Chapter One
Cody Ryan inched along at less than ten miles an hour on the icy roads. He had driven through sandstorms, outrun tornadoes, and even worked his way over snowcapped mountains, but nothing had ever been like this.
“So much for a big Texas homecoming,” he muttered as his truck slid over toward a ditch and then back again to the middle of the road. His windshield wipers were doing double time, but with the blizzard-like conditions, he couldn’t have seen the yellow line in the middle of the pavement even if there were one.
So, you’re tired of having sand everywhere and living in a tent, are you? The words of his old friend Nate Fisher came back to his mind.
“We don’t have much choice right now. We’ve got to get out of this place, and I’m ready to go home to Texas where it gets cold in the winter.” Cody repeated what he had told Nate last summer when he had hurriedly packed his bags and gotten ready to catch the next military truck headed toward a town with an airport.
“But I didn’t expect a damn blizzard to settle down right over the top of us just weeks after I got home.” His truck tires lost traction again and fishtailed all over the road.
When he finally got control, he hit the speed dial for Sunflower Ranch to let his family know he wouldn’t be home as soon as he thought. Addy, his sister-in-law, answered the phone on the third ring.
“Hey, Cody, everything okay?” she asked. “The roads look pretty bad out there.”
“Yeah, sorry I’m running late. Please don’t hold supper. It’ll be a while before I can get back home in this storm,” Cody said.
“I’m putting you on speaker. I’ve got Pearl, Sonny, Mia, and Jesse all here around the table with me.”
“Hey, everyone!” Cody answered. “Y’all need to stay inside as much as possible, and off these slick roads. Have you heard a weather report?”
“Uncle Cody, they say this snow isn’t going to stop for a couple of days,” Mia chimed in.
“Drive safe,” his father yelled.
“Will do, and save me some supper,” Cody said and ended the call.
Cody’s dad had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a while back, and a few months ago, he’d had a reaction to the drugs in the clinical trial. That incident had made Cody realize just how much he missed family and being home in Texas, so he’d given up his job with Doctors Without Borders and moved back to Honey Grove.
“But I damn sure didn’t miss brutally cold winters,” he muttered.
When he came home, Cody had thought about hanging out his shingle for a family practice right there in Honey Grove. After looking around for a place to buy or rent and not finding a thing that he liked, he came up with the idea of doing old-fashioned house calls in the whole community. Elderly folks, like Max Hilton, who needed him that morning but couldn’t drive more than twenty miles to see a doctor in his condition, had quickly built up his business. Now, between helping his brother Jesse on Sunflower Ranch and trying to keep up with his patients, Cody stayed busy from daylight to dark most days.
“Poor old Max.” Cody kept his eyes on the road, but he said a quick prayer that the ambulance got Max to the hospital without sliding off the slick roads. Max was too stubborn to see a doctor and had said more than once that his time was worth more than sitting in an office waiting for hours for a doctor to see him. But when he found out that Cody would come to his ranch house to see him, he called on him every few weeks. Lately, Cody had been telling him that he needed to see a heart specialist.
“I guess he’ll see one now, whether he wants to or not.” Cody slowed down another five miles per hour and leaned over the steering wheel to better see the road in front of him.
Addy, Cody’s nurse, would be glad that Max would be getting help. She’d been worried about him after the last two times they had been out to Max’s ranch.
Cody hit another slick spot and went sideways in the road for a few seconds before he got straightened out. He started to pull off to the side until his heart stopped pounding, but the smart thing was to keep moving ahead. He made it another quarter of a mile, when a front tire hit a pothole and sent him into another greasy slide. He gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles ached, and hoped that no one would need his doctor services again until the roads were clear.
“And I thought a sandstorm was the most horrible thing in the world. Thank God you aren’t here, Addy. I would never forgive myself if you got hurt and those twins didn’t have a mother.” He thought of the twin boys his brother and Addy had adopted right after they got married. Sam and Taylor were only about three months old, and Cody loved them almost as much as if they were his own sons.
He leaned forward as far as the seat belt would allow, hoping to get a better view of the road up ahead. “It’s only twenty miles to the ranch. Even at this rate I should be there before bedtime. Talking to myself doesn’t help, so why am I doing it?”
The words had barely left his mouth when a buck with a huge rack of antlers jumped out right in front of his truck. Instinctively, his foot left the gas pedal and stomped the brake. The deer disappeared in a flash, but Cody’s vehicle began to spin like a top, and there was nothing that he could do to stop the motion.
The steering wheel had a mind of its own, and neither the brake nor the gas pedal had any effect on what was happening. Adrenaline raced through his body, and he covered his face with his arms, expecting his crew cab truck to hit one of the many potholes in the old country road and begin to roll.
Then Cody felt as if he was flying for a split second, and the truck landed with so much force that it jarred his teeth. For several seconds he wasn’t sure what had happened, but then he realized all the white stuff around him wasn’t snow but airbags. He fought them back away from his face and unfastened the seat belt, only to fall forward nose down.
He slung open the door and rolled out of the truck to land in several inches of snow. When his heart settled enough that he could breathe without panting, he pulled his phone from his hip pocket to call the ranch for help, only to realize that there was no service. He stood up, checked for blood or broken bones, and heaved a huge sigh of relief when he figured out that he was fine.
“Thank you, God!” he said when he recognized an old mailbox. Just last week, he’d met Max at a barn about a quarter of a mile down the lane to check his blood pressure. Cody remembered Max’s blood pressure being too high then and had told the octogenarian that he needed some tests done, but the old guy flat-out refused.
“They’ll put me on some god-awful diet and tell me to exercise,” Max had growled. “I’m going to eat what I want, and I get all the exercise I need right here on this ranch.”
Cody visualized an old potbellied stove in the tack room where he’d done what he could for Max. He’d seen a pile of firewood in one of the stalls out in the barn, and there had been a bunch of kittens playing chase in the hay bales. “Maybe there will be phone service when I reach the barn,” he muttered as he opened the back door of the truck and grabbed his black doctor bag. “If there is, I can let the folks know where I am.”
He pocketed his keys, zipped his coat to his chin, and turned his collar up. Then, bent against the driving north wind blowing snow right in his face, he headed up the lane. He vowed that he would never leave home again without both a ski mask and a stocking hat—even if it was summertime and the thermometer registered over a hundred degrees. At least his cowboy boots gave him protection from the snow.