Read Online Storm Over the Lake by Diana Palmer - Free Book Online Page A

brought it all back, and it was taking her forever to push it far enough away.
    Far away in the darkness, there was asound. A rumble, vaguely like thunder, above the steady beat of the rain. Then a crashing watery roar seemed to come out of nowhere. On a wide plain, she was standing, paralyzed, watching, as a thirty foot wall of muddy, debris-carrying water came tumbling over the waterfall and down over houses and trees. Frightened into action, she turned and ran, her thin white silk gown flaring out behind her as she sprinted ahead of the water, her lungs bursting, her legs stretched to the limit, and all around her the screaming, dying sound of victims being sucked into that wet, hungry maw…it caught her, and soaked her, and she was being dragged under…
    â€œMeredith!”
    The voice was salvation, shelter. It jerked her away in the nick of time, returning her to consciousness, bathed in sweat, tears rolling down her cheeks. She looked up drowsily into a broad, leonine face, its hard planes outlined in the light of her small lamp. He was sitting beside her on the bed, his eyes dark with concern,his big hand holding both of hers. He must have come running, she thought dazedly, because that broad, hair-riddled chest was bare, and all he had on were silk pajama bottoms.
    â€œMy God, I’ve never heard a scream like that,” he said gently. “Are you all right, honey?”
    â€œWhat?” she whispered, blinking her eyes, her breath coming in gasps, as if she’d been running.
    His fingers brushed the damp, sweaty strands of her hair from her temples, her cheeks. “You had the great grandfather of all bloodcurdling nightmares, from the sound of it,” he told her, a smile touching his hard mouth.
    She swallowed, catching her breath, just his voice enough to calm her, to ease back to fear. “I’m all right,” she whispered. “I’m all right, now.”
    â€œYou were screaming,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “I want you to tell me about it, Dana. Now.”
    It barely registered that he’d called her by her first name, or that the concern inthose dark eyes was genuine. She didn’t look higher than the bronzed skin of his throat.
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œYou can.” He threw the covers back. His big arms lifted her, turned, cradled her until she was lying across his broad, warm chest with her cheek on his bare shoulder.
    â€œNow,” he murmured, looking down into her stunned eyes, caressing her bare shoulders, the soft curves of her nightgown, with gentle eyes. “Tell me what happened. Tell me what you saw. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can touch you as long as I’ve got you close like this. You’re safe, honey. Tell me about it.”
    And she did. She told him about the dam that burst on a rainy Sunday morning in the darkness, and the unbelievable damage that a 30-foot wall of water can do to property and people, and about the victims…the victims…
    â€œSo many of them were children,” she whispered, her face buried in the curling hair on his chest, her hands clinging to him. “So many…and the mud and mirewas everywhere, and I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to look!” A sob shook her. “But the whole place was covered with reporters and TV cameras and curiosity seekers who got past the rescue workers…! And that man, that poor harassed man in the thick of it trying to get his friend’s body onto a stretcher past the television camera, and he said…he said…” Her voice broke. “He said we were vultures, that we were making a…a carnival out of it, and he was right, Adrian, we were, we were! All those poor, dead people, and the poor men who had to get them out and live with what they saw…!”
    â€œOh, my God,” he breathed, his big arms swallowing her, protecting her. “Oh, my God, Dana!” She felt the powerful muscles go taut as he