Page 161 of Sunrise & Serenity

The simple honesty in her voice nearly undoes me. She isn’t asking me to excuse him. Just understand him.

Before I can answer, she pulls her horse to a stop and holds up her hand. “Hold on.”

I bring Cozy to a stop too and listen. At first, I can’t hear anything. Then a thin, distressed sound, almost like a baby’s cry, wavers through the air, followed a moment later by the deeper call of a cow.

“Calf might be stuck,” she says. “We need to check it out.”

She urges her horse forward, and I follow. Before long, we crest the top of a rise and spot a black cow pacing along the opposite side of a narrow gully.

She calls out again, and the calf answers from somewhere below her.

Taryn slows, eyeing me. “Careful. We don’t want the mom to panic when she sees us.”

My stomach twists, but I nod and follow her as she angles us wide so we approach from the side rather than head-on. When the cow spots us, she swings her big head our way, and her eyes roll, but she doesn’t make any aggressive moves.

Taryn dismounts, and I slide off Cozy, leaving her beside Taryn’s horse, then creep along behind her. As we get to the edge of the gully, the calf comes into view, lying about five or six feet down in a trickle of water running along the bottom, covered in mud.

Taryn grimaces. “Poor little guy tired himself out trying to escape.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

She looks back the way we rode, surveys the angle of the sun, then looks back at the gully. “Yeah. I think we can get it out.”

“Just us?” I ask.

“I’ll call River. But it’ll take a while for anyone to get out here, and that calf’s already exhausted. He can’t be more than a week old. He’ll need to nurse.”

The calf lets out another cry, and the mom calls back, still pacing.

Taryn plants her hands on her hips and scans the terrain. “The slope gets a little gentler down there.” She points farther along the gully, toward a section of the opposite bank that isn’t quite as steep.

Squinting, I assess the situation too. “Do you really think we can get him out?”

“Yeah. But we’ll probably get dirty.”

“I’m okay with that.”

She flashes me a grin. “Okay. Someone needs to stay up here and use a rope to guide him, and someone needs to climb down and push him along from behind.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Well, you know what you’re doing with the rope, so maybe I should go down.”

Taryn nods slowly. “You’re a bit taller than me too, so you’ll have an easier time keeping him on his feet.”

I blow out a breath. “Right.”

She grasps my arm, giving me a concerned frown. “We don’t have to do this if you’re not comfortable. If you’d rather wait until my brothers get here, we can do that.”

The calf cries again. Waiting for the others means leaving him down there even longer. “No, it’s fine. We’ve got this.”

Taryn’s frown disappears, and she eyes the side of the gully. “Think you can get down there in one piece?”

It’s fairly muddy, so I imagine I’ll slide pretty easily. “Fingers crossed for no broken bones. Just give me a minute.”

While she calls River and explains the situation, I lie on my belly and wriggle backward toward the gully until my legs hang over the edge. With my toes digging into the dirt, I ease lower. My foot slips as a chunk breaks loose beneath my boot, and my heart lurches, but I manage to steady myself.

“Careful,” Taryn says. “The banks are soft.”

“Uh-huh. I can see that.”