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Confusion was not a familiar state for Daniel. Until now.
This situation with Erin was a no-win wrapped up in a heartache. There was so much on the line. But his daughter was bursting with the pride of finally meeting her mama, and discovering Erin’s accomplishments.
At only thirty-four, Erin was a gifted photographer who had been awarded some of the world’s highest honors for her work. Daniel was not immune to the impressive allure of Erin Gray and her talent.
True, this Erin might be different from the young woman who’d stood before the justice of the peace with him over sixteen years ago, but when Daniel looked into her eyes, a glimmer of that skittish girl still existed.
He knew her fears, knew her past and knew she would run away to catch up with her future as soon as she got well again.
And that was exactly what he wanted. Or was it?
MILLS & BOON
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MAE NUNN
grew up in Houston and graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in communications. When she fell for a transplanted Englishman who lived in Atlanta, she hung up her Texas spurs to become a Georgia Southern belle. Mae recently retired after thirty years of corporate life. When asked how she felt about being a full-time writer, Mae summed her response up with one word, “Yeeeeeha!”
A Texas Ranger’s Family
Mae Nunn
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.
—Ecclesiastes 4:12
A Texas Ranger’s Family is for my darlin’ Michael. Thank you for taking care of me, putting up with me and loving me completely as only you can do. Our twenty-year marriage is proof that happily-ever-after endings occur outside of fairy tales and romance novels. Psalms 37:4 tells us to “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Honey, with God as the third strand of our braided cord, I have more than I ever dreamed of. You make it all worthwhile. I adore you.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
Questions for Discussion
Chapter One
“Erin, are you awake?”
It was only four words, yet the man’s accent was vaguely familiar.
“Yes, I am.” Erin Gray’s heart lurched at the first recognizable voice she’d heard since regaining consciousness in the ICU of Walter Reed hospital.
The thud of footsteps brought him closer.
“I can’t open my eyes!” Her cry was not much more than a raspy whisper, excruciating at that.
“It hurts to move, to talk, to breathe. Hurts everywhere!” She’d give in to the panic rising from her gut but even a single wrench would be too painful.
Tight strips of gauze covered her eyes blocking out all light. Her head and shoulders thumped like the blades of a Blackhawk. Bandages weighed her torso down like a lead blanket. She licked sore lips with a dry tongue. Her mouth was desperate for moisture. Her throat raw.
Respirator.
That’s right, a nurse had explained something about being on a respirator for almost three weeks.
Three weeks in a medically induced coma!
Accustomed as Erin was to a military cot, the soft contours of a hospital mattress had produced a throbbing low in her back. She was desperate to sit up or roll to one side. But even the smallest voluntary muscle twitch took her breath away, and if she hadn’t been told otherwise, Erin would swear she was in a straightjacket.
“Try to take it easy.” The kind man gave a gentle pat to her left hand, the only area of her upper body that seemed free of restraints. “It’s not as bad as it seems right now and nowhere near as bad as it coulda been. The heat from the truck bomb that hit your convoy in Kirkuk should have blinded you, but you’re only dealin’ with scorched corneas. The best ophthalmologist in this place says your healin’ is right on schedule.” His words were reassuring.
“Thank you, Lord,” she mouthed. Her one and only talent was photography. Without work behind the camera lens, she’d have no work at all. God was good, her life and vision had been spared.
“What about my arm?” She needed the truth. “I can’t move my arm.” A disability would end her imbedded service in Iraq, her limb just one more casualty of a foreign war. “Will I—” she couldn’t get the words out the first time “—lose it?”
“God was watchin’ over you. Any muscle-bound marine would have bled out from that kind of tissue damage, but I hear your commanding officer got you to the medics in time. You’re not out of the woods yet, but all signs are positive.”
It was critical, but nothing she couldn’t overcome.
A plastic straw pressed to her lips and she sipped carefully, then breathed her first sigh of relief since awakening a few hours earlier.
“Thank you…” She waited for him to say a name she felt she would recognize.
“Daniel.”
The surprise caught in her ragged airway.
“Yeah, it’s me, Erin. Your bureau chief notified us you’d been critically wounded.”
Daniel Stabler was the emergency contact she’d listed on the application when she’d first gone to work for World View News. She would have left the form incomplete but the human resources police had insisted. So her ex-husband’s name was the one she’d used to fill in the blank.
“I’m so sorry J.D. troubled you, Daniel,” she rasped, thinking she’d give her boss a piece of her mind once she was able to yell again. “He should have known you were only to be contacted in case of a life or death situation.”
“Erin, it was life or death. Nobody expected you to make it.” He delivered the news in the steady, calm Texas accent she recalled as pure Daniel. “Your lungs shouldn’t be workin’ after the fumes you inhaled, and there was enough staph in your body to kill a Dallas Cowboy linebacker. The fact that you’re here today is nothin’ short of miraculous.”
She knew a little something about miracles. She’d tried countless times to trap one in the viewfinder of her Nikon, to capture one on film. She was grateful to be alive, and surely God spared her for a purpose. For work she still needed to do in this world.
“So, if I’m back from the brink of death, whatever possessed J.D. to notify you now?” She wheezed out the long sentence.
“He called me weeks ago while you were on the flight to the States. We arrived in Washington the day after you did and we’ve been here ever since.”
She swallowed another sip of water, careful not to choke on the revelation. Why would Daniel come? After the way she’d run out on their marriage he had every reason and every right to stay away, no matter the severity of her circumstances. Maybe he needed something?
The lanky young man she’d married so many years ago stood tall in her mind’s eye. He was a portrait of good intentions and Southern manners in worn-out boots. He hadn’t seemed much more than a boy but he knew his heart’s desire just as well as Erin had known her demons. No man ever wanted a family with a happily-ever-after ending more than Daniel. And he’d been willing to give his best shot at what she’d known for a fact was only a fairy tale.
He’d begged her to marry him and keep the child they hadn’t planned. Erin was just a college sophomore when she agreed. She tried to buy into the illusion Daniel spun about a happy family, a foreign concept for an orphaned girl raised in foster care. And after seven more months of pregnancy and twenty-three hours of labor, she gave birth to a daughter.
Three sleepless days and nights into motherhood, Erin lost all ability to distinguish the colicky squalls of her baby from the anguished screams of her childhood memories. She coped in the way she learned from growing up with a raging father in the house. Daniel returned from work to find the tiny infant wailing in her bassinet, while Erin lay curled into the dark confines of their small closet.
“Are you crazy? How could you leave her alone?” Daniel shouted above the baby’s cries. He could never understand and Erin couldn’t have explained at that age.
So she never tried. She recognized her foolish mistake in believing in his ideals.
She could never be part of a family, never even be comfortable with her own infant. The baby deserved a chance to grow up in a safe home.
So Erin ran like the coward she was.
Lying in the hospital bed now, she conjured up the vision that had assuaged her guilt for sixteen years. Daniel’s sinewy arms gently cradling his daughter, his head bent close as he whispered comfort to the tiny life flailing beneath a pale pink blanket.
No, there was no chance the man so determined to have the treasure of his child needed anything from the woman who believed staying as far away as possible was the best thing to do for her daughter.
So, why had Daniel come, and more importantly, why had he stayed so long?
“Did you hear me, Erin?” He touched her hand softly to get her attention.
“Sorry, I guess not. The pain meds have my mind wandering between decades.”
“That’s a good sign. The doc will be happy to hear you’ve still got a memory.”
She had one but only selectively. Long ago she’d resolved to have dreams of her own, dreams so big there would be no room in her grown-up mind for the unbearable recollections of childhood.
“What time is it?” She needed an anchor, a sense of night and day and of what had transpired in the world while she’d been drifting in nothingness, evidently with Daniel close at her side.
“It’s after one. J.D. and Dana should be back up from the cafeteria any minute now.”
Dana.
The name they’d given the baby who’d inherited Erin’s tainted genes.
Erin had left Texas to protect the defenseless life she brought into the world. And all these years later against every precaution to prevent it, that life was about to collide with hers, again.
The creak of a door and lighter steps signaled a nurse’s approach. Metal bearings whirred as a nearby curtain eased back so the attendant could check the machines that hovered nearby.
Erin felt helpless as a turtle on its back, completely dependent upon someone else for her most basic needs. The room was silent as she waited for the encouraging voice of the ICU nurse. The footsteps stopped to her left but there was no conversation, no efficient activity, no tugging off of surgical tape or changing of bedclothes. Only the mechanical beeping and humming of machines.
She held her breath as her mind conjured up the worst that could happen in her world of blindness. But nothing in her imagination prepared Erin for the reality beside her in the quiet room.
“Is she awake, Daddy?” The soft voice of a teenage girl drifted across the empty space that was suddenly crowded with expectation.
Daniel gripped the brim of his Texas Ranger Stetson to mask the trembling of his hands. His heart rattled against his ribs like a diamondback warning off an intruder. Nothing in a dozen years of law enforcement had invoked this visceral response, this quaking in his gut. No drug-ring infiltration or arms-dealer confrontation had imbued this feeling. Where dangerous men had failed to shake Daniel’s reserve, this woman lying in Walter Reed’s critical ICU had succeeded. Daniel Stabler was afraid. Afraid this moment would mark the unraveling of his world.
He held his worries in check, allowing his Dana her first verbal encounter with the mother who’d been a phantom for sixteen years. J.D.’s call had changed everything. Daniel owed his child the one opportunity she had to see her mother alive.
As the days turned to weeks, his daughter insisted she would not leave without Erin. He’d accepted Dana’s proclamation without argument. Even agreed with it since things had been grim at first. But he realized now with shame that he’d never trusted God for Erin’s healing. In fact, Daniel had done everything he could to prepare Dana for the inevitability of Erin’s death. Now that it was clear she would survive, Dana was insistent upon taking her mama back to Houston with them.
“Daddy?” Dana gripped his forearm, stared up with glistening, hazel eyes. His daughter’s face was flushed with excitement over an all-consuming dream about to be fulfilled. Under normal circumstances there was little he wouldn’t sacrifice to see this welcome change. His often-sulking sixteen-year-old was inclined toward ghoulish makeup and shrouds of black Goth clothing, looking more like she belonged to Ozzy Osbourne than Walker, Texas Ranger.
“Daddy, what if she can’t hear me?” Dana pressed a palm to the anxiety in her throat, giving him a glimpse of fingernails polished black and bitten to the quick.
“I hear you.” The response from the bed was raspy.
“What?” Dana’s head, dotted with short purple spikes of hair, swiveled toward the sound and then back again. “Did she say something?”
“I said I heard you, which is about the only thing I can still do.”
Daniel noted the voice grew stronger with each word. It was time for the introductions he’d never expected or intended to make. He would need the wisdom of Solomon to navigate this situation if it came close to what Dana envisioned.
“Erin, this precious girl is Dana Marie, our daughter.” He gave his only child’s shoulders a gentle squeeze. “She’s been by your bed every hour the hospital staff allowed and quite a few they don’t know about. And when she’d let me join the party, I’ve been here, too.”
“That was very kind of both of you.” Erin was cordial, reacting more as Daniel had expected than Dana had hoped. “But as you’ve probably heard, I’m going to be fine so you should get back to your own lives now.”
“How can you say that to us?” Dana’s words were awash with indignation. She wriggled to be free of Daniel’s hold just as she had a thousand times in her young life.
“I’ve been crazy worried about you!” Dana inched between the mountain of machines and the bed. Hours of questioning the nurses had familiarized her with the workings of all the equipment. She’d overcome all fear of tripping a wire or kinking a hose.
“I’ve been waiting for you my whole life. And I’ve been in this room praying for you to wake up for eighteen days! I’ve counted the tiles on this ugly floor and the metal hooks that hold the curtain to that track thing on the ceiling. I know how many beeps the heart monitor makes between your breaths and how many times your IV drips in thirty minutes. I’ve watched while they’ve bathed you and changed your bandages. The scars are wicked now, but they’ll be really cool once they heal.”
Dana’s words gushed out, a torrent of teenage emotion demanding release. She dared to touch her fingertips to the back of Erin’s closed fist.
When Dana spoke again her voice was soft, thoughtful.
“I found out that underneath all that gauze your hair is the same color mine used to be.”
Daniel’s heart ached in his chest like he’d run a wind sprint. There was no sign of his physical attributes in his child. She had long been desperate to find a connection, a simple resemblance to somebody. Her euphoria over the discovery of something as mundane as her mama’s hair color had reduced Daniel’s sixteen years of single parenting to the value of a toilet plunger. Nice to know it’s there but not something to brag about to your friends.
Dana continued, “And I need to see whether or not our eyes are the same, too.”
“I’d like to see that myself.” Erin relaxed her left fist and slowly rotated her wrist, not exactly welcoming but neither brushing away the touch of the girl who seemed brave and outspoken.
Must have gotten that from her daddy. Erin imagined a female cookie-cutter version of Daniel. Tall and thin, with those naturally expressive brows of his.
“As a matter of fact, I’d like to see anything.” Erin tried to make light of her blindness when in truth, the skin on her neck crawled at the thought of being witnessed this way. Broken. Scarred. Vulnerable.
“Waking up to all this is pretty creepy,” Erin admitted. “So I’m sorry about what I said before. I appreciate you being here with me.”
She tried to make her croaky words sound sincere but the whole situation was like an out-of-body experience. Maybe any moment the going-toward-the-light part would start. No such luck. She was still very much in this life, in this damaged body, in her dark cocoon with her nose twitching from antiseptic cleanser and no ability to scratch.
“Butter bean, let’s sit over here and give Erin a minute to rest her voice.”
Feet shuffled away from the bed and Erin thanked God once again that her hearing had been spared. It told her that within arm’s reach, the most thoughtful man she’d ever known stood sentry. She wouldn’t kid herself that his vigil was for her. No, Daniel would provide the best for his child at all cost. But had he ever considered the price might go this high?
Erin certainly never had. Though she prayed often for the husband and child she left behind, it had never crossed her mind that one day they’d cross her path. And now they were a stone’s throw away, not that she could toss a rock if her life depended on it. Her bandaged eyes burned with the notion.
A door creaked and more footsteps thumped against the floor.
“Hello, Ms. Gray.” Another voice joined the room. “I am Dr. Agawa.”
Fabric rustled on the bed as shoes and chairs bumped about. Erin assumed a path was being cleared for his approach.
“I see your Texas visitors are here again today. You are fortunate to have such loyal friends.”
“How are you, sir?” Daniel’s greeting was personable, followed by the sound of palms slapping together as the men shook hands.
“I am good, Daniel. Excited to see our patient alert, as I’m sure you and Dana are, as well.”
The words were like poking a fresh bruise. Strangers had been attending to her most personal needs. Not only had they invaded her privacy, they seemed to have bonded right under her itchy nose. For the first time she felt kinship with the images in her portfolio of suffering individuals helpless to change their circumstances.
“My ophthalmic team has been treating the thermal burn to your corneas. You are healing very well, indeed. Time for a look,” Dr. Agawa announced.
“You’re going to remove the bandages?” Erin was hopeful and horrified in the same breath. She’d be brought out of this darkness before an audience.
“Yes, and if all is what I expect, we won’t reapply them,” the doctor reassured her.
An electric motor hummed as the head of the bed began a steady incline. The shifting of her spine and the repositioning of her weight was painfully pleasant. A loud groan accompanied her long sigh.
The movement stopped. “I’m sorry to hurt you,” a woman spoke from the foot of the bed. “This is the first time we’ve raised your head since we brought you out of the coma.”
“Actually, it’s lovely to change positions. Please continue,” Erin encouraged the attendant.
“That is very good to hear, Ms. Gray.” The doctor seemed pleased. “Having you upright will make it easier to remove the compresses. I believe you will see fairly well. But if your vision is blurred for a time, do not be overly concerned.”
Her heart’s naturally slow rhythm shifted like a souped-up Humvee. Her cardiac monitor beeped into high gear. Someone leaned past the bed and turned down the volume.
“There is nothing to fear,” the kindly doctor promised.
Fear? There was no way this pounding of her heart was a sign of fear. She’d been calm when she’d photographed the execution of Saddam Hussein. She’d never broken a sweat when her World View crew had come under guerrilla fire in Somalia, and not even a close encounter with Brad and Angelina in a Parisian restaurant had made Erin’s pulse quicken.
No, she’d survived the worst fear had to offer at nine years old, when her drunken father had beat her mother to death. Since then there hadn’t been a threat Erin couldn’t look in the eye while she kept a steady hand on the shutter release.
“May I have a sip of water?”
“I’ll do it,” Daniel’s daughter insisted, shuffling closer to the bed, rattling more ice into the cup and angling a straw into Erin’s mouth.
The liquid was a cool blessing. She curved her lips in a smile of gratitude.
“What was the last thing you recall seeing before your convoy was ambushed?” Dr. Agawa made conversation as he helped to gently raise her head away from the mattress.
“Actually, not much. We were in the middle of an Iraqi sandstorm. Our battalion had pulled to the side of the road outside of Kirkuk to wait for it to pass. The center of those storms is as black as any darkness you’ve ever encountered. So, we never saw it coming.”
Scissors snipped through thick tape and confident hands unwound the long strips that secured soft pads to her eyelids. As she waited for the pressure of the bandages to abate, a warm hand covered her fingers that had gone cold and trembling with anticipation.
Would her eyesight be the price she paid for the talent that had earned her a Pulitzer prize? Had her bizarre drive to validate her life’s purpose by capturing a miracle on film come to a fruitless end?
“Ms. Gray, please be patient and keep your eyes shut for a moment longer.”
The compresses fell away revealing a sense of light just beyond her closed lids. Then darkness covered her face as the florescent fixtures were extinguished.
“Open your eyes and look toward the ceiling, please,” he instructed.
Fluttering her eyelids was wonderful, like a good stretch after a long flight. But as a bright penlight was shone into first one eye and then the other, it was impossible to make out anything. The doctor agreeably mumbled to himself in Japanese before instructing the nurse to turn on the overhead lights one at a time. With the first flash, Erin squinted to adjust to the brightness, then looked in the direction of the person holding her hand.
The tall gentleman beside her was even more handsome than the skinny boy she remembered so well. The heart monitor began to beep loudly again. Daniel reminded her of a grinning but blurry George Strait. Quite something.
The second switch was snapped on and more light filled the room. Erin’s eyes cut left and right to find the fuzzy faces of the doctor and nurse who still supported her shoulders. When the final bank of bulbs glowed overhead, she turned her attention to the foot of the bed and focused hard on the girl dressed all in black, glints of silver dangling from her ears. Dana hugged herself with crossed arms that did nothing to disguise a body well-developed at a young age. As Erin found clear spots in her vision, she looked for signs of Daniel’s tanned good looks in his daughter. Instead she noted fair skin, a high forehead, a pointed chin and what looked like spikes of purple sprouting from her head.
As Erin’s squint locked on a dark gaze, her breathing stopped and her stomach quaked low in her abdomen. She knew those eyes. Up close there would be flecks of gold.
Erin was a little girl again, hiding with her sleeping baby brother in a dark pantry that smelled of rotting onions. Her mother’s screams had mercifully ended hours before but Erin had remained paralyzed, didn’t dare to make their presence known. Not even to the people who had finally come to help, the adults who were calling her name.
Suddenly the door swung open and amber eyes with glints of gold glared down from her big sister’s face. Her look was as accusing as her words.
“I knew you’d be in your hiding place, you little coward! You didn’t do anything to help Mama. Daddy finally killed her!”
Erin blinked, expecting her eyes and imagination were deceiving her addled brain. But the proof stood a few feet away and bore no resemblance to Daniel. From what Erin could make out, hair color was the only physical trait she’d passed on to her daughter. The rest of the girl was the mirror image of Erin’s older sister.
Alison.
“How soon can I get out of here?” Erin asked J.D. the moment Daniel and Dana left the room to give her some privacy with her boss.
Her Pillsbury Doughboy of a bureau chief was all smiles to see her sitting upright, her eyes unfettered by the bandages. But she was far from enjoying the blurry images around her. The very thought of being so needy and at the mercy of others, even in a hospital, made her insides shiver. Living with troops in Iraq was a whole lot easier than letting someone else call the shots or take control of her life.
“Take it easy, Wonder Woman. You’re still looking at another week here, then once they’re satisfied with your vitals and blood work, they’ll release you to a rehab facility.”
Rehab facility. The term conjured up dingy images of an institution filled with those who needed caregivers.
“Not if I can help it,” she murmured.
“There’s always the option of going to Texas with Daniel and Dana. They’re sincere about this, you know. It’s all that girl has talked about for days.”
Erin closed her eyes against the thought, reflecting instead on all the injuries she had to overcome.
“Let me make sure I got it all straight.” She began to recite her list of traumas. “My right arm was half blown off but thankfully reattached and though I’m going to survive my fingers may not. My pelvis is bruised, but not broken so that’s reason to be thankful. My corneas are healing but who knows whether or not I’ll be able to focus a camera lens again. The concussion from the IED generally produces long-term memory issues so I’m lucky I know my own name.” She paused to consider her circumstances, grateful to be alive but beginning to feel the anger of having lost control of her destiny.
“Oh, and the only viable option to my apartment is a nursing home.”
“It’s called a rehab facility,” J.D. countered.
“That’s code for smelly, depressing nursing home and we both know it.” Though it was shameful it felt amazingly good to gripe a little now that her voice was back.
“Erin, your frustration is understandable. Anyone in your condition would need to vent.” He squeezed her hand again. J.D. oozed calm and patience, traits he’d never displayed in the ten years she’d covered assignments for World View. His kindness didn’t make her feel any better. In fact, it made the few hair follicles that weren’t taped to her skin prickle with worry.
“Sooooo,” she dragged out the syllable. “Am I out of a job?” It might not be the question most people in her situation would ask, but work was her life. It was her world.
“Would you please stop imagining the worst?” J.D. sighed loud enough for Erin to hear. The bedside manner he’d worn for her sake was wearing thin. “You have months of sick time and excellent medical insurance. And don’t insult either of us with the insinuation that I’d let you get away from World View. You’ve shown more guts for living embedded with our troops and compassion for victims of war than the UN and the Red Cross rolled together.”
When she didn’t respond he patted her hand, accepting her silence.
“Kid, I’m sorry to leave already, but the nurse on the other side of the window is waving me out.” He pushed his chair away and stood. “I’ll be back tomorrow so you can make some decisions. There are nice places in Washington but I thought you might want to get back up to the city so I have a list of New York rehab hospitals to tell you about, too.”
“Can it wait a few days?” The idea of being relegated to an institution, no matter how well the reputation, made her empty stomach churn. “I know you want to get home to Mary Ellen and the boys but I’m going to need some time to ingest all this stuff.”
“Sure thing, no rush. And while you’re laid up, I’ve got some great reading to keep you occupied.”
“Not again, J.D.”
He regularly mentioned that there was a box of letters for her in the mail room but she always declined to have it forwarded. She wasn’t exactly Annie Leibovitz so what could possibly be in the postal tub besides credit card applications and Publishers Clearing House offers?
He smacked a loud kiss on her cheek and left Erin alone with her thoughts in the quiet room.
Even if only briefly, her situation was hopelessly out of her hands. But life had taught Erin to be a realist. Going home to her third floor walk-up was definitely not doable. She accepted the fact; her only choice was between a stinky nursing home in D.C. and a stinky nursing home in New York. Too bad a sweaty military Quonset hut wasn’t on the list. That would make it a no-brainer.
There’s always the option of going to Texas with Daniel and Dana. She recalled J.D.’s comment.
Is that truly an option, Lord? she whispered. After all my years of wandering the world in search of images that will honor You, have You brought me back to make things up to my child? To honor my family?
