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But of course he hadn’t. As a dutiful son, he’d replied that he would look forward to seeing them. Ha.
His stepmother was a flirt and a social climber. The woman had tried to seduce him the summer he’d turned fourteen and grown to six feet in a spurt of maturation that had left him feeling gangly and confused. That had been eighteen years ago.
It had taken him a while to realize females of all ages were attracted to his looks, his money and his family name, one of the oldest in the county. None of which was him, the real person.
He’d learned to keep his distance during the years he’d had to dodge his stepmother and try not to hurt his father, who doted on the woman. College had been a relief in comparison to his home life.
But he’d learned another lesson while there.
After falling for a fellow student and thinking she felt the same, he’d realized she was concerned only with appearances when he heard her tell a friend that his black hair and blue eyes were a perfect foil for her blond hair and blue eyes, and that they were by far the best-looking couple on campus. With him as her escort, she’d be the Christmas Carnival Queen easily.
Her words had made him furious at the time. Now he only spared a cynical lift of an eyebrow over the episode and put both it and his stepmother out of his mind.
Yawning as fatigue and the warmth from the pickup’s heater stole over him, he thought of a hot shower and a warm bed. He’d been through a difficult birth with a kid’s pony for the past three hours.
The little mare had been too small for the size of the foal, but he’d managed to pull both through, the anxious but trusting eyes of the ten-year-old owner on him all the while. The girl had given him a strangling hug when he’d finished and pronounced both mare and foal well and safe.
If he could find a woman who would gaze at him in adoration for his skills or something besides looks, money and name, he’d marry her in an instant.
So far, at thirty-two, he hadn’t run across that paragon. He knew what he wanted—a woman who was soft-spoken, smart and loyal, someone gentle and safe.
Safe? Now that was a weird thought.
Also, his wife would have to be a good mother. He wanted kids, at least two or three of ’em. Yeah, a librarian or teacher would do just fine.
A picture of Shannon Bannock came to mind—her smile as she led the children across the street, the way the kids in the parade had called to her. As a cop, she was sharp and competent. She was also headstrong, independent and argumentative. Not exactly the woman he had envisioned. So why had he invited her to the café?
An impulse born of illogical attraction.
The way she looked a man over as if judging his every thought and action was a challenge any red-blooded male would find hard to ignore. And she was built nicely, he added, amused by his thoughts.
Glancing at the gas gauge, he saw he had less than a quarter tank. Better fill up in case of an emergency over the holiday. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. The whole county would close up at five so store owners could go home to their families. Nothing would be open on Christmas Day.
He wheeled into the gas station and stopped at a pump. Fishing his credit card out of his wallet, he noticed the Out-of-Order sign on the machine.
“Damn,” he muttered and headed inside to pay. “What the hell?” were his next words as he stood inside the store.
It looked like a scene from a bad movie—bodies lying in pools of fake blood, an eerie silence over the place.
Only the blood wasn’t fake. The salty, metallic scent of it filled his nostrils. It was real. And fresh. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air.
Putting his wallet away, he bent to examine the first figure on the floor.
Shannon Bannock, the cop he’d spoken to earlier at the parade, lay with a gun clutched in one hand, a pair of glasses in the other. She was on her stomach, her face to one side, her expression serene, as if she were merely napping for a moment.
Blood pooled under her head from a gunshot wound. He couldn’t see any other injuries. She opened her eyes briefly as he examined her.
“I knew…you would come,” she said cryptically, then gave a sound like a sigh and fainted again.
“Yeah,” he agreed, checking her for other injuries.
He’d just bought a small acreage bordering the Windraven Ranch owned by Shannon’s grandfather, which was probably where she was heading when she stopped at the gas station. Relieved that she wasn’t dead, he quickly examined the other two and found them breathing. After calling 911, he retrieved his medical bag from the truck and began first aid on the three wounded people.
The police officer was the most serious. It looked as if a bullet had entered her temple, then exited under her lower jaw. He thought of what a bullet could do to a person’s brain.
A few hours ago this same woman had been directing traffic, efficient and confident at her task. He wondered what her future was going to be now and experienced an odd stab of pain or pity or something under his breastbone. He looked out the plate-glass window. Where the hell was that ambulance?
Chapter Two
Shannon woke to complete darkness, totally disoriented. She put a hand up to her eyes and discovered bandages.
A hand caught hers. “Don’t disturb the bandages,” her cousin said.
“Kate?”
“Yes. Megan and I are here with you.”
“What happened? Where am I?”
Speaking was difficult, as if she hadn’t used her voice in a long time. It also hurt. She realized bandages were taped over her jaw and part of her neck, that they encircled her head and wrapped across her eyes.
Her eyes? Why were they covered?
Dizziness rolled over her, leaving her nauseated and frightened, a sensation that seemed all too familiar, although she couldn’t recall ever experiencing it prior to this moment. Clutching Kate’s hand, she realized she was terribly weak. And helpless.
“You’re in the hospital. You were lucky. A surgeon from Denver was up at the ski resort with his family. He came to the hospital when he heard the news—”
“What news?” Nothing was making sense.
“That you were shot,” Megan said from the other side of the bed. “Don’t you remember?”
“No. Wait. Yes.” Shannon paused and tried to see through the swirling fog in her brain. It even hurt to think. “I remember going in someplace and…yes, there was a guy with a gun. He shot at me. It really happened? It seems more like a nightmare than reality.”
“You relived it over and over during your coma,” Kate said in soothing tones.
“I’ve been in a coma?” This was becoming more bizarre by the minute.
There was a slight pause. Shannon imagined the other two cousins looking at each other and wondering how much to tell her. “How long?” she asked, needing to know everything, to understand what had happened to her.
“A week,” Kate said, her voice soothing and firm as if she had everything under control. “The doctors put you in a coma to allow your body time to heal. You were very agitated after the…the incident.”
Shannon tried to comprehend what the words meant, but it was hard to sort out. Struggling with an urge to fade back into the serene, foggy place she’d been for a week, she forced herself to concentrate. A scene popped into her mind. “The gas station,” she said. “Did he get away?”
“Who?”
“The robber. I walked in on a robbery. I had to stop him. He was armed. He shot at me—oh!” Her hand went once more to the bandages. “He hit me?” she asked in a disbelieving voice. “In the head?”
“Shannon…”
The hesitancy in Kate’s voice rasped across Shannon’s nerves like a file. “What is it? What’s wrong with me? Am I…am I…is it my eyes? Is something wrong with my eyes? Why are they bandaged?”
Kate gripped her hand again. “The bullet went through your temple, around the inside of your skull and out under your jaw. The bone wasn’t shattered. You were lucky.”
Lucky? Being shot in the head was lucky?
She almost laughed at the irony in that statement, but it hurt too much. She cautiously explored the gauze wrapping her head. “My eyes?”
“The doctors don’t know,” Megan said quickly. “One eye was affected, but the other—”
“Which one? Which eye?”
“The left one might be permanently injured. The bullet grazed it near the optic nerve.”
“I can’t lose my sight,” she explained to them as reasonably as she possibly could. “I have plans. My degree, the future, everything.”
There was the practice she intended to open when she got her Ph.D. in psychology. And what of her dream of helping families work through their problems?
“No,” she protested, pulling at the covering over her eyes. “No. I’ve got to see. I’ve got to!”
She heard another voice in the room. “Keep her hands still,” the new person said.
Little squeaky sounds accompanied the voice, as if the woman carried mice in her pockets. Shannon struggled with the hands that grasped hers.
“It’ll be all right,” she heard both her cousins say.
The words were a lie, meant only to soothe. “You don’t understand,” she told them. She was having trouble speaking, but she had to explain, to make them see…
Her mind went hazy. Sounds faded. She fought the darkness, then realized she’d been given a sedative.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice sounding far away. “I need to know, to find out… Oh, please, please, don’t…”
She realized she was begging, just as she had when her father had packed and left. It hadn’t done any good then, either. The tears came, helpless and despairing, then everything fell into darkness.
Shannon woke slowly, fighting her way through layer after layer of cloudy material. The room, which she somehow knew wasn’t hers, smelled of antiseptic and flowers. An odd combination. She listened carefully, every nerve alert and tensed for trouble. However, the room felt empty.
The soft clink of metal against metal and the whir of a motor alarmed her, but then she recalled she was in the hospital. The floors were cleaned and polished during the wee hours of the morning. That was the sound she heard, coming from down the hall.
So it must be after midnight but before dawn.
She’d been dreaming—dark, restless dreams that still troubled her. In them, she faced the robber again and again, always experiencing the pain anew—quick, hot and blinding in its intensity.
Then someone—an ethereal being of coolness and light, such brilliant light she couldn’t see his face—came to her, lifting her out of the hot pain and scary darkness, taking her to a secret haven, his arms strong, his embrace sweet, his scent fresh as the outdoors. She had instinctively known him. He was the one she’d been waiting for. He’d made her feel safe….
It was a foolish dream. No guardian angel had come to her rescue. An illusion, her mind’s way of coping with the reality of being shot, was all it was.
Turning her head against the pillows, she gingerly examined the bandages covering her head and half her face. Pressing her left temple, she found that to be a sore spot. Also a place under her jaw.
It hurt to move her mouth, either to talk or eat. Swallowing the liquids they’d put her on was difficult. However, it wasn’t as bad as yesterday, and tomorrow would be better than today.
Thus speaks the optimist, she mused, attempting a smile. That hurt, too.
That morning—no, this was a new day, so it was Tuesday, the first day of the New Year, she realized. The day before, when the nurse had come in, her mind had been clear for the first time as the heavy drugs left her body. Every sound had made a sharp impression.
During the day, she had listened to footsteps and tried to guess who the person was. She had known when Kate or Megan arrived before they spoke. And the hefty nurse who was always so cheerful. Her shoes made squeaky noises on the floor when she stopped or turned.
No mice in her pockets. Shannon had liked that image.
She had opened her Christmas presents yesterday, which seemed pointless, while her cousins described them to her. She’d pretended to be delighted so they wouldn’t worry about her state of mind.
Still not quite able to believe what had happened, she’d tried to check her eyes during the night to make sure they were open, but she’d encountered the bandages. Maybe she’d hoped she was waking from a bad dream and that only the night was black, but it wasn’t to be.
Everything was black to her. Day, night, it made no difference in her encapsulated world.
And never would.
Fear rolled over her in waves of nausea. She fought for control. The ophthalmologist called in on her case had been optimistic, but he had cautioned her that sometimes, when one eye was injured, the other, although medically okay, would sometimes act as if it, too, had been wounded.
Sympathetic ophthalmalia, it was called. There was a fifty-fifty possibility she would be blind, not just in the injured eye, but in both eyes.
Panic swept through her, pushing at her self-control like a log carried on a flash flood. She took deep breaths and willed it away.
The doctor had also said her right eye could be as good as ever. Or there could be a period of blindness, then the gradual regaining of her sight and that it could happen in both eyes.
So, there was nothing to fear but fear itself. Someone great had said that. President Roosevelt?
Relief eased the fear. She could remember things. People’s names. Stuff she’d learned in school. Incidents from the past. She’d pestered Megan and Kate on their visits, making them test her so that she would know her mind was functioning normally.
A mind is a terrible thing to lose.
A slogan for an anti-drug campaign, she recalled. They didn’t know the half of it. Brain damage. It was a thought that frightened her even more than blindness. However, her mind appeared okay.
It had been a week and two days since the shoot-out. If she really did lose her sight… She tried to imagine it, to see herself coping, tapping her way through life with a white cane. The blackness seemed to darken more. She would be a burden, dependent on others the rest of her life.
But it was too early to think like that, the doctor had assured her. There was a chance. Fifty-fifty. Not bad odds for a person who’d been shot in the head.
Tears filled her eyes and spilled into the bandages. She willed them away. Crying did no good whatsoever.
Hearing a man’s voice in the hall, she wondered where Brad was. He hadn’t visited, or even called.
What man in his right mind would tie himself to someone who might be blind for life? a cynical part of her asked.
The man who loved her, came the answer from her never-say-die counterpart.
A hopeless romantic, she had always believed a couple could make it through any tragedy, but it took strength and dedication from both of them. If she and Brad had married, would they have made it through this crisis?
Maybe. If he had loved her. If she had loved him.
Love was the key. She had thought that was a possibility with Brad, but now…
