Rain of Fire by Linda Jacobs

Author:Linda Jacobs [Jacobs, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781605429205
Publisher: Medallion Press, Inc.
Published: 2006-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

SEPTEMBER 26

Hours later, Kyle lay in her sleeping bag beneath the sky. The fingernail of pale moon reminded her of when she was five, looking through her father’s telescope at the brilliant pockmarked surface. He’d shown her Saturn’s gauzy rings and the big red spot on Jupiter that glared like a baleful eye.

Once Dad had pointed out a little spark moving fast against the black of beyond and told her it was a Russian Sputnik.

Tonight, as the bright bead of another satellite fell between the stars, she was in a different sort of cold war. Ten feet from her, Nick snored evenly, while Wyatt had spread his bedding farther away. The wind bore the stench of burned rug.

She’d never been able to sleep when she drank. Oh, she’d fall into a stupor for a while and then awaken feeling like hammered rat shit. With a cottony mouth and throbbing temples, the iceberg peak of a huge submerged hangover, she realized that even though her sleeping bag had good insulation, the cold was seeping through.

Reality was insinuating itself back into her consciousness, as well. Brock’s prediction had come true. And if the new moon quake’s focus plotted on the plane of the fault running through the Saddle Valley what did that mean? Could her suspicion of this afternoon be correct, and the gas seeps along the valley really be evidence that magma was rising along the fault? She would have to talk with Nick about it in the morning.

She looked at him, his forehead a pale shape against the darkness. If there had been no earthquake, what would have happened between them? She thought she knew, something naked, raw … and needful, for she’d been alone too long. Yet, how did he view what they’d been about to embrace, with the passion she thought she’d seen in his eyes, or with the kind of crass male indifference he’d thrown in Wyatt’s face?

Twisting her head toward Wyatt, she saw that he lay with his hands clasped behind his head, staring at the heavens. She had an idea how much more virulent his anger would have been had he walked in on her and Nick in flagrante delicto.

Something surged inside her. Whether it was anger at Wyatt for not joining the Nick Darden fan club or hurt at his continued betrayal of their prior closeness, she didn’t know. Maybe she’d brought this on herself by refusing to tell Wyatt the reason for her tears at Earthquake Lake, or not recounting enough details of her and Nick’s past when Wyatt asked the other day, but that didn’t make her sense of loss less painful.

She didn’t expect to fall back to sleep, but the next thing she knew her eyes stung in the relentless morning light. The generator rattled and coughed. Her headache was a horror, and her head stung in the cold.

When she raised it, she saw that at least four inches of powdery snow covered her sleeping bag. Nick’s was still mounded nearby and his frosty hair stood up in disheveled little peaks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.