“Don’t move her yet,” barked Cowboy, climbing over the felled limb to get to them. “I need to remove that branch. Tom!” he called, and the older man came running.
Charlotte cringed with fear and worry, fighting back tears. The men managed to push the limb off Grams’s unconscious body, but despite what surely must be painful, Grams didn’t wake up. Cowboy draped Grams’s arm over his shoulder and Tom did the same on the other side, the mencarrying her awkwardly over the tree branches and sawed pieces to safety.
“Put her on the living room couch,” called Charlotte, already running ahead to stoke the flames of the fire burning in the hearth.
It was far warmer here, though she knew it must still be chilly by heated home standards. She prayed it would be enough as she dragged the couch closer to the fireplace. Cowboy carried Grams into the room and settled her on the couch as Charlotte raced to retrieve the blankets from the other room.
They were all wet. “Damn it!” She raced up the stairs and pulled every blanket she could find off the beds and brought them down with her. Tom sat on the sofa, Grams’s head cradled in his lap as Cowboy cleaned her wounds. Charlotte covered Grams and took a step back, helplessness washing over her.
There was nothing she could do, no one she could call. Either her grandmother was going to make it or she was not. Wind blew at her back. She needed to find a way to close off the den, or it would never get warm in here.
The den was connected to the house by a doorway some six feet wide. She ran through the foyer and made her way up the steps. She wandered through the upstairs, looking for ideas. The home had solid wood doors, which were a definite possibility. She’d need some way to connect them, maybe with boards holding them together, but it would be time consuming to get the doors off their ancient hinges.
Entering her grandma’s bedroom, her eyes fell on a large patterned rug, thick and tightly woven. She pushed the bed off it, then rolled it up and dragged it downstairs, astonished by how much it weighed. She left it at the bottom of the stairs and told the men her plan, the three of them securingit in place with a hammer and nails Tom ran to get from the workshop.
The improvement was instantaneous.
Tom went back to sit with Grams, and Cowboy opened his arms to Charlotte. “Come here.”
She didn’t have the energy to fight her need for this man, didn’t have reserves to bolster herself up. She needed him to hold her, needed him to comfort her in the face of her grandmother’s condition, needed his love.
Closing her eyes against his chest, his arms came around her, the familiar scent of his body shoring her up. If there was a way for Grams to survive, Leo would help her find it, and she wondered in that moment why she’d ever run away from him.
Her eyes popped open, the memory of her earlier nausea returning with a start. She really needed to find her phone and look at her calendar.
Being pregnant could change everything she thought was true, and most certainly her relationship with this man. Cowboy would be all over it—all over her to marry him, that is—in an instant. She had no doubt that would put his earlier efforts to shame.
Please, God, don’t let me be pregnant.
She wanted to cry. Wasn’t being overly emotional a pregnancy sign as well? But she was terrified for Grams and nearly as frightened for herself, needing the kind of clarity and relief only her calendar—or her period—could bring.
12
Cowboy was seriously worried about Grams. He held his hand to her forehead. Her color was poor, her skin noticeably cold to the touch, and she’d yet to wake up some thirty minutes after her rescue.
He needed to call Logan, Charlotte’s brother, who was a medical doctor by training. He turned to Tom. “Where’s the house phone?”
“In the office.”
He pointed Cowboy in the right direction. The office sat on the opposite side of the house from the den, a mirror image of the room in which Grams had been trapped. It had closed French doors whereas the den had an open doorway, the freezing cold temperature inside the office making him realize how warm the living area was by comparison.
A large desk was centered in the room, a tall leather chair behind it and an old-fashioned corded phone on its surface. He picked up the receiver, relieved to hear a dial tone, and called Logan’s number from memory.
“Hello?” Logan sounded out of breath.
“It’s Cowboy. I need your help. Your grandmother’s suffering from hypothermia. What do I do?”
“Shit. Hang on.” He could hear voices in the background. He looked around the office. Several bookcases flanked opposite sides of the room, a vertical filing cabinet standing in a corner. He should look through them, see what he could find out about Tom. Hell, he should look through the rest of the boxes in the spare bedroom, but he’d been a little busy since then.
Logan came back on the line. “Gemma’s water broke. We’re on our way to the hospital.”
“Wow, I’m sorry to interrupt. Everything okay?”
“No. She’s not due for six weeks.”
Concern filled his mind like concrete filling up a form. “I hope everything turns out all right.”
“Can you get Grams to a hospital?”
