The SEAL's Secret Heirs(32)

Kyle hadn’t been there in years but he remembered it. He and Liam had played there as boys, splashing through the shallow water and gigging for frogs at dusk as the fat reptiles croaked out their location to the two bloodthirsty boys. Calvin had made them clean and dress the frogs when he found out, and they had frog legs for dinner that night. It was a lesson Kyle never forgot—eat what you kill.

They arrived at the edge of the pasture in a couple of minutes. A fence was down. That explained it.

“What happened?” Kyle asked as he swung out of the saddle to inspect the downed barbed wire and wooden stake.

“Not sure. Slim and I were running the fence and found this. Then he went to the creek to check it out. Sure ’nuff, one of the cows had wandered off. Still don’t know how she got down there. Slim stayed with her while I came and got you.”

“Good man. Hustle back to the barn and grab some of the guys to get this repaired,” Kyle instructed, his mind already blurring with a plan. He just had to check out the situation to make sure the extraction process currently mapping itself out in his head was viable.

Johnny nodded and galloped off.

Kyle let Lightning Rod pick his way along the line of the creek until he saw Slim down in the ravine, hovering over the cow. She was still standing, which was good. As soon as a cow lay down, that meant they had less than an hour until she’d start delivering. They’d have to work fast or she’d be having her baby on that thin strip of ground between the steeply sloped walls and the creek. If the calf was in the wrong position, it would be too hard to assist with the birth, and besides, all the equipment was back at the barn.

Somehow, he had to figure out how to get her out. Immediately. Clearly, Slim had no idea how to do it or he wouldn’t have sent Johnny after the boss. This was Kyle’s battle to lose. So he wouldn’t lose.

Kyle galloped another hundred feet to check out the slope of the creek bed walls, but they were just as steep all the way down the culvert as they were at the site where the cow had gone down. As steep as they’d been when he was a boy. He and Liam had slid down the slope on their butts, ruining more than one pair of pants in the process because it was too steep to walk down. But that had been in August when it was dry. In March, after a cold winter and wet spring, the slope was nothing but mud. Which probably explained how the cow had ended up at the bottom—she’d slipped.

Kyle planned to use that slick consistency to his advantage.

“Slim,” he called down. “You okay for another few minutes? I have to run back to the barn to get a couple of things, and then we’re gonna haul her out.”

Slim eyed Kyle and then the cow. “Haul her out? That’s a dumb idea. And not what Danny Spencer would have done.”

Too bad. Wade Ranch was stuck with Kyle, not the former ranch manager. “Yep.”

Not much else to say. It wasn’t as if he planned to blubber all over Slim and ask for a chance to prove he could be as good as Spencer. He firmed his mouth and kept the rest inside. Like always.

The ranch hand nodded, but his expression had that I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it vibe.

Kyle galloped back to the barn and found exactly what he was looking for—the pair of hundred-foot fire hoses Calvin had always kept on hand in case of emergency. They’d been retrofitted with a mechanism that screwed into the water reservoir standing next to the barn. The stock was too valuable to wait on the city fire brigade in the event of a barn fire, so a smart rancher developed his own firefighting strategy.

Today, the hoses were going to lift a cow out of a creek bed.

Kyle jumped into the Wade Ranch Chevy parked near the barn and drove across the pasture, dodging cows and the stretches of grass that served as their grazing ground as best he could. Fortunately, Johnny and the other hands hadn’t fixed the fence yet, so Kyle drove right through the break to the edge of the creek.

By the time he skidded to a halt, the hands had gathered around to watch the show. There was no time to have a conversation about this idea, nor did Kyle need anyone else’s approval, so if they didn’t like it, they could keep it to themselves. Grimly, Kyle pulled the hoses from the truck bed and motioned to Johnny.

“I’m going to tie these to the trailer hitch and then throw them down to Slim. I’ll rappel down and back up again once we have the hoses secured around the cow. You drive while I watch the operation. We’ll haul her out with good old-fashioned brute strength.”

Johnny and the other hands looked dubious but Kyle ignored them and got to work on tying the hoses, looping one end around the trailer hitch into a figure-eight follow-through knot. It was the best knot to avoid slipping and his go-to, but he’d never used it on a fire hose. Hopefully it would hold, especially given that he was the one who would be doing the rappelling without a safety harness.