He spoke with a distinct Texas drawl that said he’d grown up here. “World traveler?”
He shot her a grin over his shoulder. “Courtesy of the United States Army, ma’am.”
She was glad he quickly turned back to his task. His grin was positively lethal.
She sat down on the bottom step and rubbed Sugar’s warm head when the dog rested it on her lap. It was hard not to keep looking up at that cellar door. It was hard not wondering what unmentionable creatures they were disturbing in the dirt cellar with their very presence. “You don’t look like a soldier.” She jerked the flashlight upward again and jumped at another crack of thunder.
“I’m not anymore. You don’t look like a reporter.”
“I told you. I’m a journalist.”
“Working on a magazine article. I remember.”
Which brought her mind squarely back to her purpose for being there in the first place. She blamed the fact that she’d been even momentarily sidetracked by the storm.
She jerked the flashlight—and her gaze—away from his butt when he turned with a lantern in his hand. She’d seen ones like it pictured in the advertising section of Weird. She herself, however, had never had any personal experience with the things.
Primarily because her idea of roughing it meant being somewhere without a handy Starbucks.
Or traveling to a tiny map-dot called Paseo, Texas, where cell phone signals were apparently unheard of.
Along with the lantern, he’d also found a box of kitchen matches. But instead of lighting a match by scraping it against the box, he just scraped his thumbnail over the top. Then he set the flame to the lantern, and a moment later, another source of light countered the gloom. He set the lantern on the floor near her feet. “Turn off the flashlight. Might as well save the batteries.”
She turned it off before handing it to him. He stepped around her, going up a few stairs before tucking the flashlight between the wall and the handrail near the door. “That’s where we usually keep it.” She leaned to one side for him to go past her again as he came back down.
Then he picked up the lantern, holding it high as he looked around the rest of the room, making a satisfied sound as he headed into one of those far corners. When he came back into the small circle of light, he was carrying a puffy, orange sleeping bag that he flipped open a foot from her toes.
Her alarm level started rising again. “We’re, uh, not going to be down here all day, are we?”
“Probably not.” He set the lantern on the floor next to the brightly colored bag and disappeared into the shadows again. He came back with another sleeping bag, though he left this one rolled up and tossed it down on the one he’d spread out. “There used to be a small table and a couple chairs down here. Don’t know what happened to them. But we might as well be a little more comfortable while we’re here.” Suiting action to words, he knelt down and stretched out on one side of the opened sleeping bag and propped the rolled-up one behind his head.
Then he patted the area beside him. “C’mere, girl.”
Her mouth went dry.
Then she felt her face flush when Sugar sniffed her way along the edge of the sleeping bag before circling a few times next to Jayden’s hip and lying down.
Of course he’d meant his dog.
“Room for you, too,” he said.
She pressed her lips together in an awkward smile and shook her head. She was twenty-seven years old. Hardly inexperienced when it came to men. But lying on the floor next to a soaking wet stranger—even a handsome cuss of one—was not exactly in her wheelhouse.
Though it had been over a year since she’d broken up with Steven—
The thought blew away when the cellar door suddenly flew open.
Dirt and debris rained down the stairs and she shot off the step where she’d been sitting. She would have collided with Jayden, who’d bolted upright to his feet, if not for the quick way he set her aside.
She wrapped her arms around her midriff, but that didn’t really help the quaking inside her. She didn’t know how it was possible, but the sky outside was even blacker than before. So black that she almost questioned the time of day, even though logic told her it was still afternoon. “Can I help?”
He was halfway up the stairs, reaching out of the cellar opening to grab the door that kept slamming against the ground. “Stay there.” His voice was terse.
It seemed the nerves inside her stomach had found a whole new set of hoops to toss around.
The wind was whipping down the stairwell so violently that it blew his shirt away from his back like a maniacal parachute. The end of the sleeping bag flipped up and over her boots. Her hair felt like it was standing on end and Sugar shot off to hide in one of the dark corners.
She sat down on the sleeping bag and patted her hands together. “Come here, Sugar. It’s okay.” After a moment, the dog slunk back. Her tail was tucked. Her pointed ears were nearly flat against her head. She was more terrified than Ariana. She put her arm around the dog, wanting to bury her face in the dog’s silky fur.
Then Jayden finally won his battle with the door and it slammed shut with such force that even more dust came down, settling over his head.
He secured the latch again and jammed the flashlight through it as well.
“Is that going to hold it?”
“It’ll hold the latch.” He came back down the stairs. “Whether the door holds together is another matter.”
Sugar whined.
Ariana wished she could, too.
“Hey.” He crouched down next to them both. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
The door blew again, metal and wood seeming to scream against the pressure.
“You don’t know that,” she told him.
“You’re too pretty to be so pessimistic.” He put his arm around her and his dog.
She didn’t move away. Because, whether she wanted to admit it or not, just like Sugar obviously did, she felt safer with him right there even though the wetness of his clothes seeped through hers.
Still... “There’s a tornado out there,” she said, as if she needed to point that out to him.
“Not yet. At least I didn’t see the funnel cloud again. Hopefully, it’s just one hellacious storm.”
Right on cue, thunder shook the very walls. She couldn’t help flinching. “I never liked thunderstorms, either,” she admitted.
His hand squeezed her shoulder. “I don’t know. This one’s not so bad.”
She huffed out a disbelieving laugh. “Right.”
“It brought you, didn’t it?”
Jayden felt Ariana stiffen next to him and wished he’d said just about anything else.
That was the problem with his propensity for voicing blunt truths.
He pushed to his feet. He was soaked to the skin but he ignored the annoyance. “If I remember, there ought to be some stuff to eat and drink down here. Interested?”
She rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “If it’s a hundred years old like that cellar door, I don’t think so.”
He chuckled as he