Amy insisted that Zack stay at the hotel. He insisted that Luigi drive her home in the Bentley. Since the rain was coming down in sheets, and she didn’t look forward to the four hour drive home in her current state of hysteria, she agreed. Her children needed a mother all in one piece.
When they arrived in Northfork after midnight, she apologized to Luigi. He seemed stoic about the whole episode, while still managing to emanate an air of disapproval. She swore she’d make up for the ungodly hour to him later, then stumbled upstairs to her empty apartment rather than wake Jo’s household.
She crawled into her cold bed and shivered in the dampness generated by the torrential rain pounding on the roof, missing Zack’s warm body radiating heat next to hers, yet knowing the longer she stayed and continued to dream, the harder it would be to say good-bye. She’d spent this last year sleeping alone. She’d learn to get used to it again. Somehow. In a million years or so.
Zack had wanted to take her and the kids to London. She’d thought he just wanted an affair. He wanted them to meet his parents. Was he insane? Or was she?
What he suggested was impossible. An international entrepreneur might be used to living on planes and in hotels. Change was nothing to him. He’d worked his way into the community, the mill — her life — in a few days, and could walk away just as easily.
She couldn’t do that.
Assuming she could as easily fit into his life as he did into hers was a monstrous leap of faith even she couldn’t make. It had taken her years to figure out what she wanted…and he wanted to turn everything she knew about herself inside out on a whim? Her children needed stability. Routine. Consistency.
He hadn’t mentioned marriage.
What in hell was she thinking? She didn’t want marriage, ever again.
She wept into her pillow, too exhausted to sort it all out.
* * *
The wind ripped at the roof over the apartment as Amy staggered from bed and wrapped herself in a robe the next morning. She’d left her electric kettle at the office, so she filled a sauce pan with water for her tea and reached for the phone.
She hated wind. She watched the rain course down the huge windows, shielding the view of the mountain, and waited for Jo to answer the phone on her end.
“I got in late last night,” she told her sister at her greeting. “I thought I’d take today off and putter around the cottage. What do you say I take the monsters off your hands? You’ve been a gem to take care of them. I owe you and Mom heaps and bunches.”
“You got the mill running,” Jo replied. “Mom thinks you walk on water. Of course, if you’ll look out the window, you’ll see that you might have to walk on water to get over here. The highway has turned into white-water rapids.”
Amy carried the cordless to the front window and tried to see the street, but everything was a gray haze of wind and water. “That looks bad. Maybe I better go down to the café and start some coffeepots running.”
She had an ugly thought. “Have you heard anything from the mill? Has the river started rising?”
Jo’s usual effervescence went silent as she grasped the horrible implication. “Let me call someone to look. The SUV won’t be safe out there. Or Flint could come up and get the pickup and drive over.”
“Left the pickup in High Point. All I have is Luigi and the Bentley. I’ll call Hoss. He has that old Land Rover. We might have to call off the shift today.”
She hung up on Jo and flipped through her card file for Hoss’s number. Punching it into the phone, she clicked on the television for a weather report.
She’d been living on such a high cloud this past week that she hadn’t heard the news or weather or anything outside her own little bubble. This was what happened when grasshoppers convinced ants to play.
“I’ve just done been down there,” Hoss reported when she asked. “It’s rising fast. The bridge ain’t safe once the water goes over it. You’d better start calling and canceling. Guess that hurricane that hit the Gulf is finding its way up here.”
Amy stared out the window in growing horror. “You remember what happened the last time a hurricane came inland from the Gulf?”
“Yeah, baby,” Hoss said with regret. “That man of yours got a yacht to save us?”
Amy said a word that hadn’t passed her lips in a decade, then started giving orders.
* * *
Zack found one of Amy’s sweaters on the floor of the hotel closet. He picked it up, and the gentle aroma of jasmine wafted around him. His insides knotted at the memories produced by the scent.
He’d made colossal mistakes in his life. Letting Gabrielle drive to the Alps with Danielle had been one of them.
He didn’t want to lose the woman and children he loved…again.
He couldn’t help thinking that his leaving Northfork now would be a mistake that would hurt a lot of people. But he didn’t trust his own judgment. He wanted Amy, and he liked getting what he wanted. He was capable of justifying and rationalizing until he was convinced that going after her was the right thing to do.
Maybe she was right and they didn’t belong together. His parents certainly had proved that love didn’t make a marriage work. He thought his parents loved each other. They simply couldn’t live together. Or even choose a country to live in. He and Amy had entire continents separating them. So maybe they needed time apart to think about it.
The only thing he knew absolutely was that he loved his work and he didn’t want to return to the lonely way he’d lived these last ten years.
Crushing the silk knit in his fist, Zack punched Pascal’s speed-dial number on his cell and waited for his financial consultant to answer. He watched the rain patter outside the hotel window and wondered if Amy had made it home safely last night.
Stupid thought. If she hadn’t, Luigi would have called.
Amy hadn’t called him this morning.
Absence might make the heart grown fonder, but Zack’s simply hurt from her rejection. Contemplating strings of lonely mornings like this, he growled into the receiver when Pascal finally answered.
“Have Brigitte schedule my flight. I am almost done here. We have enough orders to operate for the next six months, at least. Set a date with the Versailles committee for next week. I am meeting with the Smithsonian next month, so I cannot linger over there. We will need to find a manager for the Versailles project.”
He had spent ten years building his fame and reputation. It was time he rested on his laurels, picking and choosing his projects. He liked it in the States. He disliked Versailles. Easy choice. Those in the future might not be so easily decided.
He clicked on the local news to check the weather while he discussed arrangements for the project with Pascal. He muted the talking heads until the weather map appeared, then flicked the sound on in time to hear —
The hurricane hitting the North Carolina mountains has caused a landslide on the Blue Ridge Parkway, causing that road to be closed, according to the state police.
A choppy video of rushing brown waters and toppling trees followed. An SUV floated past the remains of a home crumbling into the river. A list of school and work cancellations scrolled across the bottom of the screen.
Zack didn’t wait to see if the mill was listed. Cursing, he hung up on Pascal and hit the speed dial for Luigi’s cell. And got no answer.
Now wasn’t the time to panic. He’d do that later, after he found Amy and the children and saw them to safety.
If Amy didn’t see the sense in leaving the mountains now, and coming to live with him, then his father would be right. American women were too stubborn and independent to live with.
Zack knew he was kidding no one, not even himself, but he needed a balm to soothe his rattled nerves, and Amy wasn’t here.
The drive to the mountains would take hours. He prayed there were still roads left for him to drive on by the time he got there.
* * *
“The cell tower must be down.” Luigi stoically clicked his useless clamshell closed and with Hoss’s help, heaved a computer server onto a dolly.
“Leave, now,” Amy ordered. “You and Hoss take the Rover and go. I’d appreciate it if you’d check on the kids at Jo’s, but get the heck out of here while you can.”
Hoss snorted. “Flint and Jo can take care of the kids. I’m not crossing that bridge now.”
“And we’re not leaving you anywhere near those computers,” Luigi added ominously, pushing the dolly toward the elevator to the second floor.
A gust of wind and rain swept water under the doors. It wasn’t enough to cause alarm yet, but Amy didn’t want to risk all of Zack’s new equipment and their small inventory of cloth. She’d had Luigi drive her to the office so she could call every employee on their payroll and tell them to stay home, but some of their workers had insisted on coming in to help anyway.
The mill was their livelihood, and people up here knew how to fight for what was theirs. As long as the mill building itself held, they’d be fine. The heavy machinery couldn’t be hauled to higher ground, but they were moving everything else that could be.
Hoss checked out the second-story windows and yelled down from the balcony, “Bridge is under water. Hope y’all brought lots of good food.”
Amy closed her eyes and prayed. She prayed for the safety of her children first. Flint’s log cabin was sturdy enough, but if the mountain decided to slide, a cabin wouldn’t stop it. At least they were away from the river. So was her mother. She was the fool down in the valley.
She wished she could sing like Jo. A good round of “Amazing Grace” would do wonders at a time like this.
The electricity flickered and went out.
“I didn’t do it!” she shouted into the sudden darkness.
Nervous laughter rippled across the huge echoing room. She’d counted a dozen employees hauling inventory up the stairs, most of them older workers without small children at home. The rain would stop soon, she tried to tell herself. All would be well.
Thunder rolled overhead, and the rain poured harder.
“Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah!” a voice sang out in the darkness.
Laughter followed, but more voices lifted in the old gospel song.
“Sister help to trim the sail,” Amy sang with the next verse. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She loved these people. She couldn’t leave, no matter how much she loved Zack.
Thinking of him had the tears rolling faster. She loved his charm, his humor, and his intelligence. But most of all, she loved the man buried deep inside who so desperately craved the love of others. And before she could even consider all the permutations of that, she had to let him go.
“The river is deep and the river is wide,” she sang with great feeling. The chorus had never held so much meaning as it did now, with the river slowly covering the floor of the old building.
Carrying a heavy bolt of tapestry toward the stairs, Amy splashed through an ankle-deep low spot. The mill had survived floods before, she told herself.
But cleaning the machinery would take months. They’d have to shut down production.
“Chills the body, but not the soul,” rang to the rafters.
Amy wanted nothing more than to fling her chilly body into Zack’s warm arms right now, apologize fervently, and promise she’d never leave again. She would never again force him into anything his sensible head said not to do, if only he would speak to her after this was over.
But she knew she lied.
She’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. She couldn’t let her home die. So she’d simply have to find some way to save the mill by herself.
She guessed that was why bodies had souls. And hearts. Love and courage would keep them going when all else failed.
“There’s benches over in the Music Barn,” someone called from the floor. “Maybe we could prop some of these bigger pieces up on benches and hope the river don’t rise much more.”
Amy glanced out the window. Muddy water swirled across the parking lot and between the buildings. It wasn’t deep yet, but it would rise swiftly as the river rushed down the mountain.
“Works for me,” Hoss shouted, clattering down the stairs in his big boots.
Amy knew she didn’t have the authority to stop him. She wished Zack was here to tell him they were fools, that machinery wasn’t worth their lives.
She glanced up the hill where her cottage was hidden by trees. Without the mill, she’d lose her home.
“If anyone goes out there, I’m following,” she shouted into the darkness below. “So you better think twice before you open that door, Hoss Whitcomb! That isn’t white water out there, and you can’t raft on it.”
She could feel the fresh damp breeze and see the rectangle of light as he defiantly opened the door.
“It’s just a little bitty creek, Ames,” Hoss shouted back. “You just come right on out and wade in it if you like.”
She smacked her hand into the wall as a line of people followed him out into the dangerously swirling waters.
“You can’t stop people fighting for their lives,” Luigi said from beside her. “Zack would have been down there, leading them on.”
Which is why she didn’t belong in his world. She belonged in her cozy kitchen, with her children at her feet, baking muffins with pig snoses.
But thanks to Zack, she’d learned she could do what she had to do. And do it damned well.