As much as Caitlin would have loved to feign disinterest, her curiosity was piqued by the proceedings. She watched in fascination as they poured the first of the full barrels of oil into a container that would pump it into the drill string. Unused to the strain being required of them, the mud pumps started up with a growl.
“Stand back!” Grant ordered.
“What can I do to help?” Caitlin demanded, wary of being pushed aside in an effort to protect her. Unless there was a damned good reason for her to go, she was determined to stand beside her husband. Right up until the bitter end.
“I need you to see if we’ve got circulation yet. Go down to the mud pit and see what Joe needs help with.”
Although she knew Grant was trying to protect her from a hazardous situation, the request was reasonable enough to force Caitlin’s compliance. The truth of the matter was, her services would be more valuable to the mud man right about now than on the drilling floor itself. As she headed down the stairs, she heard her husband yell to his driller.
“Donny, put some pressure on this pipe and try to get it turning.”
The intrepid driller did as he was told, gradually increasing pressure at Grant’s command. A short while later when the rig began to creak beneath the strain of the blocks, Grant immediately ran over to relieve Donny of his duties. “I’ll take over from here,” he said in a tone that breached no discussion.
Suddenly the whole rig shook, and the earth emitted a low growl as the bit popped loose like a tooth being extracted from the mouth of some terrible giant.
Even from her safe spot far below at the mud pit Caitlin could hear the crew’s jubilant cheers. She checked her watch. It was unbelievable. Barely an hour had passed since Grant had made the decision to bypass her recommendation and do things his way. Undaunted by her dire predictions that it couldn’t be done, Grant had shown her it could. And far from being offended at being proven wrong, Caitlin was delighted. Although their chances of striking oil before the deadline passed remained slim, it was no longer the impossibility it had been a short while ago.
Caitlin’s battered heart swelled with hope.
Her father had once told her not only to believe in miracles but also to rely on them. If L.L. Drilling somehow warranted divine intervention, maybe it wasn’t unreasonable to seek similar assistance for the blessed institution of marriage. Even one built on rocky ground and the preconceived belief that opposites attract.
Squinting against the sun, she grinned to see Donny Schaunders doing a fine imitation of a jig on a drilling floor slick with mud and oil. Her breath caught in her lungs as she realized Grant was looking straight at her. Or was that straight through her? Her heart beating in accompaniment to Donny’s joyful dance, she expelled her breath in a whoosh of relief as she bent deeply at the waist and melodramatically tipped her hat to her husband.
A smile as wide as the mountain range behind him crossed Grant’s face at the sight of his wife’s theatrics. Considering her adamant opposition to his methods earlier in the day, he would have expected her to grudgingly attribute his success to nothing more than good luck. Having seen other marriages dissolve over such petty differences as who was right about which way the toilet paper should be unfurled on the roll, who forgot to record which check, or whose turn it was to fold socks, Caitlin never ceased to amaze him. Leave it to his sweet, charming wife to publicly acknowledge his triumph with all the grace and aplomb of an accomplished actress.
The thought of loving her for a lifetime caused his heart to thrum rapidly against his rib-cage. Taunting himself with such foolish notions was a painful endeavor. Even if it was possible that such an extraordinary woman could truly love him without regard to money, background, or a future that was uncertain at best, Grant could not bring himself to ask her to sacrifice her youth at an altar littered with men’s fingers and hands, broken backs, crushed skulls, and shattered dreams. As much as he despised her for what she did to Paddy so many years ago, Laura Leigh was right after all. An oil field was not a proper place for an intelligent, beautiful young woman like Caitlin. Such a dirty, fickle business should be left to rough men who had little to offer the world but the strength of their muscles.
Even if he could somehow manage the down payment on that ranch he’d had his eye on for so long, Grant could no more ask Caitlin to trade one backbreaking job for another. He couldn’t imagine her grubbing an existence from this harsh land any more than he could envision himself at a debutante ball. If she thought Wyoming’s climate was severe at this time of year, how could he expect her to cope with drastic temperature changes, some of eighty degrees from one day to another in the wintertime?
With these somber thoughts in his mind, rather than blowing Caitlin a kiss from the drilling floor the way he wanted to, Grant merely turned away and got on with the business of making this hole pay out.
Caitlin refused to let her disappointment at her husband’s dispassionate treatment of her to slow her down any on the job. There was a stand of pipe to be pulled, new mud to be mixed, and a myriad of other obligations to keep her busy. Knowing only too well that saving the drill bit was no guarantee of saving her father’s company, she threw herself into the tasks at hand without stopping to eat. She labored beside each of the men, filling in as needed without complaint. Working herself like a machine, she tried futilely to blot out the pain caused by Grant’s desire to end their marriage as soon as Paddy was strong enough to withstand the news. From the sound of the phone call she had received earlier, that day was imminent.
The single night of splendor they had shared was not enough to satisfy Caitlin for a lifetime. The memory of his hands on her body sent shivers racing through her. The recollection of how it felt to wrap him up inside her in the most intimate of acts caused an animalistic whimper to escape her lips. The thought of spending the rest of her days without the gentle man who made her complete as a woman was enough to make her feel numb to the cool breeze that stirred the dusty air around her. As the light of the day softened into a sunset that painted the horizon with rose-colored brushes, Caitlin stopped what she was doing only long enough to place her hands upon the small of her back and stretch out her aching muscles.
Unbeknownst to her Grant was watching her every move. In fact, she had never been out of his thoughts. The whole of the day he had observed her covertly, admiring her stamina and grit from a distance. Caitlin’s mettle took him aback.
It seemed fate had not married him to some fainthearted damsel. Covered in layers of dust that could not mask her beauty, she looked so achingly lovely that his heart could scarce contain his emotions. Frightened to lose her, frightened to hang on to her, he was frozen to this time and spot in the universe.
Caitlin felt his gaze upon her as one feels the brush of angels’ wings in the passing of a wispy cloud overhead. She snapped her head up in surprise, and in so doing caught him in the act of watching her with such an expression of tender devotion upon his face as to make her heart stop beating altogether. He stood a mere forty feet away from where she was positioned just outside the doghouse. It was one of the magical moments, too fragile to explain in terms mere mortals could understand, in which they regarded one another with complete and total honesty. Without a single word passing between, volumes were spoken. In the way their eyes held each other. In the way their bodies reacted to proximity uninhibited by another single soul. In the way their pulses synchronized and their blood ran hotter and faster than common sense dictated.
In that one miraculous minute there was no denying the intensity of the feelings they had for one another. The differences between them shrank beneath the heat of their mutual attraction like a drop of moisture on the lip of an erupting volcano.
Caitlin felt her knees grow wobbly beneath her own weight. A silly little smile settled on her face as she imagined the sound of bells ringing in her head. She suddenly felt dizzy. Vaguely she wondered if some heavenly hosts weren’t trying to warn her of imminent danger to her heart and soul,
but before she could even finish the thought, she slumped into a heap on the floor.
Sixteen
Caitlin was not imagining the bells she heard in her head. Grant recognized the sound immediately as a death knell, the alarm signaling that they had hit a poisonous gas pocket and some had escaped from the well. Men scattered in all directions, trying to outdistance the fumes that reached out to detain them with sinister fingers. A few good whiffs of hydrogen-sulfide gas was all it took to prove fatal.
Knowing that he could either take the time to grab a gas mask and save his own life or that he could risk all odds and attempt the impossible, Grant didn’t pause to consider the consequences of his actions. Glancing at the windsock on the derrick to gauge which way the breeze was blowing, he didn’t so much as break stride as he ran toward the slumped figure of his wife.
The fact that he was upwind gave him all of about five seconds.
Filling his lungs with all the good air they could hold, he reached Caitlin in less than ten steps. Without giving heed to being gentle, Grant slung her over his shoulder like a sack of grain and raced to the beaver slide. Most of the crew had already shot down the frightful hundred-and-some-foot metal slide and were racing away from the site as fast as their legs would carry them.
Fighting back the tears that stung his eyes, Grant expelled the air in his lungs as slowly as was humanly possible. He didn’t have the luxury of positioning himself and his cargo in the most comfortable or safe position as he hit the slide running. Pulling Caitlin into his lap, he tried to protect her as best he could while shooting through space. He hadn’t risked his neck simply to break hers at the bottom of this chute straight to hell.
The air rushed past them on their perilous descent, and long tendrils of dark hair flew in his face temporarily blinding him. Holding on tight, he braced for the sudden impact of solid earth below.
They hit the catwalk with a thud that sent them careening into the dirt where they were enveloped by a cloud of dust. Choking and gasping, Grant emerged at last like some great dirty phoenix arising from the ashes of destruction. His lungs were on fire. His nostrils burned. Tears streamed down his face. Breathing hurt.
Still holding Caitlin’s limp body against his chest, he lurched drunkenly toward the little trailer where an oxygen bottle was stored. By the time he reached the door, the emergency blow-out valves had done their job by clamping shut and thereby sealing the well off tight. Nonetheless the alarm bells continued ringing. The tiny bit of hydrogen sulfide that had escaped was enough to kill each and every member of the crew ten times over.
Wasting no time, Grant dropped his precious cargo upon the floor and grabbed the portable oxygen bottle and mask that he kept in the closet. He strapped the mask over his wife’s pale face and feverishly checked her vital signs. Grant hadn’t prayed since his parents’ death, but finding himself on his knees over the prostrate body of his beloved, desperate words formed on his lips as he barraged heaven with his pleas to spare Caitlin’s life.
“Please don’t let her die,” he implored.
Her pulse was as erratic as his own pounding heart, but Grant was reassured by the most beautiful sight in the world—his wife’s chest rising and falling with each breath of cleansing oxygen that purged her lungs.
Caitlin’s eyelids fluttered open. Too groggy to trust her senses, she awoke to a surreal scene: Grant kissing each of her fingers, then gently turning her hands over in his own, and pressing his lips against her open palms. The look of genuine concern, of utter devotion, etched upon his features was almost too painful to bear contemplation.
Caitlin wondered if she were lost in some sweet dream of her own making. The certainty of that fact became apparent when she brushed away the tears rolling down this big tough cowboy’s face and he uttered the words that she so longed to hear.
“You can’t die, Caitlin. I love you.”
This must be heaven, she thought dreamily to herself. But the man who held her so tenderly in his arms was solid enough to base a future upon. And as real as the mingling of their heartbeats and their tears.
Once Grant was able to assure himself that Caitlin was truly going to be all right and that there was no need to transport her to the hospital, he carefully transferred her to the sofa. As much as he hated to leave her side, he had little choice in the matter. Duty demanded that he return to the rig, round up the crew, check on their safety, and ascertain what exactly they had hit that would cause that amount of upward pressure to close the blow-out preventers. Whatever it was, Grant knew it had to be big.
“You’ve got one heck of a headache coming on, darlin’,” he warned. “The best thing you can do for it is to stay right here and keep on sucking on that oxygen bottle periodically. I’ll be back to check on you just as soon as I can. I want you to promise me that you won’t move an inch.”
Since her throat was too raw to handle words yet, Caitlin merely nodded her head. Had she been able to speak, she would have assured her husband that she would wait an eternity for him if he would only ask her to. The sound of the front door closing behind Grant was lost to Caitlin as she entered a dream world dominated by a dark-haired giant with callused hands and gentle blue eyes which beheld her as the center of his universe.
Grant was relieved when his head count revealed all of his crew accounted for. Most had grabbed gas masks before diving from the rig like so many sailors abandoning a great ship in distress. Upon hearing the alarm signal, the others headed upwind as fast as they could force their feet to carry them. Caught unawares, Caitlin appeared to be the only one among them to have suffered any ill effects from the minute amount of poisonous gas which had escaped.
Once the alarm stopped ringing and all the instruments registered that the danger had passed, Grant hastened to return to the business of drilling for oil. His nose was twitching, and despite the disbelief such an unscientific method had evoked in his wife, he suddenly felt more hopeful than he had in weeks.
Torn between his desire to beat an unreasonable deadline and his need to be at his wife’s bedside, he drove himself like a veritable slave. Between superhuman bouts of physical labor, he sneaked in peeks at Caitlin’s sleeping figure. She looked so beautiful to him that he longed to take her again in his arms and smother her with kisses. Grant denied himself such selfish luxury. Covering her with an afghan, he did not disturb her sleep. When she did come to, he knew she would have a horrible, hurting headache, the intensity of which was certain to detain even someone as obstinate as his wife from attempting to go back to work until it had passed.
Caitlin awoke wondering vaguely why someone seemed so intent on kicking her head in. She couldn’t remember drinking anything of an alcoholic nature that had ever packed such an ungodly wallop. Had someone slipped her a mickey?
The sight of an oxygen tank at her side brought with it the dim recollection of alarm bells. Belatedly her textbook training kicked in and the reality of what must have happened caused her to moan in agony. If merely moving her hand to her forehead caused such excruciating pain, she could only imagine what it might do to her to attempt to swing her legs over the edge of the couch and put her feet firmly on the ground.
Firmly was a relative term Caitlin realized as the room swam about her. She sat perfectly still for a long couple of minutes, cradling her head in her arms and praying that the aching which had settled into her back and all of her muscles would soon abate. Instinctively, she understood the only way to hasten that would be by getting her blood circulating. And that meant getting herself up and going, no matter how badly it was bound to hurt.
Forcing herself up on wobbly legs, Caitlin grabbed for the wall and began the slow, arduous journey to the bathroom.
Grant paled at his view of an empty sofa, a discarded afghan, and an overturned oxygen bottle. Imagining all sorts of disasters which might have befallen Caitlin, he tore through the small trailer like a madman, cursing himself all the while for not remaining at his wife’s side throughout the day.
/> “Caitlin!” he roared in a voice made raw by panic. “Where are you?”
“In here,” came a small, weak voice from another planet.
That sickly mewl led Grant to the most unlikely place he’d expected to find his ailing wife—his own bed. Caitlin’s hair spilled over his pillow in a cascade of mahogany silk that took his breath away. With blankets pulled demurely up to her chin and skin so fair it was almost translucent, she reminded him of a sleeping angel.
Exquisite.
Delicate.
Precious.
“How are you feeling, baby?” he asked, gently placing his weight on the edge of the bed.
“Better,” she mumbled, a soft smile playing upon her lips. “Now that you’re here.”
“You promised me you’d stay put,” Grant chastised mildly.
Slipping a hand from beneath the covers, Caitlin smoothed out the worry lines etched upon her husband’s chiseled features. “I knew I needed to get my circulation going,” she explained. “That and I hoped to drown myself in the tub if the throbbing in my head didn’t get any better.”
Grant smiled in spite of himself. It was so like his little spitfire to crack a joke in the wake of an accident that could have well claimed her proud young life. His eyes darkened with intimate need as they swept over the lithe figure so poorly hidden beneath a single sheet and blanket. The thought of what it would be like to be met by such a sweet sight every day for the rest of his life squeezed his heart painfully in his chest.
“Just seeing you in my bed is enough to get my circulation going,” he told her.
The warmth of his gaze was almost enough to cause Caitlin to throw off her covers. She truly was feeling better. Well enough in fact to have come to some astonishing conclusions in her short hours of confinement. Afraid that her little tussle with death may provide her husband with the impetus he’d been seeking to kick her off the rig and out of his life for good, she was determined to make her feelings known once and for all.
The Cowboy Takes A Bride (The Bridal Bid #2) Page 16
