Linda Goodnight – Lone Star Dad (страница 1)
The Secret Next Door
Nurse Gena Satterfield knew raising her rebellious nephew, Derrick, would be tough, but moving to Gabriel’s Crossing was supposed to help ease the transition into their new reality. That was before she realized her new neighbor was Quinn Buchanon—her teenage crush, the town’s onetime star quarterback...and Derrick’s father. Her sister’s dying wish was that Gena keep this secret. Yet watching Quinn connect with the boy and penetrate his angry walls, Gena begins to see him in a whole new light. Now, torn between the truth and the promise she made, Gena has to follow her heart. And hope they can all heal together...as a family.
Her cranky, surly nephew sat on the bare floor while a mother cat licked milk from his fingertips.
Nestled around the black-and-white cat was a bunch of brand-new baby kittens.
Derrick raised a rapt face. “She had babies. I watched.”
Gena went to her haunches. “How many?”
“Four. She’s really tired now.” He sounded vulnerable and sweet, like the loving little boy he’d once been.
“I expect so.” She stroked a finger across the mother cat’s head. The animal seemed friendly. The big surprise to her was that Quinn Buchanon would own a cat. An attack-trained rottweiler, yes. But a cat?
She looked up at the bewildering man standing inside the door. Had she misjudged him?
He was watching her. Not Derrick or the cats but her. For ten seconds their eyes held. Gena suffered a dozen conflicting emotions—including completely unwanted attraction and a need to know the man behind the haggard face and bent, scarred arm.
LINDA GOODNIGHT, a New York Times bestselling author and winner of a RITA® Award in inspirational fiction, has appeared on the Christian bestseller list. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Active in orphan ministry, Linda enjoys writing fiction that carries a message of hope in a sometimes dark world. She and her husband live in Oklahoma. Visit her website, lindagoodnight.com, for more information.
Lone Star Dad
New York Times Bestselling Author
Linda Goodnight
Let us come boldly unto the throne of grace,
that we may obtain mercy,
and find grace to help in time of need.
—Hebrews 4:16
For family, who sustains me, and as always,
for the glory of Jesus.
Contents
He wouldn’t do this. Not again. He wouldn’t shame himself or his family this way.
Quinn Buchanon clenched his jaw hard enough to make his face ache and slapped his outstretched hands against the fireplace mantel. He was off balance, as always, the fingers of his right hand barely reaching, while the left was just dandy. The bitter root of the last eleven years curled inside his chest. His arm throbbed harder.
He glanced up at the plastic clock tacked above the crackling fireplace. Two o’clock. Too early.
Releasing a slow, frustrated breath, he pushed back and rubbed his right arm, the exact spot where the surgical titanium rod pushed against the bent muscle and scar tissue. On winter nights, the ache was worse. Add precipitation, like tonight’s cold misty rain, and he was in a world of hurt.
Quinn had thought he’d conquered the problem during his stint in Dallas, but the last surgery and coming home to Gabriel’s Crossing brought the pain and grief and most of all the pure exuberant thrill tumbling back in. The glory days. The accident. Yes, accident, as he’d come to realize last year. Jake Hamilton had not intended to hurt him. If anything, the fault was Quinn’s. His own fault. His own misery.
Whoever was to blame, the damage was done and he’d never be the same. Most days, he didn’t even feel like a man, certainly not the toast of Gabriel’s Crossing and half of Texas that he’d once been.
Memories were killer.
Head starting to pound in that incessant ache he knew too well, he took long strides down the length of the cabin, through the living space and out onto the saggy front porch. The air would clear his head. The cold would give him something else to think about.
He liked the quiet, lonely spot here in the woods by the Red River where none of his well-meaning siblings—six of them—could casually drop by. He loved his family but he needed space.
A sharp, wet wind blew up from the river. Quinn reached back inside, grabbed his coat from the hook hanging next to the door and shrugged it on. He shoved his hands into his pockets but left his head bare. He lifted his face to the blast of wet air, needing the slap of cold.
The weathered old hunting cabin he called home was nothing fancy, but the rustic unpainted logs and bare-bones essentials nestled among the oak and cedar of northeast Texas suited him. The porch wasn’t much, either, a wooden floor and a sagging overhang with a weathered rocking chair, a pile of firewood and a dead potted plant from his landscaper mother that he’d forgotten to bring in before the frost.
He sucked in the cedar scent, held the frigid air in his lungs until they ached and then let it out in one gusty breath.
The pawpaw tree two steps off the porch clung to a single leaf like a mother holds on to a child’s hand in a hurricane.