The Cowboy's Forever Family. Deb Kastner
with Craig. He was good-looking, smart, successful and utterly devoted to her. Almost too good to be true. Besides, the senator approved the match, and the senator always got what he wanted. Thank God she found out about Craig in time and broke off the engagement.
Rennie’s fingers gripped the stick tighter, knuckles whitening under the pressure as she contemplated the consequences of her actions. She didn’t want to be there when the Senator returned from Washington and learned what she had done.
Glancing up she noticed that the landing-gear-indicator light had burned out. Routine, she told herself. No reason to panic. And she didn’t, until several moments later, when the engine didn’t sound right.
Apprehension darted through her like a hard-driven nail. Like it or not, she had to turn around and return to the airport.
It was in the midst of a banked left turn to head back when the engine went to takeoff power. That’s when the world exploded.
There was a horrible noise, followed in less than a heartbeat by a jolt that pitched Rennie forward in her seat. A ferocious heat welled up behind her. She didn’t have to turn around to know that the plane was on fire and that she was going to crash.
There was a bone-shattering thud when the plane hit the ground. Cushioned by the soft, damp earth, it remained in one piece. Rennie was shaken violently from side to side as the tail section spun around and around, churning over the muck and saw grass.
When the plane finally came to a stop, Rennie found herself miraculously alive and pinned beneath the wreckage. Jet fuel from the engine poured on her. Her fingers clawed at the seat belt. In her frenzy she got it unbuckled. Disentangling herself from the wreckage, she fell out of the plane into the swamp.
Worse than the awful sound of the crash was the crushing silence that greeted her. There was no noise, no movement, no life, it seemed in the cold, raw darkness that swallowed her up. She stumbled away from the plane, mindless of injuries and fearful of the sinister creatures that lurked in the swamp. Alligators came to mind. Snakes. And panthers. God only knew what was out there. It was so dark she couldn’t see a thing. Then a startling realization came over her. The darkness all around her was not caused by the veil of night or because her eyes were shut. Her eyes were, in fact, wide open. She blinked several times just to make sure. Yes, open. Her hands went up to her eyes, and she cried out at the horribly painful touch of her fingertips. With a strangled sob she realized that she could not see.
Panic unlike anything Rennie had ever known seized her, constricting the breath in her throat and threatening to choke her with fear. It was then that she began to scream.
In her terror, Rennie did not hear the sound of the frog hunter’s airboat. In her blindness, she did not see the light on his helmet leading him through the dark swamp to the woman who had collapsed unconscious on the soft, wet ground.
Images darted out of the darkness. Distorted images of Craig, his eyes filled with the same arrogance she had heard in his voice that night she stood in the doorway listening to him speak to someone on the telephone.
She had gone to his apartment to tell him the news that she’d been awarded a grant to study the myths and legends of the Seminoles. Letting herself in with the key he’d given her, she overheard him telling someone on the telephone of his plan to build a high-rise condominium on a prime parcel of coastal real estate he was receiving as a wedding gift. All he had to do was make a sizable donation to the senator’s reelection campaign…and marry a woman he didn’t love.
Rennie was devastated. She knew the senator had promised Craig the land, but she never dreamed that it was the only reason he was marrying her. It had all been a charade—their first meeting, the courtship, everything had been carefully orchestrated by Craig to get the land.
She thought that marrying Craig was a way to test her independence and find some shelter from the influence of her family, but his betrayal only proved that she hadn’t been making the right choices for herself. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Maybe she just hadn’t wanted to see. Maybe she’d been unconsciously trying to replace the father she lost at an early age. Whatever the reason, the eye-opening experience drove home the realization of just how important it was for her to stand on her own two feet and not to depend on someone else for happiness, especially someone as controlling as Craig.
Rennie struggled to awaken, but unconsciousness maintained its tenacious hold, and all she could do was thrash this way and that in a vain attempt to block out the images.
The images faded and returned and faded again until, in the end, she sank even deeper, to a place where there were no memories or images, only a nothingness in which to take refuge.
It could have been minutes, hours or days before she crawled painfully awake out of unconsciousness. There came to her the smell of the damp earth. It seemed somehow familiar, but her mind was hung with moss and cobwebs and was unable to make a connection.
Slowly she became aware of the sounds around her, the hum of insects, a bird’s cry in the distance, and a strange shhh that she could not identify, beckoning her into a state of semiawareness. Uncurling her fingers, she splayed them against the soft fabric on which she lay. Cotton, worn fine by age and cool to the touch.
She did not have to open her eyes to know that she was awake. Yet when she tried to open her eyes, she could not. Was she still dreaming? No, she was sure she was conscious. She could feel a thin ray of sunshine on her face and the dryness in her throat. Why, then, couldn’t she see? Her hands moved cautiously upward, coming to within inches of her face and pausing. She tried with a desperate force of will to tell herself that everything was all right, but when her trembling fingers felt the gauze that covered her eyes, she knew in one great gasping breath that it wasn’t.
A scream welled up within her but no sound emerged as darkness came again like a cold wind, wrapping chilly arms around her and leading her back to unconsciousness.
She had no idea how long she lay there, slipping back and forth from reality to dark dream. In the place in which she hovered, time had no meaning. It could have been day. It could have been night. She didn’t know where she was, or even if she was. For all she knew she was dead, and this was what heaven was like…or hell.
It went on like that until something called her away from the darkness and back to the conscious world. It was the touch of hands working with amazing gentleness to peel the dressing away, hands of mercy applying a soothing compress to the burned skin around her eyes, followed by fresh gauze.
Her voice, unsure and untested, scratched painfully at the back of her throat and emerged as a husky whisper. “Am I in a hospital?”
“No.”
The singular word uttered in a deep pitch that was both unfamiliar and unfriendly made her shudder.
“Wh-where am I?”
“You’re at my place.”
There was no mistaking the inhospitable edge to the voice that spoke, conflicting sharply with the tenderness of the hands that applied fresh gauze to her eyes.
There was a scent about him, of the forest and the damp soil, a scent that Rennie found both comforting for the mother-earth images it conjured up, and frightening with visages of wild things.
She could feel his presence in the very air she breathed, and she wondered how it was possible to be so aware of a man she could not even see.
She drew back, partly out of caution—she had no idea who he was—but mostly from the unanticipated warmth that began at the tips of her fingers and spread clear down to her toes. Appalled at such a reaction at a time like this, she waved his hands away, questioning, “Who are you?”
“My name is John Panther.”
Her mind clouded by the effects of unconsciousness, she echoed, “Panther? Is that some kind of joke?”
“Not that I know of.”
There was a hint of something savage in the deep-throated reply, of wildness and regret and things that Rennie didn’t understand.