Riding the Storm (12 page)

Then
again, he'd never spent real, quality time with any of the women he slept with,
even the ones he'd been with during the calmer times.

Christ,
the way she looked at him could take him down at the knees if he let it. She
was watching him—studying him really—her eyes luminous and wide in the
lamplight, and this time he could've sworn she wasn't doing it for science. But
she was, and he would damn sure figure out her angle. If Haley wanted to play,
he was going to give her her money's worth. Because he should get to have some
fun during all this.

Hopefully,
Mother Nature would cooperate, because he wasn't sure he could handle two
strong women pulling at him at once. A team of tangos, yes, but none seemed to
be available at the moment.

Over
the years, he'd learned how to take better control, knew exactly what was
needed to maintain his tenuous grip on his emotions—and subsequently, the
weather. His rational mind could keep him in check, most of the time, but if he
got injured or let his anger get the best of him, people needed to start
running, because as much as Mother Nature could pull at him, he'd learned that
he could push right back.

Now
was time for that push.

"You
know, they say that the bayou's a pretty magical place,
chere
," he
said. "A lot of that weather stuff you're talking about could just be a
built-in part of this area. Mysterious and unexplainable."

"I
don't think so," she said.

"You
don't believe in unexplained phenomenon?"

"I
think everything has an explanation, if you just look hard enough," she
said.

He
thought about pushing the shirt off her shoulders to expose her breasts again,
and a low rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. She furrowed her brow,
looked at the barometer, then back at him.

He
shrugged, put on his best I'm-completely-innocent face and watched the color
rise in her cheeks. This one was easy—his being horny didn't cause a storm to
happen, but if there was one in the area when his cock demanded attention, he
ended up drawing the energy in his direction. "I told you the storm's not
over."

"And
you know that how?"

"From
living here for the first seventeen years of my life. From watching all kinds
of strange, unimaginable things occur."

Like
the time Melissa LaRue had taken his virginity—he'd been fourteen, she was
sixteen, and that was pretty much the explanation for the hail that took out a
few cars in front of Melissa's house. The hail in the shape of crucifixes had
just been for practice. He'd also formed hail in the shape of devil's horns
outside a church, just to be fair.

"And
you never questioned them?" Haley persisted.

He'd
never had to. He'd been born with this draw being as much a part of him as his
fingers and toes were, and until recently, he'd managed to coexist with the
sometimes strange electricity that lived inside of him. But lately, Mother
Nature had been behaving like a petulant child, and he'd been repenting like
hell, in hopes she'd ease up.

"I
learned to enjoy what I couldn't explain," he said. It was more than a
partial lie, especially the way these last six months had taken their toll on
him—his life and his career—but she wouldn't know that. He took another swig of
beer as hail began to strum the old roof. The left-hand side of the roof, to be
precise. He watched with amusement as Haley leaped from the couch and hovered
over her weather equipment on the table.

"This
is impossible," she muttered as she scanned what looked like an on-demand
rader image on her laptop, and he had to wonder just who she worked for to have
such advanced satellite technology built into her computer.

"What's
impossible?" he asked, though he knew.

"The
hail," she snapped, probably annoyed that all her scientific crap couldn't
explain a damned thing. "The closest storm cell is several miles away,
according to this." She turned to a portable radar that didn't look all
that portable, and how the hell had she gotten the thing in here? "My
radar, however, indicates a sizeable echo right on top of us, and if I run a
loop—" she pushed a button, and the screen ran a series of images
"—you can see that this echo formed almost instantly."

Yep,
it pretty much had. Interesting. He'd never seen evidence of how his
weather-weirdness worked.

"And
outside, the pressure rose, the temperature dropped and the wind picked up,
consistent with the hail that shouldn't be here." The desktop
weather-station gadget blinked with all the updates.

Damn,
she was hot when she was agitated, the way she kept sweeping her hair out of
her face and biting her bottom lip.

She
tapped a bunch of keys and looked up at the roof, where the hail still drummed.

He
stopped it as suddenly as he'd started it, mainly because his stomach had
started to growl. "Didn't you say you were going to make some food?"

"Food?"
She leaned close to the radar, her gaze shifting between the machine and the
weather station. "How can you think of food when—" She sucked in a
harsh breath. "It's dissipating. Too fast. This isn't natural."

"I
tried to tell you that things are mysterious and unexplainable around
here." His stomach growled again, this time loud enough for her to hear
it.

She
turned to him. "I don't know what's going on, but I'm going to find
out." Shaking her head, she sighed. "Tomorrow. When all the data is
in, and I've gotten some rest. And food. I probably should clean up a little
more, though."

For
the first time, he actually surveyed the room, and it sobered him up again. He
saw that four of the five windows in the living room and kitchen were blown out
completely. Haley must've cleaned while he slept, and she'd tried to rehang the
pathetic lace curtains that had been up for twenty-five years, if not longer.
She'd straightened the pictures on the walls and piled the wet books and papers
into a corner, and she'd added to the pile of debris he'd swept up earlier.

He'd
never seen it this bad. But then, he'd never been coerced to remain inside when
a storm raged. Even his team members had given up trying to keep him in once
they realized things got better a few minutes after he stepped out into the
storm. Besides, several of them had learned the hard way not to physically
restrain him when his storm-fervor had him on edge.

But
this… this had been really bad, and he drew a long, deep breath, took into his
nostrils the burnt stench he always smelled after an episode, a combination of
hickory and cinnamon, not unpleasant, not sickeningly sweet, just strong.
Normally, he welcomed it, because it meant that things were over, but the way
his skin still tingled, just below the surface, told him different.

Haley
was still standing in the middle of the kitchen. She scrubbed her cheeks with
her palms for a second and then nodded, like she'd made some kind of internal
decision. She grabbed the broom and moved to sweep out the pile by the back
door.

He
leaned against the fridge and slowly shook his head. "Forget it. You can't
sweep that outside."

"I
can't leave it like this. The generator's nearly out of gas and I don't want
one of us stumbling into the pile if we need to get to the door."

"We
can use the front door instead."

"What's
the big deal, Remy?"

"You
just can't sweep it out the door. Not tonight," he said, realized he was
going to sound like an even bigger freak, but hey, some things were so born and
bred they could never be lost. "Look, it's an old Cajun superstition,
okay? You're never supposed to sweep dirt out the door after dark."

"Why
not?"

"It's
bad luck," he said, watched her bite her lip and try, unsuccessfully, to
hold back a smile.

She
didn't make it—a small giggle burst from her before she covered her mouth.
"I'm sorry," she said, but there was still laughter in her voice,
something that made him feel… lighter. "It's just… She motioned around
them and he couldn't stop his own mouth from tugging up at the corners, until
he let himself have a full-blown belly laugh right along with her.

"Yeah,
well, you grow up around here, you're not going to escape without a few
superstitions."

"Why
do I have a feeling you've got more than a few?"

He smiled
into his beer, thought about the time he tried to break a tornado when he was
younger, by making a cross with two knives nine times in a row. "They
exist for a reason, you know."

"Yes,
to scare people into submission."

"I'd
think, with your line of work, you'd have a little bit more of an open mind
about things like this."

"I'm
a strange combination of open mind and skeptic. I don't believe in frightening
people—I believe in using science to prove fact. Once you know the facts, the
reasons, well, it can be very freeing." She paused. "You don't buy
it."

"Not
a bit. You must have some superstitions, even if you don't really believe
them."

"I
don't walk under ladders, if that's what you mean. But that's because walking
under a ladder is unsafe." She propped her hands on her hips, managing to
look both serious and cute. "Now
I'm
starving—it's definitely time
for food."

The
kitchen had fared almost as bad as the living room. The cabinet doors had been
wrenched from their hinges, and the silverware drawer had somehow slid out,
spilling forks and spoons onto the floor. Only the dish towel Haley must have
bought remained intact. It still hung on the stove, neatly folded and
unscathed.

"I
don't think we've got any dishes left," he said, without taking his eyes
from the towel. And, as he watched, it slowly slid off the handle and onto the
muddy floor below it.

He
scooped up the towel and stared at it. "Shit," he muttered.

"What?
Is there a dropping-dish towel superstition?"

"Means
company's coming." And really, that one had always proven true for him.
Maybe the old man was coming back… or worse.

She
looked past him, through the half-shattered kitchen window. "
Bebe
,
ain't no one comin' out in this one," she said in an exaggerated drawl.

"Ah,
she thinks she can speak in Cajun tongues," he murmured.

"And
soon I'll be learning to make gumbo and wrestling alligators." She took a
step forward and winced. "Dammit, I thought I got all the glass up."

"You
still should be wearing shoes,
bebe
," he said, not giving a shit
about his own bare feet. "Stay there." In three strides, he closed
the distance between them and picked her up, carried her to the kitchen table
and set her next to some of her equipment.

"That
really wasn't necessary," she said.

"Just
sit still." He cradled her foot against his thighs, saw blood oozing from
the area surrounding the shard of glass lodged into the arch.

"It
doesn't look too deep. Stop staring and just pull it out."

"Bossy
thing, aren't you?"

She
jerked her foot back and shoved him away. "I'll do it myself."

"Hey."
He grabbed her foot again. "Relax. It was a joke."

"Sure
it was. Because you're such a funny guy, Remy. A bundle of laughs."

He
had no idea what had gotten her back up, but she was definitely riled.
Curiosity tugged at him, but first things first. "I'm going to pull the
glass out and see if you need stitches. I've got my medic kit with me, so I
could—"

With
a muffled curse, she yanked the glass out and hurled it to the floor. He
grabbed the dish towel he'd draped over the back of one of the old, mismatched
kitchen chairs and wrapped it around her foot to stop the bleeding.

"What
the hell are you trying to prove, Haley?"

Haley's
foot stung where she'd ripped the shard from her flesh. She tore her foot from
Remy's hands.

"I'm
not trying to prove anything to anyone," she said, even though it wasn't
true at all. There was so much to prove—to the agency, to her old CO, to her
parents. That her parents were dead didn't matter. "Can you give me a
little space, please?"

"Yeah,
just like you've given me.
Espesces de tete dure
," he muttered with
a shake of his head, but he didn't seem angry or upset.

"And
what does that mean?"

"Means
you're hardheaded." He ignored her request to back off and grabbed her
foot again, used the towel to put pressure on the wound.

"I
said, I can do it myself."

"I'm
sure you can do a lot of things yourself, but that doesn't always mean you
should."

"I'm
like you, Remy. I don't count on too many people." She hadn't needed
ACRO's dossier on Remy to know that either. His attitude screamed,
Loner
.

His
gaze locked on hers, making her shift uncomfortably on the hard wooden surface
under her, and she mentally berated herself for giving away more than she'd
wanted to about her own life, not to mention how much she knew about his.