Page 32 of Breaking His Exile

Evander crouched near the base of the cabin, his hood up, water streaming off his jacket. He was digging something—a trench—his shovel biting into the earth with a steady rhythm that seemed almost meditative under the chaos of the storm.

Tilly stood nearby, head low, her black coat plastered to her body. She looked miserable.

Rainey pulled the door open and stepped onto the porch. The wind hit her immediately, cold and wet, carrying the smell of saturated earth and pine resin and something sharper underneath—ozone, maybe, or the creek that had swollen somewhere below.

“Tell me you’re not going to stay out here all day,” she called over the rain.

Evander didn’t stop working. His shovel came up, went down, mug flying into a pile beside the trench. “Get inside, Rainey.”

Yeah, right.

She pulled the blanket tighter and leaned against the porch rail, her forearms crossed on the wet wood. The rain soaked through the sleeves of her borrowed shirt in seconds. “What are the trenches for?”

“Water’s coming off the ridge faster than the ground can take it.” He paused, wiped his face with the back of his glove. “The slope funnels everything straight at the foundation. If the trenches can’t channel it around the cabin, we’ll wake up ankle-deep.”

She watched him work. The rhythm of it—shovel, lift, throw—had the same patience she’d seen him use on Sable. No wasted motion. No frustration. Just a man doing what needed doing, a little at a time, until the problem stopped being a problem.

Tilly trotted over to the porch and shook herself violently, spattering Rainey’s legs with cold water. Then she sat at the top of the steps, pressed against Rainey’s knee, and stared out at the rain.

“I think your dog’s had enough,” she called.

“She’ll survive.”

“But will she enjoy it?”

That earned her a pause.

Evander looked at Tilly, then at the sky, then at Rainey. His face was unreadable under the hood, but she caught the faintest shake of his head before he drove the shovel into the ground and walked toward the porch. Water ran off him in rivulets.

“Fine,” he said. “Five minutes. Then I’m back out.”

They went inside. Evander stripped off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, where it began immediately to drip onto the floor. Tilly found a spot near the stove and collapsed with a sigh that sounded almost human. Rainey added wood to the fire, coaxing the coals back to life, and made coffee while Evander scraped mud from his boots.

“How bad is it?” she asked. “The rain.”

He took the mug she offered. Drank. His fingers left damp prints on the metal. “Depends on how long it holds. This drainage system was built for normal storms. A heavy downpour like this, it’ll keep up for a day, maybe two. If it goes past thirty-six hours, expecting the ground to hold gets dicey.”

“Dicey how?”

He set the mug down and looked at her. His eyes were dark, serious, but not afraid. “The creek below can jump its banks fast. I’ve seen it happen. The water comes up over the culvert, spills into the low ground, and suddenly the soil’s too heavy to sit still. Trees go down. The road washes out in half a dozen places.”

She thought about that. The track they’d driven in on, already rutted and narrow, now being eaten away by moving water. The isolation of this place, which had felt like safety for the past days, suddenly felt like a trap. If the road washed out, they weren’t going anywhere.

“Could it reach the cabin?”

“Not up here. We’re on high ground.” He paused. “But it’ll slow everything down. The fire road on the north ridge will be mud. The creek crossing on the southern route will be running too high to ford. And there’s a risk of mudslides.”

“Mudslides?”

“We should be safe here. We have mostly rock above us.”

That wasn’t reassuring. “So what do we do?”

“We stay put until it passes.”

“How long?”

He shrugged. “Montana mountains in the summer. Could be a few hours. Could be three days. Hell, the temp could drop, and it could turn to snow.”