Page 28 of Making New Plans

Steeling myself, I accepted the call. “Hello?”

“Chloe.”

I froze, not sure if the deep, raspy voice was real or I was still in my dreams. “Hunter?”

“The lodge is flooding. You’d better get here quick.”

10

Chloe

“Pants! I need pants!” I screeched, dropping my phone.

Dimly, I heard Hunter through the phone, “You’re not wearing any pants?”

“Of course I’m not wearing any pants! I was asleep, you idiot!” I howled in the direction of the phone. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“This is the fourth time I tried calling you! And I sleep occasionally too, you know!”

Rolling my eyes, I yanked on some old sweats. “I’ll be there in five minutes. Do—I don’t know—something until I get there!”

I hung up without waiting for a response. Sarah had crashed at her parents’ house for the night, so I grabbed the car keys and sprinted out the door.

On the five-minute drive over, questions flocked me like a horde of angry woodpeckers. How much water was in the lodge? Should I call someone to help me bail it out? Damn it, what if my parents found out? Which was moot because they certainly would. Stuffing their unsurprised, disappointed faces into a dungeon in my mind, I refocused. Why hadn’t our sump worked? Were our guests okay?

The tires squealed as I whipped into a parking spot then leapt from my car, boots clomping, breath freezing in my lungs. The lodge looked fine. Not that I expected it to be underwater or something. I swept through the sliding doors to see Hunter standing at the front desk.

For a whole half second, I completely forgot about the flooding. I stopped and stared at Hunter. From his unlaced boots to his forest green pajama bottoms slung low on his hips. A black hoodie zipped three-quarters of the way up and no shirt underneath. And the sensual dips of his collarbones? Why did I so desperately want to trace my finger over them? And then his hair. Oh, his hair. Gloriously mussed and flopping over his tense face in golden-brown waves.

The fact that he was staring at me like I had two heads ruined the moment.

I snapped back to emergency mode. “Okay, what happened?”

He ran a hand through his hair and motioned me forward. “You’d better follow me. The guests are fine and still asleep, which is why I didn’t want to raise any loud alarms. At least until you got here.”

My eyebrows skyrocketed as I followed him to the basement. Like, wow, did he actually care about the guests and the lodge’s reputation? Was he actually deferring to me on this?

On the second-to-last step, Hunter threw out an arm to stop me and pointed. I gasped when I looked at a basement that had been fine twenty-four hours ago. Water, maybe a foot deep, rippled over the concrete floor. Thankfully, no carpet to ruin. But the wooden shelves holding our room and food supplies would be warped. Our industrial-sized washer and dryer were probably toast. And, if the water level kept rising, we’d be in some serious trouble.

Thinking of the damage control I’d have to do, I demanded, “How did this happen?”

His eyes, level with my own since he stood one step below me, widened. “I was just about to ask you that question. Didn’t you read my note?”

My stomach plummeted over a cliff. “What note? There weren’t any notes on my door this morning.”

“Ah, shit. That’s why you didn’t say anything,” Hunter mumbled under his breath as he scrubbed his hands over his face.

Then he looked back at me, exhaustion heavy in his gaze. “I left you a couple of notes. One of them said that the sump wouldn’t turn on even when I unplugged and re-plugged it. I’m no expert, but Google said that could mean different things, so I left you a note about it, figuring you knew a repair guy.”

I groaned. “Well, why didn’t I see any notes then? I looked everywhere—”

“Forget the notes, Chloe! Anything could’ve happened to them. Wind blew them off, employee knocked them down, whatever. We shouldn’t have been communicating through notes in the first place, which is why I left you my phone number on one of the sticky notes this morning…yesterday morning. You know what I mean!” He broke off, breathing hard.

I blinked. My emotions tried to sort themselves out. There was anger that he didn’t like my notes idea, especially when he’d insisted on hands-off training. Frustration and curiosity about what had happened to the notes. And excitement, maybe? That he’d given me his number. No wonder he’d been sending me strange looks all day. He probably thought I hadn’t used his number on purpose.

Gathering my wits, I waved aside the notes drama. “Well, bottom line is, we made a mistake, and we need to fix it asap. Henrietta Meyers is the only certified plumber in town with an industrial-sized water vacuum thingy, so we’ll need to call her. But we should also save as much stuff out of here as we can in case the water level keeps going up before she gets here.” I bit my lip looking around the dim basement-turned-swimming-pool. “I’ll grab a headlamp so we can see. But it’s going to be so cold and wet and—”

Hunter touched my arm. “I’ll take care of it. You go call the plumber and grab me that headlamp. I’ll rescue the inventory.”

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