He looked at the bricks at their feet, and quirked his eyebrows at her.
“I’ll get you a pillow,” she said, letting her hands slide down his arms to his wrists before she let go.
“Speaking of pillows, I’d better let you get to yours,” he murmured. “Good night, Esperanza. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The way his words made her heart lift amused her on one level, even as she savored them. “Good night, Officer.”
And she turned toward her room, still grinning.
CHAPTER12
As Esperanza had predicted, the effects of the storm were much worse by the light of day. None of the trailers in the trailer park appeared inhabitable, even after the debris was cleared away. Javi was one of the first to arrive on the scene, but he wasn’t the last. Several of the neighbors from the park showed up, chipped in, tossing debris into the backs of pick-up trucks until a big truck came through, blasting its horn, hauling a large dumpster behind it.
“Where did this come from?” Javi asked Manny, who was behind the wheel of the truck.
“Hailey sent it over from The Wheel House. She might not have realized how much work actually needs to be done though,” he said with a grimace as he looked at the area in front of him.
“Won’t she need it?” Javi couldn’t imagine she could manage without it. He thought of the trash just he and his friends generated on their trips to the restaurant.
“She said she’s just doing to-go orders right now, and she can get by with a garbage can for now. If she needs to, she said Ginny would let her use her dumpster for bigger loads.”
“That’s very generous of her.”
“Yeah, well, like I said, she might not know the extent of the damage.”
Javi didn’t doubt that. He’d been out here last night and he hadn’t expected it to be this bad. Trees, siding, yard decorations, insulation and broken fence—it was just a mess.
Before he left to go to work, Beck and Caleb had joined in. The foreman from the McKay ranch brought a bulldozer which was able to clear paths pretty quickly. But even Hailey’s dumpster filled up quickly, and they were going to have to get Manny to remove it so it could be emptied at The Wheel House.
Javi wasn’t at all surprised to see Angelica pull up, though he thought he’d see Esperanza, too. He crossed the lot to where she sat in her van.
“Where’s your sister?” he asked, not even pretending he wasn’t interested.
She considered him a moment. “Helping out at the diner and taking food over to the emergency shelter. If she’d known you’d be out here, she would be, too.”
Okay, so Esperanza didn’t keep secrets from her sister. Good to know.
He looked behind her in the van, but only saw three people, the family with the teen whose name he couldn’t remember. Angelica turned off the ignition and slid out of the vehicle.
“We’ve come to help. Put us to work.”
He looked over his shoulder at the mess. “We’re clearing paths, first, so we can shore up the structures and people can salvage what they can safely.”
She grimaced. “Looks like that will be a job in itself.”
He glanced at his watch. “It will be, and I hate to run off, but my shift starts in an hour.” He was going to be nice and sweaty but he didn’t have time to go home and shower. At least he had had the foresight to bring his uniform along. “That man in the Riley Foster t-shirt over there is Beck Conover. Tell him I sent you over. He’ll put you to work.”
Before he walked out to his truck that he’d parked on the street that ran perpendicular to the entrance, he turned back to Angelica and her clients. “Thank you. This really means a lot. I mean it. Thanks.”
She acknowledged with a dismissive wave, already in work mode, and he turned around to head to the department.
* * *
In between helpingGinny serve her customers, Espy packaged up breakfasts to carry over to the shelter. Thankfully most of the people were staying there because they had no power, not because of damaged homes. Broken Wheel had been very fortunate.
When she started toward the motel—because she didn’t know what else to do right now—she saw the Laughtons walking toward her. Her gut sank. They were going to complain about the delay, she was sure. She thought they’d had a breakthrough on the road yesterday but maybe not. She plastered a smile on her face as she approached, though she really wanted to bolt in the other direction..
“Hey, how’s it going?”
