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“Leave it.” His voice was sharp and her hackles started to rise.
She deliberately closed her hand around the phone before straightening in her seat once more. Annoyed or not with his tone, she still needed to explore this whole Fortune thing. And a girl usually got further with honey than she did with vinegar. “I appreciate your—”
“Sweetheart, in gear. Now.” He grabbed her arm, practically hauling her out of the car.
Horror mingled with annoyance as she struggled against his iron grip, nearly tripping before she found steady footing. If it weren’t for her high-heeled boots, he would have towered over her. As it was, her forehead had a close encounter with the faint cleft in his sharp chin. “I don’t know who you think you are, but—”
“I’m the guy who’s trying to get us to cover.”
She dragged her blowing hair out of her eyes again. “Are you going to melt in the rain? Seems to me you’re already soaked through.”
“No, but I don’t want a house coming down on those ruby slippers of yours.” He gestured and her mouth went dry all over again at the sight of the funnel cloud snaking downward from the clouds.
“Oh, my God!” She grabbed his wet shirtfront. “That’s a tornado? Is it coming this way?”
“Let’s not wait around to see, okay?” His hand was like iron as he pulled her along with him—not toward the nearby stone-sided house surrounded by a wraparound porch, but well off to the side of it in the direction of the barn. He stopped halfway there, though, letting go of her long enough to lean down and pull open a storm-cellar door angled into the earth. “Get in.”
She looked nervously from the house to the barn, then stared into the black abyss below the cellar door. Ax murderer? Tornado? It was no time to weigh odds, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Sweetheart, 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.
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?”
Chapter Two
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 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 kept up with the world plenty thanks to fifteen years with the army.”
She set aside her phone and lifted her hair off her neck with both hands. “It’s warm down here.”
And getting warmer. He wasn’t entirely certain that his clothes hadn’t started steaming. “Blame it on the whiskey.” Personally, he was blaming it on her.
“It’s June but the rain still ought to cool things off.” She twisted her hair, managing to tie it into a knot atop her head. She inhaled deeply and Jayden did blame the whiskey then, because he should have looked away from the lush curves pushing against that thin excuse for a shirt, but he didn’t.
And the heat inside his gut just increased.
The only thing that distracted him was the thumping of the cellar door as the storm buffeted against it. It sounded like it was hailing, but in the lantern light, he could see the glimmer of rain dripping through the slats of the wood door.
If he’d met Ariana Lamonte under just about any other circumstance, he wouldn’t hesitate to pursue the attraction. But she was in his storm cellar. Essentially under his protection.
Which changed the rules entirely.
Or should.
“So what do you do in Austin when you’re not chasing around stories for your magazine?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “The usual. I have friends. Parents.” As if she realized the spare details were hardly the way to keep a conversation going, she pushed to her feet and paced the short distance to the shelves, arching her back a little as she stretched. Then she bent over in half, her bracelets jingling softly, and pressed her fingers against the dirt floor.
He damn near swallowed his tongue.
The knot in her hair wasn’t holding up. As he watched, it seemed to uncoil in almost slow motion. Then she straightened again, caught her hands behind her back and stretched once more.
He closed his eyes, stifling an oath. “Grow up there?” He had to raise his voice over the noise from outside.
“In Austin? Born and raised. Same as my mom and dad before me. I love the city. I have an apartment that overlooks the skyline. Ridiculously expensive, so I barely have it furnished, but I can walk or ride my bicycle to work if I want. I can get most anywhere I want, really, without even taking out my car.”
He looked at her again and was both relieved and chagrined that she’d stopped stretching and was pacing once more. “Except here,” he said drily.
Her lips curved. They were full and luscious, like the rest of her. Not overblown. Just...right.
Exactly right.
“Except here,” she agreed. “What about you? Did you grow up in Paseo?”
“Born and raised,” he parroted. “Right here on this very ranch.”
She propped her hands on her hips and looked at him. “And your parents?”
He wasn’t accustomed to telling strangers his business. But she was easy to talk to. And it kept her from turning to see the water that had begun streaming down the steps.
The cellar had stone walls and a dirt floor. He’d never known it to flood more than a foot. Still, if it got worse, he was already figuring they’d have to leave the shelter. In a flood, being inside the house higher up was better than being below ground. If there really were tornadoes in the area, they’d have to take their chances. His mom’s bedroom closet in the house would be the best bet. First floor. Interior room.
There wouldn’t be much space for the two of them. It would definitely be close quarters—
“Never knew my father,” he said, pulling his thoughts away. “My mom was pregnant when she came to Paseo.”
Her expression shifted a little. “So your mom is a Fortune?”
“Not one of those Fortunes,” he reminded her. “The ones you’ve been writing about for your magazine. Like I said. The name’s just a coincidence. So if that’s what brought you to Paseo, you’ve wasted a trip. My mother’s definitely not related to them.”
She tilted her head slightly. “It’s not that common a name.”
“It’s the one my mom decided on when she was making a fresh start here. She wanted a new life. A new identity. Said my brothers and I were the only fortune she needed. Thus the name. I’m pretty sure she was running from the guy who’d gotten her pregnant. She could have chosen any surname she wanted.” He raised his voice over a crack of thunder. “Always figured Fortune was better than Smith.”