Page 31 of A Summer to Claim Her Cowboy

They’d had two whole months of this, and he still couldn’t quite get used to it. Wrap his head around it.

But Sky would be back next week. He was on the last leg of his camping excursion, and he and Frankie had planned on her staying until Carter came back, but of course they’d both known they couldn’t keep sleeping in Walker’s room when Sky returned so it just...threw everything into uncertainty.

He stood up, making the decision that he was going to go ahead and grab her and drag her to bed because she was driving him crazy and he wasn’t going to be able to finish his chores until he got a little bit of satisfaction, when his phone buzzed. He answered it. “Is this Walker Cole?”

“Yes,” he said.

“This is Marcie calling from Goldstar Accident Services dispatch. Your vehicle was involved in an accident. I asked the driver if he wanted me to contact law enforcement, medical and family.”

“What?”

His stomach turned to ice, his whole body going cold. “What car? Which driver?”

“It’s the 2021—”

Carter had a newer car. That meant that it was Sky. “Did he speak to you? Was the driver talking to you?”

Frankie was staring at him, her mouth slightly open.

“He was conscious. I can give you the accident location.”

“Yes. Give it to me.”

He was conscious. That mattered.

“One moment while I gather that information.”

And he tried not to think about all the times that somebody was okay, only to find out that they had a horrible injury, but shock had kept them talking and alert until it couldn’t anymore.

He tried not to catastrophize everything.

“Fuck,”he said.

“Sir,” she said, “you may want to wait until emergency personnel—”

“No. I need to get there now. I need to get there.”

“I’ll drive you,” said Frankie. She disappeared from the room without even waiting for details and returned a moment later with a T-shirt on and keys in her hand.

“Wherever you need to go. Is he okay?” She knew. Without him saying what was happening, without hearing that half of the phone call, she knew.

“She said he was conscious.”

Marcie from dispatch gave him the location for the accident. It was about forty-five minutes away. They’d been planning on camping close, at a campground just near the coast.

If anything happened to that kid...

If he was okay, but the other boys...

The world was just so dangerous. It was so damned dangerous.

He got off the phone with the dispatcher after she conferred with him to get his number to law enforcement. Then he pulled up the tracking app and tried to get a location on Sky. It wasn’t showing up.

He called, and it didn’t ring. It went straight to voice mail.

What he needed to know was if they were going to be taking his boy to a hospital.

They were mostly silent the whole way to the scene, Frankie driving, and him sitting there, feeling ineffective. He wished that he could be the one driving so he could control how fast they got there. That was exactly why Frankie was driving. She was probably keeping them alive.

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