Charming The Highlander

Jonathan returned to the kitchen, set his own computer on the table beside hers, and turned it on.

Grace continued looking for her disks. They weren’t in the briefcase. She went to her bedroom and looked through the empty luggage Grey and Morgan had brought down from the mountain. She checked every pocket and nook and cra

Jonathan stood in the door of the bedroom. “What? Do you have the disks?” he asked.

Grace shook her head. “No. They must have gotten misplaced on the mountain,” she said, more to herself than to him.

He came into the room and stood facing her. “What do you mean, ‘on the mountain?’”

She looked up. “My plane crashed. The pilot died. Baby and I and a neighbor who was traveling with us were able to make it down off the mountain okay. But some of my stuff is obviously still up there.”

Jonathan’s eyes grew wide with shock, and he took hold of her shoulders. “You were in a plane crash?

Just a few days ago?”

“Yes. But miraculously, neither Baby nor I was hurt.”

She was suddenly pulled into a crushing embrace. “My God, Grace. Why didn’t you call and tell me?”

“I forgot,” she said into his shoulder. She leaned back and smiled at his stricken expression. “I would have called you today, Jonathan,” she quickly assured him. “But you showed up before I got the chance.”

“I could have lost you,” he whispered, pulling her back against him, hugging her tightly.

Just as Michael had done only a few hours ago. But where Michael’s body had been warm and desperate and filled with emotion, Jonathan’s embrace stirred nothing inside her.

“Lost me or my brain?” she asked.

He suddenly set her away with a scowl. “You,” he snapped.

Grace sighed and shook her head. “Let’s be honest now, Jonathan. We have a mutual respect for each other’s talents, and there’s friendship between us, but there’s never been any romance.”

“There could be,” he growled, his posture defensive. “If you come home to Virginia and give us a chance.”

“I am home, Jonathan,” she softly told him. “And…and I think I’m staying this time.”

He reached out to pull her back into his arms, but Grace sidestepped him and walked out of the bedroom.

“You can’t mean to give it all up,” he entreated, following her. “Grace. We’re right on the verge of making a breakthrough that will have people living on the moon in less than ten years.”

She shut down Jonathan’s computer and slid it back into his briefcase. “No, we’re not,” she said, looking up. “Because just as soon as I get my computer rebooted, I’m dumping the experiment. You’ll be back to square one then, and I have no intention of continuing this work. Not if it can be used as a weapon.”

“Dammit, Grace. You can’t mean to just walk away from your life’s work.” He waved an angry hand in the air. “You can’t expect science to come to a screeching halt simply because you have a conscience. If every scientist did that, we’d still be living in caves. You can’t stop progress, Grace.”

“No,” she agreed, nodding. “But I can stop this. I will not be a party to building a weapon of mass destruction.”

He ran a frustrated hand through his hair, staring at her for several seconds before he let out a tired sigh.

“Not if you can’t unscramble Podly’s signal,” he said, sounding defeated.

He walked to the one clear window in the room. “Do you know these mountains, Grace?” he asked, looking toward TarStone Mountain. “Can you find where you crashed, and is there a chance your disks survived this weather?”

“Yes, I can find it. And yes, they’re in a waterproof case. But it could take forever to reach the crash site, Jonathan. The weather’s bad, and the terrain is rugged.”

He turned to her. “Does this town have any equipment we could use? Snowmobiles, maybe? Something that can travel in these conditions?”

Grey’s snowcat immediately came to mind, but Grace would not even consider asking his assistance.

Not after the scenes she’d just endured, first at his house and then at the Bigelows’. Ellen had actually had tears in her eyes when Grace had told her that she hadn’t been able to get any help for their trees.

“Well?” Jonathan asked, walking back to her.

“Nothing that I can think of. Most of the people have snowmobiles, I guess, but the power’s gone out,”

she said, waving at the darkened, silent room around them. “They’re not going to want to head into the mountains. They have to stay close to home to keep watch over their fires, their neighbors, and their property.”

He gave her a laconic grin. “Not even for twenty thousand dollars? You don’t think somebody in this rundown town could use that kind of money?”

She could only stare at Jonathan. “You could buy several snowmobiles with twenty thousand dollars,”

she said finally. “Why not just do that?”

“We don’t have that kind of time. Don’t you understand? Our entire future is sitting up on that mountain.”

“Where it will have to stay until this storm is over.”

“But we need those disks now. AeroSaqii’s men are probably already here in Pine Creek.”

“I’m just as frustrated as you are, Jonathan, that the transmission won’t download properly. But those men are having to deal with the same weather we are. And I doubt they’re here. Ellen Bigelow told me that the main road coming up from Greenville will likely close soon, and that’s the only way into Pine Creek. Several trees have fallen, pulling miles of power lines with them. That should buy us some time.”

Jonathan slapped the table in frustration, then picked up his briefcase and stormed into the living room.

Grace fed Baby, burped him, changed him, and set him back down to sleep in his cradle by the fire. He was tuckered out, sound asleep before his head even hit the mattress. Ellen and John must have spent the entire time playing with him.

After making sure Baby was covered up warmly, Grace went about preparing her home for the long winter siege ahead. While she worked, Jonathan sat in the overstuffed chair in the living room and alternated between talking on the phone—which had somehow escaped the wrath of the ice—and working on his computer.

Grace was glad he was occupied elsewhere and no longer bothering her. She drained what water was left in the holding tank into several jugs and set them on the counter to reserve for drinking. She filled pots with broken icicles she chopped from the eaves and put them on the stove to melt. She dug out the kerosene lamps that had been around since before she was born, and it was just as she placed them on the sideboard that she found Mary.

The Oreo cookie tin was sitting in the middle of the sideboard. Grace picked it up. There were two small dents in the front of the can, and she slowly spa

Michael must have slipped out of the house after following her to the Bigelows’ in his truck and brought Mary back here. Michael had left the house while Grace had a quick lunch with Ellen and John before she returned home with Baby.

Grace hugged the tin to her chest, glad to have her sister back and sad beyond words for Michael. It must have been hard for him to have spent the last five months wondering where Mary was and if she would return and the last twenty-four hours coming to terms with the fact that he would never see her again.

Grace wiped at the tears that kept leaking from her eyes. It seemed she cried at the drop of a hat these days.

“Oh, Mare. What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “I love Baby. I can’t just give him away.”

She didn’t get an answer. Nor did she wonder about the sudden sensation of warmth pushing against her chest. She simply hugged the tin more fiercely against her aching heart.