Lenore rushed forward and dropped to her knees at his side. “Are you okay?” She brushed his hair back. “You’re bleeding.”
He’d had three points of pain on his body—the back of his head, his forehead, and his throat. And out of all of them, his throat hurt the worst.
“I can’t—” he said. “—breathe.”
“It’s okay,” Lenore said, staying absolutely calm. “You’re all right. There’s nothing preventing you from breathing, Brandon. Take a breath.”
He did, but it was sharp and quick and did nothing to help the panic rising in this chest. He pressed his eyes closed, telling himself to breathe over and over again.
She put one hand on his chest. “That wasn’t a good one. Go slower.”
He couldn’t, and he gasped at the air in short bursts for what felt like a long time. Finally, he managed to exhale properly, and he took in a long, deep breath as he finally allowed himself to relax into the ground beneath him.
Somehow, a smile came to his face. “It wouldn’t be worth doing if something exciting didn’t happen,” he said, the same way his daddy had when things hadn’t gone exactly right on the ranch.
Lenore scoffed, but Brandon was just glad he could take a regular breath again. Everything had settled, and the silence of the homestead brought a measure of peace with it.
After a few minutes, Lenore punctured the silence with, “Did you pass out?” Her delicate fingers brushed along his hairline again, eliciting a shiver to run down his back. “Brandon, I swear if you passed out?—”
He smiled, and without opening his eyes, he reached for her and said, “Lay by me, sweetheart. I need to remember how to keep breathing for just another minute.”
Then he pulled her to the ground and tucked her against his side as he kept on breathing.
11
Once Lenore had Brandon in her cabin, lying on her couch with painkillers and cold water in him, she tended to the wound on his hairline. “That one just needs a bandage,” she said, smoothing down the edges of the one she’d put over the small cut on his forehead.
Then she looked at his throat. “This one looks bad,” she said. “But I think it just shredded the skin.” She dabbed antibiotic ointment into the many cuts that had come from the rough edge of the strap.
“It’s not a clean line, you know?” She set aside the cream and looked at the box of Band-Aids. They weren’t going to work on this wound.
“Doesn’t feel like it either,” Brandon said between gritted teeth.
Lenore looked up at him and found his eyes clenched closed—just like his fists were.
“Sorry,” she said. “I do think we should cover it, just to give it a chance to relax.”
He nodded, and Lenore got up and hurried into her bathroom to get a box of gauze pads.
It took three to cover the slash on Brandon’s neck, and she quickly taped them in place with medical tape. “There you go,” she said, and he seemed to relax.
Lenore didn’t know how he did that, because they still had a greenhouse attached to a skid steer and so much more to accomplish that day.
She glanced toward the front door. “Are you okay in here?”
“Yes.” His eyes came open. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go finish up with the greenhouse,” she said. “I can get it unstrapped, and I’m pretty sure I can back that thing up.”
“Lenore,” he said.
Fire filled her belly because she didn’t want to be reliant on him. She wanted to learn, and then she wanted to do things for herself. “I can do it.”
He studied her, and she searched his eyes too. After only a moment, he nodded. “It’s not hard. On one of the control levers, there’s an arrow pointing back toward your body. You pull the stick back toward you. It backs up.”
She nodded, the determination inside her the only thing keeping her from screaming. “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she said. “And if your arms and legs aren’t broken, maybe we can keep going.”
He grinned at her. “Always pushing toward the next thing,” he said, letting his eyes fall closed again.
