Page 21 of Roping Her In

“What happened?” she asked. “What hurts?” She looked into his eyes, and he gazed back at her.

“I can’t tell if it’s my wrist or my arm.” He sat with his shoulder hunched forward, his elbow cradled in his lap, almost laying his forearm against the front of his thigh.

“All right,” Hailey said, determined not to lose her head. “The cow will be fine. We’ll leave the blankets here for them to nestle in, and I’ll get you back to the ranch, and then I’ll come back with a load of straw for them.”

Sixteen minutes there, sixteen back…Hailey pushed against her exhaustion.

She stood up and reached for him, as if she could lift a man twice as big as her to his feet. In that moment, one of the ATVs cut out, and half the light they’d been using turned dark. Jake looked over and said, “Well, that SUV is out of gas.”

Hailey looked at it. “That ATV’s out of gas?” She switched her gaze to the one she’d driven out, and it was smaller than his. Maybe two people her size could ride it if they were both uninjured, but there was no way Jake could hold on with one hand while she navigated them almost twenty minutes back to the ranch.

He looked at her again, and she held his eyes for only a moment before sweeping them across the prairie to that swell he’d talked about earlier. “How far to the cabin?” she asked.

She looked back at Jake, who shook his head. “We’re not going to the cabin.” He shivered in the next moment, and Hailey drew her mouth into a tight, determined line.

“Yes, we are,” she said. “So get to your feet, cowboy, because I can’t carry you.”

9

Jake had been outside for too long. He’d been riding through the herd for a couple of hours before he’d found the pregnant cow in distress. It had been another hour since then, and his clothes were wet.

He shivered again as he glared up at Hailey. But she was right. His ATV had just run out of gas, and he wasn’t even sure he had the energy to get to his feet, let alone survive a ride back to the ranch.

He groaned as he rolled onto his knees, still cradling his right arm against his body. Though he didn’t want to, he let Hailey help him all the way to his feet, and he couldn’t stop the next shudder as it moved through him.

“Do you have extra clothes with you?” she asked, her voice as soft and velvety as the night around them.

“I have a pack,” he said. “On the ATV.”

She turned and looked back to the vehicles. “I didn’t bring a pack or anything.”

“The cabin will have fuel,” he said. “And probably some emergency food.”

Hailey looked at him again, pure vulnerability on her face. “We’ll be able to build a fire there?”

“We should be able to.” Jake faced the prairie, and it seemed like suicide to head that way instead of going to the east and the center of the ranch.

“Can you stand there by yourself?”

He nodded and pressed his lips together as Hailey released him and strode toward the ATVs. She leaned over hers and cut the engine, then swiped his pack from the back of his. She didn’t stumble, not for a single step, and Jake wished he could be the one to rescue her.

She approached, and he caught that flint in her eyes he’d come to know after only working with her for a single week. “Okay.” She stopped next to him. “I’m blind out here, Jake, so you have to stay conscious long enough to get us to the cabin.”

He tried to scoff, but only a weak version of it came out of his mouth. “I’m not going to pass out.”

“You don’t look good.” She sized him up with those pretty blue eyes, and Jake looked away.

He nodded toward a swell about two hundred yards away. “It’s just past that rise in the land.”

“I can’t see it.”

“You will as we get closer.”

She positioned herself on his left side and reached for his hand. “Okay, let’s go.”

Jake tried not to squeeze her hand too hard, and he couldn’t believe this was the first experience with her palm pressed to his and her fingers laced so tightly with his. His body remembered that he hadn’t hurt his legs, though he’d definitely twisted to avoid landing on his hands and had hit the ground with his hip.

And he’d still landed wrong on his right hand.