These Ties That Bind

She glanced at his profile and saw his eyes widen.

“Mom, look,” he shouted.

Farther down the road at the entrance to the Caldwell ranch, a car sent plumes of smoke into the air. Rem’s place!

Sara pushed the accelerator to the floor and the car surged forward.

“Wow, looks bad, Mom. Unbelievable! Check out all that smoke.”

“Get my cell phone and dial 9-1-1. Tell them we need the fire department.”

As she drew closer, she noticed two people in the road, one lying down.

“Tell them we need an ambulance, too.”

The other person was running toward the burning car. Rem! What was he doing? Going in? Was he nuts?

She came to a gravel-spewing stop across from the accident, just shy of a large buck on the shoulder.

“Stay here,” she ordered Finn, and jumped out of the car.

The first thing that struck her was the noise of the deer lowing pitifully, in pain, of the woman groaning, also in pain, and of the fire crackling, eating up the car that Rem was about to jump into.

She grabbed her first aid kit from the trunk and yelled, “Rem, what are you doing? Don’t.”

REM’S BODY HAD GONE COLD. Geez, there was a kid trapped in that inferno.

The driver’s door stood ajar and he wrenched it open all the way.

Weirdly, he thought he heard Sara Franck’s voice.

The child screamed again.

“Melody!” the woman lying in the road screamed, lucid and hysterical now.

Afraid she would run to the car, Rem whipped around to tell her to stay put.

Sara knelt beside the woman, restraining her. Where had she come from?

“Rem,” she called, “don’t be stupid! Don’t go in there.”

“Can’t wait.” He coughed on smoke. “She’ll die.”

Turning back to the smoke swathed car, he cried, “Where are you?” even while he leaned toward the burning passenger seat.

“Here.” The terrified young voice came from the backseat. Thank God. He slammed the driver’s seat forward into the steering wheel and climbed into the car, the heat intense.

The scent of burning skin and hair choked him. The fumes from melting fabric and metal stung his eyes. The child cried out again, her screams terrible.

Rem barely made out a small form huddled beside the window in the only corner of the car not engulfed in flames. She beat her fist against the glass.

Reaching blindly, he grasped a leg.

“Gotcha!” Rem pulled hard. A small body crashed into his chest sending him backward against the door.

With a jerk, he dragged her out with him. He batted at her burning hair with his bare hands, then checked her over. Fire had touched only her hair.

He blinked hard. His eyes watered from the smoke.

As he carried her away from the burning vehicle, putting distance between them in case it blew up, Rem stared into her wide eyes. “You were lucky you were in the only corner of the car that wasn’t burning.”

“Was on…other side,” she gasped.

Hacking coughs wracked her thin body.

“When I woke up, there was fire everywhere. I undid my seat belt and moved over.” She lifted her shaking hands to show him her burnt palms.

“I couldn’t get Mom’s seat out of the way.” Her lower lip trembled. “I couldn’t get out.”

“Shh. You’re safe now,” Rem crooned, the same way he would to a balky horse. He wanted to rest his head on hers to soothe her, but he feared hurting her damaged scalp. Or maybe he wanted to soothe himself.

“Who are you? Where’s my mom?” She should be crying more, he thought. Her scalp had to hurt like crazy. She was probably going into shock.

“I’m Rem. Your mom’s okay. She got out of the car.” No sense mentioning her mother had been injured. Or that she’d stumbled out of the car on her own, likely forgetting about her daughter because of shock and a head injury.

Rem laid the girl on the grass, but hesitated to let her go. Maybe if he held on tightly enough, he could keep her safe.

The child looked older than her tiny body would indicate—about eight or nine, at a guess.

This close he could smell her burned skin and it gripped him with the talons of a familiar helplessness.

Sara was a nurse. She’d know what to do for the child. He searched for her.

“Sara?” She still knelt beside the injured woman wrapping her arm against her chest with gauze.

“Sara!” he barked. “Get over here. This girl’s hurt.”

Sara ran over.

“Fix her,” he said.

Gingerly, she checked the girl. “I can’t. They both need to get to the hospital.”

“I’ll take them.”

“We shouldn’t move the mother. The ambulance is on its way.”

“Ambulance is probably still on the other side of Ordinary. How long will it take?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Each way. Too long.” He gestured toward the injured woman. “She’s already moved, sat up just as I got here. If one of those ribs punctured a lung, she’ll get bad fast. We need to go.”

He ran to the still-disoriented woman. “I’m going to lift her.”

“Careful,” Sara said.

Reaching under the woman’s legs and with one arm across her back, Rem picked her up as if she were a porcelain doll, trying to keep her in the same position she was already in.

He was beyond gentle, but she cried out anyway. There was no way to do this without hurting her.

While they placed her into his Jeep, Sara supported her bloody head. Before resting the woman back onto the seat, Sara shimmied out of her sweater and balled it up to cushion her head.

“That sweater will be ruined,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

She’d never had a lick of vanity.

“We can’t put her seat belt on,” Sara said. “Drive carefully.”

Yeah, right. While I speed like a demon. “I’ll do my best.”

“Do you keep a gun in the Jeep?”

“Yeah. A rifle. Why?”

“That stag’s in pain. He can’t be saved and he’s dying too slowly.”

“Let me get my kit and I’ll give him an injection.”

“We don’t have time. Where’s the gun?”

“I’ll get it.” Rem rushed to the back and reached in for his rifle.

When Sara tried to take it from him, he said, “Move.”

“I can do it. Get those two to the hospital. Go. Now.”

Here in full force was übercapable Sara. She charged through life taking care of everyone and everything around her.

Rem and Sara had practically grown up together. He knew she loved animals as much as he did and he wanted to spare her this ugliness. But he also knew that look of determination. Fine. She could do it.

He shoved the rifle into her hands, then returned to the sobbing child, whispering inanities as he lifted her. A little bit of a thing, she whimpered against his chest like a kitten. So vulnerable. So helpless against life.

Rem cleared his throat of the fear blocking his breath. She’ll be fine. Have faith.

He put her into the front passenger seat where he could keep an eye on her. Her chest seemed to be fine, so he buckled her in, ran around to the driver’s side and pulled onto the highway.

As he sped off with his window open, he heard one rifle shot.

Sara had been a thorn in his side over the years, but he couldn’t deny she had guts.

Sheriff Kavenagh’s cruiser approached, barreling down the highway from the opposite direction, toward the cloud of dirty smoke the car threw into the air.

Easing to a stop, Rem rolled down his window. Cash did the same in the oncoming lane.

“I’ve got an injured woman and a burned child. I’m taking them to the hospital.”

“I’ll give you an escort.”

The woman in the backseat moaned. Rem needed to get moving.

“Don’t worry about it. You have a fire extinguisher in the trunk?” Rem asked.

“Sure,” Cash answered. “I always keep a couple on hand. They won’t put out a fire that size, though.”

“Fire department isn’t here yet. I’m worried about the brush on the side of the road. Last thing we need is a grass fire.”

“No kidding. I’ll see what I can do.”

They separated and accelerated in their separate directions.

In his rearview mirror, he watched Sara pull a U-turn and speed down the highway after him.

Dark smoke still rose from the wreckage. With all the chemicals and plastics used in manufacturing these days, car fires burned hot and intense. That fire could spread to his fields and reach the house.

He couldn’t think about that now.

Rem flew through town, blaring his horn for the length of Main Street. Sara caught up and stuck to his tail like contact cement, her horn blaring in unison with his.

Someone was sitting in Sara’s passenger seat, someone as tall as she. Finn? Had he grown that much since Rem had seen him around town at Christmas?

The woman in his backseat had stopped moaning. Maybe she’d passed out.

The shops passed in a blur.

On the highway on the far side of town, an ambulance passed headed toward the accident scene. It would take too long to stop, wait for the ambulance to turn around and then transfer the patients over. Best to just keep going.

Rem got back on his cell and told 9-1-1 to cancel it and to hook him up to the local hospital in Haven.

While he waited to be patched through, he checked the girl. Her eyes were open, but unfocused. She’d started to shiver.

Shit!

She was getting worse.

He didn’t have anything to cover her with.

Finally, the hospital came into view and he screeched into the emergency entrance, narrowly missing a car.

A few nurses he knew stood outside the doors with stretchers. Randy took the child from the front seat and placed her onto one of the gurneys.

“She’s in shock,” Rem said, jumping out and rounding the SUV.

“Got it,” Randy responded, wheeling her into the hospital.

Kelly and Phil went to the back for her mother.

“Careful. She’s got head injuries—concussion, for sure—and a broken arm and we’re pretty sure some busted ribs.”

“Park your car,” Kelly told him, her voice calm but rushed. “Then get a nurse to help with your injuries,”

His injuries? What was she talking about? He was fine.

He parked the Jeep and ran back to the emergency doors. Just inside, white coats and nurses’ scrubs swarmed the two stretchers. Nurses ripped plastic from IV needles and inserted them into the uninjured arms of the patients.

On her stretcher, the child glanced around, her eyes wide and scared. When her gaze settled on Rem, she seemed to settle. He gave her a thumbs-up.

Her tremulous smile tugged at something deep inside him, as though there were already a connection between them. What was that Asian proverb? If you save a life, you become responsible for that life? Forever after that, you were obligated to take care of them. Or was that just a myth? For whatever reason, Rem did feel responsible. He wanted to be able to fix her, to take away her pain and fear.

In a whirlwind of activity, the two patients were taken to examination rooms, followed by nurses and doctors. The gurneys disappeared behind closing doors and suddenly all was quiet.

In the vacuum, Rem bent over and struggled to breathe, air searing his throat as it passed through his windpipe. He hadn’t realized he’d inhaled that much smoke. Didn’t matter. He would live. He hoped like crazy those two would be okay.

When the adrenaline that had carried him this far gave out, his knees buckled. He grasped the counter of the nurses’ station.

If he’d slept through the crash…

Or what if he’d already been out working, taking care of animals on someone else’s ranch…

Those two might be dead now, one on the road and the other burned to death in the backseat of their car. Sara would have helped them when she came along. Could she have climbed into a burning vehicle, though? He didn’t know. Her shock after her brother had been burned had been profound. He just didn’t know how much of that she’d got over.

Nausea rose into his throat along with memories he’d grown damn good at repressing, but here they were now, vivid and too real, brought on by the scent of roasted flesh—a ball of fire, Timm Franck’s screams, the other children running away, parents scrambling to put out the fire. Sara frozen in place and staring at her injured brother.

The stinking horror of it rang in Rem’s conscience—your fault. Your fault. Those words—your fault, Rem—had dogged him for twenty years. Far too many years.

He’d put his worst memories behind him, but today’s crash, that burning girl, played havoc with his equilibrium. Maybe he felt this connection to her because he’d saved her from getting burned as badly as Timm had.

Sara ran past him. On her way through the examination room doors, she said, “Sit down before you fall on your face.”

Rem stumbled to a blue plastic chair, one of a row, and sagged into it.

That poor kid.

He slumped against the chair and his back burst into flame. Howling, he shot forward. What the hell? He stood and tried to see his reflection over his shoulder in the side of a chrome vending machine, but the finish was too dull.

“Where’s your shirt?”

Rem turned. Finn Franck stood in front of the machine with a fistful of change, staring at Rem’s back and his hands.

He’d combed masses of jet hair across his forehead like a modern-day Beatle look-alike. With silver-gray eyes he’d inherited from Sara, the kid promised to be a heartbreaker one day soon.

He’d grown a lot since the last time Rem had seen him. Must be taller than Sara by now.

He was turning twelve in a couple of weeks. Rem knew his birth date. He knew a lot about him.

“When I heard the car crash I jumped out of bed.” Rem finally answered the boy’s question. “Didn’t have time to get fully dressed.”

“There’s a long scratch on your back. It’s bleeding.”

Must’ve happened when he pulled the girl out of the car.

Finn stared at him, unnerving him. “Does it hurt?”

“It didn’t until a minute ago.” Rem had driven all the way out here with his back against his car seat and, in those adrenaline-fueled moments, hadn’t felt a thing.

“I saw you go into the burning car,” the boy said. “That was cool. Really sick. You were great.”

Finn’s eyes gleamed with hero worship.

Lord no. Anything but that. Rem was no hero. Never had been. Never would be.

“Don’t try it at home,” he muttered. “Fire is dangerous business.”

Rem slowly turned away from the boy and sat back down.

He couldn’t handle this right now.

He’d just rescued a girl from a burning vehicle, but to have a conversation with his son scared the bejesus out of him. Over the years, during Sara’s visits home from school, he’d seen Finn around town. He’d admired the fine job Sara was doing raising him, but Rem didn’t know what to say, what to talk about, and that helplessness frustrated him.

He wanted to connect. To claim the boy. Badly.

Sara had finished her nursing degree a few years ago and had been working in Bozeman; but she’d returned to Ordinary with Finn last week, this time to stay for good.

Rem wanted to know why.

He stretched his neck to ease the tightness there, where his resentment of Sara had settled since last summer.

Finn poured coins into the pop machine. When a ginger ale fell into the bottom, he pulled it out and sat on a chair in the same row as Rem, holding the can level on his thigh.

Rem stared at the boy’s smooth profile, at his straight nose and square jaw, as nonplussed as if Finn were a strange kind of animal Rem had never encountered before.

He wanted to touch the boy, to acknowledge him as his son. He was ready. Did Finn ever ask about his father?

With the utmost care, Finn popped the tab, then took a long gulp, all while Rem stared at Sara’s reflection in his young face.

Rem pointed to the cast on Finn’s left wrist. “What happened?”

“Skateboarding.”

Rem nodded. “Shit happens.”

Finn nodded, too. “Yeah, shit happens.”

SARA STEPPED OUT OF THE emergency hallway and what she saw brought her up short. Rem sat beside her son. They were talking. Get away from him, she wanted to yell but didn’t. She had more self-control than that. Instead, she brushed a quick hand down her torso to ease her panic.

When Rem bent toward Finn, motioning to his cast, Sara noticed what she’d spent most of the past eleven years ignoring—how her son often tilted his head the same way when he was curious about something, and how their lush dark hair curled in the same direction. If Finn didn’t use product to keep his bangs straight across his forehead, they would flop forward like Rem’s did.

It made Rem look like a rebel, like James Dean, but less sulky, more dangerous.

When Finn took a pencil out of his sketchbook and handed it to Rem to sign his cast, she called, “Remington Caldwell,” too sharply.

Rem looked up at her and frowned at her tone, then deliberately took his time with his autograph. He knew what this was doing to her, how it unnerved her, but he did it anyway.

He’s mine, not yours. Only mine.

Rem smiled at her son, stood and then walked toward her.

Sara didn’t want to stare, but couldn’t help it.

As a teenager, she’d worked hard to ignore Rem’s charms. As a grown woman, she tried not to drool.

Why was it so hard to turn off her attraction to him?

He wasn’t the only man on earth.

He’s the only one who makes you feel alive.

That had been brought home to her too clearly with the recent situation with Peter, yet another man who couldn’t measure up to Rem. She’d broken up with Peter simply because he wasn’t Rem, and wasn’t that ridiculous considering how unsentimental she was supposed to be. No-nonsense, dependable Sara.

Wasn’t it serendipitous that shortly after, she’d moved home with Finn to get him away from that gang’s influence? She no longer had to see Peter at the hospital every day and be reminded of her own foolishness. She didn’t have to see that bewildered look on his face whenever they met. He had no clue why she’d ended their relationship after his proposal. She hadn’t been able to explain fully to either him or herself exactly what her problems were.

She continued to stare. Rem was the handsomest man in Ordinary, Montana, and she was only human. Usually, she coped. It was just that she hadn’t seen him since Christmas and now without a shirt. That was all.

Her stomach rebelled when she noticed the scar on his abdomen and remembered the terror of the night last summer when he’d been stabbed in a bar, and her own helplessness, of how little she’d been able to do for him while they’d waited for the ambulance.

She’d almost lost him that night. He’d been drinking in Chester’s when it was still the Roadhouse and a biker had hassled one of the waitresses. When Rem stepped in to protect her, the biker stabbed him in the stomach. Foolish, courageous Rem who never thought of the danger to himself.

It didn’t matter that it really hadn’t been his fault. Trouble stalked Rem and that scared her.

The strawberry birthmark above his left nipple had faded over the years. The last time she’d seen it in daylight, they’d gone swimming with Timm. Her brother and Rem had been only ten and she nine.

Time had changed them all.

Rem’s arms and chest had been scrawny back then, but weren’t now.

When he lifted his hands to his hair to tidy it, his biceps flexed. Those unruly locks fell back onto his forehead.

He winced. He’d hurt his hands.

The small scar that bisected his upper lip—from a minor childhood mishap she no longer remembered—served to accentuate how full it was. The things that would be flaws on regular people looked like heaven on Rem.

To a plain woman like Sara, it smacked of unfairness.

He was still the best bad boy Ordinary had ever produced and Sara hated that she was so aware of him.

“Follow me,” she said.

“What do you want?” he asked, belligerent as hell.

“I’ll take care of your back.”

“Someone else can do it.” His lips barely moved. He was being rude.

“Little pitchers have big ears,” she said.

“What?”

She motioned with her head toward Finn. “Mind your manners.”

He blushed, obviously only now remembering that Finn would hear every word they said.

“There is no one else to do it,” Sara said. “They’re busy with the accident victims.”

He approached and said under his breath, “You live to make my life miserable, don’t you?”

“I do my best.”

She led him to an examination cubicle, all the while too aware of how close he was.

“You look like you’re chewing on a mouthful of finishing nails,” Rem observed.

He wasn’t far off. She felt that tense. With a flick of her wrist, she pulled the privacy curtain across the opening of the cubicle, closing them into a space too small for Sara’s comfort.

“What did I do wrong?” Rem muttered.

“Shut up and sit.” She pushed him onto the bed.

“Nice talk, Sara.” Rem sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress. “Great bedside manner.”

She ignored his sarcasm and examined his back. Despite her feelings, she made sure to keep her touch gentle. She checked out the burns on his hands.

“Ouch,” he said. “I didn’t even realize those were there.”

“They must hurt.” Sara sterilized the wounds.

“They do now. That poor little girl has worse burns on her hands and the top of her head.”

Although she was being careful, he flinched. Burns were tricky to clean without hurting the patient.

“Have you heard how the girl is?” he asked.

Sara’s tension eased a bit. Rem had a soft spot a mile wide for children. And animals. “No. If I hear anything I’ll let you know.”

Rem stared at her clothes. “Why aren’t you in scrubs?”

“I’m not scheduled to work today.” She glared at him. “That was a stupid stunt.”

“Excuse me? What stunt?”

“Climbing into a burning car.” Sara tore open packages of gauze so hard she nearly ripped the bags in half. When she started to clean the cut on his back, he hissed, and she struggled to relax, to ease her pressure on his cut. He’d terrified her when he’d climbed into that car.

“Do you think you’re invincible?” She knew full well how vulnerable people were, how easily they could be hurt, and how hard it was to come back from some injuries. Like burns.

She’d spent her teenage years helping her brother recover from his burns.

“Saving someone is wrong?” Rem asked. She watched him grit his teeth, but she couldn’t be any more careful than she already was and still do the cleaning and patching that needed to be done.

She secured his injury with gauze then handed him a scrub top to wear. He shrugged into it.

“Saving someone isn’t wrong, but why couldn’t you have waited until the firefighters got there? They wear protective gear.” She refused to look at him, didn’t want him to see her fear, didn’t want him to think she still cared for him. “They don’t reach into burning cars half dressed. After all these years you’re still reckless.”

“Sara, you’re being unreasonable. On the way to the hospital, did we pass any fire trucks?”

“No, but—”

“There is no but. That girl needed to be rescued.”

“And you just have to be the hero, don’t you?” she said.

“It wasn’t about me!” he shouted. “You’re being unfair.”

He was right. She needed to bring her irrational anger under control. She usually didn’t have this much trouble, but then she’d spent years away from Ordinary so she wouldn’t have to deal with Rem.

“Honest to God, Sara, I really don’t need to be a hero.” He touched her chin and forced her to look at him.

“We both know there’s nothing heroic about me,” he said. “But sometimes there isn’t time to wait for someone else to show up.”

But he was a hero. He’d just proven it and it went so far toward redeeming him, toward paying for all of the faults he’d shown when he was a teenager, that she had trouble keeping up. She’d thought badly of him for so many years. But he’d apparently been able to give up drinking and women and any number of destructive habits. Apparently, he was a responsible man now. And he’d just saved a child’s life in a way that was pretty hard to beat. Sara didn’t want to be impressed, but she was.