Page 19 of Rolling Thunder

Are you busy?

A few moments dragged by and then his response popped up.

What do you need?

She felt suddenly and alarmingly swamped with emotion. There was so much she needed.

My power’s out and I don’t know how to fix it…

So, you’re just using me for my electrical skills.

No, it’s your hot bod I’m after.

Then she wanted to smack herself. She defaulted to the saucy response because it was the only way she could relate to men. It was a lie, like everything else.

My hot bod will be there in ten minutes.

As promised, ten minutes later, he pulled in with his truck. He went straight to work like a professional, unloading flashlights and a few toolkits.

Watching his glistening, muscular, tattooed arms, and his chest barely concealed by his thin wifebeater shirt in the waning twilight, her pulse jumped a little.

“Wow. You come prepared.”

He turned, cocked his head a little and winked at her. “I always have the right tool for the job.”

He also always seemed to have a perfectly executed one-liner that gave her goose bumps and made her think of sex.

He shined the light around, spotting the still-open breaker box after her feeble, girly attempt at getting her power to come back on. He strode over to it.

“Can you hold the light for me?”

“Yeah, of course, sure?—”

She hurried over, took the flashlight, and stood on her tiptoes to shine it over his shoulder so he could see what he was doing.

“The box is still hot. How long’s the power been out?” he asked as he began to remove the cover with a screwdriver.

“I’m not sure. I was working horses.” He exposed a rat’s nest of multicolored wires, complete with rodent droppings and the remains of a mud wasp nest. Even to her untrained eye, it looked like a disaster.

“Holy shit! Do these main lines coming out of the dirt with no conduit feed the barn? This is just screwed into the bottom of the distribution panel overlapping the wires from the main feed. What electric is in the barn?

“Lights, fans, the well pump.”

“All right, we gotta let this box cool for a bit anyway. Let me walk out and see what kind of box the barn has. Back in a minute.”

He wasn’t gone long. When he returned, he announced that the other side of the barn feed lines went into a fifty-amp breaker box, and the wiring out there was at least passable.

Returning to the main box, he said, “You need a two-hundred-amp breaker box. This box is rated for one hundred, but wired for one seventy-five. No wonder it got so hot. I can’t believe it worked at all before now. That old wasp nest must have fallen down and blocked whatever little ventilation it had in there.”

“You wanna try saying that again in English?”

“Yeah, your box is seriously overloaded. No electrician did this. This is a do-it-yourself nightmare, and on top of that, I bet he was drunk.”

Kayla shook her head, remembering Canyon Bill. “You’re right. He was.”

He looked at her quizzically for a moment, then said “For now I’ll just take the two main feeders from the barn and patch them into the main feed from the pole. That will bypass this box, and it’ll be safe until we can get the box replaced. All right, hold that light steady now. I’ll have to do this on live wires since I’m bypassing the breakers.”

Kayla watched as he continued to speak in terms she didn’t quite follow, all while he deftly unscrewed clamps and moved wires and tightened screws. She was totally distracted by the sheen of sweat that had formed on his bare, muscled arms.

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