Page 50 of The Law of Attraction
“What’s wrong with your family?” he asked. “Or are you sensitive about that too?”
“No, I brought it up, so it’s fair game.” She shrugged and glanced out the window. The rain was still coming down in buckets. “Nothing’s wrong with them. I just wanted to forge my own path, preferably in another state.”
“What path did they want for you?”
“Not much of one, to be honest. I was always in the shadow of my siblings. My older brother was this star football player until he blew out his knee a few years ago. And my little sister was an annoyingly perfect straight-A student who ended up at Harvard Law. I couldn’t compete with either of them.”
“You didn’t get straight A’s?” Adam asked, cocking an eyebrow as he forked the last bite of chicken-fried steak into his mouth.
Olivia snorted. “I had a solid A-minus average. In any other family I’d have been considered a great student, but not with Emily around.”
He pushed his empty plate away. “Do you resent her? Or them?”
“Not excessively so.” Mostly, she tried not to think about them at all. “Do you get along with your sister?” She assumed so, since she’d invited him to dinner.
“Sisters,” he corrected with an emphasis on the s. “I have three of them—all older.”
“Wow.” So he’d grown up in a house full of women. That helped explain some things—like his incongruously chivalrous tendencies and considerate streak.
“We get along okay,” he said with a one-shouldered shrug. “My family’s pretty close. Too close, sometimes.”
“But you didn’t tell them what happened with your ex.”
He stiffened, his eyes skating away. “No.”
“And I can see you’d rather not talk about it, so I’ll drop it.”
He threw her a grateful look. “Should we get dessert?” he asked, turning to catch the waitress’s attention.
“Might as well.” Olivia’s eyes went to the window again. Outside, the parking lot looked like a lake, and the rain was still pouring down. “Doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere anytime soon.”
They ordered hot fudge brownie sundaes and took their time eating them. The storm still hadn’t abated when the waitress came to clear their empty dishes away a half hour later. “Hope you folks weren’t planning on going anywhere tonight.”
“We’ve actually gotta get back to work,” Adam told her as he dug his wallet out of his back pocket.
“Where you work at?” she asked.
“The Walhalla plant down the highway.”
The waitress clucked sympathetically. “Not tonight you don’t. Remember that river you drove over on your way here? It’s out of its banks. Highway’s completely flooded out west of here.”
“But we have to get back,” Olivia said as panic rose in her throat.
The waitress nodded at the window. “You see any cars out there getting through?”
They turned to look. The highway that had featured a steady stream of traffic an hour ago was now dead quiet. Not a single pair of headlights shone through the rain.
They were stranded.
Chapter Eleven
“How long before the road’s drivable again?” Adam asked the waitress. His fingers drummed the Formica tabletop like a court stenographer jacked up on speed—or eight cups of coffee and four cans of Coke.
The waitress shrugged. “Rain’s gotta stop first. After that, maybe a few hours? Assuming the bridge doesn’t take any damage in the flooding. Last year an RV got swept into it and took out a couple of the pilings.”
“There’s got to be another way around,” Olivia reasoned. “An alternate route to get to the plant so the workers can get back and forth.”
“Oh, sure. You can get to it from Rutersville.”
