“What’s wrong?”
She turned the screen to show him. “Fifteen messages. The last time I had fifteen messages, it was after my mom found out Adam had a baby.”
“Seems like Adam should have been the one getting the messages.”
She sank onto the arm of the couch as her fingertip began swiping her phone screen. “You don’t understand. Larkin was really sick for a while. Aplastic anemia. He might not have made it if Adam hadn’t been a bone marrow match.” She held the phone to her ear as she listened to a voice message.
Color reentered her cheeks as fast as it had fled, though, and she hopped off the couch arm. “There’s been a flood at the hotel.”
He frowned. “From the rain?”
“I don’t know. I guess?” She was hunting in her bag again. “Where are my keys?”
“I’ll drive.” He bolted up the stairs and yanked on the first pair of jeans he came to. He pulled on socks and his boots, grabbed a shirt and hustled back down the stairs again. “We’ll run by your brother’s place on the way.”
They left the barn at a jog, bypassing his grandmother’s house altogether to go straight for the truck. He’d pulled on his shirt by then and she tossed her bag onto the floor, not even noticing this time the way she flashed her sunglass panties at him as she climbed up inside.
There was never any traffic on the road out to his grandmother’s place, so he pushed the speed without regret. Not even thirty minutes had passed when he pulled up at the curb outside her brother’s house.
Arabella’s heart was hammering as she ran inside. Harper and the boys were sitting in the living room playing Candy Land and she hopped up, scattering the pieces when Arabella rushed inside.
“Bella! Brady’s been looking—”
“I know.” She tugged self-consciously at her dress. “I just found out.” She headed up the stairs. “Just going to change,” she called down as she went.
She replaced her shrunken dress with black leggings and a loose T-shirt, pushed her feet into her tennis shoes and pounded back down the stairs again. Naturally, Harper hadn’t gone to the hotel because she was taking care of the twins.
“You were with Jay?”
“Yes.” Arabella reached down and hurriedly provided the hugs that both boys were squawking for. “I just listened to the most recent message. How bad’s the flood?”
“Really bad. Brady says he’s not sure how much more the hotel can take.”
Arabella scrubbed her fingers over Murphy’s head when he jumped against her leg, then she hugged Harper as well. “It’s going to be okay. It has to be.”
She was still repeating those words inside her head when Jay pulled into the hotel parking lot a short while later.
Unlike the last emergency that had turned out to be a false alarm, there were no fire trucks this time. No police cruisers. No flashing lights, no people swarming around.
The parking lot was mostly empty, in fact, which for a Saturday evening wasn’t exactly the best thing to see, either.
Jay parked near the entrance and they started to go inside. But even before they made it to the wide, shallow steps of the entrance, they could see the water flowing over them, pooling at the base and running off to the side in the general direction of the pool.
“Good grief,” Arabella muttered, stepping more carefully because her tennis shoes were proving to be as useful as water skis. She looked upward. “Do you think it rained here harder than it did out at your place?”
“It’s possible, I guess.” Jay had closed his hand protectively around her elbow when he’d seen her slip the first time. “Careful.”
They went up two more steps and when she slid yet again, she muttered an oath and pulled the shoes off altogether. Her bare feet had better traction but when they entered the lobby, the water was even deeper, covering her feet right over her toes. The water was bad enough. But there were brochures and reams of papers floating about in the mess. Flowers from the arrangement that always took center stage in the lobby drifted along with them.
It seemed like a dozen people were hustling around with big buckets while a dozen more swept at the water with everything from wide brooms to mops to other buckets.
Nobody was above pitching in. Mariana. Grace Williams. Callum and his brothers. Kane and Brady, who greeted her and Jay’s arrival with a narrow-eyed glare. Even Beulah was there, her sour face tight with concentration as she mopped water into the bucket that Hallie was holding.
Arabella stopped next to Jason, whose trousers were wet up to his knees while he dragged a trash barrel around in an attempt to capture some of the non-liquid debris. “Here. Let me help.” The poor kid looked about ready to bawl.
He gladly surrendered the plastic bin.
“I’m going to check in at security,” Jay said grimly.
She nodded and watched him work his way through the mess before turning back to the task at hand. “Jason, what happened here?”
“Sprinkler system went haywire.” He pointed to the ceiling. “Went off out of the clear blue sky and then nobody seemed able to shut it off again.”
She shook her head, trying to adjust her thinking from a rain flood to a sprinkler system malfunction. “The fire department was just here two days ago because of the alarm going off! Shouldn’t they have noticed then if something was wrong with the system?”
“There’s no way this was an accident,” Brady said, wielding a push broom nearby to send a wave of water hurtling toward the open front doors.
Grace Williams had tears in her eyes as she followed behind Brady with a broom of her own.
Just seeing the woman who was always the epitome of her name in tears was enough
