Ice Storm (Ice 4)

“How about you stay with Mahmoud and I’ll do recon?” Isobel asked.

“Because I don’t trust you?” he suggested. “Besides, Mahmoud isn’t looking well. He needs a maternal touch.”

“I’m not the motherly type,” she snapped, glancing at the boy. Mahmoud was curled up on the banquette, and beneath the layers of dirt he was turning a definite green.

“Just keep telling yourself that, princess. I think I’d better find some Dramamine before we’re both very sorry. Do you need some as well?”

“I have no problem with seasickness.”

“That’s right, this isn’t the first ferry we’ve been on together, is it?”

“Go to hell,” she growled, looking away from him.

He closed the door quietly behind him. She’d take good care of Mahmoud. She was trying very hard to be a major badass, but it was a lost cause. Even after all these years, and the changes she’d gone through, he knew her too well.

And as long as she hated him with such a fiery passion, all was well. She hadn’t gotten over him. She’d never get over him.

Not if he could help it.

Bastien Toussaint sank back on his heels, staring at the piece of wood in front of him. There was an American saying—measure twice, cut once. He’d measured seventeen times and cut twelve, and the damned piece was still just a hair too big. He opened his mouth to let out a long, colorful string of curses, and then closed it again. The baby was asleep, strapped into the perchlike contraption Chloe used for him, and he tended to sleep through everything, including saws, hammers and loud music. A blessing, since their first child, Sylvia, had chosen to disdain sleep for most of the first year of her life. And at age four months the baby was hardly likely to notice the difference between a “blast it” and the string of much more colorful invective Bastien had been toying with.

But he couldn’t bring himself to swear in front of his very young children. He was getting soft in his old age.

He rose, took the offending board back to the table saw and shaved one more sliver off it, then returned. It finally fit, needing just a few taps of the hammer to secure it into place.

Baby Swede was stirring, now that things were quiet. Ridiculous name for a Toussaint, but Bastien had gone along with it, because Chloe had wanted it. In honor of Stockholm Syndrome, she’d said. That unfortunate and highly unlikely scenario in which a hostage fell in love with her kidnapper. And he couldn’t argue with that, particularly with a very pregnant, very cranky woman.

He picked up the sling, gently, but Swede opened his blue eyes to stare up at him with that solemn expression he’d been born with. He looked like him, a fact Bastien found disarming.

Chloe was in the half-finished kitchen of their rambling house, and she raised an eyebrow when he came in. “How’s the Hundred Years War coming?”

“Carpentry takes time,” he said. “You can’t rush these things.”

She simply shook her head, knowing him too well. The work would be done in his own time, and meanwhile she managed with only two interior doors, on their bedroom and on the working bathroom, plus a door on every closet in the house. No door to the bedrooms, but the closets were complete, and fortunately no one asked why, when there were no kitchen cabinets, and only plywood flooring and Sheetrock walls. He wanted to do it all himself, needed to. Every other weekend Chloe’s family came up to help him, but in the end it was up to him to make the house secure. And he needed to do that, to make peace with himself.

Chloe moved past him, scooping up the baby and giving Bastien a fleeting kiss. “I know, dear,” she said.

It was close to dusk, almost time for him to quit for the day. He reached out to her, to pull her back, when suddenly the power went out, leaving them in the afternoon dusk.

Power went out often enough up in the mountains of North Carolina, but there was no wind storm, and the day was calm. There were only two possible reasons.

Someone might have hit one of the power lines with his car—an accident.

Or someone knew that most of Bastien’s elaborate security devices ran on electric power.

He froze, waiting for the familiar, comforting sound of the generator powering on. Nothing. The lights stayed off, just the one battery-powered emergency floodlight spearing into the room.

He was crushing Chloe’s hand, and she hadn’t made a sound of protest.

“Where’s Sylvia?” he mouthed.

“Down for a nap.” She could be as silent as he was.

“Take the baby and go to her room. Take her and get in the closet. Lock it and don’t come out until I tell you to.”

“But—”

“The closet’s fortified, remember? You’ll be safe.”