Brynn, the cameraman’s eyes were on Sebastian.
Orly nodded at him, and Sebastian jumped into action.
“Grab your coat.”
Brynn looked up at him. “Where am I going?”
“You’re going to Adelaide Gulch, obviously.”
“I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but right now’s not the best time to go sledding.” She took another bite of apple and smiled
at him, confused. “You know all those precautions I was teaching you to watch for? Yeah, well, I know I didn’t mention it,
but whenever there has just been an avalanche...”
“Wow, you let that ambition of yours off the hook pretty easily, didn’t you?”
She chewed and thought, and then her eyes flew open. There it is. Her eyes flashed to the television and then back to him. “You mean...”
He grabbed her elbows and leaned down to meet her eye to eye. “Listen to me, Brynn. There’s not a national-caliber reporter
anywhere in the world closer to this story than you are right now. You can be live on the air in forty-five minutes, and every
news network across the country will pick up your feed so they can finally stop airing stock photos from five years ago.”
Sebastian moved his hands up to cup her face, fully aware that the story for the people there at Cassidy’s Bar & Grill in
Adelaide Springs was suddenly all about that. About them. Avalanche? What avalanche? Are Brynn and Sebastian together? Yep.
He knew that he’d just singlehandedly fueled the rumor mill for the next couple of news cycles.
Well... as long as they were going to be talking anyway...
He leaned in and brushed his lips against hers and then whispered, “Opportunities like this don’t come along very often.
Trust me on that. This is an opportunity to be the reporter on the story.
If you do this, it won’t matter what footage you and Orly have captured this week.
This will be the footage that runs on Sunup tomorrow morning.
I promise you. The story will no longer be about a mistake, and it won’t be about the scripted lines. The
story will be about the story , and the way you choose to tell it. You just have to decide if that’s what you want.”
Her eyes remained locked with his. “Will you go with me?”
What a loaded question that was. He didn’t see a way to go with her where her career was about to take her, but he suspected
she knew that. Right now, she just needed to know if he would go with her to Adelaide Gulch. To the center of the action—a
place he hadn’t dared to go since smuggling himself onto a long-tail boat out of Kawthaung. He’d found sanctuary from all
of that in this peaceful, ridiculous little town that he loved with his whole heart, and now this woman he’d hated at the
beginning of the week was asking him to accompany her back to the center of the action—where lives would potentially be lost
and helicopters would circle overhead, dropping rope ladders rather than bombs.
There wasn’t even a question in his mind.
“Of course I’ll go with you.”