That didn’t really bother her. She was very happy with the way her men had finally come around. “That sounds like a wonderful idea. We’ll make a day of it.”
Now that they understood she did love them and that they needed to make her a partner in every way, she was confident things would be better from now on.
* * * *
“I think the Town Trust will be happy with the proposal,” Adam said. He pointed the car toward home. “The committee asking to include our fire department in the mutual assistance agreement will nudge us all to get that new fire house built.”
“The Town Trust will likely focus on buying new equipment first,” James said. “Our being available to assist with fires in Hamilton County means we’ll need double our equipment and roster of volunteers. It’s not inconceivable we could face grassfires in the two counties—Hamilton and Benedict—at the same time. We’d need to be able to fulfill that obligation, should the crisis arise, because it’s more than possible it will.”
“No kidding. Mother Nature can be a bitch when she wants to,” Adam said.
They drove in silence for a time. Adam let his mind go over the events of the day. He’d like to make notes tonight so that when he attended the next meeting of the Town Trust, he’d be sure of his presentation. He looked at his watch then smiled.
“We won’t be late getting home,” he said. “That’s a bonus.”
“We should pick up some flowers for our woman before we get there,” James said.
“You read my mind.” Adam gave a quick look toward his brother and then refocused on the road. “We can stop in Gatesville. That way they’ll still be fresh when we give them to her.”
“Good idea.” James sat back in the passenger seat, his gaze directed out the window.
They’d regularly traveled together and were more than comfortable in silence. But even if they weren’t speaking, their thoughts would often be on the same page. “Did you notice the look on Pammy’s face this morning when we invited her to go car shopping and gave her carte blanche?”
“Yeah,” James said. “That was a moment. My heart filled with love and gratitude, and at the same time, I wanted to kick my sorry ass for being such a damn fool and not seeing what we were doing sooner.”
“We’d never treat each other or anyone else that way, so why the hell did we treat the one person who means more to us than anyone in the world that way? As if her opinion didn’t even matter!”
“You know how Mother sometimes goes off on a tirade, in Spanish, about her idiot sons?”
Adam chuckled. “I’m thinking the same thing. Mother is a lot smarter than we ever acknowledged.”
James chuckled. “Maybe we should get her some flowers, too.”
They lapsed into silence again, and James turned his gaze to the window. His brother enjoyed looking at the farms and fields as they drove along the countryside.
They’d entered Benedict County and had another half hour-until they arrived home, slightly longer if they were going to stop and get those flowers.
“What the…Adam, slow down! What’s that guy doing?”
Adam slowed the car to a crawl, his gaze seeking and quickly finding what his brother was looking at. Just ahead and to the right, on a piece of farm land that appeared to have been recently plowed, a battle was taking place. Adam stopped the car because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The combatants were a man on his tractor, armed with either a rope or a chain, and a tree stump. Adam wasn’t a farmer or a rancher, but even he knew enough not to try to pull out an old stump that way.
Hell, if that tree was an oak, that stump could be bigger and ornerier than anyone could know.
“Oh, hell!” Adam watched as the rope or chain—probably a chain—grew taut, and the front end of the tractor began to rise up off the ground.
A few people who had been standing back raised their arms and, from their gesticulations, were likely telling the man on the tractor to stop.
It looked as if the man listened because the front wheels of the tractor came down again. Adam sighed in relief and then swore when the man looked behind him then apparently put his foot on the gas, this time with force. The chain went taut again, and then the tractor’s front wheels once more left the ground—and this time it didn’t look as if they were going to come down.
“Oh, fuck!” Adam headed for the driveway, one hand pressing down the horn, and his heart in his throat. That tractor was an old one, not equal to the task, and didn’t have a cage or a roll bar to protect its idiot operator. He was watching a disaster playing out before his very eyes and felt sick—heart sick—for what he feared would happen next.
The people on the ground watching the horror play out didn’t even notice their approach. Their attention was all on the tractor that was now falling…backward. Adam stomped on the brake and threw the car into park—but didn’t turn the engine off.
They didn’t need to use words between them. Adam had more experience with trauma situations. He headed to the scene confident James would use his own key to open the trunk while Adam raced to the scene of screaming people with a man pinned under his now overturned tractor.
“Stop! We’re doctors!” Several of the witnesses turned and made way so that, when Adam slid to a stop himself, he was right there.
There was blood, and the patient was unconscious. Adam had looked at his watch the moment he saw the tractor go over and began counting.
It was called the golden hour—the period of time following a traumatic injury where the chances were best that prompt medical or surgical attention could save a life. He now had less than fifty-eight minutes. They were about twenty minutes away
