“The door’s old,” he allowed. “But not a hundred years old. It’s just the Paseo sun that makes it look that way.” He pushed aside a stack of newspapers. Who kept old newspapers these days? To him it was sort of like saving string.
Outside, the thunder had settled into a continuous rumble. He hadn’t lied to the lovely, young Ariana Lamonte. Aside from that one sight of the funnel cloud, he hadn’t seen it again when he’d been fighting with the damn cellar door. But he still wasn’t inclined to leave the safety of the cellar just yet, either. Not when the sky had that ominous blackish-green hue. Just because he hadn’t seen a funnel didn’t mean there wasn’t one. And he had no desire to tangle with a tornado.
As far as storm cellars went, this one was pretty old. Back in the day, it’d been used more as a root cellar than anything. Nowadays, it was the place where old crap—like thirty-plus-year-old newspapers—went to die.
He didn’t find the box of crackers he’d been hunting for, but he did find an old radio. He switched it on.
“Is that a radio?”
He didn’t want to dash the hopefulness in Ariana’s voice, but truth was truth. “There are only a few radio stations with a strong enough signal to reach Paseo. Television’s even worse. Hated it when I was young.”
“That’s what cable and satellite dishes are for.”
He chuckled. “No cable out here. And satellite was way too expensive. At least it used to be.” They had satellite television now, primarily so his mom could keep up with Grayson’s rodeoing when she wasn’t traveling with him. But when the weather was bad, the first thing it did was lose its signal. He held up the radio that emitted only static no matter how many times he turned the dial. He turned it off again and stuck it back on the shelf.
“And no cell phone signal, either,” she said. “Which I discovered for myself already.”
“Nope. No cell signal.” He shrugged and moved a cardboard box full of toys he vaguely remembered from his childhood. If he was really lucky, he’d find some old towels.
“Any internet?”
“The library in town has it. They’re only open on Wednesdays, last time I checked.” Admittedly, that had been a good year ago, when he’d been ironing out leftover details from leaving the service.
“This is Texas,” she muttered. “Not a third-world country.”
He smiled faintly. “We are kind of off the grid,” he allowed. “But I’ve traveled the world. Seen the best and more often the worst of people along the way. So I’ve come to appreciate Paseo’s peacefulness.”
The cellar door shuddered again.
“Usual peacefulness,” he amended, resuming his search for the crackers. From the corner of his eye, he watched Sugar cuddle up close to Ariana.
The dog was ordinarily wary as hell around strangers. But he couldn’t exactly blame Sugar.
The reporter—journalist—had curves just meant to be cuddled up close against. She had rich brown hair that reached halfway down the back of the artsy black-and-white sweater she wore open over a clinging gray top. Her snug jeans showed off shapely thighs before they tucked in impractical knee-high red boots. They ought to have looked ridiculous, those boots. Like they belonged on a fashion runway. On her, though, they were just plain sexy. Combined with darkly lashed brown eyes that had sucked him in the second she’d turned them his way out on the highway, Ariana Lamonte definitely made an impact.
And her presence now was only serving to remind him just how long it had been since he’d enjoyed an attractive woman’s company.
He’d hooked up a time or two right after things ended with Tess in Germany, but that was it. Grayson had told him he was turning into a hermit and suggested he meet some of the buckle bunnies always following him around. Jayden had bluntly told his brother to stuff it.
He finally spotted the old-fashioned metal container that held a sealed box of saltine crackers. “Ah. Success.”
For all he knew, they were the same ones he’d put there when he was eighteen, but he was hoping they’d been refreshed somewhere along the way. He pulled the tin off the shelf, as well as the dusty bottle sitting behind it—definitely not his doing when he’d been eighteen. He’d been a hell-raiser, but even he hadn’t had the nerve to keep a bottle of whiskey in the cellar right under his mom’s nose. She’d have tanned his hide, regardless of his age. He’d never met a fight he didn’t like—except when it was against his mom.
Carrying both the tin and the bottle, he went back to sit on the sleeping bag.
Sugar lifted her head and shuffled over to him, curling up against his thigh and going back to sleep.
“How old is she?”
He rubbed the dog’s ruff. “About three. I brought her back from Germany with me when I got out of the army.” He left out the part that he’d basically stolen her from his master sergeant. The man had gotten Tess. As far as Jayden was concerned, he hadn’t deserved to have the dog, too.
“Was she born blind?”
“No.” He ignored her curious expression and peeled open the cracker box. Fortunately, it looked relatively new. And the outer metal box had done a good job keeping bugs from getting at the cardboard inside.
The storm was howling worse than ever outside. Rain had started lashing against the door and he hoped to keep Ariana distracted from it as much as he could. “Here.” He set a sleeve of crackers on the sleeping bag between them and wiped off the dusty bottle with his wet shirttail. “No glasses, I’m afraid.” He held the bottle closer to the lantern so she could see the label he’d exposed. “You are legal, right?” For all he knew, she could be a twenty-year-old journalism student.
She let out a soft, sexy laugh and leaned forward to take the bottle. Her fingertips brushed his. He wasn’t sure if that made more of an impression on him than the way her long, tangled hair formed a curtain around her. “More than legal,” she assured him. “I’m twenty-seven.”
Older than she looked, which was a relief. “I’ve got nine years on you.”
“Not exactly a generation gap,” she offered drily. She twisted off the cap from the bottle of whiskey, took a sip and promptly coughed. “Potent,” she finally managed. She set the bottle next to the crackers and peeled off her sweater.
The clinging shirt beneath possessed no sleeves. Just two narrow straps over shoulders that gleamed ivory-smooth in the lantern’s light. His gaze started to drift over the shadowy cleavage also on display beneath her collection of thin gold necklaces, and he grabbed the whiskey bottle for himself.
Hell of a time for that dead feeling inside him to be shocked back to life.
“Potent,” he agreed after he took a healthy swig. The liquor burned all the way down, joining the heat already pooled inside him.
Fortunately, she seemed to take his comment at face value and fiddled with her cell phone. “I couldn’t function without the internet,” she said. “How do you stand it?”
“Just fine,” he drawled. “What do I need it for?”
“Keeping up with the world?”
He smiled slightly. “Hear everything I need to know at the feed store in town.” It was an exaggeration, but not that much of one since he, personally, wasn’t all that inclined to ever turn on the television. Not when every time he did, all he saw were politicians arguing and neighbors shooting neighbors. He’d seen enough of that in the service. “What do you need the internet for?”
She’d been sitting cross-legged and she shifted, straightening out her legs, too. “My job, for one thing. Research. Filing stories.” Her lips twitched. “Keeping up with the world.”
“I