She plastered on a smile. “Morning.”
“Not yet, but I couldn’t sleep.” He yawned, looking her over. “Fixin’ to leave before dawn?”
“Uh ...”
“That’d be a mistake.” He pointed to the window. “Pouring, and I heard on the radio the river’s flooded over the road. Gonna have to use the mountain trail to reach the stables. That’s a steep three-mile trek, and you’d be hard-pressed to do it in the dark on foot. It’d take hours.”
She flicked a look into the howling void. Hours in the freezing cold, soaked and struggling.
“Best to hold until morning.”
Her nerves were taut bundles. How could she afford to delay?
Kevin scratched his stubbled chin. “You were going to leave without tellin’ your boyfriend?”
“Like I said, we aren’t together.”
“Oh. That’s right. Seems like a good catch, though. Capable. Military man, huh?”
“He’s a SERE instructor for the Air Force. On leave.”
“That explains it.”
To her dismay, instead of heading back to his bedroom, Kevin began to prep the coffee maker. “Dawn in a few hours. Might as well start loading up the caffeine, huh?”
She nodded weakly, considering her plan in light of Kevin’s revelation.
As much as she detested delaying, she couldn’t afford to spend hours hiking unfamiliar terrain. Lorraine’s boyfriend might be departing anytime, or maybe he already had, but she had a better chance of hitching a ride to the stables and sneaking away from there than traversing flooded territory she’d never clapped eyes on.
Before she’d quite finished mulling it over, Gideon strolled down the hallway, appearing as fresh as if he’d slept a full eight hours, except for the slight favoring of one shoulder. He draped his backpack, neatly restored to order, on a chair.
“We’re all early risers, I take it,” he said with a nod to Kevin. His gaze sought hers. “Good to see you, Zee.”
Did he think she had listened to his sage advice and changed her plan? Let him think what he wanted. At the stables, they’d part ways. For good. “Kevin says the main road is flooded so he’s going to have to take us another way.”
Gideon didn’t comment. “May I handle the coffee preparations, sir? I noticed when I put the dishes away that you have a French press and some coffee beans in the cupboard.”
“I do?” Kevin shrugged. “Don’t even know what a French press is, but have at it.”
Mackenzie sat on the sofa. She didn’t want to show any interest in the man who’d tried to hold her phone hostage as if he was protecting an ignorant child, but Gideon’s movements as he prepped a cast iron pan drew her in.
When he’d gotten it hot, he dumped in the beans. “Just a quick re-roast.”
She suspected the coffee had been in the cupboard for a long while. He stirred them with a wooden spatula as they heated up.
The aroma grew even more enticing as he used a small grinder to process the freshly roasted beans into a coarse, glistening pile. He boiled some water and poured it into the press and swirled it.
“To warm it,” Gideon said before he added the coarse grounds and the rest of the boiling water to the press. “Four minutes,” he said and gave Mackenzie a wink.
She hastily averted her gaze, annoyed that he’d caught her watching him.
At the end of the allotted time, he pressed down the plunger and poured them each an almost full mug. “This should get us started while I prep another batch.”
Kevin sniffed his suspiciously. Mackenzie sipped and almost closed her eyes in pleasure at the rich, full-bodied coffee that tasted a world apart from Kevin’s brew.
“It’s ... good,” she said.
Gideon grinned. “No, it’s way better than good, and you know it.”
