One

Johnny

The rocking chair creaked on the front porch as I squinted against the bright December sunshine, my heart squeezing painfully in my chest. The phone sat silent in my hand. Deathly fucking silent. Just as it had for days after my team had gone dark last week and become incommunicado. I was as useless as tits on a bull—no, worse than that—shuffling around my parents’ five-thousand-acre ranch just outside of Eagle Pass, Texas, nursing my right shoulder back to full fighting strength after being shot by a drug cartel scumbag.

I was a highly trained Marine. I wasn’t a cry baby. But it was damn hard not to feel sorry for myself, being holed up here, while the rest of my team moved out with our SEAL partners to work leads and track down the bastards who shot me up, among other things. Hell, my shoulder was too jacked for me to even be of much help with the chores on the ranch. I couldn’t heft the hay bales or work the horses. I was pretty much relegated to my rehab therapy with my therapist and old high school friend, Joanna, and helping Mom with some of the small household stuff like dishes and dusting. I was pretty sure my mother was secretly enjoying having her big, bad Marine son home and cleaning toilets.

But, damn it, if even she wasn’t out helping Dad take a horse into town to the vet, leaving me alone with the animals, a sprinkling of ranch hands, and our foreman, old Pete.

Well . . . and Scarlett and her boys, though I tried to pretend she didn’t exist because, well, that was just too damn painful, and my shoulder was pain enough.

I glanced down at my phone and rocked the chair harder as I became inexplicably agitated.

I tried Tito’s number again.

Straight to voicemail.

“Damn it!”

I looked over at the murmur of a familiar female voice in the distance about one click away. I swallowed at the sight of golden honey hair shimmering in the sunlight as womanly curves encased in denim bent down to scold a certain six-year-old for something or other. Poor Nathan. He was always up to something. Reminded me of myself on this ranch when I was his age. It was only his first day of Christmas break and he was already up to mischief. It was going to be a long two weeks.

His younger brother, Daniel, joined them and Scarlett turned to watch them make their way to the playscape my parents had installed just for them when she had started working here doing the books two years ago.

Two horrible years ago.

She lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and I didn’t have to be close to know the exact shade of hazel of her eyes or the little flecks of gold that shimmered in them when she was angry. Nor did I have to be within inches of her body to know she had the most adorable freckles across the bridge of her nose and the cutest damn dimples a man could get lost in when she smiled, and the sexiest curves this side of the Pecos River, or that she smelled good enough to eat—she always had.

I also didn’t need reminding that her heart belonged to someone else—someone I could never, ever compete with in a million years . . . my dead best friend.

~ ~

I puttered around the house until the sun began to sink into the horizon, painting the sky deep oranges and pinks. Mom and Dad would be home from the vet soon and I had nothing better to do, so I grabbed some ground beef from the fridge to start a pot of chili for supper.

I circled my right shoulder to stretch it before reaching for a can of beans, hating the ache that had burrowed deep under my rotator cuff. Joanna would work that hard tomorrow, I was sure.

I rounded back toward the stove, but froze next to the kitchen sink, my gaze tracking out the window. The air was still, but something suddenly felt . . . off.

The hair on my arms stood on end as my brain began to catalog details of the yard like a battlefield, moving on instinct. Nothing out of the ordinary. Still, I knew—

Then I heard it.

The faintest cry. Tiny, but because I was listening, I picked it up.

The boys.

Heart storming my eardrums, I bolted for the back door, not bothering with my boots, and streaked down the steps toward the sound. I was at a sprint, heading on instinct for the pond before I could form another coherent thought. Twilight was descending a deep lavender now, the air chilled, bringing bumps to my flesh as my intuition kicked in like a screaming banshee.

There was a small sputter and a splash, then silence.

The scariest damn sound I’d ever heard.

“Nathan!” I screamed as I neared the pond, my socked feet squishing in the cold, soggy ground. “Daniel!”

I got to the water’s edge and spotted a tiny blue jacket strewn on the ground next to one of Daniel’s GI Joe toys. Another one floated listlessly in the water.

Without slowing down, I dove straight into the pond, the frigid temperature punching me straight in the heart like a sledgehammer. I swam toward the toy, my eyes wide in the murky water as I begged for a glimpse of the boy in the dark depths.

My lungs began to burn. My head felt like it was going to explode.

I rushed up for a deep breath of air and dove down again, a silent prayer on my lips.

Just as my chest was about to implode with the need for air, a flash of white caught my eye. I swam for it. An arm. I tugged. Tugged harder, yanking him from the weeds and dragging him up, up, up.

He was limp in my arms as we bobbed to the surface. “Daniel.” My teeth chattered, my words barely coherent as I swam toward shore with thick, clumsy limbs.

In the distance, I could hear his mother calling his name now, but I didn’t have the energy to yell out.

I drug us both out of the water and checked his pulse. His skin was icy cold. His little lips were blue.

Nothing.

“Daniel Rayburn,” I scolded, my voice trembling as I positioned his head for CPR. “Don’t you die on me, boy. Your mama loves you too much and you can’t leave her like your daddy did. I won’t have it.” I forced two breaths into his tiny, frigid body then began to compress his chest. Breaths, chest, breaths, chest.

As Scarlett’s now frantic voice neared, he showed his first signs of life, sputtering and coughing, blowing pond water into my face. I rolled him to his side. “Over here!” I yelled as loud as I could, though my voice was still frozen. “We’re over here.”