Texas Homecoming

by Carolyn Brown

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright 2022 by Carolyn Brown

  Cover design by Sarah Congdon. Cover photograph © Chamille White

  Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Forever

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  read-forever.com

  twitter.com/readforeverpub

  First Mass Market Edition: January 2022

  Forever is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Forever name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-3563-3 (mass market); 978-1-5387-3565-7 (ebook)

  E3-20211215-NF-DA-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Letter from Carolyn Brown

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Discover More

  Coming in 2022

  About the Author

  High Praise for Carolyn Brown

  Also by Carolyn Brown

  Fall in Love with Forever

  This is for my friend, Laura Drake.

  With hugs for all the support!

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  Dear Reader,

  I’m finishing this book just as spring pushes winter into the history books. After this past year with all the problems that covid (I refuse to capitalize that word in hopes that I will offend it so badly that it dies in its sleep) has brought to us, I’m glad to see spring coming around. I’m hoping it will bring new life to the whole world and restore some semblance of normal into our lives.

  As always there are so many people to thank for helping me take Texas Homecoming from a rough idea to the book you hold in your hands. Some of those have gone on past this lifetime, but they remain in my heart and give me the courage to keep writing. A saying about life says: “You don’t meet people by accident. There’s always a reason—a lesson or a blessing!” Many of the people I have met have taught me valuable lessons, and many others have brought a blessing into my life.

  Today I’d like to thank those who came bearing blessings. To my editor, Leah Hultenschmidt, and all the folks at Forever—you are truly a blessing. To my agent, and the folks at Folio Management—you are truly a blessing. To all my family, friends, and fans—you are truly a blessing. And of course, as always, to Mr. B—you’ve always been my biggest blessing.

  I hope you enjoy reading Cody and Stevie’s story, and that the characters stay with you long after the last page.

  Hugs to you all,

  Carolyn Brown

  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.

  His nose and ears felt like Popsicles by the time he made it to the barn. He was wearing gloves, but his hands were stiff, and he had trouble sliding the barn door open enough to get inside. Unfortunately, it wasn’t any warmer than the outside.

  “But at least it’s dry and out of the wind,” Cody told himself as he removed his cowboy hat and brushed snow from it on the way to the tack room. Bits of snow sifted under the collar of his mustard yellow work coat and down the back of his neck.

  The tack room door was already open, and dry wood was stacked neatly in the corner, which, otherwise, was a mess. He threw the stove door open and shoved several sticks of kindling inside, and then stacked three sticks of firewood on top of it. Everything was ready to start a fire, but he didn’t have a lighter or matches, so he went in search of something to light it. He found rusty screws stored in peanut butter jars, several cans of beans, tuna fish, and chicken, a container of cornmeal and one of flour, but no matches.

  “Why on earth would Max have food here when he couldn’t even start a fire to heat it?” Cody muttered.

  A cast-iron skillet was sitting on top of an old green rounded-top refrigerator, and because he had left his phone in the fridge one time, he even opened the door to see if there were matches in there. Other than a withered apple and two jars of elderberry jelly, the fridge was empty. In the freezer he found a few packages of meat wrapped in white butcher paper—steaks was written on the outside of a couple of them—so he wouldn’t starve. He was disappointed when he turned on a burner and found there was no gas.

  “Propane tank must be empty, so I guess I’ll have to use the woodstove, provided I can ever get a fire going,” he said.

  He was about to give up ever being warm again, when he glanced around the room and noticed a rusty old match holder on the wall to the left of the stove. The burlap curtain hanging over the window where the vent pipe went outside covered part of it, but still Cody fussed at himself for not seeing it earlier as he made his way toward it. His mama always kept a container of matches a lot like that on the wall beside the stove at the ranch house.

  “Country folks put things where they need them,” he said and reached for a match, and discovered that there were only six left.

  He held one of the matches close to the little chips of wood and struck it against the stove. Nothing happened. He tried again, and the head of the match popped off, but there was no flame. The same thing happened with the second one.

  His heart had begun to beat fast, and he had visions of busting a bale of hay and covering himself with a layer of the stuff just to get warm. “Four more tries, and then Jesse may find me frozen when he shows up here.” He thought of his brother and the rest of the family, all warm on Sunflower Ranch while the cold was seeping into his bone marrow.

  At the thought of his brother, he jerked his phone out of his pocket only to see that the battery was almost dead. He didn’t even try to call but sent a text: I’m fine. Slid off the road not far from Max Hilton’s old barn. Will hole up here until storm blows over. He hit send, and the screen went dark.

  He tried the third match. When it flared, he held it carefully next to the kindling until a tiny little blaze started, and then he blew on it to encourage the thing to grow. That tiny blaze meant more to him right then than all the money he had in the bank. When the blaze finally ignited and warmth began to spread out from the stove, he slumped down on the old brown-and-orange-plaid sofa not far away. His eyes slid shut, but he snapped them open and recited the signs of hypothermia out loud, starting with shivering and ending with drowsiness.

  Afraid to close his eyes again, he stood and began pacing from one end of the room to the other. On one of his trips, he noticed two little beady eyes peeking out from underneath the sofa and came close to jumping up on the workbench, but then a little gray kitten inched its way toward the stove. In a few seconds, a yellow one and then a black-and-white one did the same. And then a big calico cat cam
e from the tiny bathroom with a dead mouse in her teeth. She dropped it beside the kittens, and they began to growl and fight over their dinner.

  “I’m not afraid of mice or spiders, and I’ve seen rats as big as possums and spiders that would cover a dinner plate,” he told the cats, “but snakes are a different matter, and for a second there, I thought for sure you were one of those.”

  He went back over the symptoms of hypothermia—fumbling and confusion. He ripped his gloves off and held his hands out. No tremors. That was a good sign, but talking to himself and seeing snakes instead of kittens wasn’t.

  The mama cat came right over to him and began to rub around his legs, her purrs so loud that they covered up the crackling sounds of the fire. Cody squatted down and rubbed her fur from the top of her head to the tip of her tail. “Are you depending on mice to raise these kids of yours, or has Max got some dry food hiding somewhere in this room?”

  As if she understood him, she went over to a plastic bin shoved up under the worktable and sniffed it. Cody pulled the lid off, and sure enough, it was filled to the brim with dry cat food. He found an empty margarine container and scooped out enough to fill it, then set it beside the stove. “That should keep you for a day or two, but you’re a good mama to give your kids a taste for mice. That will keep the varmints out of the barn.”

  His hands and feet finally stopped tingling, so he removed his hat and coat and tossed them on the end of the sofa. The room was warming up nicely, and there was nothing to do but settle in for the duration. He laid his head on the sofa arm and closed his eyes. With all the work going on at the ranch, and his doctoring business, he was usually on the run from daylight until after dark. Jesse would come rescue him by morning, so he might as well take advantage of a free evening.

  * * *

  Dr. Stephanie O’Dell, Stevie to the folks around Honey Grove, figured when she left her place that morning that the going could get rough. The roads were icy, and noise similar to shotgun blasts filled the air as the tree limbs laden with a thick layer of ice snapped off. But Dale Watson had called with the news that both of his female alpacas had died giving birth that morning. He was able to save one baby, but he had no idea how to care for it.