Cade thought Abigail might break into laughter, but even though her lips twitched, she held it together. “And what did you say?”
“I told her it was insulting to say that to me when I just liked dating. And my mother had nothing to do with my love life. And okay, at that point it so happened that I was dating a few people, but it was none of her business. I told her that, too.”
“How many people?”
“What?”
“How many women were you dating then?”
“Maybe four. Or five.”
“At
once?
”
“I don’t remember. Probably,” Cade said.
“Wow. I’d never be able to keep that straight in my head. How did you remember which was which?”
“It was kind of hard sometimes.”
Now Abigail really was laughing at him. “Is that normal for you?”
“Of course not. Not really.”
“Not really! That means yes! What about now? How many girls are you dating at the moment?”
“Not even one.”
Abigail went silent. She looked into her coffee cup but didn’t drink from it.
Crap, should he have said something else? “I mean, yeah, last night…”
“No, not me, of course,” she said.
“Um. No. I mean, we’re not really…dating.” Cade felt like an ass.
“Yeah.” Abigail set down her coffee cup and sat up straighter. “Well, I should probably…”
“No, don’t.” Cade, still sitting next to her, put a hand on her leg. “I don’t cat around. Whatever that means. I have friendships with girls and it never gets serious. That’s what Aunt Eliza hated. I don’t think she ever cared what I did with a girl, as long as it meant something.”
“Does it ever mean anything to you?”
“No. Not usually.” Cade tried to put his meaning into his voice, into his eyes, but she was looking down again. “It’s not usually like last night.” It was the most he could say. His heart beat traitorously fast.
“You don’t have to say that. It’s all right.”
“The fight had ended with her saying I wouldn’t ever get the land that I wanted unless I fell in love. I thought she was being stupid, and I told her so. She didn’t come to see me for a while after that. We talked on the phone, but we didn’t say much. Then she started driving up twice a year, bringing those bags and boxes with her. We never spoke about the fight, and she didn’t ask about my love life ever again. But oh, my God…” Cade paused, hit with a flash of insight. “She was meddling with my love life, even then.”
“What?”
“Think about it. I just figured it out. I can’t believe it took us this long to catch on. Aunt Eliza and I had that fight, she goes home, and a year later starts to stock your store up here.”
“My store?”
“She was hooking us up. Planning on it, even back then, seven years ago.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’d only just met her not that long before…” Abigail looked at him, her eyes wide. “Do you think she’d really be that…”
“Manipulative? She was the sweetest person in the whole wide world, until she got a burr under her saddle. My love life was a burr, I know that much. She meets you, she starts to make plans.”
“Why on earth would she think you wouldn’t find someone else in the meantime? Or for God’s sake, that I wouldn’t? I dated. I dated a lot, thank you very much.” Abigail glared at him.
“I’m sure you did.”
“And if that was her plan, why not just bring me up here with her on one of her trips?”
“Did she invite you?” Cade asked.
“Yeah, but I kept having to say no. I never seemed to have the time.”
“And I was too busy to go see her. I put it off, always.” Cade rubbed his hand against his eyes.
“So if she couldn’t make us meet in life, she’d throw us together after death.”
Cade said, “That’s the bossiest thing I ever heard.”
Abigail laughed, but the laughter stopped as soon as it started. “Don’t worry about it though. Keep up with your ladies. When’s your next date?”
Cade smoothed the sheet and didn’t say anything.
“Oh, I see. Tonight?”
He nodded.
Abigail sighed. “Okay, cowboy. That’s all good. But hey, I’ve got a lot of work to do today, and I’m going to have to hobble around to do it, so if you wouldn’t mind”—she cleared her throat—“passing me my robe over there, I’d appreciate it.”
“I didn’t mean—” Cade started.
She held up her hand. “There’s nothing wrong, Cade. Mind-blowing sex is mind-blowing sex. But I still have to figure out where stuff is going to go in the store, and you’ve got to work on some water thing for your sheep. Life goes on.”
Cade handed her the robe. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
The yoke is like February: it’s not really that long, but it takes forever
.
—E.C
.
T
wo weeks later, Cade drove up the county road, toward the house. He’d been over at Landers’s, helping him with his all-terrain vehicle. Landers needed the ATV to work so he could easily cart his feed around, and Cade enjoyed working on the engines. The fact that Landers’s wife made excellent brownies didn’t hurt.
He hadn’t seen Abigail in almost two weeks. It was like she’d disappeared into thin air. She must be working on the cottage, he knew, but he also knew she was avoiding him.
Hell, just because they’d had sex didn’t mean that he was tied to her. It didn’t mean anything. He was sorry her feelings were hurt, but he couldn’t see much of a way around that.
He drew closer to his property line.
He saw smoke.
On his land.
Black smoke. Vegetation fires put up white smoke and that would have been bad enough. Black was worse.
Cade’s accelerator hit the floor.
Cell phone already in hand, Cade fishtailed around the turn that led to his driveway. He was up the small hill in a matter of heartbeats. What the hell was on fire? Not the barn, please God, not the barn. Or the house.
Or her cottage. Not the cottage either, dammit.
One more heartbeat and he was at the top of the drive. Gravel scattered as he shot up past the house. The house and the cottage were fine—the smoke was coming from behind the barn. The only thing back there was the old purple shack that he used for storage, the one Abigail had asked about when she got the alpacas.
He gunned the truck up and around the barn.
Flames roared out of the shack, shooting straight up through the roof, which already looked annihilated.
Abigail stood thirty feet away from the fire, directing a garden hose toward it.
“MacArthur Ranch!” Cade yelled into the cell phone. “Structure fire, fully engulfed storage shack!” It would take the fire department at least eight or ten minutes to get here, and it was obviously too late to save the shed. But the sparks…
Jesus.
The tanks of propane.
He stored the propane in there. Abigail wasn’t far enough away from the shack.
Abigail.
He dropped his cell phone, threw the truck into park, and launched himself out of the truck and hit the ground running.
“Move! Drop the hose!”
But the noise of the fire drowned out his words. Abigail hadn’t even heard the truck pulling up. She kept directing the stream of water at the fire, but the heat was so intense that the water evaporated before it even got anywhere close.
Oh, God.
“Abigail!”
He’d never, ever felt this kind of fear before. Cade poured every ounce of every muscle in his body into racing toward her. He wrested the hose from her hand. She screamed.
“Move!” He grabbed her arm and pulled. He didn’t care if he hurt her. “Run!”
“I’m trying to help!”
“Propane!” He dragged her behind the truck and ducked down, taking her with him.
As he did, the tanks blew. The roar of the fire doubled. The noise was deafening.
Burning parts of small bottles flew out of the shack. Spray-paint and lubricant cans halved by the heat, flying like missiles. One blown-apart can hit the side of his truck, and when he looked under the chassis, Cade could see it there on the ground, still smoking.
After long seconds, the rain of metal stopped. The fire still roared.
Cade wrapped his arms around her. Safe. She was safe. He held her more tightly and she clung to him in return. He could feel her heart racing. Or was that his?
All of those pieces shooting out like shrapnel could have done serious damage, at the very least. Not to mention the blast when the fire doubled as the propane blew. How close had he come to losing her?
“I have to…” he started.
“Don’t let me go,” said Abigail in a low, shaking voice.
“Then hold on to me. I just have to get my phone.” While Abigail held tightly to his arm, he reached into the truck with the other and found his dropped phone. He called 911 again and warned them about the propane.
“They’re just around the corner, sir,” said the dispatcher.
Cade heard the sirens as he put the phone in his pocket.
“They’ll be here in a minute. Did you see what happened?”
Abigail shook her head. Her teeth were chattering.
“Are you hurt? Burned?’”
She shook her head again.
“Get in the truck. I’ll move it out of the way.”
Abigail, still silent, climbed in. Cade started it up and backed it farther away from the fire. Sure enough, the grass around the shack had caught fire already, the flames rolling up the paddock, being pushed by the wind. But that field was empty; he’d moved the flock that had been in it into another more than a week ago.
And the flames were rolling away from the barn.
“It’s a small-enough grass fire that they’ll be able to put it out easily enough,” said Cade.
Abigail’s eyes were huge.
Cade said, “The wind isn’t strong, and we just had that rain a couple weeks ago. The grass is short. This is what the fire guys love to do. And sparks are flying away from us, into the field.” He wasn’t sure if he was reassuring her or himself.
She still didn’t speak, just stared at the inferno that had been his storage shed.
“What happened?” Cade asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I looked out and saw smoke. Then I ran, thinking I could put it out. Oh, God. And I hadn’t even called 911. Once I got the hose out, I was just waiting for the fire department to arrive. I have no idea why I didn’t think of calling.”
“You didn’t call 911?”
Abigail shook her head.
Cade parked the truck by the barn. The fire at the shack raged on, but there had been no more explosions.
“Where the
hell
is Tom?” asked Cade.
“I haven’t seen him.”
Cade’s heart froze and he lost his breath. “He was here this morning when we did chores, and he didn’t say anything about leaving. Oh, God.”
The worst thought flashed through his mind.
Tom was his oldest, best friend. He couldn’t even think the words.
But no, Tom’s truck wasn’t here, and Tom was always with his truck, or somewhere near it. Tom wasn’t here. Cade prayed to God he wasn’t.
Three fire engines screamed up the driveway and pulled up near Cade’s truck. The captain of the off-road engine yelled for Cade to open the gate leading to the field on fire. Damn, he should have thought of that.
He jammed the truck into drive again and led the engine to the gate nearest the blazing grass. Abigail sat next to him and clung to the sides of the seat with white fingers.
Then Cade drove back to the barn. The battalion chief in his red patrol vehicle was just arriving.
Cade turned to Abigail. “Do you want to stay here? Or do you want to come with me to talk to him?”
Abigail’s lips were pale. “I want to stay with you.”
Cade nodded and then jumped out of the truck. Once she was out, he took her hand and led her to the battalion chief.
Bill Leary spoke rapidly into the two radios he held. The back of his truck stood open, and he was already making marks on a white board. The largest of the three engines had pulled up closer to the shack. Four men piled out of the cab and hit the ground running, pulling hose and starting the pumps. A huge stream of water, followed by another from the next engine, made an enormous whooshing noise.
Cade felt Abigail put her hand in his. She held on tight.
“Cade.” Chief Leary nodded at him. “There’s no getting that outbuilding back. Anything else in there we need to know about?”
Cade shook his head. “Just the propane, but I haven’t heard one explode for about three minutes. They might be all done.”
“How many blew up?”
Cade thought. “Seven? Maybe eight. I think that’s about all I had in there. They all kind of went at once, like the pressure valves all hit their heat limit at the same time. But a lot of spray cans exploded and flew out. I can’t be sure they’re all done.”
“Anything else?”
“Maybe some paint cans. Only other stuff I kept in there was old tools and a mower with no gas. Some expired medicine that I didn’t get around to throwing out.”
The chief nodded. Then he said something into the radio in his left hand and craned his head to peer at the smoke from the field.
“They’ve just about got that fire contained. Less than an acre, I’d guess. You were lucky, my friend.”
Cade didn’t feel lucky, although he knew he would soon enough. He did feel better, though, as he heard another vehicle roaring up the driveway. He knew the sound well.
Tom’s truck was a beautiful sight. He parked and ran to where they stood.
“What the hell? I heard it on the scanner and I could see the smoke from town.”
“Where were you?”
“I told you I was going to town, remember? That last working pair of hoof trimmers broke when I stepped on ’em.”
“Oh, yeah.” Cade had forgotten that.
“Shit. This is awful. And I was only gonna be gone a little while, but when I came out of the feed store, some punk-ass kid or someone had slashed both my front tires. I had to get a tow and then the tire store couldn’t even fix ’em—I had to buy two new ones. Took forever.”
“I’ll pay you for them. You were in town on a work errand.”