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 went over to the shelves. They were crammed with everything from tools to packing boxes that had been there since before his mom had ever set foot in Paseo. Which dated them more than thirty-six years, since he and his brothers hadn’t yet been born. In the years he’d been gone in the army, the shelves had only gotten more jumbled.
“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
