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turned her head to stare in frozen agony at the door, trying to hear if they were coming up the stairs, but this far from the door she couldn’t hear anything. Frantic, almost sobbing, she grabbed the window handle and began tugging viciously.
    A man’s head suddenly appeared on the other side of the window. A squeal almost popped out and she choked, slapping a hand over her mouth. She stared, so frightened she could barely move, and abruptly she recognized him. Her heart leapt, and her knees almost buckled. The relief that washed through her was as warm as the sun she longed for at this moment.
    Gabriel McQueen.

Chapter Four
    By the time Gabriel reached the turn off the main road, the combination of rain and low clouds had deepened to the point that he needed his headlights on to see. The wind had picked up, too, tossing the trees and whistling around the truck. Wind was bad; it would make the limbs and trees begin coming down just that much sooner.
    He would much rather have been with Sam, but he never once thought of turning around and simply telling his dad that he hadn’t been able to make it up the mountain. Giving up wasn’t in his DNA; he’d fetch Lolly off the mountain if he had to drag her down by the hair, which probably wasn’t what his father had had in mind when he sent Gabriel on thismission, but then the sheriff didn’t know Lolly the way Gabriel knew Lolly.
    She’d always been a spoiled brat, nose in the air, convinced she was better than anyone else. Some kids took teasing well; Lolly wasn’t one of them. Hostility had rolled off her in waves. Once she’d looked at him with complete disdain and said, “Worm!” He’d hidden his reaction, but inside he’d been furious that she’d dismissed him so completely with that one word. He was the sheriff’s son, he was popular and athletic and invited everywhere, and she thought he was a
worm?
Who the hell did she think she was? Oh, right, she was a
Helton
, and she didn’t associate with people like him.
    She had held herself separate from everyone else, not part of a crowd, never at any of the parties. Looking back, Gabriel wondered now if she’d ever been invited to any of the parties. Probably—but only because she was the mayor’s daughter. None of the kids had liked her, and wouldn’t have willingly invited her anywhere. He didn’t know if that had bothered her, because she certainly hadn’t been a joiner. The only school activity she’d been involved in was keeping her nose buried in a book, if that counted.
    He wondered if she was still that way—different, and alone. From the distance of years, he could now also wonder which had come first: her attitude, or the teasing. His own parents seemed to like her well enough. Would his dad have bothered to send him on this errand if it had been anyone other than LollyHelton who was out of cell range and possibly unaware of what was coming? Harlan McQueen had been lifelong friends with the Heltons, and that hadn’t changed just because the Heltons had moved to Florida, trading ice storms and snow for the occasional hurricane.
    Meeting up with her again after all these years should be interesting. He just hoped she wouldn’t give him any grief about coming back to town with him.
    A new weather bulletin came on the radio, and he turned up the volume to listen; evidently it looked as if the storm was going to take a turn for the worst, and faster than expected. He slowed down, looking at the trees, checking for icing. Surely even Lolly would see the wisdom of getting off this mountain before she got stuck here for possibly weeks, without electricity. Unless she had laid in a lot of provisions, she’d be out of food, too. If enough ice coated the trees some of them would come down, blocking the road. Clearing this road wouldn’t be a high priority for the county, because the Helton house was the only one on it. Once there had been a couple of other houses, but one of them had burned years ago,