New weekly freebie: Under the Magnolia via Blog

Donna and I have been sitting on top of this novella since we got the rights back, wondering what we should do with it.  On the one hand we were always rather fond of it–it’s the story that taught us to trust Anne Scott, our wonderful Samhain editor, who sent us a thoughtful and encouraging rejection that made us take a second look at the middle of the story and question what, exactly, we were doing. And while we went on to work with her on many other projects, we also fixed up this one and sold it again.

However, even though we’re really fond of it, there’s a certain danger in looking at stories you wrote 18 months ago if you started writing stuff to submit 19 months ago.  I hope to spend my entire career learning about writing, but I hope I never have to learn as much in so short a time as I did my first year out.  The learning curve was steep, steep, STEEP and it seemed like every week we relearned most of what we thought we knew.

That’s why Donna and I eventually decided to leave old stories alone instead of trying to revamp them for release at a later date.  We have plenty of stories to tell, and hopefully we’ve gotten a wee bit better at telling them.

We’ve toyed plenty with the idea of a blog serial, but there’s always the question of commitment, and time-management, and we have too much on our plates right now to want something else we can forget to do.  But here’s the perfect chance!  The story’s done, so now all we have to do is post it.  So for the next 9 weeks we’ll be doing one chapter a week, every Wednesday.

Disclaimers: it hasn’t received additional editing and may be a bit rough around the edges.  It also will contain some adult content and naughty words. And psychics.

Having disclaimed and explained, nothing else to do but begin!

Adelaide has a secret: she can see the future. The visions are always unpleasant, until she catches a glimpse of herself engaged in the hottest sex imaginable with hunky police chief Wesley Saxon, a man she’s had a crush on for the past year.

Wes has been watching out for Addie for years, even if she did break his heart in high school. But when his attempt to rescue her from an oncoming hurricane leaves them stranded in the basement of an island resort, Wes will face a danger more terrifying than any criminal: falling in love with her again.

UNDER THE MAGNOLIA
Chapter One

Wesley Saxon sipped his coffee and stared out at the darkened August sky. Normally, two o’clock in the afternoon was bright, sunny, but today was an exception.

Lightning flashed against slate-gray clouds, and he rubbed his thumb against the side of his mug as he unconsciously counted off the seconds before he heard the rumble of thunder. “Storm’s moving in fast, Howie. If you want to get in one last cigarette, you’d better head out before the storm hits.”

Officer Howard Westbury snorted. “It’ll wait. Bea wants me to quit anyway.”

Wes grinned. “Scared of a little rain?”

“Nope. But this one’s supposed to be a doozy.”

The sky lightened for a few moments before rain began to thump against the roof of the police station. In less than a minute, Wes could barely see out the windows. “Nothing stronger than a Category Two has hit the Georgia coast head-on in over a hundred years,” he reminded the older man blandly.

Howie just shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

As quickly as it had come, the rain subsided. “It’s coming down in fits and starts, that’s for certain.” Wes moved back to his desk and checked the phone line to make sure it was still operable. “At least you didn’t have to handle evacuations. Jack and Chris said some of the vacationers out on the island didn’t want to leave at first.”

Howie grimaced and rose, adjusting his gun belt over his substantial girth. “Dumbasses. That bridge is built so low that it’ll be the first thing that floods out, and then they’ll be stranded, maybe for days.”

Wes shook his head. “Nah, nobody wanted to stay after they heard all the hotels and stores were closing up. Being stuck out there would be bad enough even if you weren’t going to be alone. Turns out, nobody wanted to risk it.”

“Good.” Howie moved to pour himself a cup of coffee. “You want more, or can I finish this off and start another pot?”

“Go for it.” Wes eyed his computer screen. “It looks like the—”

Wes’ words cut off as the phone pealed, demanding his attention. He picked up the receiver. “Carter’s Bay Police, Chief Saxon speaking.”

“Wesley, we’ve got a bit of a situation over here at the shelter.” The soft, melodic voice identified the caller as Howie’s wife, Beatrice.

“What’s wrong, Bea?” Howie looked up sharply when he spoke, but Wes shook his head and held up a hand. “Something bad happen?”

“No, not exactly. We’ve got two kids over here who were just out on the island. They say they were campin’ on the beach, missed the first couple of evacuation notices, then got their car stuck in the mud.”

Wes frowned and set down his mug, already dragging his jacket off the back of his chair. “So how’d they get to town?”

“Well…” Bea sighed and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Wesley, they say a woman came out of nowhere and winched their car free then told them she’d meet them at the shelter. But they haven’t seen hide nor hair of her yet.”

Something in her tone of voice gave him pause. “What are you not telling me, Bea?”

He heard a rustle of activity and a murmur of voices, and Bea said, almost apologetically, “Honey, they’re describin’ her as ‘a crazy blonde lady in a ratty old Jeep’.”

His heart stuttered painfully. “Where?”

“Out by the Cove in the park, they said. Oh, Wes, you’d better hurry.”

He bit back a groan as he dropped the receiver back in its cradle. He should have known who it was the second Bea mentioned a woman driving straight into the path of a hurricane to rescue two strangers.

Adelaide.

* * * * *

Adelaide Gardner had gotten herself into a lot of trouble in her day. Her penchant for driving into the middle of storms and chasing wildly after tornadoes had certainly made life interesting on more than one occasion; her habit of showing up in the midst of trouble vexed the law enforcement in her tiny town to no end. Wherever there was trouble, Addie was there, up to her knees in it more often than not.

Now was no exception. The hurricane closing in on the coast was a Category Two at the least. She’d heard rumors on the radio that the pressure had dropped again at the last recon flight, with winds now pushing 110 miles per hour. She’d completed her storm preparations the morning before, and she should have been curled up in the basement with her radio and her computer.

Instead, she was wedging rocks and branches underneath her tires in a frantic attempt to free her Jeep from the mud.

“So much for precognitive ability,” she muttered angrily as she stomped on the branch she was holding, breaking it in half. One end went under the left tire, joining the rocks she’d already shoved there.

Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to psychics. They especially weren’t supposed to happen to a psychic whose particular gift was seeing the future. Sure, she was always around when there was trouble, but she was there to help other people, not to put herself in need of rescuing.

And yet, here she was, struggling to free her Jeep from a quagmire in the face of an oncoming hurricane. Not in spite of her gift, but because of it. Because she’d woken up in a cold sweat from a nightmare about two college kids, trapped and terrified as they struggled to keep from drowning.

Apparently she’d woken up from the vision before she got to the part where her Jeep got mired in the mud, leaving her stranded in the middle of the island’s rustic state park, miles from anything approaching a reasonable shelter.

The sky opened up again as she worked the second branch under her right tire, hopefully giving her the traction she’d need to drive free. She was drenched to the skin and shaking from nerves as she climbed back into the Jeep and tried again.

The wheels spun, and for a moment—just a moment—she thought the Jeep was going to lurch free. Please, please.

But the Jeep didn’t move, and she found herself cursing as she scrambled out again, fighting a rising feeling of panic as she dropped to her knees in the mud. It would be the perfect lesson for her class. When this was all over and she was back in the classroom, she’d tell them this story, make them work out a solution.

She wrote the lesson plan out in her head as she struggled with the rocks, using the exercise to keep herself calm. She would have to duplicate a smaller scale of the conditions, which wouldn’t be difficult. Mud would be a bit too messy in the lab, though she could probably use the old cornstarch and water trick. Combining them would create a quicksand-like substance, and this mud certainly had a quicksand sort of feel to it. It was all too easy to imagine her Jeep slowly sinking into the earth as she struggled to free it.

She ignored the chattering of her teeth and the increasing howl of the wind, letting her mind formulate a perfect lesson for her tenth graders even as her body moved on reflex. Shove the rocks under the wheels, hope the wheels grip the branches… Try not to think about what might happen if the bridge is flooded by the time I finish this.

Addie almost didn’t hear the rumble of an engine over the sound of the wind whipping through the massive pines surrounding her. She straightened and squinted through the downpour, shoving her hair back from her face as she struggled to focus on the source of the sound.

A utility vehicle with the police department logo emblazoned on the side pulled to a skidding stop on the road up the hill from her, and a man in a navy blue slicker climbed out.

He called out to her as he slipped and slid down the embankment. “Addie Jo Gardner, you are giving me gray hair!”

She could only imagine what she must look like, drenched from the rain and covered in mud. If it had been any other man she might not have minded, but of course it was Wes. Handsome, funny Wes, with the gorgeous blue eyes and the charming smile that had been distracting her more and more over the past year.

It was silly. She’d known him since middle school, and never once during her hormonal teenaged years had she thought about him in more than a friendly fashion. Her heart had belonged to the school’s resident math genius, a brilliant young man who’d spent endless hours studying with her without noticing that she was a girl. Or maybe Chuck just hadn’t known what to do with girls; he certainly hadn’t seemed interested in them.

She doubted there had ever been a time when Wes hadn’t known what to do with a willing woman. He’d been popular with the girls in high school, and every last one of Addie’s friends had been in love with him at one point or another. If she’d ever been able to pull her attention away from Chuck, she might have joined them. He was impossibly charming after all.

Better late than never, crushing on the quarterback, she grumbled to herself as she resisted the urge to wipe at her face. She’d only add to whatever mud was already there, and now was not the time to be worrying about appearances.

So she smiled at him a little self-consciously and gestured to the rocks under her tires. “Got a little stuck.”

He shook his head, clear blue eyes taking in the sky. “Leave it. The bridge is covered over, anyway. We’d better make for the plantation house.”

“Shit.” She turned back to the Jeep, dragging her bag from the back seat before giving the vehicle one longing look. The chances she’d see it again in one piece weren’t very good, but she’d rather live than get sentimental over a vehicle.

She slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder and followed him back to the steep slope. “Did those kids send you out here after me?”

He paused only long enough to lift the backpack off her shoulder and throw it over his. “Yeah. They went over to the shelter at the Presbyterian church like you said. Bea Westbury called the station when you didn’t show.”

“I thought I could make it out.” And she felt more than a little guilty that she hadn’t, since now she’d dragged him into the path of danger with her.

“Doesn’t matter,” he told her shortly as he dragged open the passenger side door and gave her two quick slaps on the back. “Get in and buckle up.”

He moved with enviable ease, even in the driving rain and under the considerable weight of her bag, and it took no time at all for him to shove the knapsack between their seats and climb in behind the steering wheel. “You ready to go?”

She nodded, but all of her attention had shifted to the growing tension inside her, the feeling she got just before she had one of her waking visions. Not now, God, please not now.

Psychic ability might be the newest pseudoscience to go mainstream, but Addie still had occasional nightmares—not visions, thank God, but garden-variety bad dreams—that she would find herself the toasty target of a witch hunt if her placid, boring neighbors ever found out about her abilities. Even if they didn’t run her out of town, she imagined no one would want her to keep teaching their children. The ACLU was already having a field day prosecuting employers who suddenly “let go” employees who displayed psychic power.

Addie’s waking visions weren’t subtle. Even now, her heart raced and her breathing sounded fast and loud in the closed confines of the car. She curled her hand around the handle of the door, closing her eyes as she tried to fend off the rush of power that sent a shiver up her spine and raised the hair on the back of her neck.

“Hey.” His voice was concerned but stern, and his fingers touched her bare arm. “Are you okay, Addie?”

Heat flooded her as the world disappeared. She was on fire, burning from the inside out, and Wes was above her, skin sliding against hers in tantalizing ways as he dragged his tongue up the side of her neck. He whispered something she couldn’t understand, and she caught the faintest flash of those devastating blue eyes before his teeth closed on her ear. In the next moment he was thrusting into her, and she had been waiting for this so long, so fucking long—

The vision released her as quickly as it had seized her, and she jerked her arm away from his fingers as color rushed to her cheeks. Holy shit.

* * *

Come back on Wednesday, September 2nd for Chapter Two!