“Me too.”
For a while they talked, about Carol and her fall, about Barb and the way she’d stepped up since. If Olivia was older, Sela would be tempted to tell her all about Ben, and the shower, and the tantalizing When we have sex comment, but rifle aside, Olivia was still a kid. And Sela had never been keen on sharing details of her sex life—or lack thereof—even with her close friends. She was a private person. Shy, yes, but also private. She held some things, some thoughts, very close. They were for her and for her alone.
Sela almost dozed off. Her eyes drifted closed; her head nodded. Olivia did doze, though she woke at regular intervals because sleeping soundly upright in a chair wasn’t something that was going to happen. Now and then they tried to keep one another alert with conversation about the weather and the future and their neighbors, but there were long periods of silence where neither of them had anything to say.
Her hands and feet got cold. She got out the hand warmer packs and squeezed to activate them, put one in each pocket and gave the others to Olivia who silently did the same. She took off her gloves so she could better feel the heat from the packs. As small as the heat source was, having warm hands was blissful and made her feel warmer all over. She began getting sleepy.
In an effort to wake herself up, she drank more water, got up and walked around. Olivia scooted her chair closer to the counter, crossed her arms on it, and rested her head on her arms. While she slept, Sela stood at the windows with her hands in her coat pockets and watched the cold, still night.
It was the reflection of moonlight on glass, a quick, subtle flash, that first caught her attention. She cocked her head, staring down the road. Then she heard the sound of engines, once commonplace but now so rare that adrenaline sent an electric charge through her body.
“Olivia!” she said urgently, because someone driving down the highway with their lights off couldn’t be good news.
“Hmm?” Olivia mumbled.
“Someone’s coming.”
Hurriedly she went to the counter and picked up the rifle, went back to stand beside the door and look out the windows. Olivia came to stand beside her, holding Carol’s .22 with the barrel pointing down and away from Sela. “I don’t see anything,” she whispered.
“Listen.”
The sound of engines was louder—not just one engine, but several. Again, not good.
“Oh no.” Olivia sounded dismayed. Sela felt as dismayed as Olivia sounded. She had come here because she knew there was a possibility someone would try to steal the gasoline, but faced with the reality of multiple people driving toward her with their headlights out—sneaking—her stomach tied itself in knots. First and foremost was a sharp terror that something would happen to Olivia.
“Get behind the counter,” she ordered.
“No.” Olivia’s tone wavered, but she stood her ground. “I’m with you.”
Sela pushed the door open, secured it so it stayed open. Maybe that was the wrong move but she didn’t know defensive strategies and she did know she didn’t want to shoot through glass. Her SUV was here; that and the open door might convince whoever was coming to keep on going.
“It could be people coming to get in line,” Olivia offered, hope in her voice.
“With their headlights off?”
“I guess not.”
Five vehicles, three pickups and two older-model cars, came into view, moving slow. They drew even with the store and stopped.
Chapter Seventeen
Ben had slept some after supper, sprawled on the couch with the dog on the rug beside him, but after he woke up from the nap he was restless and couldn’t settle down. His shoulder was just sore enough to be annoying, but what made him more uncomfortable was thinking about Sela’s gentle hands on his bare skin. It had been a long time since he’d been focused on a woman, period, and never to the extent Sela grabbed his attention. He could have had her this afternoon, and his dick was telling him that he’d lost his fucking mind because he’d refused. He was beginning to agree with his dick.
Except—he didn’t want her under him as payment for anything. He kept coming back to that. He wanted her there for no reason other than the two of them wanted it. His instant decision had been the right one; knowing that didn’t stop him from regretting it.
He lit a lamp, kicked back, and read for a while, but he was wide-awake, uneasy, and didn’t see the point in going to bed. After a while the dog raised his head and whined, so Ben took him out to let him mark his territory again. Then the dog went back to sleep; Ben didn’t. He made some coffee—to hell with sleeping, it wasn’t happening anyway so he might as well have some—and walked out on the porch to stare down at the dark valley. The moon was bright, the air cold but not freezing. His breath fogged in front of him.
There was enough light he could make out portions of the silver ribbons of roads into and out of the valley, including the bypass from Knoxville. He began thinking about strategy, how people would try to move in and how best to energetically discourage them from it. Not everyone would be automatically turned away; those who could contribute would be welcome. They didn’t need a constantly moving patrol as much as they needed strategic sentry posts, clearly understood signals, and organization. They would be more efficient with a clear progression of authority rather than different people making decisions on the fly—in effect, more military in structure.
He didn’t want to be actively involved; he’d get them set up the way he’d promised Sela, then let them handle it.
Sure.
He growled a bit under his breath as he gave up that fiction; come morning, he’d be stepping into quicksand and he’d likely never pull himself out. The idea of helping the community with their self-defense was tantalizing. As disgusted and emotionally exhausted as he’d become with political decisions that had cost the lives of his friends, his men, at his core he was military and part of him felt as if he was going home. This wasn’t just in his wheelhouse, it was his wheelhouse. Even when he’d devoted himself to being as solitary as possible, he’d used military applications for self-defense.
Not only that, he had to accept that Sela wasn’t solitary. She came with people she cared about, not just her relatives but her neighbors, her community. He couldn’t isolate her up here with him, despite his instincts to do just that. For as long as this reluctant fascination with her held, she would link him to those people. Exactly how long that would be, who knew—
The sharp, light crack of rifle fire echoed across the valley.
Years of training kicked in and he was moving before he had consciously identified the sound as that of a .22 rifle. The mountains could mess with sound and a lot of people around here had .22s, but his instinct told him it was coming from in front and to the right, which would roughly be where Sela’s store was.
Alarmed, the dog stood up and barked when Ben erupted into the house. He grabbed his hunting rifle from the rack, a box of cartridges, the Mossberg in its scabbard, and his truck keys. He was out the door again seven seconds after he entered, leaped off the porch, and was in the truck at ten seconds, accelerating down the rough driveway in twelve seconds.
In the three seconds between porch and truck he heard more gunfire, the distinctive sound of more .22 shots, and the deeper bellow of higher caliber rifles.