Marie Ferrarella - The Rancher And The Baby

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 corner 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.