Cassie emitted a choked cry, then raced to the fallen man. She threw herself to her knees on the mound of rocks, tossed aside her sunglasses and shouted, “Tom! Tom!”
The young man, an apprentice barely out of his teens, lay perfectly still, white-faced, with eyes closed. But he was still breathing. Blood pooled onto the limestone from the back of his head. Cassie jerked off her flannel shirt and pressed it against the gash.
“He grabbed ahold of a live wire up there!” Darrell Brown shouted as he crabbed his way down the scaffolding toward the ladder braced against it. Other men were crawling down behind him like ants off a mound.
From inside the structure, the banging of hammers, the whining of saws and the loud rumbling of a rock radio station all ceased. The framing carpenters rushed out and gathered around with the stonemasons.
High up on the house, a new man—a loner named Whitlow—stood and pointed with a long piece of board at a thick white wire. Up there, Cassie knew, the dangling wire was the power to the decorative lighting that would eventually illuminate the massive chimney.
“That one shouldn’t be hot!” she argued senselessly.
“This thing’s hot, all right,” the carpenter called back. He casually flipped it with the stick, and sparks flew.
The man’s fearlessness with the arching wire snapped a red flag in Cassie’s mind, but she was too distracted by Tom’s condition to puzzle its meaning.
Why the hell was that wire hot? It wasn’t like her electrician to make a mistake and switch the temporary with the main power.
“Somebody go kill that damn power,” she ordered.
A gangly young man hollered, “Yes, ma’am!” and sprinted away.
“Somebody go down to the site trailer and get the big first-aid kit.”
Again Cassie’s order was obeyed with a “Yes, ma’am!”
Jake Coffey had dropped to one knee on the other side of Tom and was pressing two fingers against the victim’s neck. “His pulse is okay,” he said quietly.
Cassie fumbled around in the bib of her overalls, pulled out her cell phone and punched 9-1-1. Electric shock was a worry, but she was more concerned about the effects of the fall. She told the dispatcher the problem quickly, while Darrell scurried over the stones toward them.
“No,” Cassie shouted into the phone. “There’s a shortcut, a private gravel road—” she looked pointedly at Jake Coffey “—through Cottonwood Ranch.” Jake nodded. His dark brown eyes were alert, concerned. His mouth looked grim.
“How far is the turnoff from Highway 86?” She searched Jake’s face imploringly while the dispatcher held.
“Let me.” He took the cell phone from her. “It’s two-tenths of a mile. Hard to see. I’ll phone someone at the ranch and tell them to park one of our red trucks out there and flag the paramedics.”
He handed Cassie the phone. “They want us to stay on the line.”
She nodded, pressed the phone to her ear and looked down at Tom.
“Think he broke his neck?” she heard Darrell calling to Jake Coffey, who was sprinting toward his pickup.
“We’d better not move him, just in case,” Jake called back. Cassie looked up and saw him pull out his cell phone. She turned her full attention back to Tom.
The men stood in a circle of stunned silence, watching as Jake, Darrell and Cassie covered Tom with emergency blankets, then padded the man’s limbs against the sharp rocks as best as they could. They bandaged his burned hand, and then there was nothing to do but wait on the ambulance.
In the distance the rock crushers resumed their methodical work, the operators oblivious of the tragedy up on the hill. The sound filled Cassie with a mixture of guilt and nausea. She wanted the noise—that aggressive sound of progress—to stop. She knew there was no rational reason for work all over the development to halt. Still, her ambitious concerns of only moments ago seemed utterly callow now.
Please let him be okay, she prayed as she studied Tom’s unconscious face. “Hold on,” she told him gently. “Help is on the way.”
She kept up this litany of silent prayer and verbal reassurance while they waited for the medics.
Time stretched taut, and she glanced up once to find Jake Coffey, wearing his sunglasses again, obviously studying her. When he caught her glance, he removed the shades, poked them into his breast pocket and squatted down on his haunches next to her.
As their eyes met in mutual concern, her fear mysteriously seemed to abate and a strange lightness overcame her.
“Is there anything else I can do?” Jake said quietly.
His face, the face she’d viewed as an angry opponent’s only moments before, was the face of a compassionate ally now. She looked away because she felt the sting of tears and she didn’t want to cry in front of the men…or in front of Jake Coffey. She shook her head and turned to stroke Tom’s unburned hand.
Jake stood up again. “Fellas.” He addressed the men gathered around. “We’d better move all these pickups out of the way.” The circle of Levi’s and boots disappeared from Cassie’s view, and then she heard engines roaring to life. She only glanced up from Tom’s face one other time, to see the vehicles pulling away from the cul-de-sac. At the same time, she caught sight of men jogging down the hill from the other building sites.
None of them could do anything to help Tom, she knew, but she felt a wave of gratitude for the caliber of the subcontractors and workmen she employed. These men were the finest of craftsmen, and they knew the meaning of teamwork and cooperation. They were always on schedule, always fair, always professional and honest, and not one of them would let a man lay fallen without rushing to his side.
She heard the sirens then. “Here comes help, Tom,” she reassured the young man and squeezed his hand.
ONCE TOM WAS STRAPPED into a neck brace and safely loaded into the ambulance, Cassie turned to find the men still grouped around the cul-de-sac. An air of helpless frustration was setting in.
“Let’s get back to work!” Darrell Brown bellowed at the assembly. He waved a beefy paw, and slowly, as if unfreezing from a carved tableau, the men responded.
“Ms. McClean, I’m so sorry this happened.” A deep voice spoke quietly from behind Cassie. She turned. She hadn’t noticed Jake Coffey still standing there.
She tilted her face up to him and tried to speak, but could only give her head a forlorn shake. He studied her, and his eyes were sad. They were also very kind, as if the earlier animosity between them had never existed.
He sighed. “What a terrible thing to happen.”
“I can’t believe it,” Cassie admitted, and looked away.
Their sudden bonding over the accident came as a surprise to Cassie. And those few seconds of eye contact also brought another completely unexpected sensation. A thrill of attraction pulsed through her middle as she realized again that Jake Coffey was undeniably good-looking.
Cassie, who spent her days solely in the company of men, was seldom genuinely attracted to one. She often wondered if living in the world of construction had left her abnormally inured to male magnetism. But her honesty—her most valued trait—prevented her from feigning attraction when there simply was none. Even so, she secretly worried about herself: at age twenty-seven, she remained stubbornly alone.
And yet, she enjoyed men—enjoyed their world, their ways. She just couldn’t seem to develop an intimate relationship with one. And ordinarily she wouldn’t even behave normally around a guy this attractive, but for some reason she wasn’t acting