Page 45 of A Dangerous Heart
With shaking hands, Isaac splinted the leg firmly. He had to get the kid off the cliff. How was he supposed to do that with a drop-off and no rope? There wasn’t time to think about another plan, not with Ben going quiet and almost limp.
He tapped his fingers on his shoulders to signal Ben should put his arms around there. “My part is to do the climbing,” he said. “Your part is to hold on tight.”
Isaac maneuvered the boy into a piggyback hold, taking as much care as possible with Ben’s leg.
“I got lost.” Ben’s words were barely audible, more breath than sound, but they hit Isaac like a fist gripping his heart.
“Yeah,” Isaac said, his voice rough. “Easy to do in the dark.”
Isaac clung to the rock face. The extra weight hindered his balance. Each step felt excruciatingly slow.
His mind shouted.Hurry. Hurry.
The rocks cut into his hands. He remembered this from his days as a teen when he and Ed had challenged each other.
“Gonna have to do some scouting together come spring. Won’t be long before you know the lay of the land.” And the cliffs. No answer from Ben.
“My pa used to say Ed and me could find our way home with our eyes closed and our boots on backward.” One side of his mouth kicked up at the memory.
The wind gusted again. His arms were starting to feel like lead weights. He looked up—caught Clare’s face looking down at him. The trust in her eyes…
It hit him hard on the side of that cliff.
It couldn’t have been easy for her to accept his help. Isaac was a marshal, and he’d never met a criminal that trusted the law. Her family was probably the same.
She’d kept Isaac’s secrets from the beginning. And he knew it wasn’t because she wanted to use them as leverage or hold them over his head.
Clare had a good heart.
He knew it like he knew the land under his feet.
He kept his focus locked on her and scaled the last few feet. Near the top, he flattened himself against the rock wall while Clare gripped Ben under the shoulders and pulled him up over the cliff edge.
The weight lifted, Isaac pulled himself up over the ledge and rolled to his back on the flat ground, heart pounding. He sucked in a few breaths, then shakily raised himself to a sitting position alongside Clare. She held Ben nestled in her lap, his injured leg carefully extended, her hands gently patting Ben for other injuries.
The grit and pebbles embedded in Isaac’s palms smarted, and his shoulders still quivered. He closed his eyes as he breathed deeply. Clare’s gentle fingers grazed the scrape on his cheek.
“You hurt yourself.”
His muscles, tense from the climb, relaxed at her touch, and he lost himself in her eyes. An expression he hadn’t seen therebefore made him long for more. He had a crazy notion to reach up and brush a stray tendril of hair behind her ear.
“Thank you,” she murmured, her voice quiet but earnest. Her wide, full lips pressed into a faint smile. The ground began to tremble with the beat of horse hooves, and the moment was broken. Drew, Ed, and Eli appeared on the bluff.
“Clare, hold his shoulder. Marshal, take the other side please. Hattie will cut away his boot.” Doc Powell directed with a calm authority. Clare felt as shaky as her nephew, who lay pale and small in the examination bed in the doctor’s office.
Isaac stepped up to the bed, like a soldier obeying his commander’s order.
“Aunt Clare, is she gonna cut my boot?” Ben’s face scrunched, tears flooding his eyes again. “I won’t have a pair of boots then. I’ll only have one. I can’t just have one boot!” His cry escalated, his body tensing.
Isaac put a hand on Ben’s shoulder. “We’ll get you new boots.”
“But, but…my ma got me these boots,” Ben cried, overwrought.
Hattie, Doc’s teenage daughter who was acting as his nurse, shifted her attention to Clare while the doc bustled away. Clare tensed, needing to comfort Ben without unraveling the delicate topic of his parentage. At least Eli wasn’t here to chime in. He’d stayed on the homestead with Drew and Kaitlyn. She opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Isaac interjected.
“We’ll hold on to those boots. It’s not every day a man gets injured and has his boot cut off. We’ll keep them as a souvenir.”
“All right,” Ben sniffled. “Can we put them in your special chest?”
