I’ll carry you down those steps myself if you don’t get your butt moving.” He whistled sharply, making her jump. But the bandanna-clad dog simply trotted past her, brushing against Ariana’s leg before sniffing the ground in front of the cellar entrance. “Steps, Sugar,” Jayden said and the dog hesitantly took a gingerly step down into the darkness. “She’s mostly blind. Don’t trip over her on your way down. There’s a handrail. Use it.”
A blind dog.
She couldn’t have made up such a detail if she’d tried.
She held her arm around her head, trying to keep her hair from blowing in his face as well as hers as she took the first step beyond the wooden door. “Is that, uh, that door going to keep out a tornado?” The wood was faded nearly gray and looked to be a hundred years old. It was a fitting complement to the steep stairs, which seemed to be carved from stone.
“Guess we’ll see, won’t we.” He was right on her heels, pulling the door closed as he followed her.
“I’ve never been in a tornado.” Or gone down into a dark storm cellar with a blind dog and her handsome cuss of an owner.
“I have. There’s usually a flashlight right here by the door, but I’ll find one soon as I can. The walls are stone, but the floor’s dirt. You’ll feel the difference when you get to the bottom.”
She did, but was glad for the warning. She felt as blind as Sugar and leaned over to pet the dog, who seemed to plant herself immediately in front of Ariana’s shins. Then she felt Jayden brush against the back side of her as he, too, reached the base of the steps.
She straightened like a shot.
“Sorry,” he murmured. His hand cupped her shoulder as he sidled around her. “No electricity down here.”
She wasn’t so sure about that. Both her butt and her shoulder were tingling from his brush against her, even after his touch left her and she heard him moving around.
A deafening clap of thunder made her jump. Sugar whined and she knelt down to rub her hand over the shaggy dog, all the while looking up at the wooden cellar door. She had some serious doubts about that door. “Was that tornado a few years back in Paseo? Are we even still near Paseo?”
“My address says so.” She heard a few clanks, and then a narrow but reassuring flashlight beam shone across the floor as he moved back to her side. “Here.” He handed her the sturdy, metal flashlight and retreated once more to what she could now see were shelving units lined up against two walls. “And there was a tornado around here a few years ago, but I wasn’t here for it. Shine that up here, would you?”
“Sorry.” She immediately turned the flashlight in his direction again. But she’d seen enough of the rest of the cellar to know that it was larger than she’d expected. Her vivid imagination was conjuring any number of creepy crawlies hanging out in the far corners of the dirt-floored cellar.
She realized her flashlight was trained squarely on his extremely excellent rear end and angled it upward where his hands were. “So where were you, then?”
“Two years ago? Germany. The close-up brush I had with a tornado was further back than that. In Italy.”
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.
