Gambling On A Dream. Sara Walter Ellwood
the sadness in her voice or the pleading in her faded denim eyes. “You’ve always been good with her.”
He left the kitchen and headed down the hall to stop before the door across from his. He’d packed up his dive of an apartment in Waco, sent his stuff to storage, and moved into his parents’ home temporarily to help with Rachel, but he wanted a place of his own.
He took a deep breath as the day his parents brought Rachel home from the hospital drifted into his mind. He and Audrey were only three, but they had both been excited to have a real live baby in their midst. Audrey wanted to dress her up like her favorite doll. He’d wanted someone else to play with, but to be honest, he’d been a little disappointed she wasn’t a boy. He’d never dreamed he’d become her protector. Although he loved his twin sister, and technically, was her older brother too--if you can count a whole four and a half minutes as being older--Rachel held a special place in his heart.
Sounds of his father chatting with his mother from the kitchen brought him out of his thoughts, and he knocked on his sister’s door. “Rach, Ma’s got dinner ready.”
“I’m not hungry.” Her voice sounded muffled and distracted.
He looked to the ceiling and sent a prayer to heaven to give him the strength and the knowledge to help his baby sister. “I’m coming in.”
When she didn’t respond, he turned the knob and entered the room. A modern-looking pine queen bed and Rachel’s sophisticated styles had replaced the twin canopy beds and white girly furniture. Everything that had been Audrey’s was long gone. After all, the few times Rachel came home from her stints as an Army nurse, this was where she’d come.
She sat huddled under an old crocheted blanket in a stuffed chair and stared out the window. What he could see of her face behind her short auburn hair was pale and splotched red, as if she’d been crying. Her hands were curled into fists and tucked in close to her body. Her prosthetic lower left leg sat in the corner with her crutches.
He let out a long breath and sat on the edge of her unmade bed. When he glanced up, he noticed what had her riveted outside the window. In the yard on the other side of the rail fence, two young children played on a swing set while their father and mother worked in the yard. A picture of the perfect family. He closed his eyes and hung his head low.
God, how much more can she take?
“All I ever wanted was a family of my own.” Her voice rasped as if coming from her soul.
Yeah, me too. He swallowed hard, but his voice still came out sounding like a frog’s croak. “Ladybug, I’m not going to lie to you. I don’t know how to make this better.”
She turned red-rimmed blue eyes on him. “You haven’t called me that in years.”
He’d given her the nickname when she was only a baby because, with her bright red hair, she reminded him of a ladybug. For years, the whole family called her by the nickname. He sniffed and swallowed again. Damn, his sinuses burned.
“Everyone thinks it’s because of Audrey and Lance that I’m such a mess.”
“I know it has to be hard seeing them…”
She shifted her shoulders as if she shrugged, or maybe she took a deep breath. “The lieutenant colonel who was killed in the attack wasn’t just my commander.”
From the report, he knew Rachel had been attacked by an Afghani national who worked on the base where she’d been deployed.
She and a doctor had been working together late when the Afghani found them. He’d shot the lieutenant colonel and Rachel while they were talking in his office. She’d taken a high-powered bullet in the pelvis area and her lower left leg, which shattered the bone beyond repair. The doctor had died from his wounds, and Rachel had been flown to Landstuhl, Germany, where her leg had been amputated, her pelvis repaired, and her uterus, where the bullet lodged, removed.
The terrorist had committed suicide. His body had been found in his room along with the weapon he’d used to kill the doctor and to shoot Rachel.
Wyatt moved off the bed and kneeled beside her. He took her icy hands and held them. “You weren’t working, were you?”
She sniffled and shook her head. As she turned to look out the window again, she whispered, “Alex was my fiance. We planned to get married as soon as I could put in for promotion, but we had to keep our relationship secret since he was my commanding officer until then. No one can ever know about it. I’d never risk his name being dishonored.”
Which meant she would never discuss it with her shrink at the VA hospital. The air went out of him, and he bent his head over their joined hands. “Oh, God, Rach. I’m so sorry.”
“I wish I’d been killed too,” she whispered in a faraway tone that sent an arctic shiver through him.
He squeezed her hand and forced her to look at him by turning her head with his thumb under her chin. “Don’t you ever say such a thing. We love you. We need you here with us. You hear me? I need you.” He swallowed hard and sniffed back the hot knot clogging his sinuses. “I understand how you feel. But that isn’t the answer.”
She shook her head and yanked her hand from his. “How could you know what I’m going through? You have no idea what happened to me. What it was like to watch the man I love die.”
He glanced out the window at the happy family. The little boy was Mason, the girl Katie. He was five years old, and she was almost three. The same age his son would have been. He’d met the family on several occasions since they moved into the recently built home three months ago. “Dawn Madison and I were all but engaged while we worked vice on the PD.” He met his sister’s gaze. “She took a bullet that was meant for me and almost died.”
She huffed. “But she’s still alive. Alex is dead.”
“True.” He averted his gaze to his hands. “But I’ll never forgive her for what she did. She was five months pregnant and lost the baby.”
“Wy, I’m so sorry.” She took his hand and squeezed it.
He sniffed again, but he couldn’t look up. “She lost our son simply because she wouldn’t take herself off the case. The captain would’ve never allowed her on the sting if he’d known. Hell, if I had known about the pregnancy, I would’ve had her taken off the case.” He shook his head and wiped his nose with the back of his free hand. “I know that isn’t the same as what happened to you. But there isn’t a day that goes by I don’t wonder what my little boy would’ve grown into.” Or what life with Dawn would’ve been like.
“Why do bad things always happen to good people?”
The only answer he had was to take her into his arms and hold her as he closed his eyes against the tears he wouldn’t dare let fall.
“I don’t know, Ladybug. I don’t know.”
* * * *
That evening, Dawn got out of her Ford F-150, her boots hitting the dusty ground with a thump. Her brother’s old Dodge pickup and a horse trailer were parked next to the old-line cabin on his third of the M bar C.
The old shack wasn’t more than termites holding hands. The roof sagged on one side, and a black tarp covered the rusted tin where a leak had weakened the boards beneath. Half the porch had rotted away. The bold tanginess of deterioration mingled with the scent of creek water, horse, fresh hay, and lumber. Someone, probably Talon, had replaced the steps with a concrete block and laid a sheet of plywood over the decaying wood from the step to the door.
East of the cabin, the west branch of Oak Springs Creek meandered along slowly. As kids, she and her two brothers would fish from the bank. On the other side of the shack, a lean-to with a small corral barely contained a massive bay stallion--her brother’s horse, Ugedaliya. Or Ugly, as the whites called him, since the Cherokee word was hard for them to pronounce. Talon never told the poor bastards that the word meant tornado. Which fit