Page 92 of Burnin' For You
He braced his arm around her and helped her over to the team.
Their team.
Jed was white-faced but awake as the PEAK EMTs carried him to the chopper. Kate held his hand. Gilly watched as Reuben went up to them, grabbed Jed’s other hand, and leaned into a one-armed hug from Kate. “I told you I’d be back,” he said.
“I never doubted it.” She kissed his cheek then followed Jed into the chopper.
Reuben helped Gilly over to CJ, wrapped like a package in the litter, an IV attached to his arm. He was drifting in and out.
“We’re taking him to Kalispell Regional Medical Center if you want to follow us,” said the female EMT. Blonde, shapely even under her blue jumpsuit, she crouched to pick up one end of the litter.
“Hey, Jess, let me help with that.” Pete came running over.
They carried CJ to the chopper.
Hannah appeared pale but stronger than when Gilly had left her. “You okay?”
Hannah managed a smile. “Now we are. But you—you don’t look so good.”
Indeed. A glance at both of them suggested, well, a plane crash, a gunshot wound, a forest fire, and maybe something else.
A happy ending. Yes, that was the expression Gilly saw on Reuben’s face as he looked down at her, a spark of something in those brown eyes that had her thinking they should probably get back and cleaned up.
So she could put on the blue dress.
Chapter 10
“Don’t be afraid. I’m here to protect you.” Gilly reached over and touched Reuben’s hand, whitened on the steering wheel.
He released it and wrapped his fingers through hers, letting a low chuckle rumble out of him. “I feel so much better.”
“I thought you would,” she said, grinning as he turned under the arched entrance to the Triple M, located ninety minutes southeast of Ember.
Gorgeous. A long gravel-and-dirt drive curved toward a two-story log lodge in the distance. The lush, rolling open range filled with sage and grass undulated as far as the eye could see, dissected by groves of aspen and ragged, dark-green Douglas fir. The entire landscape butted up to the jagged, snow-tipped mountains along the eastern horizon.
Cutting through the land, the lazy, impossibly blueGeraldineRiver, bordered occasionally by willows and towering cottonwoods, reflected a cloudless sky.
Truly, Big Sky Country.
Reuben slowed, bumping over a cattle gate, and Gilly spotted a field with freshly cut alfalfa in rows, ready to be raked into stacks or baled.
Black Angus lounged in the grass, their tails swatting the occasional fly. Others roamed the pasture, grazing.
“How big is the ranch?”
“A little over nine thousand acres. We also have a private lake, although my cousin Ned calls it a pond. But he’s a Minnesota lake snob.”
She laughed. Ned, the rookie, had left for home a few days ago, eager to get back to his small town of Big Lake for Labor Day weekend.
“We also have about six miles of excellent trout fishing on the Geraldine River. Which was named, by the way, for my great-great grandmother.”
“Wow.”
“The Triple M was started by my great-great grandfather Marshall when he came over from Scotland back in the late 1800s. He had three sons, so he named it the triple M, probably intending to pass it down to them, in three parts. But the oldest returned to Scotland, and the youngest decided to find his fortune in Alaska, so my grandfather inherited the ranch. He expanded it to five thousand acres, and when my father took over, he bought out two neighboring ranches. We run about three hundred fifty head of cattle.”
“Did your grandfather have any other sons?”
“Oh, yeah—my father wasn’t even the oldest. He was just the one who loved ranching. My grandfather had seven sons. They’ve mostly left Montana—are scattered all over the world and in Minnesota, Colorado, and California. We even have cousins in Maine and Alaska. But only our family stayed in ranching.”