Page 1 of Heart Like a Cowboy

CHAPTER ONE

THATWHOLEDEALabout bad news coming in threes? Well, it was a crock. Lieutenant Colonel Egan Donnelly now had proof of it.

First, there’d been the unexpected visitor, AKA the messenger, who’d started the whole bad-news ball rolling. That’d teach him to open his frickin’ door before he’d even finished his frickin’ coffee.

Then, there was the so-called celebration that would stir up the worst of his past and serve it up to him on a silver platter. Or rather on a disposable paper plate, anyway.

Then, a letter from his ex, which he figured was never a good sign. Who the heck actually wanted to hear from their cheating ex? Not him, that was for sure.

Those were the three things—count them: one, two, three—that was supposed to have been the final tally of bad crap even if for only a day, but apparently the creator of that old saying had no credibility whatsoever. Then again, Egan had known firsthand that bad news didn’t have limited quantities.

Or expiration dates.

Now he was faced with ironclad confirmation that those other three things were piddly-ass drops in the proverbial bucket compared to bad-news number four.

And now, everything in his world was crashing and burning.

Again.

Thirty Minutes Earlier

INTHEDREAM,Lieutenant Colonel Egan Donnelly saved his best friend’s life. In the dream, the explosion didn’t happen. It didn’t blast through the scorched, airless night. Didn’t tear apart the transport vehicle.

Didn’t leave blood on the bleached sand.

Didn’t kill.

In the dream, Egan was the hero that so many people proclaimed he was. He made just the right decisions to save everyone, including Jack.Especially Jack.

Egan didn’t fight tooth and nail to come out of this dream—unlike the ones that were basically a blow-by-blow account of what had actually happened that god-awful night nearly three years ago. Those dreams were pits of the darkest level of hell where everything spun and bashed, stomping him down deeper and deeper into the real nightmare. Those dreams he fought.

Had to.

Because Egan had learned the hard way if he let those dreams play out, then it was a damn hard struggle to come back from them. Heck, he was still trying to come back from them.

Despite wanting to linger in this particular dream where he got to play hero, it didn’t happen, thanks to his phone dinging with a text. He frowned, noticing that it was barely six in the morning. Texts at this hour usually were not good. Considering that all three of his siblings were on active duty,not goodcould be really bad.

He saw his father’s name on the screen, and the worry instantly tightened Egan’s gut. His dad had just turned sixty so while he wasn’t in the “one foot in the grave” stage, he wasn’t the proverbial spring chicken, either. Added to that, his dad still ran the day-to-day operation of Saddlebrook, the family’s ranch in Emerald Creek, Texas. The ranch that’d been in the Donnelly family for over a hundred years and had grown and grown and grown with each succeeding generation. All that growth required hours of upkeep and work.

Found this when I was going through some old photo albums, his dad had texted.

What the heck? That gut tightness eased up, some, when Egan saw it was a slightly off-center image taken in front of the main barn on the ranch. His dad had obviously used his phone to take a picture of the old photo. Emphasis onold.

It was a shot that his grandmother, Effie, had snapped thirty years ago on Egan’s eighth birthday. His brother, Cal, would have been six. His sister, Remi, a two-year-old toddler, and his other brother, Blue, was just four. Stairsteps, people called them, since they’d all been born just two years apart.

In the photo, his dad, looking lean, fit and young, was in the center, flanked by Egan and Remi on the right, and Cal and Blue on the left. Remi and Blue were both grinning big toothy grins. Cal and Egan weren’t. Probably because they’d been old enough to understand that life as they’d known it was over.

Their lives hadn’t exactly gone to hell in a handbasket, but this particular shot had been taken only a couple of weeks after their mother had died from cancer. A long agonizing death that had left their dad the widower of four young kids. Still, his dad was eking out a smile in the picture, and he’d managed to gather all four of them in his outstretched arms.

Bittersweet times.

That’s when their mom’s mom, Grammy Effie, had come to Saddlebrook for what was supposed to have been a couple of months, until his dad got his footing. Effie was still living on the ranch thirty years later and had obviously put down roots as deep as his father’s.

Egan was wondering what had prompted his dad to go digging through old family albums when his phone dinged again. It was another text from his dad, another photo. It was an image that Egan also knew well, and he mentally referred to it as the start of phase two of his life.

The first phase had been with a loving mother that sadly he now couldn’t even remember. That had ended with her death. Phase two had begun when his dad had gotten remarried four years later to a young fresh-faced Captain Audrey Granger, who’d then been stationed at the very base in San Antonio where Egan was now. It was an hour’s commute to the ranch that Audrey had diligently made.

For a while, anyway.

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