Chapter 2
CHAPTER
TWO
Bailey McAllister held the phone to her mouth as she stood on the edge of her patio.
Six inches in front of her, rain fell in a sheet she couldn’t see through.
“It’s going to flood,” she said to her momma.
“I was just down there yesterday morning, and the river was already at the banks. And it’s raining really hard. ”
Bailey had never seen rain this thick, in fact.
“It’s been really warm lately,” Momma said, and she didn’t seem nearly as concerned as Bailey would like her to be. She couldn’t hear much except the pounding of the rain on the roof, and she turned to go back into the house.
She took Tuesdays as her home office day, and they only scheduled vet tech appointments, like immunizations and medicine deliveries. Her doggy daycare program had really picked up steam in the last couple of months, and Bailey had hired four people to work in that building.
Exhaustion ran through her, and a growling noise cut through the pounding of the rain. “What am I going to do if my house floods?” she asked as she climbed the steps and entered through the sliding glass door.
She’d brought home two cats from the shelter last week, just to keep an eye on them and make sure they were domesticated enough to be put into her adoption program.
None of the other veterinary clinics took in strays and rehabilitated them, but Bailey almost felt like that was her calling, and that God had given her such a sharp mind and the determination to finish veterinary school so that she could help all the animals who didn’t fit in and who’d been abandoned.
The sound of the rain overhead diminished inside the house, though it still thumped steadily.
Bailey already knew she needed a new roof, and she could only hope and pray that it would last through this storm.
She moved around her dining room table and into the kitchen, telling her momma, “I need to go. I’ve got a ton of paperwork to catch up on. ”
“All right,” Momma said. “I’m sure everything will be fine. We’ll call you later.”
She hung up, and Bailey set her phone down on the counter with a mild vein of disgust pulling through her. Her momma’s default was Everything will be fine.
While Bailey intellectually knew that she was correct, and most things did turn out fine, sometimes she just wanted someone to say, “You’re right to be worried about that stream behind your property.
It could flood.” It was almost like her mother believed that if she didn’t acknowledge the worries, they couldn’t come true.
A roar filled the house that had Bailey jerking away from the stove, her eyes immediately moving to the back door.
She never kept it locked because she didn’t need to, and she stared as a man came roaring onto her covered patio, driving an ATV with two dogs on the back.
Thoroughly alarmed, Bailey ran to the door and flipped the lock.
The man wore a dark brown cowboy hat and denim from head to toe, and he was utterly soaked.
The roar of the ATV’s engine quieted, and the man looked at her through the glass.
Bailey’s pulse rioted when she recognized Reeves Durham, the man next door, whose soft, sultry voice and broad, sexy shoulders had been haunting her for the past four months.
Just as quickly as she’d locked the door, she unlocked it. “What are you doing?” she asked. “It’s pouring out there.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Reeves said, as his blue heeler jumped off the ATV with the boxer right behind it. He followed, and by all evidence, it sure seemed like the three of them were going to come in her house.
Bailey stepped back. “Come in. How long have you been out there? You’re soaking wet.”
“I was working on my eastern fence,” he said. “The weather said it was only a thirty percent chance of rain.”
“Did you get caught in the hail?”
“Yes.” Reeves held out his fist, and both of his dogs sat. “They can stay out here.”
“Of course they can’t. Come on in, all of you.” Bailey turned. “I’ll go get some towels.” She walked through the dining room, her mind buzzing like a whole hive of upset bees.
“I might not have anything that will fit you,” she said over her shoulder.
“But my daddy left a sweatshirt here a couple of weeks ago, and we can throw your clothes in my dryer.” By then, she had reached the bathroom, and she opened the cupboard and pulled out as many towels as sat there.
She hurried back into the dining room, where Reeves had, once again, made both of his dogs sit down just inside the door.
“Look at you guys.” She handed Reeves a towel without looking at him, and then dropped to her knees, so she could cater to the canines. “You’re all wet. Did you get all wet?” She spoke to them like little children as she rubbed their jowls and ears and down their faces and sides.
Thankfully, a heeler and a boxer had coats of hair like a duck, and they weren’t too wet. Still, she loved on them, glad when the boxer gave her a lick. Then she sat back and said, “You’re all done. You can go.”
The boxer trotted away, but the blue heeler looked up at Reeves. “Yeah, go on,” he said, his voice tired.
Bailey balanced herself using the back of a dining room chair, and stood. “They’re great. What are their names?”
“The heeler is Pansy,” Reeves said as he wiped the towel through his hair and down his face. “The boxer is Sir.”
“Pansy and Sir.” Bailey folded the towels in her arms. “They’re really cute.”
“They’re good dogs,” Reeves said.
Bailey looked at him and nearly swooned on the spot at the sight of his damp swept hair and him settling his cowboy hat back over it. “Let me get you my daddy’s sweatshirt.”
“Thank you,” he said, and he shrugged out of his coat as she walked away again. She’d left the sweatshirt draped over the arm of the couch, and she hurried into the living room to grab it.
“I can—” she started to say as she turned around, but the words died in her throat at the sight of Reeves lifting his T-shirt up and over his head.
He had muscles for days in his core, and that expanded into a broad chest and those glorious shoulders.
Bailey could only stare, the sweatshirt gripped in tight fingers.
“I think that river back there flooded,” he said.
Bailey blinked, the sight of his upper half forever tattooed in her mind.
“It was really full yesterday.” She moved toward him and swapped his wet clothes for the dry sweatshirt.
As he pulled it on, she looked down at his jeans.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do about those, unless you want to hang out in your underwear and put a blanket over your lap while your jeans dry. ”
She looked at him and smiled. “I’ll go put these in the dryer, and you can decide.” She turned away from him, silently enjoying the grumpy frown that had painted itself between his eyes.
“I’m probably not even going to be here long enough for those to dry,” he called after her. “I’m certainly not sitting around in my underwear.”
“You’ve seen me in mine,” Bailey said. “And hanging out in wet denim is your funeral.”
She turned into a small laundry room just off the dining room and put his clothes in the dryer.
She added the towels she’d used on the dogs, as they were still mostly dry and would help with the other items. She added a dryer sheet and started the appliance, then took a moment to gather herself together.
Maybe she’d thought a lot about Reeves since moving here, since he’d saved her from freezing in the snowstorm, since taking him peppermint bark for Christmas. Maybe she still wondered what he’d done over the holidays, and if he’d truly spent them alone.
She’d texted him a few times, but if anything, he acted annoyed with her when he had to help her with something in the house, or talk about the climate here in Coral Canyon. Heaven forbid, Bailey thought, some of her own grumpiness shining through.
Out in the kitchen, the kettle she’d put on started to whistle, and Bailey dashed back that way. “I’ve got hot water,” she said. “Do you want coffee, tea, hot chocolate?”
A fire now crackled merrily in her hearth, and Bailey stared at it from the other side of the peninsula as she reached for the handle of the kettle. Reeves sat in the living room as well, and he did have the blanket over his lap and bunched up around his hips.
“I couldn’t sit in the wet denim,” he said. “I laid my jeans on the fireplace.”
“You built a fire while I put your clothes in the dryer?”
He shrugged as if to say, Yeah, of course. “I’d take some coffee.”
Bailey looked down at the kettle. “Yeah, sure.”
She turned off the flame and stepped down the counter to her coffee maker, quickly measuring grounds and pouring cold water in. “I can put your jeans in the dryer.”
“They’ll be fine there.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No, I just ate lunch,” he said.
Bailey nodded. “I was just taking a break from my paperwork.”
“Do you work from home?” he asked.
“On Tuesdays, I do,” she said, keeping her back to him as she pulled out a sleeve of saltines and a snack-sized bag of shelled pistachios. “I’m in the clinic every other day, including until noon on Saturdays.”
“Wow,” Reeves said.
“We try to do all of our ranch and farm calls on Mondays and Thursdays.” Bailey smiled in the general direction of the living room without meeting Reeves’ eyes. “It’s a pretty decent schedule.”
“Sounds like it,” he said.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a farmer,” he said, and Bailey remembered the high-end finishes and extreme craftsmanship of his house.
There was no way he’d accomplished that on a farmer’s salary.
After all, the growing season in Wyoming only lasted for a couple of months, and unless he was growing gold leaf next door, Bailey highly suspected he actually did something else.
Or maybe he comes from money, she thought. No matter what, there was way more to Reeves Durham than farming.
“Has that little stream in the back flooded before?” she asked.
“Yep,” Reeves said. “It’s a bit of a mess, but it usually just flows out fifteen or twenty feet and then sinks back in. It does muddy up your fields back there a little.”
Bailey nodded, because she didn’t have any fields back there. The scent of coffee started to lift into the air, but while the smell usually settled her, today it didn’t. She didn’t want to deal with a flood, just like she didn’t want to deal with taking a date to Boston’s wedding.
An idea flowed through her mind, warping, and twisting as she watched the rain fall outside.
“This might be kind of bizarre,” she said, trying to find and latch onto the words she needed. She turned back to Reeves. “But a friend of mine is getting married in a few weeks, and I’m getting hammered on all sides about bringing a date.”
Reeves cocked his eyebrows, and Bailey heard how crazy the invite was.
“It wouldn’t mean anything,” she said. “I’ve just been too busy with the clinic to meet many people, and I only have one man who works for me, and he’s married.”
“So you want me to go to the wedding with you,” Reeves said.
“We could just go as friends,” she said.
“But we’re not friends.”
“We could be,” Bailey said. “We live right next door to each other in a tiny Wyoming town. Don’t you want to be friends?”
Reeves sighed. “Yeah, of course I want to be friends, Bailey.” His dark eyes never left hers. “If you don’t have time to meet people, how do you have time to go to the wedding?”
Bailey didn’t want to get into all the complexities of the Young family. No one in the world had time for that, and she didn’t want to go to Boston and Cora’s wedding at all.
Yes, she knew them, but they weren’t her close friends. And though she had been asked by Bryce and her mother if she would be bringing anybody to the wedding, Bailey hadn’t truly given it any serious merit.
“Tell you what,” she said. “If you tell me what you really do for a living, I’ll just go to the wedding by myself.”
Reeves blinked almost lazily. “I already told you what I do for a living.”
“Yeah, but I’ve seen your house,” she said. “And I’ve known farmers my whole life. There’s something else going on there.” She grinned at him and got to her feet. “And you know, if we’re going to be friends, I’m going to find out anyway.”
She moved into the kitchen, pulled open her cupboard, and got down a bag of orange essence herbal tea. “In fact, I bet I could look it up online.”
“Don’t do that,” Reeves growled, and Bailey lifted her eyes back to his.
“Okay,” she said. “The wedding’s off the table.” She shook her head. “I don’t even know why I thought to ask you.”
She poured the kettle water into her favorite mug and started to unwrap the tea bag. “You can just tell me what you do—what you really do—and we’ll call it good.”
He said nothing, and Bailey peeked up at him from beneath her eyelashes.
“I mean, if we’re going to be friends….” She let the words hang there, and then told herself to stop talking, as Reeves seemed like the type of cowboy who would stay silent until forced to speak.
Bailey had plenty of experience with cowboys and “farmers” like him, and she simply smiled sweetly at him, determined to wait him out.