Page 50 of Reluctant Bride

DAWSON

The explosion lifts the number two truck bay clean off its foundation, and Mick Harlan is inside it.

I feel it before I hear it, a pressure change in my own chest half a second ahead of the sound, and then the sound arrives and takes the rest of the morning with it. Glass goes first, every window on the yard side of the office blowing inward in one long percussive sheet, and I’m moving before the ringing in my ears finishes, boots crunching over glass.

Black smoke rolls off the collapsed bay in a column thick enough to blot out the mountains behind it. Fire licks up through the wreckage where the hydraulic lift used to be, orange and hungry, feeding on diesel and rubber and God knows what else Mick had stacked back there for the quarterly inspection.

“Mick!” Finn’s voice, raw, already hoarse, already running toward the one thing every instinct in a functioning brain says to run away from.

I catch him by the collar before he clears the doorframe. “Wait.”

“He’s in there, Dawson, he was doing the lift inspection, he’s been in there since seven⁠—”

“I know where he was.” My voice comes out even, too even, the calm I use on frightened men in dispatch offices, except right now it’s aimed at my own brother and it isn’t working on either of us. “You don’t go in alone. We go in together or we don’t go at all.”

Tate’s already got his phone to his ear, giving the dispatcher an address he shouldn’t have to give at his own family’s yard. West is filming, because West films everything, a survival habit that turns grief into footage he can study later instead of feeling now. Maren’s voice cuts through the noise behind me, sharp and absolutely level, directing two of the yard hands toward the second exit like she does this for a living, which today, apparently, she does.

The fire wants the whole bay. I want Mick.

Finn nods once, eyes squinted and we go in low together, side by side under the worst of the smoke, one arm each across our mouths. The heat hits my skin like something with intent. The lift’s folded in on itself, metal shrieking somewhere above us as more of the structure gives, and we find him ten feet past the doorframe, pinned from the knee down under a support beam that used to hold up a roof.

“Dawson.” His voice is raspy, smoke-scraped, but it’s steady, and steady is the only thing I need from him right now. “Leg’s pinned. I can’t feel it.”

“Hey. Look at me.” I hold his eyes and use the same voice I’d use on a spooked horse. “You’ve been in worse spots than this. We’re getting you out. Just breathe with me.”

Finn and I get our shoulders under the beam, both of us putting everything we’ve got into the lift, and it doesn’t move, not an inch, not for the first three seconds, and something starts climbing up the back of my throat that has nothing to do with smoke.

Then it shifts. Mick screams once, short, and we haul him free the second there’s daylight enough to do it. His weight goes dead between us, boots dragging useless behind him, while Finn and I crawl for the door on hands and knees. The roof comes down behind us in a long, groaning collapse that would have taken every one of us if we had waited another minute.

Outside, the air tastes like the best thing I’ve ever breathed.

Finn and I get our shoulders under Mick’s arms and move him out of danger before either of us lets him down onto the gravel. His leg is wrong below the knee in a way I don’t let myself look at too long. Maren’s already crouched beside him, putting a pressure bandage on the wound below his knee, hands quick and sure.

I stand there for one second too long, chest heaving, my hands not fully my own.

Not from the smoke. Not from the run. From something underneath both of those, something that started the second I understood Mick was still inside and hasn’t stopped since.

The fire crew has the worst of it knocked down inside twenty minutes, the bay a smoking, blackened ruin instead of an active blaze, and the ambulance takes Mick with sirens loud enough to be heard three ranches over. Maren rides with him. She doesn’t ask permission and I don’t offer any opinion about it.

My father’s black Mercedes G-Wagen comes through the gate before the smoke’s finished thinning, no sirens, no hurry, the exact speed of a man who has never once in his life needed to rush toward a problem he already assumes he can solve with a phone call.

Declan gets out, buttons his jacket, and looks at the collapsed bay like a quarterly loss. Not at me. Not toward the ambulance driving to town, lights flashing. At the wreckage itself, assessing board feet and insurance exposure before he’s asked a single question about the man who almost died in it.

“How bad?”

“Mick’s leg. Bad enough.” My voice comes out rawer than I want him to hear. “The bay’s a total loss.”

“Cameras?”

“Two angles. Fire took the third.”

He nods, already somewhere past the fire in his head, already drafting the statement, already deciding which reporters get a call from him personally and which ones get nothing at all. “I want a name by tonight.”

“Mick almost died in there.”

“And he didn’t. That’s the version we lead with.” He’s already turning back toward the G-Wagen, already finished with this conversation, same as every conversation that doesn’t require more than five minutes of his day. “Get me a name, Dawson. That’s the job.”

He’s gone before I can decide whether I hate him more for the coldness or for how much of it I recognize in myself.