Three Kids And A Cowboy. Natalie Patrick

Brodie’s eyes and filling his lungs with hot, suffocating thickness.

      With one hard yank, he pulled the blue bandanna around his neck up over his mouth and nose before he tore open the only door accessible to him. He stretched into the back seat, feeling, more than looking, for the two other children.

      His hand curved around one plump leg. A tiny hand struck out and snatched at his shirtsleeve. As gently as he could, he pulled a young child from the car.

      “I’m okay,” the girl, who appeared to be about five, told him. “It’s Bubba. He’s stuck in there.”

      She wriggled from his grasp, determined to go back in.

      Brodie pulled her away. “You have to get clear. I’ll get Bubba.”

      She stared at him for a moment, blood matted in her pale hair, gray ashes smudged on her pink cheeks.

      He nudged her toward the safety of the ditch. “Go. Now.”

      Gulping in fresh air, he plunged in to the car again to rescue the little boy. The heat and smoke from the front seat had grown more intense. Any second now there could be a burst of flames, and then there would be no helping anyone.

      Brodie groped in the hazy, stifling air. “Bubba? Can you hear me?”

      A muffled gurgle led him down, feeling his way along the floorboards until his fingertips brushed a mass of silky hair. Working blind, he quickly located the child’s trapped ankles.

      His muscles tightened as he curled his fingers under the edge of the seat. It wouldn’t budge.

      The child whimpered.

      Brodie tightened his grip and pulled harder, bracing his legs on the floorboard for leverage.

      Metal squawked. Brodie felt a hot, gouging pain in his thigh. He couldn’t see what was prodding him, but knew that neither he nor the child had much time left.

      He drew in the fiery, filtered air and held it, disregarding the searing heat in his lungs. Grunting out his frustration, Brodie tried to remember not to swear. What he needed right now was a little help from the Almighty, not a string of words that would singe a demon’s ears. One last time, he tightened his grip and forced the seat upward.

      The little boy cried out, but this time was able to wrench himself free. Brodie let the seat drop and scooped up the child. He dragged the small body to his chest to protect the boy from the heat and the jagged metal surrounding them.

      Quickly but cautiously, Brodie backed from the car. In long strides that jarred him to the bone, he carried the boy to safety.

      As Brodie knelt beside Donna once more, the children huddled together, seeking solace from one another.

      “Bubba, will everything be all right?” The five-year-old turned to her brother, who looked to be a year or two older.

      The boy rubbed a streak of blood from the bridge of his nose and turned his serious gaze to his younger sisters.

      Brodie knew that look. Suddenly it seemed not so long ago that he had been the older brother thrust too soon into the role of caregiver. Even as the memory loomed in his mind, Brodie had to admit that this child wore the responsibility with poignant ease.

      This wasn’t the first time this child had dealt with loss. As things stood, they were about to face it once again. The family they had hoped to find would never be now. These three small souls had only each other to cling to and count on.

       Chapter One

       Six Weeks Later

      “Mom! Daddy? Time to kill the fatted calf. Your prodigal daughter is home.” Miranda Robbins Sykes kicked open the front door of her parents’ farmhouse with one upraised knee. It swung fully open, cracking against the empty pegs of the coatrack on the entry wall—just as it always had when she came whooshing in from school as a child.

      She shut her eyes and inhaled the musky scent of old wood and lavender. Smiling, she dropped her purse, and the one small suitcase she’d brought from her car. She shut her eyes and sighed. Home at last.

      Miranda shook back her dark hair and caught a glimpse of movement just to her right. “Mom?”

      Turning to face her own reflection in the hallway mirror, Miranda gasped in surprise. The long trip from Tulsa had certainly taken its toll on her. Who’d have guessed that road-weary face had once belonged to the former Cameron County pioneer princess, the Lost River Rodeo Roundup queen and the second runner up to Miss Texas?

      Miranda batted her wispy bangs from her forehead with the back of her hand and wrinkled her nose at the image staring back at her. Those days of big hair and big hopes seemed as distant to her now as her childhood here in this house. Her worldly-wise deep green eyes seemed to belong to someone she didn’t quite recognize anymore.

      She had come back to Lost River to face her past and force him—no, it, she corrected mentally—to let her forge a future for herself.

      She glanced again at the mirror, looked away, then fixed her gaze firmly again on the woman she had become. “Miranda Jean Robbins Sykes, you are a liar.”

      She tried to smooth down the windblown mane that framed her face and tangled around her suntanned shoulders. Tugging at the waistband of her jeans, which fit even more snugly than they had a few weeks ago, she said, “You didn’t come here to face your past. You came to confront him.”

      Closing one eye like a gunfighter calling out a coward, she set her lips in a hard line. “You’ll never be able to go through with this, girl, if you don’t admit right now that you’re here to look Brodie Sykes dead in the eye and tell him your marriage is…”

      Over. She couldn’t make herself say it, even though the word rang loud and clear in her mind. She inhaled the familiar scents around her and dropped her gaze to the faded needlepoint rug at her feet. Through the dull but persistent pain throbbing in her being, she forced herself to admit it, even if only in silence. She had come here to make official what a year of loneliness and self-scrutiny had already taught her—her marriage was over.

      The marriage had been over ever since the day she found out she could not give Brodie the thing he wanted most in life, a child of his own. Miranda ran one hand down her sleeveless cotton shirt, letting her palm rest atop the cool buttons over her flat stomach. Even after all this time, the cold reality still cut like a blade twisting in her belly.

      When they first learned of her infertility, she had believed that she and Brodie could move beyond it. It wasn’t as though they didn’t love each other. If they worked together…

      Brodie Sykes, she had learned during the year it took for their relationship to unravel to the point that she felt she had no choice but to leave, was not the work-it-out-together kind. It simply wasn’t in his nature.

      She must have known that before, she realized now. Brodie never pretended to be anything but the man his life’s experience made him. The same Brodie who had stepped in to take charge of his younger brother, had applied the same determination to build a first-class cattle operation and then to cope with her infertility.

      Books, specialists, treatments. Brodie had been relentless in his quest to create a child. With each new failure, another brick had formed in the wall between them. The passion that had once burned so hot that a look could set their hearts afire at a shared glance had been reduced to something calculated and clinical. The long talks about hopes and dreams and the future had slowly changed into discussions about odds and statistics and new procedures to aid conception. In the weeks before she left, they’d hardly spoken at all. Still, Brodie had persisted. One more theory, one more medical opinion.

      Miranda shook her head at the irony. The very things she loved most about Brodie, his untamable animal passion, his mule-in-the-mud stubbornness, even his scruffydog