Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (30 page)

“That’s right,” she
said with a sharp nod. “I started canning again when this crazy volcano blew up. The world’s gone bananas ever since Carter got elected. Everybody’s forgotten their morality, and now hellfire is raining down on us.”

Boone looked at me with an uneasy question in his expression. I shook my head to indicate we’d all be better of
f if he didn’t reply.

Dad’s cell phone rang. Grandma squinted at it like the devil’s handiwork. “Fol
ks used to talk to each other face to face,” she called to his retreating back. “Now everybody beeps and tweets, and I don’t know what it all means.”

“Hey
, Grandma,” I said, hoping to back up the brimstone bus before it left the station on a one way, non refundable trip. “Maybe I can help you the next time?”

“Help me what?”
she asked sourly.

“Can. I mean, I could learn.”

I’d surprised her, and her frown turned upside down. “Well, sure, sweetie. The girls in this family might need to know how to get along without a grocery store, how to keep a home the way my mother taught me.” She shot Boone a warning, as if to say
not yet
. “Never thought I’d see the day when Candy would start a garden. What we need to can is some meat.”

Dad danc
ed back in the kitchen. “Good news. Dr. Tucker’s old film X-ray machine finally bit the dust. He needs a new digi-ray, pronto. I’m going down there tomorrow to measure the room.”

Mom dashed from the dining room to give Dad a tight hug as a chorus of congratulations filled the room.

“Matthew, you and Daddy need to get deer tags,” Grandma said, unimpressed. “Violet and I are going to can some meat.”

I looked at Boone and mouthed, “Canned meat?” I’d been picturing green beans and applesauce, not chunks of venison. Gack. He smiled into his mug.

“Put chickens or turkeys on your list, Candy. We’ll teach Violet on those until we can get a steer or some venison.”

“Awesome,” I said half-heartedly.
 

 

Mom showed us pictures on her phone of long white refrigerated cases where the plastic-wrapped, foam trays of steak, pork chops, and chicken pieces usually lay. Empty. Produce shelves displayed only a few wilted lettuce leaves and two sleeves of celery, which Mom had bought. Dad shouldered a giant bag of rice labeled in Spanish to the dining room.

“Don’t worry,” Grandma said, patting my
back. “I know a lady who raises her own chickens. We’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

I’d thought canning
store-bought chicken
was
the old-fashioned way, but an additional step back into hunter-gatherer mode awaited me.

“Good thing we have
water on our property,” Dad said, like he owned a gold mine. “Not a bottle to be had, and the cashier said Gardenburg’s public supply is getting spottier every day.”

“Th
e pharmacy would only give me thirty days of my pills,” Grandma groused for the third time. “I’m supposed to get ninety. I told that fellow I couldn’t go back and forth to Gardenburg with gas prices the way they were, but he said something about rationing the popular drugs, like I take my heart medicine for fun.”
 

 

Dad left early for Dr. Tucker’s office in Kentucky. A steady rain fell, the power was off, the house held hostage by a damp, October chill.

“I’m going in to the newspaper,”
Mom said shortly after his departure. “If the power isn’t on there, we’re going to have to start using the old typewriters. I even found some carbon paper in the supply closet.”

She yelled up the steps to Sara. The high school resiliently
kept the semester going with porta-pots and the request for every student to dress warmly and bring his or her own food and drinks. As usual, Sara grumbled around in our dark kitchen, insisting more than half the kids were skipping and the material the teachers were able to cover without lights, computers, or Smartboards was “bogus.”

“Many generations learned with nothing more than one textbook, a slate and a piece of chalk,” Mom
retorted. “You’re Laura Ingalls, remember?”

Sara curled her lip. “If you start telling me to put my hair in two braids and wear a calico dress, I’m outta here
.” She flipped the hood of her raincoat up.

“At least you’ll get to see Danny,” I called.

“Whoo hoo.” She twirled her fingers in the air. “Ride in a smelly bus and sit in dark classrooms all day so maybe we can share my PBJ at lunch.” She glared at me, Boone and Mom. “My life sucks.” She punctuated her dismay with a slamming door.

Mom glanced over at me. “I keep
reminding myself I hated you at that age, too.” After shoving a few files in her bag along with a laptop with zero charge, she grabbed her own PBJ lunch and her keys. “If the power comes back on….”

“
I know what to do,” I promised. “And I’ll try to cook something for dinner, too. If it comes back on.” I eyed the camp stove with distrust. Mom and Dad had managed to make some good French press coffee this morning, and last night, Dad scrambled eggs, but I cooked on stoves with electric burners heated by the twist of a dial, not liquid fuel that had to be pressurized and released and lit with a lighter.

“You can at least boil some pasta or something,” Mom teased. “Boone
will show you how to light it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Boone said.

She smiled and shook her head. “You are such a Boy Scout.”

I laughed and socked him on the shoulder. “That’s what I keep telling him.” He fit right in with my family
, amazingly. Parker had always been like a kid in time out, sullen and too cool to interact much. I wondered if I’d worried about bringing Boone here because of a fear of the same mutual disinterest.

Boone looked mystified as Mom and I grinned at him.

“All right, you kids hold down the fort,” she said. “Matt said he was going to talk to you last night about your…you know….” She posed her hand into a gun like a little kid playing cowboy.

“Yes, ma’am, he did. I’ll put it away in the closet today, when no one is around.”

“Okay.” She looked out the window over the sink. “You’re right. The world is changing so fast.” I could see her mentally shake herself. “Oh well, I’m out. I’ll probably stay most of the day to make the trip worthwhile.”

I cleaned the breakfast dishes in a dishpan Mom kept full of soapy water and set them out to drain while Boone made a couple of wet trips in and out from his truck
. He wiped his feet each time he passed through with bags and packages to stow in his room. We managed to be somewhat productive all morning, which was saying something, considering we had no power, no running water, and very little light from the overcast sky, though the rain lightened to a drizzle.

After lunch, I sugge
sted we watch a movie on the ancient portable DVD player Sara and I shared on childhood road trips. I threw the cushions off the back of the couch while Boone picked one of the few movies from our library he hadn’t already seen.

W
e stretched out, side by side, to squint at the tiny screen. I worried the battery might not have enough power to play the whole movie, but it turned out to not matter. The sensual scenes of
The Thomas Crowne
Affair
moved the sexual spark from the screen directly to us.

B
eneath several fleece blankets, I couldn’t stop touching him. I nuzzled his neck and tasted his ear lobe. For days, I’d watched him labor with a shovel and a digging iron. I knew he was strong and skilled and sexy as hell, and I wanted—needed—to explore the hot skin of his chest.

“Violet,” he sighed when
I discovered rippling abs. I traced up to his chest, lightly haired, with definite pectoral action. “Baby, why are you always testing me like this?”

“Why do you always think so much?”

“One of us has to.”

“No,” I whispered. My lips brushed over his, side to side, as I shook my head. “Not every second of every minute of every day. Can’t we be in this moment?” I se
ttled into a real kiss, felt his split second of hesitation before he returned the kiss with abandon. He moaned into my mouth when I brushed a nipple with the flat of my hand.

His fingers speared into my hair to gently push my head back. “Not here.

“Why not?” I pinched the nipple lightly. His breath hissed between his teeth. A hint of rebellion hardened his face. I spoke before he could. “I’m not a princess in an ivory tower. If we were in your dorm room, would you stop? If we were alone in
your
parents’ living room?”

To answer, h
is hand finally slipped under my sweatshirt, then, in a deliciously commanding motion, he rotated to press me beneath his welcome weight. The DVD player thunked to the floor, forgotten. My legs went around his hips, with only fleece and denim dividing us, and I wanted him, a physical necessity akin to drawing air into my lungs.

He studied my face. “I’m not like this.”

“I know. You help others but you won’t take anything for yourself.”

His expression darkened.

“Even when you want it, even when it is wonderful and perfect, you won’t take it.” I goaded him, pushed for something I knew we were ready for. We were easy and good together, and this was meant to happen. I
needed
it to happen.

My eager fingers
found the lean valley made by the muscles along his spine and followed it to the small of his back.

His hips flexed forward
under the pressure of my fingertips. My body instinctively answered. He cupped my breast and I lifted toward his tentative possession, every square inch of my inflamed body eager to respond to his touch.

If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have worried about how his hand engulfed my rather diminutive boob, but I wasn’t thinking clearly
, and he didn’t seem to mind. He caressed and squeezed and shifted so his lips were on my neck.

“Boone,” I whispered, finally understanding what those sultry paragraphs in Mia’s regency romances were about.
My voice betrayed longing I’d never experienced before. He drove me mad, and I wanted more. I tugged at the bottom of his shirt. He readily complied, tossing it onto the coffee table.

“Boone,” I said again, reaching up to flutter my fingers over his awesome shoulders. He was all blo
ndness and tan and smooth skin. “You’re so gorgeous.”

He braced himself on his elbows, managing to reach one hand up to tuck my hair back. “You make me crazy. Every time I touch you, a little more crazy.” He eased my shirt up, giving me the chance to say no before he pulled it off. He studied m
y body. His hips moved against me again, an instinctive motion of appreciation, possessiveness and lust. The slow slide of his thumb across my breast made my back arch in return, to press against him, his hand, his erection, anything. Everything.

He moved to cup the other breast.

“They’re kind of small,” I whispered. I’d never minded my little boobs. I only worried that my dimensions wouldn’t thrill him the way his did me.

H
is smile was feral. “I’ve seen you in your tight little tank tops, Biker-girl, so I’m not surprised. And definitely not disappointed. You’ve got a hot body. Your legs feel like they could crush me if I don’t treat you right.” I stopped breathing when he lowered his head. The touch of his lips and tongue made my nipples tighten and prickle. “Perfect,” he murmured. I struggled to inhale as he nuzzled across my chest and down my belly then drifted back up to kiss me again. We touched and tested and learned, swirled and swelled our mutual desire until it pulsed like a living cocoon around us.