Stranded for the Fourth (Holiday Hearts MM #8)

Chapter One

The last dry stretch of highway had ended forty minutes ago, back where the gas station attendant told him to take the north fork if he wanted to shave off twenty minutes.

Avery had taken it. Of course he had. Efficiency was the whole point of leaving three hours later than he'd planned, after the client call ran long and his assistant sent him four separate messages about the Hendricks proposal that could have waited.

Now the north fork was just trees. Pine after pine after pine, crowding so close to the shoulder that his side mirror had clipped a branch twice in the last mile.

The GPS on his phone had lost signal somewhere around the last gas station and never found it again, and the paper map his mother had mailed him — an actual paper map, folded into a bright yellow envelope with DO NOT BE LATE THIS YEAR written across the front in her handwriting — sat useless in the passenger seat because he hadn't had a free hand to check it in twenty minutes.

His knuckles were pale on the wheel. He noticed that, distantly, the way he noticed most things about his own body lately, like a doctor cataloguing symptoms in someone else's chart.

The dashboard clock said he was already behind schedule for the schedule he'd built around the schedule his mother had emailed him.

Color-coded. Arrival times, staggered by cousin, so that no two branches of the family showed up within fifteen minutes of each other and caused what she called "doorway congestion.

" He was supposed to have crossed the county line by now with time to stop and change out of his driving clothes before he got there, because his aunt Diane always commented if he arrived looking like he'd slept in his car, and this year there was no fiancée standing next to him to run interference, to laugh it off, to say he's been working so hard, aren't you proud of him in that easy, deflecting voice Marcus used to have.

Avery's jaw hurt. He'd been grinding his teeth again.

The trees thinned for a second, just enough to show him the lake below — a long gray-green ribbon between two ridgelines, choppy even from this distance — and then the sky over it did something he didn't like.

The clouds on the far side weren't clouds anymore.

They were a wall, blue-black and low, moving fast enough that he could watch the tree line disappear underneath it in real time.

"No," he said out loud, to no one. "No, no, no."

The first raindrops hit the windshield like gravel thrown from a truck bed.

Then it wasn't drops anymore. It was a sheet, solid and immediate, and the wipers on their highest setting barely bought him two seconds of visibility between swipes.

The wind came from the side and shoved the whole car a foot toward the center line.

He overcorrected. His pulse jumped into his throat and stayed there.

He dropped his speed to twenty. Fifteen. The road had vanished into a smear of gray, broken only by the ghost of his own headlights bouncing back at him off the rain.

The radio — he'd left it on low, some classic rock station fading in and out — cut to a burst of static and then a voice, flat and official, reading off something about the coastal route. He turned it up with a shaking hand.

"—repeating, Route 9 southbound is closed at mile marker 34 due to a mudslide. Crews are on scene, no estimate for reopening. Motorists in the lake district are advised to seek shelter and avoid travel until conditions improve—"

Route 9 was the only way to his parents' cabin from this side of the ridge.

Avery's stomach dropped the way it had in college, the one time he'd genuinely thought he'd failed a final. That same lurch, hollow and fast, like the floor of the car had opened underneath him.

The engine made a sound he didn't recognize.

A cough, low and mechanical, somewhere under the hood, and then the temperature gauge on the dash — which he had never once looked at in three years of owning this car — swung hard toward the red line like it had been waiting for the worst possible moment.

"Okay," he said, too loud, to the empty car. "Okay. Okay, that's fine. That's fine, we're fine."

He wasn't fine. He was gripping the wheel like it might try to leave without him, and the rain was coming down so hard now that the road ahead was mostly guesswork, and somewhere in the gray on his right a shape resolved itself — a wooden sign, weathered, swinging on one hinge — and underneath it a break in the tree line, gravel, a low building with light in one window.

Briggs' Marine Repair.

He didn't decide to turn. His hands did it before the rest of him caught up, wrenching the wheel right, and the car rattled over the gravel lot with a new, worse sound coming from under the hood, something grinding, and then it just — stopped. Died. The wipers froze mid-swipe.

For a second Avery sat there with his hands still on the wheel, breathing too fast, listening to the rain hammer the roof like it was trying to get in.

Then he saw the man.

He was maybe fifty yards off, down near the water, and for a moment Avery's brain refused to process him as a person and not some trick of the storm — a shape too big, moving too fast in the wrong kind of light.

He was hauling a blue tarp over the bow of a pontoon boat, alone, the wind trying to rip it out of his hands, and he was soaked through completely, shirt plastered black to his back, dark hair flattened to his skull.

He wrestled a bungee cord around a cleat with hands that didn't fumble once despite the wind, despite the rain sluicing off him in sheets, and then he was already moving to the next boat down the line before Avery had gotten his own door open.

Avery got out anyway.

The rain hit him like a wall shoving him sideways, and by the time he'd taken three steps his dress shirt was soaked through and clinging, his loafers sliding on wet gravel, and he had to half-shout just to be heard over the wind coming off the lake.

"Excuse me — hi — I'm so sorry, I know this is — my car just died, and I have no idea where I am, the radio said Route 9 is completely washed out, and I have to get to my family's place tonight, it's a whole thing, and I don't suppose you have a phone I could —"

"Get inside." The man didn't stop moving. Didn't even look at him fully — just a fast, assessing glance, up and down, that took in the loafers and the button-down and dismissed all of it in under a second before he went back to lashing down the tarp.

"I — sorry, what?"

"Storm's not done." He hauled the last strap tight, tested it with one hard yank, and started coiling a length of rope with the kind of speed that came from doing something a thousand times before. "You're standing in a lightning field."

"Right, no, of course, I just — do you have a landline?

My phone hasn't had signal in an hour, and I really need to call my mother, she's going to think I've been in an accident, which, I mean, functionally, my car might actually be totaled, I don't even know what that sound was, it was this grinding — "

"Pop the hood?"

"What?"

"Your car." He was already moving past him, toward the sedan, rain running off his jaw in a steady line, and up close Avery registered him the way you register weather — something to brace against. Broad through the shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with a gym.

Forearms marked with old grease that the rain hadn't touched, like it was worked into the skin.

He didn't so much as flinch against the wind that was making Avery's eyes water.

"I don't — the button's on the — hold on —"

Avery fumbled back into the driver's seat, yanked the hood release, and by the time he'd gotten back out the man already had the hood up and was leaning under it, one hand braced on the frame, squinting into the engine through rain that hadn't let up at all.

"Radiator," he said, after a second. To himself, mostly. "Hose blew."

"Is that — bad?"

"You're not driving anywhere tonight."

The words landed somewhere under Avery's ribs and just sat there.

Not tonight. Not to his parents' place. Not to the dock where his father would be standing with a drink at the exact hour he'd specified, checking his watch, making the comment he made every single year about punctuality being a form of respect.

Avery felt his chest do something tight and fast, felt the beginning of the spiral he'd been holding off since the client call that morning, and he heard himself talking before he'd decided to.

"No, that's — I have to get there, you don't understand, tomorrow’s the Fourth, my whole family's going to be there, my mother has a schedule, there's an itinerary, if I don't show up she's going to call everyone she's ever met, is there anyone else out here who could maybe — a tow truck, or —"

"Not in this." The man straightened up out of the engine, wiped a hand down his face that did nothing against the rain still falling, and looked at him — really looked, for the first time, dark eyes narrowed slightly against the water running into them, and something in the set of his mouth that wasn't quite annoyance and wasn't quite anything else Avery could name.

Just flat. Assessing. "Roads are gone both directions.

You're not going anywhere till morning, maybe not then. "

"That's — no, that can't — there has to be —"

"There isn't." He said it without heat, which somehow made it worse. A fact, not an argument. "You got a bag?"

"What? I — yes, in the trunk, why —"

The man was already moving toward the back of the car, and Avery had to half-jog through the gravel and the rain to catch up, his loafers giving out on the wet stone, nearly going down before he caught the side mirror.

By the time he straightened, the man had the trunk open and Avery's single suitcase — sleek, black, absurdly out of place — already in one hand like it weighed nothing.

"Wait — you don't have to — I can carry my own —"

"Talk less." He said it flat, not cruel, already turning toward the building with the lit window, rain sluicing off his shoulders in sheets. "Walk faster. We're both gonna freeze standing here."

And then he was moving, not waiting to see if Avery followed, boots sure on gravel that Avery couldn't get two steps across without sliding, and Avery stood there for one more second in the downpour — soaked through, stranded, his mother's itinerary dissolving into pulp somewhere in the passenger seat behind him — before he gave up and went after him into the storm.