Page 17 of Angel's Smoke

“I guess so. I lose power a bunch where I am. I have a generator. Once the sun’s up, I’ll head back to the . . .”

The string of curses flitted through Anna’s mind as she realized just where the hell her generator was stored and how her very pregnant and sciatica-prone body wouldnotbe able to safely drag that thing from the shed to her house where she could connect it to the transfer switch, let alone hobble back in the snow to get the can of gasoline.

Crap. She was supposed to check the oil levels in the generator after the last storm they had. That was . . . mid-February? Was that when one of her neighbors much farther down the mountain had helped her haul the thing to her house and set it up? No, there had been a storm since then, right? But then why didn’t she remember when she filled up the gas can last?

“You okay? Anna?”

“Yeah, I just had to readjust some things in my head, that’s all.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that, given the snow, I don’t think it’ll really be worth it to lug the generator out. Besides, Aurora’s so well-prepared. I’m sure the power will be back on by the morning anyway. I could just?—”

“Where’s your generator?”

“It’s . . . on property.”

“This isn’t fucking Disney World, Anna. The storm’s about to get a shit ton worse before it gets better. Can you access your generator or not?”

“At the moment? Not.”

A long hard pause plunged their conversation into a fathomless silence. Finally, Iron said, “Please, tell me where you are. I can get to you, get you hooked up and comfortable before things get really bad.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good?—”

“Please, Anna.” A painful angst hardened the edges of his words, and it caught her off guard, but then the lightness she imagined coating his earlier texts returned. “Hey, perfect track record, remember?”

Oh, she remembered.

Anna shook her head and looked to the stormy sky for answers, but the damn thing was too busy causing problems.

With a shaky sigh that did a piss-poor job of hiding her trepidation, she told him where she lived.

And hoped like hell she hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of her life.

Chapter9

An hour. It took Iron an entire goddamn hour to make the ten-mile trip from his family’s parking garage in Aurora proper up the road toward Anna’s house. What had started as annoying fluff quickly turned into two inches. At that rate of snowfall, it wouldn’t take long for the roads to become impassable, and while he would have loved nothing more than to take to the skies and bypass this whole mess in ten minutes, exposing himself that way wasn’t a good idea. Not yet, at any rate. He’djustgotten her to tell him her name, and even that trusting courtesy didn’t yet extend to surnames.

So, the F-150 it was.

His snow chains crunched like popcorn through the winding road’s unplowed terrain until the truck’s headlights passed across the roadside mailbox with the number he was looking for. Already, the thing had a healthy funnel of snow growing around its base. Set back from the road was a modest cabin with a quaint sloping roof, obligatory fenced-in porch, and flashlight beams darting from behind its prominent picture window.

Anna’s house.

Iron grabbed his phone, sent a quick text, and backed his truck into the driveway.

Iron:Here.

His boots barely hit the snow before the cabin’s front door opened a crack, and Anna poked her head out.

“Thanks for coming,” she yelled as her words caught on the wind and traveled closer to him.

He stalked up her porch steps but found himself stalled out on the coir doormat.

Anna stood there, wrapped in a comforter of insanely floofy proportions, with one hand gripping a phone while the other fisted a Maglite. A soft corona of flickering light from the candles lit in the room behind her haloed her hair in a gentle embrace. And damn if his angel fire didn’t stir within his core, pulsing in time to the ambient glow that wisely chose the perfect subject to illuminate.

But there was something else he saw there that he’d missed earlier.

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