Lone Star Survivor Read online

  A soldier’s memories are more dangerous than anything he’s encountered in the line of duty

  “Killed in action” a year ago, US Army captain Ian Rayford shocks everyone when he stumbles half-dead onto his family’s Texas ranch. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Ian can barely remember his relatives. His former fiancée, a psychologist specializing in PTSD, arrives to help Ian recover. But not everyone wants her to unearth the dangerous secrets he’s carrying.

  Now engaged to another man, Dr. Andrea Warrington fights her feelings for Ian even as she helps him remember how much they once loved each other. Yet the closer Ian gets to his past, the more someone else has to ensure the treacherous truth stays buried.

  “You really think you’re up to riding fences with me all day?” Ian asked.

  Andrea nodded. “I want to try.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t want to play nursemaid to some greenhorn.” The moment the words were out of his mouth, he felt a stab of regret. He was being a jerk, he realized, punishing her for…

  Had she broken up with him, or was he the one who’d left her? When he reached back for the memory, he found only a black fog of loss and pain—that, and the nameless anxiety that stalked him day and night.

  There’s something important you’re forgetting. Something so big the weight of it will crush you flat when it finally comes.

  “You don’t know what you want, Ian. That’s the problem. But I might be able to help you with that.”

  “I want to be left to my work, alone.”

  “I’m coming with you,” she insisted. Emotion rippled through her words, real emotion as the mask of compassionate professionalism slipped a little. “I’ve really missed the man I knew.”

  “That man’s gone forever.”

  Dear Reader,

  I’ve always loved stories of second chances, of lovers or siblings or parents and lost children reunited long after hope was lost of a successful reunion. There is something about severed bonds that the mind keeps turning back to in quiet moments, probing the wound the way one might check an empty socket for a missing tooth.

  Maybe because we’ve all pondered impossible reunions I was drawn to this story of a “lost soldier,” Ian Rayford, who, long after having been presumed dead, miraculously finds his way home, his journey made possible by the memory of the woman he loves. But so many other memories are missing, from those of what really happened during a torturous period of confinement to an earlier breakup with his love and the estrangement with his proud but troubled ranching family.

  Finding his way back home from hell required one miracle. But finding his way back to his grieving family and especially to Andrea, who believes she has moved on with her life since Ian’s death was initially reported, may take the greatest miracle of all…especially when it’s clear that someone—perhaps the government itself—is willing to go to almost any lengths to stop Ian from remembering the secrets still locked up inside him.

  I hope you’ll enjoy this story of a true Lone Star survivor and take a moment to appreciate the sacrifices of so many still struggling to find their own way home.

  Colleen Thompson

  LONE STAR

  SURVIVOR

  Colleen Thompson

  Colleen Thompson

  After beginning her career writing historical romance novels, in 2004 Colleen turned to writing the contemporary romantic suspense she loves. Since then, her work has been honored with a Texas Gold Award, along with nominations for a RITA® Award, a Daphne du Maurier Award and multiple reviewers’ choice honors. She has also received starred reviews from RT Book Reviews and Publishers Weekly. A former teacher living with her family in the Houston area, Colleen has a passion for reading, hiking and dog rescue. Visit her online at colleen-thompson.com.

  Books by Colleen Thompson

  HARLEQUIN ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  Passion to Protect

  The Colton Heir

  Lone Star Redemption

  Lone Star Survivor

  SILHOUETTE ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  Deadlier Than the Male

  “Lethal Lessons”

  HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE

  Capturing the Commando

  Phantom of the French Quarter

  Relentless Protector

  Visit the author profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  To the father who first taught me that a true hero is not the man who talks about it but the man who quietly, steadfastly loves and supports throughout the years.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Excerpt

  Chapter 1

  Waves of searing heat shimmered above the empty road, the endless road he had been walking for hours or days or all his life. How long didn’t matter, only that blurred spot in the distance, beyond the sea of dry, gold stalks, where the blazing sun reflected off what had to be a lake. The sight of it made his parched mouth ache with the memory of water, cool and fresh and unimaginably luxurious as his body slipped through it, graceful as a seal’s.

  While his blistered feet stumbled forward, the walker’s mind returned to a jewel-bright pool of turquoise. As he sat along its edge, lush green fronds waved in the sultry breeze and giant coral blossoms spilled their honeyed fragrance. A woman in big sunglasses swayed toward him, a floral sarong molding to the sweet curve of her hips and a deep blue bikini top holding her firm, round breasts in place. But it was her smile that sent lust spearing straight to his groin, that dazzling smile so white against her summer tan.

  “Ready for another?” she invited, offering him some creamy, icy beverage in a clear plastic cup. A chunk of juicy pineapple balanced on its rim, so vivid in his memory that he could almost taste it. He could almost taste her on his lips, too, just as he could feel the dark river of her long hair running through his fingers, gleaming strands of chocolate he’d watched her brush so many times.

  He smiled, reaching for her. And felt the pain of his chapped lips splitting, tasted the thick, salt tang of blood instead of the hallucination’s sweetness. The mirage teased in the distance, a lie woven from refracted heat waves. You’ll never make it back to her, not even if you walk to the earth’s ends.

  But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t, not while every step carried him closer to the oasis he dreamed of. Toward it and toward a woman, her name as lost to him as his own.

  He knew one thing, though. He’d loved her. Loved her even if... The rest shimmered in the heat and vanished, an absence permeated with the bitterness of loss. There was fear as well, the anxiety that he’d done something unspeakable to poison what they’d had. That he’d been someone who deserved the scorched red skin, the knotted beard and the half-healed scars he’d glimpsed in the window of the pickup that had pulled over to offer him a ride an hour earlier. Or maybe it had been yesterday. Impossible to know, since time had grown as slippery as a live fish squirming in his grasp.

  A single, splintered second pierced through his confusion: the moment when he’d met the driver’s ey
es. Dark eyes, shaded by a broad-brimmed hat. A cowboy hat, like the ones they wore back in Texas. Like the ones he’d used to...

  Before he’d been able to wrap his parched brain around the thought, those dark eyes had flared wide. The driver had hit the gas too hard, the back end of his pickup sliding around to spray the walker with pebbles. An instant later, the truck sped away in a plume of dust that he could still see hovering above the oasis.

  The walker stopped and rubbed his eyes in an attempt to clear them. Because that growing smudge on the horizon—that was from now, not before. For a moment, he wondered if it could be the same truck whose driver he’d frightened away before with his appearance. Some buried instinct warned him the man might be returning to mow him down or shoot him, leaving his body to the blistering sun and the scavengers that he’d sensed watching, following his movements with hopeful, hungry eyes.

  At the thought of dying here, of finally stopping, he felt an odd blend of disappointment and relief. Resignation, too, since there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it, with nothing but flat, oddly familiar rangeland on either side and no strength left to flee. So instead, the walker kept putting one foot before the other, figuring that if he died, it might as well be one step closer to the mirage on the horizon...and his memory of the poolside beauty who’d meant everything to him before he’d somehow, he felt certain, driven her away.

  It was a blue-eyed man who pulled up beside him minutes later in a newer-model truck, a dark-haired man who reminded him of someone. Maybe of himself, or at least the version of himself who’d swum through cool blue waters.

  Taking off his straw cowboy hat, the driver jumped down from the cab. Tall and muscular, he wore a rolled-sleeved cotton shirt, worn jeans and a single bead of perspiration, running from his temple to his jawline. Color draining from his tan face, he stared directly at the walker, searched his eyes with an intensity that made his heart hammer.

  The walker took a step backward, glancing over his shoulder, his muscles coiling as he looked for an escape route.

  “I told that fool pup of a cowhand to quit talking crazy,” said the driver, unblinking as he stared, “telling me he’d seen a man who looked like—looked like my dead brother out here on our land. Then I cursed him for leaving some poor, lost stranger way out here on his own in this heat, without even offering a drink of water.”

  “You—have w-water?” The idea of it, the possibility spun from his dreams, was so powerful that he stumbled closer, forgetting his fear as trembling overtook him.

  “Yeah, sure. Here you go, man.” The driver reached back inside the truck and pulled out a plastic bottle beaded with condensation. He cracked open the sealed lid and handed it over.

  The walker was so overwhelmed by the cold moisture in his hand that he barely noticed the uncertainty darting through the other man’s eyes or the moisture gleaming in them.

  “Ian, is it really you?” he asked, letting the question hang as the walker chugged down half the bottle.

  When he started choking, the driver warned him, “Slow down. Slow down and take it easy. There’s plenty more where that came from. Food and clean clothes back at the house, too.”

  His coughing over, the walker glugged down the rest of the bottle. When he was finished, he peered suspiciously into the blue eyes. “Why?” he asked, searching the stranger for some agenda. “Why would you do all that for me?”

  “Could be one of two good reasons. Either because I don’t cotton to the idea of a stranger dying on my land. Or because you’re a walking, talking miracle—my only brother, Captain Ian Rayford, come back from the dead.”

  * * *

  Andrea Warrington stared down at the file her boss, retired army colonel Julian Ross, had handed her, her throat tightening the moment she read the name Captain Ian Rayford.

  What she had to tell the man sitting behind the battered desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie loosened against the late summer heat, would be awkward enough under any circumstances. But despite the fifteen-year difference in their ages, Andrea had recently accepted the handsome forty-six-year-old’s proposal, so bat-sized butterflies attempted to flap their way free of her stomach.

  Telling herself that putting it off was no longer an option, she drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders, just as she would have advised the wounded vets she counseled here at the Marston unit of the Warriors-4-Life Rehabilitation Center. “I—I’m afraid I can’t take this assignment, Julian. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you about myself and Captain Rayford.”

  “Sit down, Andrea, please.” He gestured toward one of the mismatched folding chairs in front of his desk, the rich bass of his voice warmed by a gentlemanly Southern accent. Six months after the ribbon cutting that had opened this donation-supported unit, they were still getting by with whatever castoffs they could scrounge, mainly because Julian, who had been named director shortly before the center’s opening, insisted on using every penny of the funds raised to provide services for their growing roster of military veterans. Though many bore physical reminders of the ordeals they had endured, the majority had come to Warriors-4-Life to deal with the fallout of combat-related brain injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder. The workload kept Andrea, the center’s one practicing psychologist, along with two counselors and a psychiatric nurse-practitioner who worked under her direction, hopping, but she didn’t mind her packed days—not when she knew for a certainty that she was saving lives.

  Besides, the crazy hours and emotional challenges had drawn her closer to the handsome older man who had started out as her boss before evolving into much more. She admired him; she respected him, but it was love that was making the words knot in her throat.

  She claimed a seat where a rattletrap oscillating fan on the desk could swivel back and forth between them. “I think I mentioned to you I was engaged before,” she admitted, the breeze blowing a strand of long, dark brown hair—an escapee from her clip—into her face. “It was one of those whirlwind affairs, everything moving at light speed.”

  She flushed, remembering the heat of it, the passion, how exciting it had felt to be caught up in something so out of her control. But thrilling as they might seem, whirlwinds had the potential to cause a lot of damage. The kind of heartbreak she’d sworn she would never risk again.

  “It didn’t take long for me to realize he was lying about his deployments. There were other disappearances as well, with no warning and no explanation. I couldn’t deal with the uncertainty, so I broke it off.”

  A smile touched Julian’s brown eyes like a warm breeze from his Savannah boyhood. He’d promised he would take her one day, to see the historic Victorian home where he’d grown up before it had passed out of the family. “Everyone has a past, Andrea. I didn’t imagine you’d lived underneath a bell jar for thirty-one years before you’d met me.”

  “Yes, but bizarre as it might seem, it was this man, Ian. Captain Rayford. He was still just a lieutenant then, and I was working on my doctorate. I—I should’ve told you, I know, after the news broke that he was found alive.”

  For weeks following his return, the “Texas miracle” was all anyone could talk about on the morning shows and social media. While Ian himself refused all interviews, the army had been left scrambling to explain how one set of charred remains could have been mistaken for another after some overworked soldier in the military’s mortuary center had failed to follow proper DNA procedures to identify the body.

  “So why didn’t you say something?” he asked. “Surely, you can’t imagine I’d hold you accountable for any of the suspicions brought up about his escape from the terrorists holding him?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just...” Though she couldn’t put an answer into words, she felt it in the warm flush that rose to her face, the aching heaviness in her chest.

  “You still have feelings for him,” Julian
suggested, though his sharp, brown gaze seemed more curious than judgmental. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, it’s not that.” She raised her hands, not wanting to hurt this good man’s feelings. “It’s only—when he was reported killed in action, it brought back a lot of memories. The good, along with the bad.”

  Her gaze dropped, avoiding his, but because she’d learned the hard way that lies of omission could be the worst of all, she forced herself to look up. “I cried a lot at night. For months, I cried for him.” Even after she’d met Julian, she’d come to work some mornings with her eyes red and swollen. His unfailing kindness, his steadiness had planted the first seeds of healing in her.

  “I’m sorry for your grief,” he told her. “But I assure you that I understand it. Possibly better than you can imagine. You see, the army personnel who debriefed the captain passed on his full dossier with the referral. I saw your name listed on his contact list, to be notified in case he was killed in action.”

  The burning in her face intensified. “He must have added me two years ago, when we were still together.” She still remembered the horrendous shock that had followed the knock at the front door of her apartment back in San Diego.

  “That’s not my point, Andrea. My point is, I feel certain—and the army psychologist I consulted is in full agreement on this—that your past connection to Ian Rayford could be the key to recovering his missing memories.”

  She shook her head. “You mean he’s still suffering amnesia? Was he found to have a brain injury?”

  “If you’ll take a look at the file—” the fan swung around to ruffle Julian’s short, bronze-colored hair, a crop of silver threaded through it “—you’ll see that’s not the case, though he does have some residual scarring. From the torture, they believe, in attempts to extract intelligence on US targets.”

  “But he was cleared of those suspicions,” she was quick to say. “And anyway, after a soldier’s captured, codes are changed, right? Sensitive locations scrambled?” She was aware American civilians working in a war zone office had died or disappeared soon after Ian’s capture, but few details had been reported, and surely, the bombing of their building could not be laid at the feet of a man who had suffered heaven only knew what torments.