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.
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
