The Widow's Protector. Rachel Lee

      She shook her head. “We couldn’t afford it. My husband inherited it, and when he lost his job we moved out here. We figured we could make it on land leases until one of us found work.”

      “Then you lost him. So no income at all?”

      “Just from the leases. There’s a lot of land. We’ve leased it to grow hay, and some as grazing land. It’s not a lot, but it was enough for the basics.”

      She glanced at the door again as the drumming resumed.

      “Everything may be okay,” he said pointlessly. Although it was easy to tell someone not to worry about things they didn’t know, and they certainly didn’t know if anything had happened to her house, worry seemed to be a natural human state.

      He hated sitting here like this, unable to do anything but wait, and if he hated it, so must she. She had a lot more at stake. But if he’d learned anything at all from his marriage to Brandy, it was that sometimes no amount of effort could solve a problem.

      Of course, he still wasn’t sure which lessons to take from that. It didn’t seem to have improved his patience any. But Brandy had tested his patience for years. He’d learned to roll with the punches and deal with each day as it came. Maybe that was the maximum patience a man could learn.

      The radio crackled and a voice came back, telling them the tornado warning had been lifted for Conard County.

      Then Marti reached out to switch the dial, and a staticky news station came on. The sheriff reported that damage to Conard City appeared to be minimal, but they were still awaiting reports from outlying areas. Power and telephones were out, and some cell towers seemed to be down. The station pleaded for folks to check on their neighbors and find a way to report emergencies to the sheriff’s department.

      Marti looked at the closed storm door again, and Ryder could read the anxiety in every line of her. She needed to look but was afraid to.

      Finally, despite the drumbeat of what he assumed to be rain, Ryder realized that nothing heavy was battering them any longer, and the wind had stopped wailing. Time to check.

      He climbed the stairs, unlocked the bolts and threw the door back.

      “Oh my God,” he heard Marti say on a breath right behind him.

      If it hadn’t passed right overhead, the tornado had certainly come close. He saw a cluster of debris around the shelter opening, and beyond it he could see her house.

      Part of the roof was gone and some of the trees had come down, although not on the house, the only mercy he could see. The tree trunks looked like splintered matchwood, giving him some idea of the power of the storm that had just passed them.

      He shoved debris aside, making a clear path for the woman behind him. He didn’t want her tripping on anything.

      Then he climbed out and turned to offer her a hand. Steady rain fell, although not heavily, and the sky had lightened to a deep gray. The inky green was gone.

      But so was part of her life.

      Marti stood there staring at her house, the one thing she had counted on to get her through, taking in the corner of the roof that had been stripped of its covering, leaving rafters bare. The rain would get in, she thought numbly. It would ruin everything.

      The downed trees didn’t shock her as much, though it troubled her to see them. They had provided protection in the winter from the wind and then shade as spring had deepened. Now they were just kindling.

      Then, feeling as if every muscle in her body had turned to lead, she pivoted to look out over the fields that had been planted with hay.

      “Oh my God,” she said again, clapping one hand to her mouth. The hay had been mown right down to the bare earth as if by a giant scythe, along a line so clearly marked she could have believed a surveyor had laid it. It told her how close that tornado had come, missing her buildings by a couple of hundred feet. And the slash was so wide.

      “My God,” she said helplessly. There went her income. Nobody was going to be able to pay up on those leases if they lost their crop.

      Her knees started to weaken, and she was grateful when Ryder gripped her elbow, steadying her.

      “It’s gone,” she whispered hollowly. “It’s all gone.” What was she supposed to do now?

      “Do you have any decent tarps?” Ryder asked her.

      Slowly her gaze tracked to him. Any other time she would have thought him a fine-looking man, with his chiseled, slightly weathered face, his lean, hard build. Those gray eyes of his were filled with compassion, and the compassion almost made her weep. How long had it been since anyone had given a damn about her?

      Not that it mattered. He was a stranger she had picked up along the roadside only because she couldn’t leave another human being out in this storm. He’d probably resume his trek in a matter of minutes.

      “Tarps?” she repeated blankly.

      “I need to cover that hole in your roof before the rain does too much damage.”

      “You don’t have to….” She had trouble grasping that he was offering to help in some way. The idea didn’t want to penetrate the haze of total despair.

      “I have to,” he said. “It’s the least I can do. Looks like you saved my life. Tarps?” he repeated.

      “In the barn,” she said woodenly. “I think there are some there.”

      “Okay.” His steadying grip on her elbow tightened a bit. “I want you to stay in the truck out of the rain. Come on.”

      She was in no condition to argue. What would she argue about anyway? There was nothing she could do herself, not in her condition.

      So she let him guide her back to the truck, let him help her climb back in.

      “Just stay,” he said, his gray eyes stern. “I can at least keep the rain out if I can find enough tarps.”

      “Thank you.” It was a paltry expression of gratitude, but she was having trouble feeling grateful about anything right now. The baby inside her kicked, and she laid her hand over the spot. The baby. Whatever she did about this, the baby had to be her first concern. Her only concern. If that meant moving on…

      She couldn’t even consider it then. She stared at the house, stared at the hole in her roof, then watched Ryder trek to the barn through the rain. Why couldn’t it have been the barn roof?

      Sometimes she just wanted to yell at the heavens. But right now she didn’t even have energy for that. The devastation she saw everywhere she looked…Well, right now she didn’t even feel grateful for having survived.

      Then the baby kicked again, reminding her why she had to carry on. The baby, she murmured to herself, over and over. Whatever came next, she had to do it for Linda Marie.

      The tears came then, silent large drops that rolled down her face like rain.

      Ryder took a flashlight to the barn with him, well aware that what he was about to do was dangerous. It was still raining, and he could hear rumbles of thunder. There was some small hail on the ground, too, which could make planting a ladder dangerous, and there might be more. What did he know about storms like this? He was no meteorologist.

      But he just couldn’t bring himself to walk away from this woman’s problem without at least protecting her house from more damage. Rain getting in would do far more to cause her problems than the tornado had.

      So he started hunting the unfamiliar space. The flashlight at least picked up on an aluminum ladder quickly, one that looked of recent vintage and would get him up the twenty feet he needed to climb to the roof.

      Hammer and nails were next, easily found in the tack room at the back. Some of the nails looked a bit rusty with age, but they weren’t bad. Enough to do a temporary job. The tarps gave him more trouble, although he couldn’t