Once a Father Read online

  Damn it all to hell, it wasn’t supposed to have happened this way.

  He shifted his keen eyes to her profile. If she lied, he’d know. Bonnie Brannigan was one of those scattered, flighty women who couldn’t be secretive even if her life depended on it. “You didn’t see or hear anything, did you Bonnie?”

  “No.” Wiping away traces of the tear, she shook her head. “I was in my office when this awful thing happened.” Still dazed, she turned to look at him, fear in her clear-water blue eyes. “You don’t think this is like that terrible bombing in Oklahoma, do you?”

  It astounded him how far off the mark she was. A tinge of relief wafted through the wall of frustration that surrounded him.

  “That was a federal building, Bonnie, not a place where people like to come to talk over how much money they have.” He watched firefighters scrambling out of the way as an outer wall fell. “Maybe it was just an accident. Who knows?” Playing out his role of the big protector, he slipped a comforting arm around her shoulders. It wasn’t a hardship. Even though a grandmother, the curvaceous Bonnie Brannigan was still very much an attractive woman. And even better, right now she was no threat to him. “But we’ll find out, by and by. Don’t go troubling that pretty little head of yours.”

  Bonnie smiled, relieved to have someone in charge taking over. She loved her job at the club, but there were times, such as now, when she definitely felt in over her head. That was why she relied so heavily on people like Yance Ingram, the head of security at the club. She recalled that Ben had been the one to bring Yance to her attention.

  Funny how thoughts just popped out of nowhere at a time like this.

  “I suppose it could have been worse,” she murmured, attempting to console herself. She looked at Stone, realizing that had to sound callous, given the circumstances. There were at least two known dead, perhaps more. “I mean, this could have happened during the busy part of the day.”

  Stone nodded, looking toward the body bags just being zipped closed by two of his men. The burned bodies had been pulled out of the wreckage that had been, until an hour ago, the main dining area of the Men’s Grill.

  “Just two fatalities.” The wrong ones. A man and a woman. Their misfortune for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Do you know who they were?”

  Were. The word had such a terrible ring to it. She nodded.

  “Daniel and Meg Anderson.” She’d stopped by their table not fifteen minutes before the blast, asking if everything was to their liking. Admiring how much Jake had grown since the last time she’d seen him. Bonnie fought back a fresh wave of sorrow. “It’s awful, just awful.” Shivering again, she ran well-manicured hands along her arms to ward off a chill that no heat could chase away.

  He had no idea what goaded him on. Instinct, probably. The security guards who had scrambled out of the burning building, soot all over their smart blue blazers and crisp gray slacks, had said that there appeared to be no one left within the area where the bomb and the accompanying fire had hit. There was no need to risk his life by diving back into the flames before they became entirely overwhelming to satisfy himself that everyone was out. His chief had ordered everyone clear of the building.

  But one of the witnesses had mentioned something about thinking he had heard a child scream a heartbeat after the explosion. That had been enough to make Adam go back.

  That and the memory of the child he hadn’t been able to save from another inferno. His own child. And his wife.

  The memory of that clung to him, riding the truck beside him with each fire he went to. No matter how many people Adam Collins had saved since that awful night two years ago when his small family had died in the flames within his house, it didn’t ease his pain. He suspected it never would.

  Taking deep breaths through his mask, Adam forged farther into the burning building. The heat was all around him as broad, decorative beams above him groaned dangerously, threatening to snap in half at any moment.

  He should be withdrawing.

  He pushed on instead.

  His captain’s voice ordering him to turn back echoed in his head as he made his way through the blinding sheets of fire.

  He almost missed him.

  If he hadn’t stumbled just then, trying to avoid falling debris, Adam wouldn’t have seen him. The small, curled up form of a boy lying on the floor, covered with plaster.

  At first he thought he was hallucinating. The boy looked so much like Bobby. But when he drew closer, fighting the flames for possession of a floor that was quickly eroding beneath his feet, Adam saw that it wasn’t Bobby, wasn’t a hallucination, it was a child. A small, unconscious little boy.

  Scooping up the limp body, Adam fought his way back out.

  Timber cracked and collapsed, nearly felling him. Blocking his path. With one arm wrapped around the boy, he picked another path, praying his luck would hold out one more time. Not for himself, but for the boy. Maybe that was why he’d been able to save so many people, because he didn’t care if he lived or died. It allowed him that tiny extra edge that the other firefighters, with so much to live for, so much to lose, didn’t have. It completely did away with any natural impulse to hesitate.

  Light worked its way through the tunnel of smoke and flames. An exit.

  Hang on, kid, we’re almost there.

  With a burst of adrenaline, Adam ran the rest of the way, making it out just in time. Behind him, the ceiling collapsed completely, making passage impossible. Had he hesitated for even a second, he and the boy would have been walled in.

  “Oh my God, look!” Bonnie cried, pointing a crimson nail toward the far side of the blockaded area where the fire still raged. She covered her mouth with both hands as shock registered. In her devastation, she’d forgotten all about the boy. “He found him, he found Jake!”

  Stone, talking to several of his men, his mind scrambling to put together the shard-like pieces of an explanation for what had transpired here this morning, looked up sharply at the sound of Bonnie’s shrill, eager cry.

  His eyes narrowed as he saw the firefighter miraculously emerge from the flames with the limp body of a boy pressed close to his chest.

  His shoved his fisted hands deep into the pockets of his jacket.

  “Looks like we got ourselves a hero,” he announced to the general populace that was now milling around what was deemed the social center of Lone Star County as well as Mission Creek.

  As cheers went up, Stone exchanged glances with Yance Ingram, the man who had once been his commanding officer in the Marines. A man after his own heart. He needed to talk to Ingram, to get the answers to questions he couldn’t risk asking out loud in front of the crowd.

  Ed Bancroft moved closer to him, a grim, wary look on his long, square face as he looked at his superior. “That’s the boy,” he confirmed. The boy he’d told Stone had looked into the security room.

  Stone set his mouth hard. Damn it, he hated loose ends.

  But as he came closer to the firemen, he saw that the boy’s small chest wasn’t moving. Maybe there was no need for concern after all.

  Bonnie’s stiletto heels sank into the damp ground with every step she took as she hurried over. “Is he all right?”

  Adam didn’t bother answering her. Instead, he ripped off his mask and helmet, his attention riveted on the boy he had rescued.

  “I need help here!” he shouted without looking up.

  The demand was issued to the paramedics who’d accompanied the fire trucks to the country club at the first sound of the alarm. But even before any of them managed to materialize at his elbow, Adam was employing CPR. One hand over the other, he pressed down hard on the boy’s chest while counting to five in his mind.

  The white patches of snow on the ground contrasted sharply with the dark, sooty layer of dirt along every part of the boy’s blistered, burned body. Adam tried not to think about anything except getting the boy’s chest to move, getting him to breathe on his own. The small chest felt so fragile. I
f he pressed too hard, he was afraid he might crush it.

  He repeated the cycle twice, first pressing down on the boy’s chest, then breathing into his mouth. Finally, the boy stirred, his lids fluttering, then opening. He looked directly into Adam’s eyes.

  Adam felt as if something had hit him smack in his chest with the force of an anvil.

  “We can take over from here, buddy.” K.C., one of the paramedics, firmly but gently nudged Adam aside. Gently, because they all knew that after two years the firefighter was no closer to being over the loss of his wife and son than he’d been the evening the tragedy had occurred.

  Adam felt something take hold of his hand. When he looked down, he saw that the boy had wrapped his small, grimy, burned fingers around it. He knew that the very effort must have hurt terribly. The boy’s grasp was not strong. It would have taken next to nothing to break the hold.

  But the connection was far stronger than any steel wire could have ever managed. Adam couldn’t pull his hand away. The boy’s eyes wouldn’t release him.

  Adam heard the captain coming up behind him, felt a fatherly hand on his shoulder he neither related to nor resented.

  “Anyone know who this boy is?” Captain MacIntire addressed his words to anyone in the immediate vicinity.

  With careful steps, Bonnie moved closer to them. There were fresh tears shimmering in her eyes.

  “That’s Jake Anderson.” She pressed her lips together, her heart going out to the boy. “Those were his parents you just…you just…” She couldn’t make herself finish her statement.

  She didn’t have to.

  Someone at the baseline of the fire called to MacIntire and he hurried away, all under the watchful eye of Chief Stone.

  Adam made up his mind. “I’m going with the boy.”

  Working over Jake, K.C. slanted a look toward Adam. There was understanding in the paramedic’s eyes. But sympathy, they’d learned, was the last thing anyone offered Adam Collins.

  “Suit yourself.” K.C. snapped the legs on the gurney and they popped upright. With Adam walking alongside him, holding the boy’s hand, he guided the gurney to the rear of the ambulance. “But being the good Samaritan won’t keep the captain from getting on your case for playing Superman again.”

  “Yeah, but it’ll postpone it for a while.” Adam stepped back to allow the gurney to be hoisted into the ambulance. Jake’s fingers remained around his. Adam twisted around to maintain the connection, then got into the ambulance himself.

  Dr. Tracy Walker felt beat and ready to call it a day. And it wasn’t even one o’clock.

  She felt as if she’d been running on fast-forward all morning, with no signs of a letup anytime soon. It had started when her alarm had failed to go off at five. Five a.m. was not her idea of an ideal hour to get up, but it would have given her sufficient time to pull herself together for the surgery she had to perform this morning. Five o’clock came and went, as did six and then almost seven.

  Fortunately, Tracy had what she fondly liked to refer to as an alarm pig, a gentle, quick-footed Vietnamese potbellied pig that was still very much a baby and went by the name of Petunia. Petunia, it turned out, was trainable and far more intelligent than some of the people Tracy knew.

  At five to seven, Petunia had snuggled in at her feet and tickled her awake. Any one-sided dialogue Tracy had felt up to rendering was immediately curtailed the instant she’d rolled over in her bed and saw that according to her non-ringing clock, she had exactly twenty minutes to shower, eat and get herself to the hospital for the skin grafting surgery she was scheduled to perform.

  Weighing her options and the somewhat seductive power hot water had over her, Tracy decided to sacrifice the shower and breakfast as she hurried into clothes, put out a bowl of fresh water for Petunia and threw herself behind the wheel of her car in less time than it took for an ordinary citizen to floss their teeth.

  As she ran out the door she promised a disgruntled Petunia to return during her own lunch break to feed her choice leftovers from the refrigerator. Petunia had said nothing.

  With one eye on the rearview mirror, watching for dancing blue and red lights, Tracy had bent a few speeding rules and made it to the operating room with two minutes to spare.

  The three-hour surgery had been as successful as possible, given the circumstances. There were no instant cures, no huge miracles in her line of work. Only many small miracles that were eventually hooked up into one large one. She was a pediatric burn specialist, and there was nothing in the world she would rather have been, even though it meant having her heart torn out of her chest whenever she saw another victim being wheeled into the hospital. Pain went with the territory. But someone had to help these children and she had elected herself to be one of the ones on the front lines. It gave her life a purpose.

  “Out of my way, Myra,” she wearily told a nurse who had somehow materialized in her path. “I’m on my way home to feed a hungry pig.”

  But the dark-skinned woman shook her head. “’Fraid your boyfriend’s going to have to wait, Doctor,” the thrice-divorced woman told her. “We just got a call in on the scanner. There’s been a bombing at the Lone Star Country Club.”

  “A bombing?” Here? In Mission Creek? They were a peaceful little town of some twenty thousand people. Who would want to bomb them? Had the world gone completely crazy? “Does anyone know who did it?”

  “Beats me,” Myra lamented. “But dispatch says they’re bringing in a little boy who’s going to need your gentle touch.”

  Tracy took the new sterile, yellow paper gown Myra held up for her and donned it to cover her regular scrubs. “Do we know how many people were hurt?”

  “About fifteen or so.” The wail of approaching sirens disturbed the tranquil atmosphere, growing louder by the second. “But according to the dispatch, there were only two fatalities.” Myra’s dark eyes met hers. “The kid’s parents.”

  “Oh God,” Tracy groaned just as the emergency room doors parted and the ambulances began arriving.

  First on the scene were the two paramedics with the boy Tracy assumed was her patient. Hurrying alongside of the gurney, holding tightly onto the boy’s hand, was a firefighter, still wearing his heavy yellow slicker. The sight had a dramatic impact.

  A relative? she wondered.

  The next moment, Tracy was looking at the boy and ceased wondering about anything else.

  Chapter 2

  She never got used to it.

  Never got used to seeing the anguish in their eyes, on their faces, could never anesthetize herself not to take note of the pitiful, fearful conditions in which so many of her patients arrived.

  Tracy never bothered wasting time trying to find answers to unanswered questions or an order to the universe. She was just grateful that her training allowed her to make a difference in these children’s lives, however small. To help start these innocent victims, who had unwittingly stood in the path of a cruel and feelingless fate, back on the road to recovery.

  She gave each patient a hundred and ten percent of her skills and, despite numerous warnings to the contrary by superiors and friends who cared about her, a piece of her heart.

  It was no different with this newest victim that the two paramedics brought her. The instant she saw the terrified look on the boy’s face, she forgot about the firefighter hurrying at his side.

  Petunia and her dilemma were placed on temporary hold in her mind as well. Tracy tried not to think of what the small pig might begin eating in lieu of her belated breakfast. That was something she would have to deal with later.

  Listening to the paramedics rattle off vital signs, Tracy shot questions back at them and swiftly assessed the boy’s injuries. She did her best not to disturb the raw, blistered flesh on his arms and legs.

  “Put him in trauma room three,” she instructed the orderly who’d rushed up to the first gurney with her. “I need someone to cut off his clothes. And be gentle about it,” she added. Looking down at the sooty, bruised f
ace, she did her best to make her smile encouraging. “You’re going to be fine, honey, I promise. Can you tell me your name?”

  The only response she got was a whimper.

  There was something about the way he seemed to stare right through her that chilled her heart.

  Shock, she thought. She felt tears forming at the corners of her eyes. Moving quickly, Tracy helped guide the gurney into the trauma room.

  “That’s okay, sweetheart. I don’t need your name right now. Mine’s Dr. Walker in case you need to call me later.” Belatedly, she realized that the firefighter was still with them and about to enter the trauma room. She shook her head, automatically placing a hand against his chest. It felt as if she was pressing against a wall, not a man. “I’m sorry, you’re going to have to stay out here.”

  “I won’t get in the way.” Adam had no idea why, but he wanted to be in there with the boy, to somehow assure him, as well as himself, that everything was going to be all right.

  “I’m sorry, only staff members are allowed past these doors.” He looked perturbed at the restriction. She paused longer than she should have. “Are you a relative?”

  He shook his head. “No. I just wanted to make sure he was all right.”

  She of all people understood becoming involved with the people you were responsible for saving. She offered him an encouraging smile. “I’ll let you know as soon as I can. Why don’t you wait in the hall?” She made the suggestion just before she slipped behind the door.

  Tracy quickly crossed to the examining table. Her team had transferred the boy while she’d hung back with the firefighter. The orderly, Max, pushed the gurney out of the way.

  With a nod of her head, she was all business again. “Okay, people, every moment we waste is another moment he has to suffer.”