Wild Rain by Donna Kauffman

heleaned his end of the mattress against the wall and hobbled around to face her.
    “You ought to be on your knees thanking God or whatever you believe in that I’m stuck here with you.”
    She actually had the nerve to roll her eyes at him. If she hadn’t been using all her strength to keep her end of the mattress from crashing to the floor, he wasn’t too sure she wouldn’t have decked him. Or kneed him.
    For some reason the sight of her struggling with the ungainly hunk of bedding made him even angrier. “What the hell did you think you were going to do all alone out here? Huh? What on earth possessed you to try and ride this thing out?”
    “Yell at me later, okay? This thing is about a quarter century old, long before anyone invented lightweight coils.”
    He wanted to hit something. No, he wanted to strangle something. Someone. He growled at her, then hobbled back to his end without bothering to see if what he’d said had any effect on her. He knew better.
    “Why are we doing this anyway?”
    He let his head drop to rest on the thick width braced between his hands. “We’re going to bend this thing into the storage room so that it covers our heads. That way, when your roof caves in, we’ll have a passing fair chance of not getting our skulls bashed in.” He’d made the entire statement through clenched teeth. He raised his head and angledit to one side so he could see her. “Now can we get on with it? If I wanted to die on a mattress, it sure as hell wouldn’t be this way.”
    Jillian ducked back behind the safety of her end of the mattress. Her face flamed even as she damned herself for letting him get to her. Her lips twisted in a rueful grin. Yeah, she imagined she was the very last type of woman a man like Reese would fantasize about spending his last minutes on earth with. To her eternal shame she couldn’t say the same thing about him.
    She vented her frustration on the task at hand. In less than a minute they had the mattress in front of the door. She stepped into the closet and quickly arranged the pillows in a framework around the edges of the room.
    “No, pile them in the middle. We’ve got to move the boxes around the edges as support.”
    Jillian understood his plan. She quickly began rearranging boxes in stacks at each corner of the room, not bothering to tell Reese to sit down. She was only half surprised that his thigh wound and the necessary mop-handle crutch were barely noticeable impediments as he efficiently arranged twice as many boxes as she had in half the time.
    Of course, if she’d stop gawking at him … his shoulder muscles and biceps flexing as he shoved boxes around, the way his jeans cupped his nice, tight … Sighing in disgust, she heaved the last box into place, then stood and wiped her damp palms on her jeans.
    “Okay, what next?”
    “Round up as much stuff from the kitchen as we can.”
    They were back in the storage closet in under ten minutes. Jillian stowed the lanterns and flashlights where she could reach them. Reese shoved the cooler they’d filled with the contents of the fridge off to one side, then ducked back into the hall and started shoving bottled water through the door. She stacked them neatly along another wall.
    Once everything had been moved in, she turned in a slow circle and surveyed the space. The boxes were stacked about four feet high at the corners, three feet in between, with a row that would form a tower in the middle once the mattress was inside.
    Even with the water, cooler, and lanterns, they had plenty of space, she noted with satisfaction.
    A loud grunt had her spinning around.
    “A little help here?”
    She instantly moved to the door and grabbed one side of the mattress Reese was shoving into the room. She really liked the way he said the word “here” she mused as she struggled to make the thick pile of foam bend the way she wanted it to. Something about a man with an accent—
    “Not that way!”
    —Made her want to