Read Online Just One Day by Sharla Lovelace - Free Book Online

direction at once, taking my breath away every time the full wrath of it would slam into the predominantly glass front.
    “Holy shit,” I whispered. Looking for Brad’s car made my heart sink, as waves lapped at the diner’s porch.
    “Don’t look,” he said softly from behind me, as if reading my mind. “There’s nothing we can do to change it, come on.” He pointed out the ice machine. “Close it back as quickly as you can.”
    There wasn’t much ice left in it.
    I looked at the hail swirling and bouncing against the sidewalk. “What if we grab some of that?”
    He stopped, mid-reach toward a closet door, and turned to see what I was pointing at. “Are you serious?”
    “It hasn’t made any more ice, and that’s free,” I said, fiddling with the locks till they surrendered. I pushed the door open with my back and shoved the cooler through the gap. I turned my face away as I held on to it. Actually, I’d planned on letting it sit there without me, but I quickly realized it would blow away.
    It filled in minutes, and I pulled it back, holding it up as the door banged back into place. Jesse laughed and walked up to me, taking the cooler from my hand.
    “Well, aren’t you innovative?” he said, wiping the rainwater from my face with his fingers. The touch was electric, and our eyes met. In that one second, we were back on a lakeshore and no time had passed. Something pulled at me, drawing me closer, but the earlier dark moment clouded his expression.
    His eyebrows twitched as he blinked and looked away, blowing out a breath. He turned and set the cooler on the counter on his way back to the closet, leaving me to flex my hands and mentally kick myself. Brad, Brad, Brad . . .
    I watched him unlock and pull open the closet at the end of the bar and disappear into it. One by one, sandbags were tossed out with solid thuds. My God, he was such a Boy Scout. I walked over to hoist one of them up and heard a chuckle behind me as I grunted and wobbled in place.
    “Stay with it there, Fremont, I don’t want to have to rescue you again.”
    Seriously? I craned my neck around to glare at him, but at least the playfulness was back. For now.
    “Where do you want these?” I asked.
    “Along the front,” he said with the strain of lugging two at once. “Pile extra around the door.”
    We heaved, grunted, and shoved bags till they were all in place. All twenty-one of them. I counted.
    “Jesus, what possessed you to fill all these?” I panted, plopping down in a booth far away from the windows. They were scaring me.
    “My low land,” he said, leaning against the bar to catch his breath. “Gotta do what it takes to take care of what I have. Guess that’s why law didn’t do it for me,” he said with a shrug. “Legal documents and putting on a show in the courtroom isn’t who I am.” He held up his hands. “I work for what I have.”
    I stood up to peer out at the porch, now flush with the ice-chummed water. “Sure hope they work.”
    The big clock over the bar mocked me, showing me with its battery-operated superiority that I only had sixteen hours left. God, every time I thought I had it settled in my mind—every time I made peace with the thought of going home to Brad and starting our life together—something weird escalated with Jesse. And things weren’t supposed to escalate with Jesse! There wasn’t supposed to be a Jesse.
    “Shit,” I muttered to myself. Or what I thought was to myself.
    “What?”
    I shook my head, looking back outside, but he wasn’t distracted with tasks anymore and zeroed in. “No, something. What’s up?”
    “Just listening to the time tick by,” I said, not turning around, and hugging my arms across me. “Why is that clock so infernally loud?”
    I heard the rumble of his laugh get closer as he slid into the seat across from me. “I hate to break it to you, Fremont, but you aren’t getting anywhere else today.”
    I took a deep breath and scooped my hair back. It was