The Rancher and the Baby Read online

  Raising her voice, Olivia called out to her partner. “Cash, we’re locking up.”

  The words were no sooner out of her mouth than the lights overhead went out.

  “None too soon, if you ask me,” Cash Taylor commented, poking his head into the office. “Is it just us,” he asked, flipping the light switch off and on with no change in illumination, “or do you think the whole town’s lost power?”

  “Lord, I hope not,” Olivia commented with feeling. “The only thing worse than cooking over a hot stove is not having a hot stove to cook over.”

  “You have a fireplace, don’t you?” Cassidy asked as she gathered a selected stack of papers together so she could review them that evening.

  As far as Olivia was concerned, a fireplace was good for one thing and one thing only. “Yes, but that’s for cuddling in front of with my husband after the kids are asleep in bed.”

  Cassidy grinned at this human glimpse into her boss’s life. “In a pinch, it can also be used for cooking dinner as long as you’re not trying to make anything too elaborate.”

  “Elaborate?” Olivia echoed. “I’d just settle for it being passably edible.”

  Now that she thought of it, Olivia had never made any reference to a meal she’d taken pride in preparing. The woman’s talents clearly lay in another direction.

  “Maybe you should stop at Miss Joan’s on your way home,” Cassidy suggested tactfully.

  Cash seconded the suggestion. “It’ll give my stepgrandmother something to talk about.”

  “No offense, Cash, and I obviously haven’t known her nearly as long as either one of you have, but I’ve never known Miss Joan to ever be in need for something to talk about. She’s everybody’s go-to person when it comes to getting the latest information about absolutely everything.”

  There was a sudden flash of lightning followed almost immediately by an ominous crack of thunder, causing all of them to involuntarily glance up.

  “Well, if we don’t all get a move on, this rain just might turn nasty enough to give everybody something to talk about—provided they’re able to talk and aren’t under five feet of water,” Cash observed.

  With one hand at each of their backs, Cash ushered the two women out of the main office and toward the front door.

  The moment she opened the front door, Olivia knew that she’d made the right call to have them leave early. The rain was coming down relentlessly.

  It was the kind of rain that placed raising an umbrella against the downpour in the same category as tilting at windmills. Olivia turned up the hood on her raincoat. Cash did the same with his jacket. Cassidy had come in wearing her Stetson, a high school graduation gift from her oldest brother, Connor. She held on to it with one hand while pressing her shoulder bag with its newly packed contents against her with the other.

  Locking up, Olivia turned away from the door. She was having second thoughts about her estimation of the rain’s ferocity.

  “Maybe you should come stay at our place,” she suggested to Cassidy.

  “And interfere with your plans for the fireplace? I wouldn’t dream of it,” Cassidy responded with a grin. “I’ll be fine. See you in the morning, boss.”

  The rain seemed to only grow fiercer, coming down at an angle and lashing at anyone brave enough to venture out of their shelter.

  Taking two steps toward her vehicle, Olivia turned toward her intern. “Last chance!” she called out to Cassidy.

  Rather than answer her, Cassidy just waved her hand overhead as she made a dash for her four-by-four. Reaching it, she climbed in behind the wheel and pulled the door closed behind her.

  Utterly soaked, Cassidy sat for a moment, listening to the rain pounding on the roof of her vehicle. This really was pretty bad, she silently acknowledged. Half of her expected to see an ark floating by with an old man at its helm, surrounded by two of everything.

  Well, she couldn’t just sit here, she told herself. She needed to get home. Pulling the seat-belt strap up and over her shoulder, she tucked the metal tongue into the slot.

  “I better get going before Connor and Cole come out looking for me,” she murmured. Connor got antsy when he didn’t have anything to do.

  Starting her vehicle, Cassidy turned on her lights and put the manual transmission into Drive before she turned on the radio.

  Apparently music wasn’t going to be on the agenda that afternoon, Cassidy realized with a sigh. The reception was intermittent at best—and hardly that for the most part. When a high-pitch squawk replaced the song that kept fading in and out, Cassidy gave up and shut off the radio.

  With the rain coming down even harder, she turned the windshield wipers up to their highest setting. The blades all but groaned as they slapped against the glass, fighting what was turning out to be a losing battle against the rain.

  Exercising caution—something, to hear them talk, that all three of her brothers seemed to believe she didn’t possess—Cassidy reduced her speed to fifteen miles an hour.

  Three miles out of town, her visibility went from poor to next to nonexistent.

  At this rate, it would take her forever to get home, and the rain was just getting worse. She needed to hole up someplace until the rain subsided. Remembering an old, empty cabin she and the others used to play in as kids, Cassidy decided that it might be prudent to seek at least temporary shelter there until the worst of the rain let up.

  The cabin was less than half a mile away.

  If the rain didn’t let up, she thought when the cabin finally came into view, then she would be stuck there for the duration of this downpour with nothing to eat except for the half consumed candy bar she had shoved into her bag.

  Her stomach growled, reminding her that she had skipped lunch.

  Leaning forward in her seat, she looked up at the sky—or what she could make out of it.

  “C’mon, let up,” she coaxed. “The forecast specifically said ‘rain.’ It didn’t say a word about ‘floods’ or the end of the world.”

  Cassidy sighed again, even louder this time. She held on to the steering wheel tightly as she struggled to keep her vehicle from veering off the trail. Ordinarily, veering off wouldn’t have been a big deal, but just as Olivia had predicted, the rain had become ferocious, turning what was normally a tiny creek into a rapidly flowing river.

  One wrong turn on her part, and her truck would be in that river.

  And then, just when it seemed to be at its very worst, the rain began to let up, going from what had all the characteristics of becoming a full-blown monsoon to just a regular fierce downpour. Even so, Cassidy knew she needed to get her truck onto higher ground before she found herself suddenly stuck and unable to drive—or worse.

  The cabin was still her best bet. From what she remembered—and she really hadn’t paid all that much attention to this aspect when she was a kid—the cabin was on high ground.

  Most likely not high enough to enable her to get a signal for her cell phone, she thought darkly. What that meant was that she wouldn’t be able to call Connor to assure him that she was all right. As much as she talked about being independent and being able to take care of herself, she didn’t like doing that to her big brother. Connor had been both mother and father to the rest of them for the last ten years. What that had entailed was giving up his own dreams of a college education and a subsequent career. He’d done it in order to become their guardian when their father died three days after Connor had turned eighteen.

  While she was grateful to Connor for everything he had done and appreciated the fact that he cared about her and the others, she was equally convinced that Connor needed a family of his own—a wife and at least a couple of kids, if not more—to care for and to worry about.

  About to turn her truck in order to get it to higher ground, Cassidy thought she saw something out of the c
orner of her eye. It was bobbing up and down in the swollen water.

  She thought it was rectangular—and pink.

  You’re losing your mind, Cassidy silently lectured herself.

  The next second, her body went rigid as she heard something.

  She couldn’t have just heard—

  No, that was just her imagination, getting the better of her. That was probably just some animal making that sound. It couldn’t have been—

  A baby!

  “Damn it,” Cassidy bit out, “that couldn’t be—” And yet, she really thought she heard a baby crying.

  You’re really letting your imagination run away with you, she silently lectured.

  Even though she was convinced she was wrong, Cassidy knew she couldn’t just shrug it off. She had to look again—just in case.

  It wasn’t safe to turn the truck on a saturated road. Cassidy did the only thing she could in order to give herself peace of mind.

  She threw her truck into Reverse.

  Driving backward as carefully as she was able, she watched the road to see if she could catch sight of the bobbing pink whatever-it-was.

  And then, her eyes glued to her rearview mirror, Cassidy saw it.

  She wasn’t crazy; there was something bobbing up and down in the water. Something rectangular and, from what she could make out, it appeared to be plastic. A plastic tub was caught up in the rushing waters and, for some reason that seemed to defy all logic, it was still upright and afloat.

  If that wasn’t miraculous enough, Cassidy could have sworn that the baby she’d thought she’d heard was in the bobbing pink rectangular plastic tub.

  With the truck still in Reverse, Cassidy stepped on the gas pedal, pushing it as far down as she dared and prayed.

  Prayed harder than she ever had before.

  Chapter Two

  The rear of Cassidy’s truck fishtailed, and for one long, heart-stopping moment, she thought the truck was going to slide straight down into the rushing floodwater.

  Everything was happening at a blinding speed.

  Cassidy wasn’t sure just how she managed it, but somehow she kept the truck on solid ground. Not only that, but with her heart in her throat, she backed up the vehicle far enough so that it was slightly ahead of the approaching bobbing tub—all this while the four-by-four was facing backward.

  She knew what she had to do.

  If Cassidy had had time to think it through, she would have seen at least half a dozen ways that this venture she was about to undertake could end badly.

  But there wasn’t any time to think, there was only time to react.

  Throwing open the door on the driver’s side, Cassidy jumped out of the truck and hit the ground running—as well as sliding. The ground beneath her boots was incredibly slippery.

  The rain was no longer coming down in blinding sheets. Although it was still raining hard, she barely noticed it. All she noticed, all she saw, was the crying baby in the plastic tub. And all she knew was that if she couldn’t reach it in time, the baby would drown.

  It still might.

  They very well could both drown, but Cassidy knew she had to do something, had to at least try to save the baby. Otherwise, if she played it safe, if she did nothing at all, she would never be able to live with herself. Choosing her own safety over the life of another—especially if that life belonged to a baby—was totally unacceptable to her.

  Cassidy wasn’t even aware of the fact that as she rushed to the water’s edge and dove in, she yelled. Yelled at the top of her lungs the way she had when she and her brothers would engage in the all-too-dangerous, mindlessly death-defying games they used to play as children. The one that came to her mind as she dove was when they would catapult from a makeshift swing—composed of a rope looped around a tree branch—into the river below. Then the ear-piercing noise had been the product of a combination of released adrenaline and fearlessness. What prompted her to yell now as she dove into the water was the unconscious hope that she could survive this venture the way she had survived the ones in her childhood. Then she had been competing with her brothers—and Laredo. Now she was competing against the laws of nature and praying that she would win just one more time.

  The water was strangely warm—or maybe it was that she was just totally numb to the cold. She only had one focus. Her eyes were trained on the plastic tub and its passenger as she fought the rushing water to cut the distance between her and the screaming baby.

  The harder she swam, the farther away she felt the tub was getting.

  Keeping her head above the water, Cassidy let loose with another piercing yell and filled her lungs with as much air as she could, hoping that somehow that would help keep her alive and magically propel her to the baby. There was absolutely no logical way it could help; she only knew that somehow it had to.

  * * *

  WILL LAREDO HAD no idea what he was doing out here. Ordinarily he wasn’t given to following through on dumb ideas, and this was definitely a lapse on his part. For all he knew, the colt he was looking for could have found his way back to the stable and was there now, dry and safe, while he was out here on something that could only be called a fool’s errand.

  It was just that when that bolt of lightning had streaked across the sky and then thunder had crashed practically right over the stable less than a minute later, it caused Britches to charge right out of the stable and through the open field as if the devil himself was after him.

  Seeing the colt flee, Will ran to his truck and took out after it as if he had no choice.

  Will knew it was stupid, but he felt a special connection to the sleek black colt. Britches had been born shortly after he’d returned to take over his late father’s ranch, and he’d felt that if he lost the colt, somehow, symbolically, that meant he was going to lose the ranch—and wind up being the ne’er-do-well his father had always claimed he was destined to be.

  It was asinine to let that goad him into coming out here, searching for the colt, when the weather conditions made it utterly impossible to follow the animal’s trail. Any hoofprints had been washed away the second they were made.

  Hell, if he didn’t turn around right now, he would wind up being washed away, as well.

  His best bet was to take shelter until the worst of this passed. These sorts of storms almost always came out of nowhere, raged for a short amount of time, did their damage and then just disappeared as if they’d never existed.

  But right now, he was wetter than he could remember being in a very long time and he wanted to—

  Suddenly, he snapped to attention. “What the hell was that?”

  The yell he thought he heard instantly propelled him back over a decade and a half, to a time when estrangement and spirit-breaking responsibilities hadn’t entered his life yet. A time when the company of friends was enough to ease the torment of belittling words voiced by a father who was too angry at the hand that life had dealt him to realize that he was driving away the only thing he did have.

  There it was again!

  Will hit the brakes with as much pressure as he dared, knowing the danger of slamming down too hard. He didn’t feel like being forced to fish his truck out of this newly created rushing river. Opening the door, he strained to hear the sound that had caused him to stop his truck in the first place.

  He waited in vain.

  The howl of the wind mocked him.

  He was hearing things.

  “You don’t belong out here anymore, Laredo,” he said, upbraiding himself. “What the hell are you trying to prove by going out looking for a colt that probably has more sense than you do? Go home before you drown out here like some damn brainless turkey staring up at the sky during a downpour.”

  Disgusted as well as frustrated, Will leaned out to grab hold of the door handle—
the wind had pushed the door out as far as it would go. Just as he began to pull it toward him, he heard it for a third time.

  That same yell.

  “Damn it, I’m not hearing things,” he swore, arguing with himself.

  Getting out of the truck, he squinted against the rain and looked out at the rushing water. Yesterday, this entire length of wet land hardly contained enough water to qualified being called a creek; now it was on its way to becoming a full-fledged raging river.

  Will’s square jaw dropped as he realized that he wasn’t looking at debris being swept away in the center of the rushing water. It was some sort of washtub, a washtub with what looked to be a doll in it.

  That wasn’t a doll; that was a baby!

  He was already running to the water’s edge when his field of vision widened and he saw her. Saw that Cassidy was fighting against the current and was desperately trying to reach the baby.

  It hit him like a punch in his gut.

  That was what he’d heard!

  He’d heard Cassidy screaming out that yell, the one that Cole had come up with so many summers ago. It had something to do with making them band together, giving them the strength of five instead of just one. They’d been kids then.

  She wasn’t a kid anymore and there were all sorts of things he wanted to yell at her now, all of them ultimately boiling down to the word idiot.

  But that was after he got to her.

  And before that could happen, he had to save Cassidy’s damn fool hide. Hers and that baby she was trying to rescue.

  Where the hell had it come from?

  He had no time to try to figure that out now. Later, that was for later.

  Will gave himself a running start, using the increasing speed he built up to propel him as he dove into the water.

  He swam the way he never swam before—as if his life depended on it.

  As if her life depended on it.

  Hers and that baby’s.

  Divorcing himself from any other thoughts—from anger, fear, astonishment—Will focused entirely on the goal he’d just set for himself. Rescuing the woman who took special delight in filleting him with her tongue whenever the opportunity arose, and the baby he’d never seen before, both of whom had just one thing in common: they had absolutely no business being out here under these conditions.