Page 22 of Roping Her In

“I can’t believe we delivered that calf,” Hailey said. “Do you think he’ll survive the night?”

“His momma will keep him warm,” Jake said. “But I’ll text Garrett, because she was pretty exhausted too. He’ll bring out the straw and get her back to the barn.”

“I thought all the calves would be born in the barn.”

“They should be,” Jake said, resolutely putting one foot in front of the other. “But we ride the herd to find the cows that are ready, and I guess we missed her.”

“Good thing you found her,” Hailey said, and it almost sounded like a compliment. “Why were you out here at one in the morning, though?”

Jake looked up in the navy sky, the pinpoints of stars so beautiful. Calming. “I woke up for some reason, and I just…had a feeling.”

Hailey said nothing, and Jake appreciated how she simply left the door open for him to speak. Or not.

He debated saying more and in the end, he had the same feeling now as he’d had in his cabin. “I’ve learned not to ignore feelings like that.” He blew out his breath. “So I got up, and I got on the ATV, and I rode the herd.”

Hailey hummed, her indication that she’d heard him, and the feeling that Jake needed to say more subsided. They walked in silence, and Jake prayed with everything he had that the cabin would be where he thought it was.

With the exhaustion clouding his mind, and the pain now an echoing throb in his forearm, he couldn’t be sure. Up the rise they went, all the hills this part of the Panhandle possessed, and the cabin appeared.

“Thank the Lord,” Jake whispered, and he came to a stop.

“Did you think it wouldn’t be there?” Hailey asked, pausing at his side.

“I was a little worried.” Jake glanced over to her and squeezed her hand, another shiver racking his body. “I’m freezing.”

“I could tell.” She faced the cabin, which was a black rectangle on the horizon, with silvery moonlight catching on the eaves. “Come on. You need to get warmed up and send that text to Garrett.”

“I think you might be more worried about that cow and her calf than me.” Jake chuckled, because he didn’t think that at all. He knew it.

“I’d say it’s about equal,” Hailey said, a measure of teasing in her voice that raised Jake’s spirits enough to get him moving again.

They arrived at the cabin, and Jake simply reached out and twisted the doorknob. They never locked their outlying buildings, because they were meant to be used in emergencies. The last thing someone needed to worry about upon encountering the shelter they needed—probably desperately—was finding a key.

So the door swung inward, and Jake entered ahead of Hailey. A fireplace took up the wall to his right, with a kitchenette at the back, which consisted of a set of old cupboards and a propane hot plate, and a bunk bed that had bedding that had seen better days to the left.

“No bathroom,” he said. “No running water. No electricity.” His eyes landed on the pile of wood on the hearth. “But there’s wood, and there will be bottled water in one of those cabinets.”

“Okay.” Hailey swung the backpack off and let it land on the wood floor with a thud. “You get out of your wet clothes. I’ll find you something to drink, and get a fire going.” She sighed and looked around. “Do you think there’s a first aid kit out here?”

“I have a small one in my pack if there’s not one in those cabinets,” he said. “But there should be.” He wasn’t the foreman and it wasn’t specifically his job to make sure the outlying shelters had the emergency supplies they needed. But he’d sat in enough meetings to have some knowledge of them.

Hailey moved the few steps to the fireplace and pulled open the grate. Jake wanted to stand there and watch her, but he bent and picked up his pack with his left hand, feeling very off-kilter. He couldn’t believe he’d injured his dominant hand, and his irritation with the situation fired all over again.

He set the pack on the bottom bunk and managed to get it unzipped with his left hand. He had an extra sweatshirt in here and nothing more, but all of his clothes were wet in some capacity. So he stripped down to his boxers, the chill in his body making his teeth chatter. His hands shook as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head, and he moved in quick, jerky movements to put his pack on the floor and pull the blanket from the bed.

He wrapped that around his shoulders and up around his ears, then pulled it closed in front of his body to hide his bare legs. He should take his clothes over to the fireplace and lay them out to dry, but he honestly didn’t think he could bend over and retrieve them.

Behind him, a flickering light danced, and he turned that way instead. Hailey leaned into one knee on the hearth and stretched toward the fire as she gently blew on it. She then fed it another scrap of something—cardboard or kindling, Jake couldn’t tell which.

She mesmerized him in every way, and he couldn’t look away from her. He’d called her in the middle of the night, so her hair hung over her shoulders as she leaned back and added a bigger piece of wood to the flames. She wore jeans and those steel-toed boots he found so alluring, along with a heavy winter coat she hadn’t removed yet.

As the fire really caught the wood, he finally found the gumption to move away from the bunks. “I can’t get my clothes,” he said as he joined her. He sighed as he sank onto the slab of stone in front of the grate, the heat from the fire so, so welcome.

“I’ll get them,” she said, and she quickly turned away to retrieve his wet jeans, coat, and shirt. She didn’t look at him as she laid them out on the wood pile and part of the cement, and she then moved into the kitchenette area and started opening cupboards.

Jake sat and absorbed as much warmth as he could, losing the battle against the yawn as it pulled his mouth wide. Hailey turned and caught the tail end of it, a first aid kit in her hands.

“I’ll get you fixed up, and you can go to bed.”