COLLIN HELD HIS foot firmly on the four-wheeler’s accelerator, forcing the vehicle through the shearing wind. The rain held back, but the skies remained gray and angry-looking. The tornado siren stopped, and he breathed easier.
He’d followed the muddy track from the house to the lake, but there was no sign of Savannah. He paused near the dock beside the churning water and checked the weather app on his phone. Another thick line of storms was building to the west. If she had gotten this far, it was only another three miles to the ranch. She could be anywhere between, but he didn’t see tracks in the mud. Even with the hard rain, he thought he would see some kind of sign that Savannah had been this direction.
He looked behind him. She might have stopped at the cabin for shelter. It would only take a couple of minutes to check, and if she wasn’t there, he would continue toward the ranch.
Collin returned up the muddy track to the ridge, the four-wheeler’s wheels slipping a bit in the mud. The cabin was dark, but since it had only rudimentary power, that wasn’t surprising. Power was always the first thing to go up there.
He stopped the four-wheeler and went to the porch. The door opened before he could reach for the knob. Savannah, soaking wet and wrapped in the old quilt, stood shivering in the doorway.
“I r-ran out of g-gas,” she said and pointed to the side of the cabin. He saw the rear of the four-wheeler peeking around the corner. “City girl sen...sensibility strikes again,” she said and smiled.
Collin wrapped his arms around her, not caring that her soaking-wet body was getting him wet, too.
“You can’t go running off into a storm like that.”
“I didn’t know a storm was coming. I was just mad.”
“Yeah, well, me, too.”
The siren sounded again and Collin pushed Savannah inside. A weather alert scrolled across his phone, warning of a possible tornado. His signal blinked out before Collin could look at impact areas or damage predictions.
“We need to take cover.”
“I was hiding under the bed earlier,” she said, and Collin couldn’t tell if she was joking. He stared at her, heart pounding.
“Seriously, it seemed like the best option with the windows rattling and the walls creaking.”
Collin pressed his mouth to hers. “Never, ever, hide under a bed when weather sirens are going off,” he said when he released her. Dragging the big table to the wall, he motioned her under it. “Rafters can go right through a mattress. A hard-topped table is sturdier, offers more protection.”
“Thanks for the lesson,” she said, ducking under the table. “Would you get your butt under here with me now?”
But Collin couldn’t stop rambling about tornado protocol. “Of course, storm cellar or a basement is the best option, but we don’t have either of those up here.”
Savannah grabbed his hand under the table. Collin tried his phone again, but the cell signal was gone. That meant the storm had taken down a tower. And that meant it wasn’t just a storm and those sirens weren’t just warnings. He pulled Savannah’s body more firmly against his.
“Is it a tornado?”
He considered lying. “Yeah, those sirens aren’t just warnings, and it’s knocked out a tower somewhere,” he said, jiggling his phone. Hail began to pound the cabin roof.
Savannah shifted closer to him. “I’m glad you found me.”
“Yeah,” he said, running a hand over her head. “Me, too. It isn’t every day a beautiful, ticked-off woman tells me she loves me and then rides off into a tornado.”
Savannah elbowed him. “In my defense, you were being a jerk, and could you lie and tell me this is only a severe storm? Please?”
“No, I won’t lie to you,” he said, and he realized he meant more than just lying about a storm. He didn’t want to lie to Savannah about anything. He didn’t want to leave out anything, and he didn’t want to tell any more half-truths. He wanted to share his life with her.
He loved her.
The weather siren faded into nothing. Collin waited a moment and then left the relative safety of the table to look outside.
Large chunks of hail and a few roof shingles littered the yard around the cabin, but there was no major damage that he could see, at least to the clearing around the cabin.
Savannah joined him on the porch.
“Did you push the four-wheeler back here?” She nodded. “I’d have just run for shelter.”
“I was trying to be responsible.”
“Well, next time ditch the four-wheeler and run for cover, would you? You’ll stay drier.” And be safer, he thought but didn’t say the words.
Savannah looked up at the sky. The thick, gray clouds from earlier had thinned, letting a little blue through. Savannah pointed, the quilt dropping to puddle at her feet.
“That doesn’t look good,” she said.
Collin looked in the direction she indicated, and it was as if a shutter had been drawn over the sky. The thick clouds were still there, but there was also a green tint. The clouds began to rotate and the wind picked up. No warning sirens sounded, but Collin had no doubt what this was.
“Get inside,” he said, pushing Savannah back through the door. She crawled under the table and Collin followed her, putting his arms around her waist as he cradled her body against his.
Wind rushed by the windows, rattling the panes of glass. He couldn’t hear anything but the wind, couldn’t feel anything but Savannah’s ragged breathing.
Savannah held tightly to his hand and yelled, “Is it on us?”
“No,” he yelled back. “Close, but it’s not here.”
“What do we do?”
“We wait,” he said as the wind continued to howl around the cabin.
* * *
SAVANNAH THOUGHT THE howling wind and shaking windows would never stop. She sat under the kitchen table, praying the thick oak would hold the roof of the house off them if the tornado came, holding Collin’s hand.
She didn’t want to die, not when she’d made an idiot of herself by getting mad and admitting she was in love with him. She should have told him in a more romantic setting—maybe after they’d made love—not in the middle of an argument involving his sister and street art.
He squeezed her hand as a particularly strong gust of wind hit the house. It sounded angry to her, almost like the roaring of an airplane engine on take-off.
And then everything went quiet. The wind dissipated, rain stopped lashing at the windows and the eerie gray-green light outside seemed to lift.
She looked at Collin but he didn’t move for a long moment. Finally he hit a button to activate his phone. He tapped a few buttons but nothing worked and he put it back in his pocket.
Together, they crawled out from under the table and went to the porch. Big limbs from the cucumber magnolia crisscrossed the yard, along with bits of shingles and chunks of hail, already starting to melt in the steaming heat. She saw a few of the orchard trees bent at odd angles.
“Oh, God,” she said, her voice quiet in the stillness surrounding the cabin.
“It missed us,” Collin said, looking up at the sky.
“This is a miss?”
He nodded. “It’s a miss. Straight-line winds, maybe, but that’s the worst of it.”
“Farmer’s intuition?”
“Something like that,” he said and smiled. He put his arms around her, pulling her body against his. “I’m glad I found you.”
“Me, too.”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you. And Amanda. But mostly you.”
“Sometimes I bring the yelling out in people.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” she asked.
“Don’t be self-deprecating about the woman I love,” he said.
Warmth filled her heart. “You don’t have to say that just because I got mad and yelled it at you back at the house.” She wanted to believe he meant it, but something held her back.
“I’m not saying it because you yelled it at me first. I’m saying it because I mean it. I love you, Van.”
Savannah looked up at him and she knew she had tears in her eyes. “I’m not yelling it now, either, and I’m not angry, and I am glad we survived whatever this was,” she said, gesturing at the mess surrounding them. “And I love you.”
Collin pressed his lips to hers, and Savannah thought it was the sweetest kiss she had ever experienced.
“Let’s go see how the rest of the orchard fared. And if the landlines are working, I’d better call your family to let them know you’re okay.”
Savannah climbed onto the four-wheeler behind Collin, and he drove slowly over the muddy lane back to the orchard. More shingles littered the yard from the barn and from the house, and the towering oak he usually parked the truck under had lost a big branch. But at first glance, everything looked fine.
“Gran, they’re here,” Amanda yelled, coming out to the porch. She jumped off the steps and hugged Collin. Gran limped to the porch.
“Thank God,” she said, clasping her hands to her chest.
“We’re okay,” Collin said. “Everything okay inside?”
“A few knickknacks knocked off the shelves, but nothing major,” Gran reassured him from the porch. Savannah breathed easier. “Phones are out, though.”
“So is my cell.” He looked around as if assessing where to start. “I’ll start cleaning up. Do you have a radio on?”
Gran nodded. “It’s all static, but it’s on. Amanda, you can help me get the mess inside cleaned up.”
“Should I collect shingles with you?” Savannah asked, unsure what her job was right now. She wanted to contact her family to let them know she was okay, and she wanted to know they were okay, but with the phones out of order she couldn’t call.
“No, go inside with Gran and Amanda. I’ll get the worst of this picked up.”
She pressed a kiss to his lips. “I know how to pick up shingles,” she said.
“There could be nails and staples. I’ll deal with it.”
It took nearly two hours to set the inside of the house to rights, and another forty-five minutes for Collin to collect the roof shingles and secure them in one of the oversize cardboard boxes they used to transport things to the farmers’ market. When he finished, he told Gran and Amanda to stay at the house while he took Savannah home.
She gasped when they reached the end of the lane. The little farm stand had been flattened by the wind. Destroyed fruit had rolled across the road and into the ditches on either side. The folding chair Amanda usually sat in was twisted around the base of a tree and the mailbox was nowhere to be seen.
“Holy cow,” Savannah said. “Your stand.”
“I guess it’s good I have that grocer contract coming up, huh?”
“Don’t even joke about that.”
“It’s joke or lose my mind with the what-ifs. Amanda could have been in that stand.”
“She wasn’t.”
“She would have been if we hadn’t been fighting.”
Pain struck Savannah in the chest. “But she’s fine.”
Collin got out of the truck and moved the worst of the debris off the road. It took them nearly thirty minutes to drive the ten miles to town, and with every minute they were in the truck Savannah’s anxiety level rose.
There was debris everywhere. Power poles were strewed across the fields like a child’s forgotten Lincoln Logs. A cell phone tower had snapped in two and lay in another field.
“That explains the cell coverage,” Collin said as they passed. He squeezed her hand in his.
A couple of cars had been flung into the ditch at the side of the road; when Collin stopped to check, no one was inside. Savannah wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Mailboxes lay across the blacktop; a few had been flung into the branches of nearby trees. Branches and roof shingles were everywhere. At the city limits, the welcome sign had been ripped to shreds.
In town, the damage was worse. Collin drove slowly down the street. Power and phone lines lay across several yards, roofs had been ripped from houses, and a few boats could be seen floating out in the middle of the lake, along with their moorings and portions of the wrecked docks.
“This isn’t straight-line winds.”
Collin shook his head. “This is a tornado.” He slammed his foot against the brake. The farmers’ market was a pile of rubble, cement blocks lay haphazardly around, and the plate-glass window shattered. Cars were stacked atop one another and sitting at odd angles in the street. A police cruiser rested under a downed power line.
People were everywhere, looking shocked. A few picked up random pieces of debris, but most couldn’t seem to comprehend what they were seeing.
Everywhere she looked, there was carnage. Savannah bit back the urge to tell Collin to go faster. She needed to get home. She needed to make sure her family was okay. Needing his support, she squeezed his hand.
“I know.” He looked at the ruined market for a long moment, then put the truck in gear and swerved to avoid another big tree branch. “I’ll get you there as soon as I can.”
Savannah’s heartbeat pounded and it was as if she couldn’t get any air into her lungs.
Collin put his hand at the nape of her neck and pushed her head down between her knees. “Breathe,” he ordered her, “just breathe.”
Savannah gulped in one and then two breaths of air, and when the truck floor stopped spinning beneath her, she sat up.
They’d cleared the city limits, and Collin turned onto the highway that would take them to the ranch. The worst of the damage seemed to be behind them.
The farther they got from town, the less destruction she saw. Tree branches and shingles still littered the fields and yards, but there were no more mailboxes wrapped around power poles and no cars flung into ditches like discarded toys.
A few minutes later Collin stopped the truck behind Mama Hazel’s sedan. The ranch seemed to be fine. No shingles in the yard. She could hear the cows mooing in the pastures.
“This is weird,” she said. “It’s like nothing happened here.”
“Probably nothing did. Tornados are weird that way. One street is destroyed, the next untouched.”
Collin took her hand and together they climbed the porch steps and went inside.
Mama Hazel sat in her rocking chair, puzzle book in hand, but staring straight ahead. When she saw Savannah, she made the sign of the cross over her chest and closed her eyes.
“Levi and your father just left to go find you.” She bustled to Savannah and drew her into a bear hug. “I told them to wait, but after you called—” She looked at Collin. “I couldn’t get them to wait once the storm passed.”
“The four-wheeler ran out of gas,” Savannah started to explain.
“We took shelter at Granddad’s cabin on the ridge.”
“I’m just glad you’re both okay. What about your family?”
Collin told her his family was fine. When he recounted the damage in town, Hazel’s expression clouded.
“It sounds devastating.”
Savannah wanted to go after her father and brother, but Collin convinced her to stay put. It seemed like a year had passed before she heard four-wheelers in the distance. The three of them hurried to the porch.
Bennett and Levi came around the side of the house and when they saw Collin’s truck, both seemed to relax.
“We tried to call. Phones are down,” Collin said, and then told them about the devastation they’d seen on the way to the ranch.
“We should go into town, see what we can do to help,” Bennett said. Levi and Collin agreed.
Savannah and Hazel stayed at the ranch, and as Savannah watched the taillights of Collin’s truck disappear down the road, she thought the worst had to be over.
* * *
COLLIN SURVEYED THE grove of peaches and kicked his booted foot against the four-wheeler’s tire. He’d taken to wearing boots instead of his usual tennis shoes because of the debris they continued to find around the orchard. Pieces of drywall, he didn’t know from where, and limbs and branches were everywhere. The little fence Granddad had built around the plum trees was completely gone.
“Crap,” he said.
Savannah echoed his thoughts. The peach trees had been hit the worst by the straight-line winds that accompanied the tornado on its way to the town. Entire rows had been flattened and on one side the trees were completely bald, all the leaves, blossoms and fruit littering the surrounding area.
“What do we do?” she asked.
Collin sighed. “Wait for the insurance adjuster to get here then replant. I’ll use some of the saplings from the greenhouse, but we’ll have to buy new stock, too.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“In three years, when the new trees start producing, it won’t be.”
In the meantime he was going to have to have a tough conversation with Westfall Foods. No peaches could mean no contract, and he really needed that contract now that the orchard had suffered severe storm damage. He’d also lost about fifty apple trees and at least as many pear.
“Oh, Collin, I’m sorry,” she said, and he squeezed her hand.
“The beauty of farming,” he said, only half kidding. When things went well, there was nothing better than working his orchard, but when things went badly...there was nothing worse than the sense of dread that accompanied a failed harvest.
Or a ruined orchard.
They returned to the house.
Amanda and Gran were waiting to go into town. Crews were working to get the town cleaned up, and the council had asked as many as could come to be at a meeting that afternoon.
Because of the damage to the city and county buildings, everyone met on the courthouse lawn. Someone had lined up folding chairs, but no one sat. People milled around, talking to friends and neighbors, but most still appeared to be shell-shocked.
Collin couldn’t blame anyone. The tornado had flattened three buildings: a day-care center set up inside an old church, an empty warehouse and the Slippery Rock Grill. Several other buildings and homes had lost roofs or windows.
Adam had run into the day-care where his kids were thought to be, trying to get them into the safe basement of the cabinetry business he ran with his father, but had gotten caught in the collapse of the building. The day-care workers had already taken the kids to the storm shelter in the basement of the sheriff’s office, but Adam hadn’t known that. He was in a coma in a Springfield hospital.
James’s father, Sheriff Jonathan Calhoun, had been caught in the storm, and was also in the Springfield hospital with a badly broken leg and a fractured wrist. They’d found him pinned under the police car Collin and Savannah had seen just after the storm, and Collin couldn’t stop blaming himself. If he’d just gotten out of the truck, he might have found Sheriff Calhoun. Might have gotten help sooner.
Thom Hall, the mayor, stepped to the front of the crowd and motioned at them with his hands.
“We just received word that the governor has declared Slippery Rock a disaster area. We’ll have help with the cleanup here within the next day,” he said, and it was as if the town breathed a sigh of relief. It was barely thirty-six hours since the tornado had struck, and a disaster declaration would go a long way toward putting Slippery Rock back together.
“We’ve received word that Sheriff Calhoun is recovering well, and we’re hoping for good news about Adam Buchanan soon, too.” Thom wiped at his brow. “In the meanwhile, I know the newspaper ran a few articles about the Bass Nationals hosting an event here in the fall—the tornado has put that on hold. They aren’t convinced we can get the marina and the outlying areas cleaned up in time.”
“We need that tourist money,” someone said from behind Collin. Several others joined in. Collin couldn’t have cared less about the fishing tournament. What was two days of tourism compared with all the disaster cleanup still to be done?
“Don’t worry, we’re still negotiating. What they’ve said is that if we can get a staging area set up, we could still be in the running. Originally, that area would have been at the fairgrounds, but the grounds were among those hit the hardest by the tornado. We need a vote on whether or not to proceed with the staging area.”
Collin stepped forward. “I think our time and money is best spent on businesses and homes and families that will be in Slippery Rock longer than a weekend.”
“Agreed,” said a voice behind him. He didn’t bother to look back. He didn’t care who agreed with him; it was obvious Slippery Rock needed to focus on rebuilding, not new building.
“Well, now, the thing is this tournament wouldn’t just be two days of tourism. We’ve done the research. The tournament spans two weekends, but the traffic leading up to the event is significant, and the increased traffic could last up to a year. That is nothing we can ignore.”
“We need all the bodies and money we can get working on businesses,” Collin said, “not some fishing expo that will be gone in two weeks.”
“What about a benefit?” Savannah said from beside him, and Collin looked at her as if she had grown horns.
“Benefit?” Thom asked.
“Something that will raise money for disaster relief while still providing the staging area the Bass Nationals needs to move forward.” She released Collin’s hand and moved to the front of the crowd. “Nashville is full of charitably minded people, both in the entertainment industry and out of it. With the right incentives, we could get a strong lineup of entertainment, and could probably get volunteers to work on the staging area. All those set designers and stage crews could probably come up with a strong design.”
“Savannah,” Collin whispered, but she didn’t hear him. Or she ignored him.
The townspeople began talking among themselves. Savannah spoke directly to Thom, and Collin’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head when she said she would make a few calls.
Calls to whom? She had no record label, no record deal, and she’d fired her manager just before the tornado. As the meeting broke up, he followed Savannah to the truck.
“What was that about?”
“A solution to the problem. The town possibly gets the staging area and Nashville artists get a project.”
“You’re not part of Nashville any longer.”
“True, but I know Nashville people. My not wanting to sing doesn’t preclude me from knowing people who do,” she said reasonably.
Collin couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that Savannah’s big solution to the town’s problem was to go back to people she no longer wanted to work with. Savannah volunteering for anything left him curious, and he knew that was just the annoyance talking. She wasn’t the self-absorbed person he had always assumed.
She was kind and warm and had a big heart.
He just wished in this case, she’d kept her kind, warm heart to herself.