Bentley Rick by Diana Palmer

Author:Diana Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-04-08T20:04:55+00:00

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BARBARA GLARED AT her son. “Can’t you just peel the tomato, sweetie, without taking out most of it except the core?”

He grimaced. “Sorry,” he said, wielding the paring knife with more care as he went to work on what looked like a bushel of tomatoes, a gift from an organic gardener with a hothouse, that his mother was canning in her kitchen at home. Canning jars simmered in a huge tub of water, getting ready to be filled with fragrant tomato slices and then processed in the big pressure cooker. He glared at it.

“I hate those things,” he muttered. “Even the safest ones are dangerous.”

“Baloney,” she said inelegantly. “Give me those.”

She took the bowl of tomatoes and dunked them into a pot of boiling water. She left them there for a couple of minutes and fished them out in a colander. She put them in the sink in front of Rick. “There. Now they’ll skin. I keep telling you this is a more efficient way than trying to cut the skins off. But you don’t listen, my dear.”

“I like skinning them,” he said with a dark-eyed smile in her direction. “It’s an outlet for my frustrations.”

“Oh?” She didn’t look at him, deliberately. “What sort of frustrations?”

“There’s this new woman at work,” he said grimly.

“Gwen.” She nodded.

He dropped the knife, picked it back up and stared at her.

“You talk about her all the time.”

“I do?” It was news to him. He didn’t realize that.

She nodded as she skinned tomatoes. “She trips over things that she doesn’t see, she messes up crime scenes, she spills coffee, she can’t find her cell phone...” She glanced at him. He was still standing there, with the knife poised over a tomato. “Get busy, there, those tomatoes won’t peel themselves.”

He groaned.

“Just think how nice they’ll taste in one of my beef stew recipes,” she coaxed. “Go on, peel.”

“Why can’t we just get one of those things that sucks the air out of bags and freeze them instead?”

“What if we have a major power outage that lasts for days and days?” she returned.

He thought for a minute. “I’ll go buy twenty bags of ice and several of those foam coolers.”

She laughed. “Yes, but we can’t tell how the power grid is going to cope if we have one of those massive CMEs like the Carrington Event in 1859.”

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“There was a massive coronal mass ejection in 1859 called the Carrington Event,” she explained. “When it hit earth, all the electrics on the planet went crazy. Telegraph lines burned up and telegraph units caught fire.” She glanced at him. “There wasn’t much electricity back in those days—it was in its infancy. But imagine if such a thing happened today, with our dependence on electricity. Everything is connected to the grid these days, banks, communications corporations, pharmacies, government, military and the list goes on and on. Even our water and power are controlled by computers. Just imagine if we had no way to access our computers.

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