Misadventures of a Curvy Girl (Misadventures #18)(27)

Holm is small—less than four hundred people, and even that number has probably shrunk some since the last census—and our Main Street is only four blocks long. My bar is at the end of it, in an old brick building that’s been around since the town’s founding. It used to be the general store before they opened a Walmart off the interstate exchange, and the old salt who opened the bar in the 1980s called it General’s to honor the building’s past. I kept the name when I bought the place, and it’s a strange relief to see it in faded paint still on the side of the building.

But everything else about the bar is wrong.

The windows are blown out. The door is gone. The brick structure survived, but the bricks themselves are blasted and chipped all to shit. And the inside looks like a ruin of glass, furniture, and ceiling tiles.

I crunch my way inside, squinting up into the shadows to make sure the ceiling isn’t about to fall on my head, and call out, “Hello?” There’s nothing but the sound of dripping water and voices from outside.

I step back out onto the street, looking for any sign of police or paramedics, wondering if the bar has been searched for people—and the other buildings on Main Street and houses too. It’s been about thirty minutes since we left the basement on the farm. Surely that’s enough time for first responders to arrive?

Caleb joins me after a minute, trailed by a shell-shocked Ireland and a nervous Greta. “Just talked to Harley from the gas station,” he says. “They’ve been through all the buildings on this side.”

“They find anyone?”

Caleb looks down the street in that My Antonia way of his, all stoic and solemn while the prairie wind tugs gently at his shirt and hair. “Three bodies. They’ve laid them out in the park, near the water tower. Called a funeral home over in Emporia already.” Caleb names who they found, two of whom were Sunday school teachers of mine and one of whom we went to high school with, and I stagger—actually stagger—against the now-bruised wall of my bar. I lean my head back against the brick, close my eyes, and try to breathe, try to remain present, try all the tricks my therapist has given me, but it’s no good. I feel jagged and angry and emptier than ever. I feel like the building I’m leaning against, like something that’s been broken and tossed away and left to crumble in its own desperate mess.

And that’s when Ireland steps past me to walk inside the bar. I open my eyes to see her curvy frame disappear into the gloom, and for a single, shining second, I recognize everything is going to be okay. That there might be a future with this sexy woman and her penetrating gaze and her secret bravery.

I take in a deep breath.

And then the ceiling falls in on top of her.





Chapter Eleven





Ireland





“I’m fine!” I shout. “I’m fine! I’m fine!”

Okay, maybe fine is a little bit of a lie, given there’s God only knows how many pounds of wood and metal pipe making a very unsteady tent above my head, but I’m not dead and I don’t think I’m injured, at least not seriously so. Something hit my shoulder fairly hard on the way down, and I think I’ll have an almighty scrape on my leg, but nothing’s broken and nothing’s bleeding in any alarming kind of way. Mostly I’m just covered in sheetrock dust.

“Jesus Christ,” I hear Caleb swear viciously, and I see something in front of me shift, letting a little bit more light into the unsteady tent of mine. “You’re really okay?”

“Help me,” Ben’s voice comes through. “Move that there—not that beam; it’ll send everything else crashing down. Yes, there, that one. One, two, three—”

Ben’s voice is knowledgeable, authoritative. Despite everything—the pain and the ruin around us and the very real danger I’m in of this stuff falling on me—I shiver a little at the reminder of how commanding he can be. How he commanded Caleb and me last night.

And in less than ten minutes, they’ve got the remains of the ceiling moved enough for me to wriggle free. There’s an awkward moment where I don’t quite fit and they have to shift more pieces around, and I have the sudden, familiar rush of longing for a different body—which is patently ridiculous, as this body was nearly just crushed by a building and I should only feel gratitude for being alive, so I shove that longing where it belongs and work my way free of the debris pile.

The minute I have my torso mostly out, I’m abruptly yanked into two sets of strong arms and crushed between two chests.

“I thought you were dead,” Ben says roughly. I can barely breathe for how tightly I’m held between them, and I feel lips—his and Caleb’s—all over my hair, and I feel their hearts drumming against my body in a frantic tattoo.

This is not how you treat someone you never see again.

Maybe they want to keep me.

But within seconds, Ben tramples the fledgling hope inside me. He pulls away from me so fast I almost stumble forward. And when I see his face, it’s not even the cold expression I’ve grown used to from him. It’s something wild and furious.

“You should go,” he harshes out. “Go home.”

Stupid me, I think home means the farm, and I say, “I’m not going home until you two are.”

He shakes his head, almost violently, sending his too-long hair flicking into his face. “Go to your home, Ireland,” he says, his eyes turbulent with something I don’t understand. “You can’t be here anymore!”