Page 21 of Angel's Smoke

An aggressive yet familiarhum didn’t so much tease Anna from sleep as slingshot her from it.

Her arm flew out blindly and quickly captured the glasses on her nightstand before they could clatter to the floor. Able to see, if not so willing to, Anna blinked to bring the numbers on her phone into focus.

Nine thirty a.m.

By the time cognition bestowed its awareness to her sleep-fogged brain, her bladder was already hammering out its SOS and likely had been for a good hour or two before then.

With a speed befitting quadruped hunters, Anna leaped from bed and bolted to the bathroom. Once her business was attended to, she simply stood in her hallway and let the sounds of her generator knit together the facts she couldn’t help but accept.

Her generator was on. It was nine thirty in the morning, and her generator had already been turned on. Not only that but the breaker switches had been flipped correctly so that the septic and water pumps were usable, a fact she regretted not realizing earlier when she’d thoughtlessly flushed the toilet.

And if the generator was on, that meant the person who’d fired it up was also still in her house.

Then she rememberedwhyit was on. Because someone must have gone back out in the middle of the night to shut everything down before they both fell asleep.

Inherhouse.

Anna quickly grabbed a sweatshirt and walked out into the living room. Beyond the window, in the light of day, the storm was in full gear, landing punches against her cabin and conifers alike. The ghostly howls pulling their bellows through the trees sank their teeth into her skin, hauling up goose bumps and reminders of her current circumstances—and who she was sharing them with.

As if summoned from the mist of her mind, Iron walked into her cabin from the front door. “Morning,” he said as he beat the snow off his boots.

“Um. Good morning. You were outside already?”

He shrugged out of his coat. “Had to see to a few things.”

“A few things being the generator?”

“Yeah.”

“And you figured out how to work the breakers?”

A smile curved his lips. “I’m good with electrical stuff.”

“Clearly,” she said, impressed. “Did you sleep okay last night?”

He nodded while keeping his eyes noticeably anywhere but on her face, a move she would have to unpack later. She didn’t miss the way her quilts were folded exactly the way she’d left them but now rested on the couch instead of the armchair.

“So, what’s the damage? Storm sounds like it’s finally worked itself up to full bore.”

“I checked the weather. Reports say it’ll move out around Sunday evening.”

Her heart sank. Damn. Sunday evening. That was decidedly not theit’ll be out of here in a couple of hoursanswer she’d been hoping for. “Have the snow predictions changed much?”

“Well, there’s about a foot out there now, so I’d say totals are moot at this point. The amount of exact tonnage is irrelevant when it’s all a shit ton. The cleanup will be brutal regardless.”

“Wonderful.” The way Present Anna would have kicked Past Anna’s ass up and down this mountain for not preparing better would have been some avalanche-worthy devastation in and of itself, for sure.

“Are you hungry? I brought some groceries in from my truck. I unpacked what I could in the kitchen. The rest are in a cooler on the porch under the overhang.”

“I’m sorry. Groceries?”

“Here.” Iron walked past her toward her piddling little kitchen, and damn if her quivering stomach didn’t have nine kinds of thoughts to express on the subject. What she saw was an answer to her pregnancy prayers.

An assortment of fresh fruit was the focal point of the display, her wooden mixing bowl laden with apples, bananas, and oranges. Beyond that was a sea of cans, jars, bread, and dried goods: tuna, mayonnaise, beans, pasta, peanut butter, and thegoodstrawberry jam, just to name a few. Stacked around it were individual servings of instant oatmeal in—her teeth sank into her lower lip—maple brown sugarandapple cinnamon varieties, along with assorted boxes of all her favorite and ruthlessly high-in-sugar breakfast cereals.

“Good thing about losing power in a snowstorm is you don’t need to worry about refrigeration. Anything we open that’s perishable, we can keep in my cooler out front. I’ve already got some milk and eggs in there. Besides, all the nonhibernating animals that would be interested in a snack are dealing with the same weather conditions as we are, so they’re stuck, too.”

“When and how did you go grocery shopping?”

---