close to the small fire.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” the boy sniffled.
“Get down right now!” Wade yelled in that no-argument parental tone reserved for situations like this.
Though she sensed the rancher’s harshness stemmed from fear for his son’s safety, his words and tone still seemed to devastate the boy into inaction. He froze on his precarious perch until his father had to lift him off the chair and set him on the floor so he could get close enough to assess the cabinets.
Wade picked up the burning mess of towels and dropped them into the sink then returned to survey the damage.
Still, the boy didn’t move, standing as if he didn’t quite know what was happening. He looked ill, almost shocky, and he stood directly in Wade Dalton’s path.
This wasn’t any of her business, Caroline reminded herself. Even as she thought it, she found herself moving toward the distraught little boy.
What was his name? Tucker? Taylor? Tanner. That was it. “Tanner, why don’t we get out of your daddy’s way and let him take care of things here, okay?”
He looked at her blankly for a moment, then slipped his hand in hers and let Caroline lead him from the room. She took him into the great room where his little brother was still busy with his trucks, unaffected by the drama playing out in the other room.
She was going to ask if he had a favorite television show she could find for him as a distraction when she noticed his left hand pressed tightly to his pajama top.
A grim suspicion seized her and she leaned down. “Tanner, can I take a look at your hand? Are you hurt?”
His chin wobbled for a moment, then he nodded slowly and pulled his hand away from his chest. He made a small sound of distress when he spread out his fingers—and no wonder.
Caroline gasped at the angry, blistering red splotch covering his palm, roughly twice the size of a quarter. “Oh, honey!”
Her reaction seemed to open the floodgates of emotion. Tears pooled in his huge blue eyes and rolled over pale cheeks. “I didn’t mean to start a fire. I didn’t mean to! I just wanted to roast marshmallows like me and Nat and Grandma did with Uncle Seth when we went campin’. Do you think my daddy will be mad at me?”
She thought that was a pretty good bet. Wade Dalton seemed mad at the entire world, as a matter of course. How would he treat his son, angry or not? That was the important thing.
“I’m sure he’ll just be worried about you,” she assured Tanner, though she wasn’t at all convinced of that herself.
“He’s gonna be so mad. I’m not supposed to be in the kitchen by myself.” His tears were coming faster now and she knew she had to do something quick to head them off or he would soon be in hysterics. Action seemed the best antidote.
“Let’s just get your hurt taken care of and then we’ll worry about your dad, okay?”
He nodded and Caroline thought quickly back to her thin and purely basic knowledge of first aid.
“We need to put some cold water on that,” she told Tanner, her mind trying to dredge old lessons she’d learned as a girl. “Do you think you can show me a bathroom?”
“Yeah. There’s one right through those doors.”
She led him there quickly and filled the sink with cold water, then grasped his wrist and immersed it in the sink, though he wasn’t keen on the idea.
“I don’t want to,” he said, sniffling. “It hurts.”
“I know, honey. I’m sorry to make you hurt more but this way we can be sure the burn stops.”
“Tannoh owie?”
Caroline looked down and found the youngest one had followed them into the small bathroom. Within fifteen seconds, she wasn’t sure what held more interest to him—his brother’s owie or the lid of the toilet, which he repeatedly flipped up and down with a nerve-racking clatter each time.
Her repertoire of distractions was severely limited but she thought maybe she could tell him a story or something, just to keep him away from the toilet and away from his brother.
“Hey, kiddo,” she began.
“His name is Cody,” Tanner informed her, his sniffles momentarily subsiding. “He’s two and I’m five. I just had a birthday.”
“Five is a fun age,” she started, but her words were cut off by a loud and angry voice from outside the room.
“Tanner Michael Dalton! Where are you? Get in here and help me clean up the mess you made!”
Caroline took an instinctive step closer to the boy. What a disagreeable man, she thought, until she remembered that he likely knew nothing about his son’s injuries.
“We’re in the bathroom,” she called down the hall. “Do you think you could come in here for a moment?”
Silence met her request for a full five seconds, then Wade spoke in an annoyed-sounding voice. “What is it? I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”
Suddenly there he was in the doorway, two hundred pounds of angry male looking extremely put-upon, as if she’d pulled him away from saving the world to ask his opinion on what shade of lipstick to use.
This was his own son and she wouldn’t let him make her feel guilty for her compassion toward the boy. Caroline tilted her chin up and faced him down.
“We’re in the middle of something, too. Something I think you’re going to want to see.”
He squeezed into a bathroom that had barely held Caroline and two young boys. Throw in a large, gorgeous, angry rancher and the room seemed to shrink to the size of a tissue box.
“What is it?” he asked.
She pointed to Tanner’s soaking hand, a vivid, angry red, and watched the boy’s father blanch.
He hissed an oath, something she gauged by Tanner’s surprised reaction wasn’t something the boy normally heard from his father.
She had to admit, the shock and concern on Wade’s features went a long way toward making her more sympathetic toward him.
“Tanner!” he exclaimed. “You burned yourself?”
“It was an accident, Daddy.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
Tanner shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I was trying to be a big boy, not a b-baby.”
The sympathy from his father was apparently more than Tanner’s remarkable composure could withstand. The boy’s sniffles suddenly turned to wails.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I won’t, I promise. It hurts a lot.”
Wade picked up his son and held him against his broad, denim-covered chest.
