followed, his rope in his hand. The water was three feet deep and rising. The rain and hail beat down relentlessly as the wind whipped up. Time to get this calf birthed and get the hell out of there before they all lost their lives. The cow, on her side in the gully, strained to keep her head above water. Brett slogged to her backside again, the water and mud caking his legs and seeping into his boots. He wrapped the rope around the calf’s legs once, twice, three times.
He wiggled his boots into the riverbed, bracing himself, then got a firm hold of the rope and pulled, growling with the effort. The calf slid another four or five inches out. Panting, Brett adjusted his grip on the rope, then pulled again. This time, the calf came. Brett fell backward in the water, the calf on his chest.
With a laugh of triumph, Brett cleaned the calf’s nose out with his finger, then tickled its ear to get it breathing. Then a golf-ball-sized piece of hail smacked Brett hard on his cheek, killing his awe over the miracle of helping birth a new life and reminding him of the danger all around them.
He pushed to his feet, bringing the calf up in his arms. He worked to untie the rope from the calf’s hind legs with one eye on the steep side of the gully. The water was above Brett’s knees, sloshing at his groin. He couldn’t get the rope around the mama cow and keep his hold on the wiggling calf, so he’d have to come back down for her.
He’d pulled himself and the calf a good five feet up the gully wall when he heard it, a roar like no other he’d heard before. Not thunder, not a twister. Something otherworldly that got louder, closer. The gully walls vibrated with the force. A flash flood. Had to be.
In full panic mode, Brett hauled himself to the ledge that the cow had originally slid onto. He grabbed his duster from where the cow had tossed it away from her face. He threw it up to the top of the ridge, then hauled himself and the calf the rest of the way up, his fingers and boot toes digging into the muddy wall, pushing the calf up in front of him with his chest. He heaved the calf over the top of the ridge as a wall of water appeared in the gully, bearing down on their location.
Brett scrambled to safety and got on his knees. As fast as he could, he wound the rope back and set the lasso loop down to the mama cow. Maybe he could anchor her there so she wouldn’t get swept away. Maybe the floodwaters weren’t as high and fast as they looked.
The flash flood hit her hard, rolling her under. The rope pulled on him as though he was playing tug-of-war with a whole football team. There was nothing to do but let go. He’d heard too many accounts of ranchers getting swept into floodwater and drowning because they were too stubborn to lose their livestock.
Brett’s legs were shaky and weak with an adrenaline crash as he stood, following with his gaze the glimpse of the cow’s head in the water until she disappeared. The floodwaters gurgled and spit at the edge of the gully wall. He stared at the water, trying not to think of the loss as a failure. After all, he’d saved the calf, five pregnant cows and his own life.
He swung his attention to the boulder where he’d left the other cows and Outlaw. Outlaw was still there, but none of the cows. Damn it.
He pulled his drenched, muddy coat on, then lifted the calf into his arms again and trudged to his horse, his eyes on the storm front that looked to be moving away from them. At least one thing had gone his way today.
Outlaw nuzzled his cheek.
“Thanks for waiting for me,” Brett said. “Happen to see which direction those cows went?”
Could’ve been his imagination, but Outlaw snorted in reply.
He scratched the horse’s neck. “Good. How about you lead me to them so we can call it a day?”
He lifted the calf onto the saddle first, then hoisted himself up, the weight of the water and mud making him feel a good fifty pounds heavier than he had when he’d left the stable. The orphaned calf looked up at him, helpless and trusting. Brett usually didn’t think of the livestock as cute, but this one surely was, with long lashes, a soft buttercream-colored coat and a pink nose. He wrapped his coat around it and held it close.
“We’ll get you home soon and make you up a bottle as soon as we find your mama’s friends. I do believe we’re gonna name you Twister. How does that sound?”
The calf’s tongue came out to lick a pebble of hail from its nose, the cutest thing Brett might’ve ever seen besides his nephew, Seth.
Jack, Brett’s oldest brother, was going to be furious about the loss of the cow. Already, he didn’t trust Brett, and this wasn’t going to help. But Brett was tired of working under his brother like some hired hand, getting his butt chewed for every perceived misstep. He was ready to redeem his reputation and earn his slice of the Colton legacy—and he had just the plan to make it work. All he needed now was to hire a financial whiz to help him crunch the numbers and profit projections he’d need to help Jack see his point of view.
With a whistle and a nudge of Brett’s boots, Outlaw burst into motion back through the storm toward home while Brett’s mind churned, plotting and planning his next move to seize a hold of his bright future once and for all.
* * *
Being a poster girl for the perils of sin had gotten Hannah Grayson nowhere fast. For as much mileage as her family’s church had gotten out of using Hannah’s accidental pregnancy as a cautionary tale, they could have at least provided her with a small stipend to ease the sting of being disowned by her parents, fired from her job and evicted from her apartment, all while battling a nasty case of morning sickness.
From her pocket, she withdrew the help-wanted ads she’d printed from Tulsa World newspaper’s online classifieds. Every lead on the papers but one had been crossed out as a dead end. She’d been counting on her newly minted accounting degree from Tulsa United Online University to help her land on her feet, but every employer she’d met with had taken one look at the now-obvious swell of her belly and decided she wasn’t qualified for the job.
With her meager savings running out, she’d made a deal with herself to explore this one last lead before giving up on accounting in favor of a retail or a fast-food position, but it was a long shot at best.
Tulsa businessman in need of an accountant for a temporary project, discretion a must.
No name or company name given, no phone number or address. Just a generic email address of “oklahoma45678” that could belong to anybody. Including a psychopath. Which was why she’d created a new, generic email address of her own to reply to the ad and had refused to give out even her name to the individual when she agreed to meet him at a window booth in the Armadillo Diner & Pie Company.
Replacing the classified ad in her purse, she paused at the window of the Fluff and Fold to check herself in the window reflection. Wisps of her pencil-straight black hair lifted in the wind that had hung around Tulsa since the previous week’s storm. She smoothed them into place and used the pad of her thumb to sharpen the line of her light pink lip gloss on her bottom lip.
The gray slacks were a clearance-rack find from a couple months earlier, when they’d been a loose fit. Now, the waist sat below the swell of her belly, which she’d covered with a form-fitting pale pink blouse. She could have de-emphasized the evidence of her pregnancy with another outfit, but all that had done in the past was delay the inevitable disinterest from the prospective employers that came when she disclosed the truth, and wasted everyone’s time. Better to put her condition out in the open right up front, before a single word was exchanged.
With her
