“I’ll call Mimi Seitler tomorrow and see if we can get a list of what we had in the shed,” Carrie said. “I know we had some rare books donated a while back. I hope they weren’t just boxed and put out there. That could be disastrous.”
“Do you want me to call Bill Sint?” Lindsey asked. “He may be more forthcoming, talking to me.”
Carrie thought about it for a moment. “I appreciate that, but he’s going to have to start talking to me sometime. It might as well be now. I’ll call him in the morning, too.”
Lindsey noticed that Carrie had a little color in her cheeks and her eyes had lost some of their grief-stricken haze. She was a doer; maybe having a cause like the warehouse collapse would help her through this stressful time.
Sully finished his tea and Nancy reached out to take his mug.
“Thanks,” he said. “That hit the spot. If you all don’t mind, I’m going to get some shut-eye. The storm is supposed to blow over by morning, but I have a feeling the digging out may take a few days.”
Lindsey felt the sore muscles in her shoulders bunch in protest at the thought of more digging, and she winced.
“Care to walk me out?” Sully asked her.
Lindsey was about to answer when Nancy said, “Of course she will.”
Lindsey turned to look at her. Subtle, Nancy was not.
“What?” Nancy asked, the picture of innocence. “Someone has to lock the door behind him.”
Sully grinned at Lindsey as he rose from his seat. He picked up a candle and stopped before her chair and held out his free hand to help her up. Lindsey let him pull her out of the chair. To her surprise, he didn’t let go of her hand as they walked toward the door.
Lindsey felt her pulse kick up a notch. As if he knew, Sully looked down at her and grinned. His dimples bracketed his mouth and his smile almost outshone the candle he held in his other hand.
The strains of Charlie’s guitar could be heard up above, and Lindsey noticed that Heathcliff hadn’t followed them to the door. When she glanced back, he was getting a treat that looked suspiciously like bacon from Nancy.
She closed the door behind them. The foyer was cold and she shivered. Sully set the candle down on the windowsill above the radiator. Their shadows flickered against the wall as a small draft from the window made the candle dance.
“I had an ulterior motive for getting you out here,” he said.
So much for the cold; Lindsey felt her whole body flash hot with anticipation.
“Really?” she asked. “So you were trying to get me alone?”
Sully’s grin deepened and Lindsey was mortified to hear that her voice held a decidedly flirty tone. It was too late to retract the words, and she felt her face heat up in embarrassment.
“What I meant to say was-” she began, but he interrupted her by pulling her close.
“You’re shivering,” he said. He opened his coat and hugged her close.
The proximity to his warmth made her dizzy, and she was relieved that he was holding her up or she might have toppled over from the contact.
His voice was close to her ear, and when he spoke, his words were little more than a whisper.
“I didn’t want to say anything to Carrie,” he said. “But I don’t think the warehouse roof collapsed because of the snow.”
“What?” She pulled back and discovered her face was just inches from his.
In the candlelight, his normally bright blue eyes had darkened to a deep navy, and she was momentarily distracted by the heady scent of him, a masculine bay-rum sort of smell, and she lost the thread of the conversation.
“About ten sheds were demolished,” he said. “From what I could tell, a small explosive was used to do the damage. I think whoever did it was counting on the blizzard being blamed.”
“But why?”
Sully shrugged and Lindsey felt his hands slide up and down her back at the movement. She swallowed hard, trying to clear her head.
“The target could be any one of them, but the Friends shed was in the center of the rubble, leading me to think it’s the one that was the object of the break-in.”
Lindsey blinked and tried to focus on his words. Someone had deliberately broken into the storage shed.
“Do the police know?” she asked.
“I haven’t said anything yet. Owen thinks it was the storm and until the police have a chance to check it out, nothing is for sure.”
“We need to find out what was in that shed,” she said.
She glanced up to see if he agreed and found him studying her. His gaze traced her features, and he looked as if he was contemplating kissing her. Lindsey felt her breath stall in her lungs.
In an instant, she knew that she would welcome it, and that she could no longer deny that she had a case of the scorching hots for Mike Sullivan.
He leaned down; she leaned up. They were a breath apart when a door slammed above them, followed by the pounding sound of Converse sneakers bounding down the stairs in their direction.
Lindsey and Sully broke apart. She cupped the back of her neck with a hand and tried to appear casual as Charlie popped into the foyer with them.
“Leaving already?” Charlie asked.
Sully glared at him, looking like he wanted to pick him up and toss him out into the snow. For some reason this made Lindsey feel unaccountably better. She didn’t want to be the only one feeling denied, and she was quite pleased that Sully looked as frustrated as she felt.
Sully looked over at her and said, “Lock the door behind me.”
She gave him a snappy salute, and his mouth curved up in one corner. He opened the door and gave her a scorching look. “We’ll revisit this conversation later.”
CHAPTER 19
BRIAR CREEK
PUBLIC LIBRARY
The door shut behind him and Lindsey stood staring at it until Charlie nudged her.
“Your candle blew out,” he said.
Lindsey couldn’t have disagreed more, but she picked up the smoking wax stub from the windowsill and followed him back into the main room.
Nancy and Carrie were huddled by the fire. No one said as much, but they all started to assume their sleep positions. Somehow, while the storm raged outside, it felt as if there was strength, or at least warmth, in numbers.
Charlie stretched out in his recliner while Lindsey took the other. Heathcliff climbed up with her and Lindsey snuggled him close.
Carrie and Nancy departed to their rooms, and a silence fell over the house, broken only by the whistling wind and the occasional hiss from the gas fire, which Nancy had turned down to blue flicker.
Even though it warmed her from the toes on up, Lindsey decided not to think about Sully or what might have happened in the foyer if Charlie had been just a few minutes later. She wasn’t sure if he had been planning to kiss her or if it was just her own temporary insanity at being that close to an attractive man.
It had been almost a year since she’d left John, and she wasn’t sure she could even read a signal from a man anymore. She had the horrible feeling that she was going to embarrass herself by leaning in to kiss Sully when he was merely trying to tell her she had spinach in her teeth.
She decided to think about what Sully had told her about the warehouse instead. He thought the damage had been deliberate. But why?
