Page 6 of Bailey

She poured him a cup and set it on a tray. Then she added a sugar bowl and got out a carton of cream and brought it all to him. He watched her approach, something sparking hotly inside him.

“Thank you,” he murmured as he took the tray from her. It bore yellow and pink flowers and looked like something Reeves’ grandmother would have owned, and she nodded to him before returning to the kitchen to get her own cup of tea.

“Where’d you get this tray?” he asked, balancing it on his lap and opening the sugar bowl.

“It was my great-grandmother’s,” she said. “I helped clean out her house when she passed away several years ago, and I got to keep it.” She smiled as she rejoined him in the living room and sat down on the other end of the couch.

Reeves finished doctoring up his coffee with only sugar, then stretched the to slide the tray onto the hearth. A hint of self-consciousness moved through him as he straightened and re-tucked the blanket in around his hips. Now, holding just his coffee mug, he wrapped his fingers around it, stealing from the warmth of the dark liquid within.

He took a sip and sighed. “Ah, you make good coffee, Bailey.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she seemed a bit surprised at the compliment.

He glanced over to Bailey, and her blue eyes shone like the crystalline depths of a mountain lake. “Have you ever been to Banff?” he asked.

Total surprise crossed her expression for a moment, and she nodded. “Yeah, I went hiking up there with some friends once.” She tilted her head and considered him. “Why?”

Heat filled his face, because there was no way he could tell her that her eyes reminded him of the gorgeous lakes up in Canada. He cleared his throat and took a too-big drink of his coffee, which scalded his tongue, the roof of his mouth, and his throat as he swallowed. He coughed a couple of times and shook his head. “No reason.”

Bailey laughed, the sound like twinkling music, and when he looked at her again, those eyes sparkled with all the sunshine he’d ever known.

“You’re really not a great liar,” she said.

“Well, I’ve never aimed to be one,” he said.

She held his gaze for a moment, then ducked her head. She took a breath and opened her mouth as if she’d ask him another question, but the silence was filled with a blaring alarm from his phone. Hers joined it a moment later, and Reeves’ adrenaline kicked into high gear.

With his pulse pounding, he lifted his phone from the armrest of the couch and flipped it over. This was the annoying alarm of the emergency broadcast system throughout this part of small-town Wyoming, and while he wasn’t quite sure what to expect, it didn’t surprise him to see an emergency weather notification flashing across the top of his screen in all capital letters.

Though the alarm buzzed in an annoying way, he took a few seconds to read the notice, which told him about high rain and winds for the next eight hours along the northern edge of Coral Canyon and southern border of Dog Valley. The highway in front of his house had been closed, and anyone living in that corridor and along Fisher’s Kill Stream was advised to evacuate.

“We live on Fisher’s Kill Stream,” Bailey said, her voice filled with fear. She tapped to silence the alert, and Reeves did the same. Their eyes met again, and his heart pounded in his chest for a multitude of reasons now.

“Do we need to evacuate?” Bailey asked. “Has that stream flooded before?”

“Yeah,” Reeves said slowly, a frown forming between his eyes. “It has. I mean, a few years ago, but it wasn’t anything dangerous.”

“Did they call for an evacuation?” Bailey asked.

Reeves shook his head. “No.”

Her phone rang in the next moment, and Reeves caught sight of the name on the screen—Bryce—before she swiped on the call and lifted it to her ear.

“Hey,” she said.

Reeves heard the low-pitched rumbling of a man talking for a couple of seconds before Bailey lowered the phone and tapped the speaker button.

“...you’ve got to get out of there,” Bryce finished.

Bailey stared into the fire that Reeves had built. “I don’t know, Bryce. The river hasn’t even flooded yet.”

“It hasn’t? How can you tell?”

Bailey got up, and Reeves should be happy that her attention had focused somewhere else, but he sure didn’t like that the first person to call her wasn’t her momma or daddy, but an unknown male.

It’s probably her boyfriend, he thought, because someone as talented, intelligent, and beautiful as Bailey surely wouldn’t stay single for long.

She moved into the kitchen, past the dining room table to the sliding glass door. “I don’t even see it,” she said. “I can’t see anything through this soup.”