Still capable.

  And the better he followed orders, the sooner he’d be back with his troops.

  “What about Eric and Jennifer Fitzgerald?”

  “Ultimately it’s up to the judge.” Dom shrugged. “But Rachel is talking about recommending long-term mandatory psych admission for both of them, separately, with the possibility, sometime in the distant future, of supervised visitation, at the institution where they’re locked up, with Claire and Neve if it’s deemed to be a healthy choice for the twins.”

  He swallowed. Would have maybe taken the news in a more congenial manner if he hadn’t been lying there without a spleen because of the older couple. From blood loss alone, he could have died. Because of them.

  “Neither of them shot you,” Dom said then.

  And it occurred to Ezra to wonder, “How did it go down?” Had Theresa gotten him and the girls out of there? Had he stumbled out? Did she leave and go for help when she’d heard the first shot?

  His lack of memory was pissing him off.

  Theresa. The thought of her made him swallow. Hard.

  “Funny thing,” Dom said. “We had no idea you were there. We were following up on a lead... We took the van you messed up, ran forensics and found evidence that the Fitzgerald twins had been inside. And that it was registered to a guy who’s been dead for thirty years. He had an old homestead on file, coordinates, not an address. Turns out the guy’s son, Steve, is Eric’s half brother, through their mother. But it was from Steve’s father, who never married Eric’s mother, that Eric was first turned on to doomsdaying when he was a young teen. And it was Steve’s son, Jamison, Eric’s half nephew, whose bunker you found yesterday. Jamison told us exactly where to find the old homestead when we hauled him in for withholding information in a kidnapping investigation. Steve is the one who shot you. The bullet was from his gun.”

  Wow. “Talk about all in the family...”

  Dom nodded, gave Ezra a noncomedic half grin. “Guess we don’t have a lot of room to talk, huh?”

  Maybe. He hadn’t been around enough to be all that close with his family in recent years. But when he came home, they certainly acted like he was one of them.

  And...maybe he liked it.

  Though a couple of hours later, he wasn’t so sure about that. There were only so many visitors a guy could take, only so much mothering. Most particularly when there was only one woman he really needed to see right then.

  And she wasn’t there.

  * * *

  Theresa had to see Ezra. To assure herself that Dom had been telling her the truth that his triplet was going to be fine. But she couldn’t leave her girls.

  Claire and Neve were eating well. They’d slept well. They were playing, but the second she left the room, they stopped what they were doing and followed her.

  Their first therapist appointment was already set for later in the week, but she knew there would be no quick or easy fix.

  They’d been terrorized.

  She got it.

  Was up for it, for however long it took, to help them feel safe and secure again. When her children truly needed her, she was a mother first, a woman second. Her choice. In her world, the right choice.

  And every second that passed that she wasn’t at Ezra’s side, she died a little inside, too.

  When Isa showed up at a little past ten in the morning, two days after the shooting, pulling up to Theresa’s little house, freshly painted but still in need of work, Theresa automatically assumed the worst. Met Isa on the front porch, with the door open and in full sight of the girls, but hopefully out of earshot.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Is Ezra okay?”

  Isadora Colton smiled, her beautifully elegant face showing genuine compassion, and maybe a bit of...pleasure as she sized up Theresa, who was standing there in an old cotton spaghetti-strap sundress that had aged about as gracefully as her house. “He’s fine, dear,” Isadora said. “A bit grumpy for my taste, but that’s Ezra when he’s feeling caged in. I think he’d like to see you, which is why I’m here. I know your sweet babies have been through a lot—Dom told me about them refusing to go to bed in their own room again last night. Certainly a hospital surgical ward is no place for them to be right now. I was thinking... They took such pleasure in being out at the Gemini, playing in the kids’ hut and spending time with the horses, and if you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to take them out for a visit while you go see my son.”

  Heart leaping into her throat, Theresa just had one thought... “Ezra said he wanted to see me?”

  “No.” Isadora shook her head. “You really think he’d come out and admit something like that?”

  The question was rhetorical, but Theresa smiled then—a genuine, toe-to-scalp feeling of happiness—and said, “No, of course he wouldn’t. And thank you. As long as the girls are comfortable with going...”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Claire and Neve jumped up in unison. Running to the door.

  So much for out of earshot.

  Half an hour later, Theresa stood outside Ezra’s cracked-open hospital room door, shaking hard. She knocked, and blinked back tears when she heard his voice call, “Come in.”

  She couldn’t stop tears from falling, though, when she saw her big, strong hero dressed in a tied-on hospital gown, propped up by pillows, with tubes taped to his skin.

  “Looks worse than it is,” he said, holding up his left arm and gesturing toward the IV bag. “This is done, just hanging around for another hour or so until they’re convinced I don’t need the pain meds they’ve been pumping through it. Switched to saline a couple of hours ago.”

  “Oh, Ezra...” She smiled, dropped to the edge of the one chair in the room, wanted so badly to touch him, hug him, kiss him, hold his hand. Instead, she held her own hands in her lap. “I just...”

  Couldn’t say most of what needed to have come tumbling out of her. Love meant thinking of those you loved as much as yourself. “I will never, ever be able to thank you...” She broke off. For saving her girls, first and foremost.

  But for saving her, too. The days with him...making love with him. He’d shown her that while a part of her had died with Mark—the part that had seen them together forever—she’d become a different woman.

  And that woman was still very much alive.

  “Just doing my job, ma’am,” he said with a shrug.

  And while she knew she had to let him go, knew that he was a soldier who had to go out into the world and fight, she’d become a fighter, too.

  “Technically, it was the FBI’s job,” she said. “And about a gazillion other law enforcement officials...” She let her voice trail off. Looked him in the eye, and when he looked back like he did, she couldn’t turn away.

  And knew she had to. But—“I just...would very much like it if maybe it would be possible for us to stay in touch,” she said. “Even just a text now and then. Just to let me know you’re safe.”

  “Sure.” He smiled, though his expression seemed a bit cloudy. Medication, maybe. Or the pain.

  “If you need anything,” she said, “please call, this week, next, whenever...”

  He nodded. The polite kind that said he would, but he never would. And then asked, “How are the girls? All I get out of Dom is ‘fine.’”

  She smiled then, spent the next five minutes telling him about the past forty-eight or so hours since he’d sent her back to the Jeep and left her there to rescue her children.

  She’d heard bits and pieces of what had gone on at the homestead in that little mountain valley and hoped some of the details she’d heard through her six-year-olds’ perspectives were largely exaggerated, but feared they were not. Ezra neither denied nor confirmed the details. But he grinned from ear to ear when she told him about his mother taking the twins to the Gemini.

  “Great idea,” he said. “Should have thought of it myself.”

  As if he hadn’t already done enough for them.

  Silence fell. She feared she was outstaying her welcome and stood. She had to touch him, knowing that she might never see him again. Leaning down, she kissed his forehead. And then, because it would have seemed wrong not to, brushed her lips across his, too. “Thank you, Ezra. You gave me back my life and will always hold an honored place in my heart.”

  With that, she turned and walked out the door.

  Before she broke and begged him to let her stay.

  * * *

  Ezra watched her go. Stared at the door after she left, too, because there was nothing else in the room that he wanted. Why Theresa Fitzgerald had impacted his head and heart so strongly, he had no idea. He’d have bet every dime of his investments that he’d never fall for one particular woman. But then, he’d have bet against Dom ever doing so, too, and he’d have lost his shirt on that one.

  Not that Theresa was Ezra’s Sami. There was no happy ending for the two of them, and one seemed pretty much a given with Dom and Sami. They weren’t just in love, both of them, with each other; their lives also fit together, in spite of the fact that Dom had been trying to take down Sami’s father, and Sami’s dad had died in the process. Sami loved Dom.

  Theresa wasn’t in love with him. She’d given him a place in her heart because of what he’d done for her girls. He’d take what she could give, remember her with fondness and get on with his life. Because while it had become clear over the past hours that Theresa and her daughters had a much more powerful pull on him than any need to travel the world, and while it had become clear that he felt much more strongly about being around to fight their battles with them rather than fighting for strangers, there was no way in hell he was putting her on the spot or misreading her gratitude. No way he’d make her feel bad by asking her for more than she had to give.

  Her true love was a man who had died.

  He’d known that going in.

  And still...he’d gone.

  He wasn’t sorry about that.

  Not even minus a spleen.

  At that point in his thought process, he’d usually get up and go to the gym. Or paint a house. Strapped to the bed by the damned tube he no longer needed, Ezra reached for the call button, ready to tell someone, anyone, that if they didn’t get the IV out of him, he’d remove it himself, but answered his phone when it rang instead.

  Rachel. The one sister who hadn’t already been in to see him. The next closest to him and Oliver and Dom in age. One of the few single births Isadora had carried. And the district attorney of Lark’s County. Her schedule was intense.

  “Hey, little sis, what’s up?”

  “First, I just wanted to hear for myself that you’re as fine as Dom claimed you were.”

  “Unfortunately, I have to disagree with him there,” he said, but he was doing it as much to be contrary as anything. “I’ll be fine as soon as someone comes in here and gets this damned tube off my arm so I can go pee in peace. You’re the DA—you got any pull here?”

  “Yep, you’re fine.” She chuckled. Asked her version of the same questions he’d been fielding from family members all morning, and then said, “I’ve already talked to Dom, and will be calling Oliver next, but I wanted to let you know... You remember Clay Houseman?”

  “The guy who confessed to the crimes Dad put Ronald Spence away for,” Ezra said. He might have kept his distance from the family, but he knew every pertinent detail when it came to what mattered most.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about him?”

  “He was killed in a prison fight. Thing is, the guy he was fighting was also killed...”

  Ezra’s instincts barged full speed ahead. “That’s not suspicious,” he said with full-on sarcasm. “You think Spence had him killed to stop him from admitting that he paid Houseman to confess and take the fall for him?”

  “Some of the others think so. And, yeah, I do, too. At least, I think it’s absolutely a possibility that needs to stay on the table.”

  “This Spence guy. He’s close. Right here in town, from what I hear. You be careful, Rach.”

  “Always.”

  His sister rang off with her usual “love you” to him, but this time, when he said it back, he wasn’t just spouting words he’d been saying all his life.

  He was thinking about what they meant.

  He loved his family.

  And, whether he liked it or not, he needed them, too. He’d let himself think for years that he didn’t. They’d never seemed to require much from him, either.

  Or maybe he’d just been a scared ass who’d refused to love so deeply that you could hurt until you wished you’d never been born.

  He’d been in town a couple of weeks, and aside from the past few days hunting down Theresa’s children, he could have been using his backdoor skills to see what he could find on Spence. He hadn’t done so.

  But he wasn’t going to let his family down again. From what he’d been told by the doctor who’d stopped in to see him earlier, and others, too, it would be eight weeks before he’d be released to go back into the field. That gave him eight weeks to see what he could find on Ronald Spence.

  The man had better watch out.

  He was soon to have a very determined, very frustrated hunter on his trail.

  * * *

  Theresa took an extra few minutes for herself, stopping for an iced coffee, before heading out to the Gemini to pick up the girls. While she was edgy being away from them, she knew that their path to security and mental health was through her.

  She couldn’t overprotect them or she’d make them fearful of being out of her sight. The Fitzgeralds hadn’t wanted to hurt the twins, not that she’d been to see them or spoken to them since their arrest. But by all accounts, they’d wanted to protect Claire and Neve. And too much of anything could be bad.

  But maybe, if they were committed to a psychiatric facility rather than prosecuted and put in jail, they’d get to the point where the girls could visit them. When Claire and Neve were old enough to better understand the nuances of what had happened to them. Hopefully Claire and Neve would then be able to further put to rest the horror of the past few days.

  Antsy about leaving them for too long lest they start to lose interest in the horses and start to fret without her, she dumped the rest of her coffee and barely managed to keep her old van down to the speed limit as she headed out to the ranch.

  The twins weren’t waiting for her. In fact, their faces fell when they saw her and realized it was time to leave. “We were going to have another ride on the horses,” Neve said, but the little girl was clinging to Theresa’s arm like she never wanted to let her go.

  Claire, always the practical one, but also clinging to Theresa, looked up at Isa and asked, “May we have that second ride at a different time, Mrs. Isa?”

  “Mrs. Isa?” Theresa glanced at the blonde who was smiling, so clearly enjoying herself that she let the name go.

  “Of course,” Isa said. “As long as your mom says it’s okay?”

  “Can we? Can we?” the girls said in unison, and looking into those uplifted little faces—one freckled, one not—reading the happiness in their eyes at the prospect of another trip to the ranch, there was no way Theresa could refuse them.

  “Yay!” they both cried out, and then ran to get the swimsuits they’d brought with them in case the sun came out and they could get in the pool.

  Claire carried the bag Theresa had hurriedly packed for the girls earlier. Neve had a big envelope in her hand. Sealed, she showed Theresa when she walked up. “We made it for Ezra,” she said, and the second the three of them were belted into the van, both children started begging to stop by the hospital to give Ezra his card before they went home.

  “He did save our lives, Mom,” Claire said, quite solemnly. “And Mrs. Isa said he gets visitors, ’cept we can’t bring Charlie like we do when we visit rooms on Tuesdays.”

  And, as Claire had so deftly pointed out without actually doing so, her daughters were no strangers to rooms with frail human bodies. They were no strangers to illness, period.

  “All right,” she told them, partially because she couldn’t find the wherewithal to tell them no. And partly, she knew, because it gave her a legitimate opportunity to see Ezra one more time.

  * * *

  Ezra, in sweatpants and that hospital gown, was sitting in the chair by his bed. He was planning his own hospital breakout—seriously, one more night and he was gone—when he heard a bump against his door, followed by whispering.

  “Can we come in?” Theresa’s voice.

  “Hell, yes” turned into “Hellyes—oh” as he saw the two faces peeking around the door at him. When he smiled, they pushed through, practically marching toward him, their mother lagging behind.

  Neve carried a card, a get-well wish from their family, he surmised. But when Claire said, “Neve,” both stopped a couple of feet in front of him, and Neve gave the envelope to Claire.

  “I’m sorry for the intrusion,” Theresa said, as Ezra, brows raised, watched the scene unfold. “They insisted...”

  He didn’t want an apology. Or for her to feel one was even necessary.

  “Hey, you two,” he said. He kept his face serious as they looked in his direction, recognizing that the rush of emotion he was experiencing was a new kind of love to him. A protective, die-for-you, paternal kind of love. “You know what Purple Hearts are?” he asked, spouting out something he’d thought of earlier.

  Theresa stopped halfway into the room, standing a few feet behind her daughters. He saw her, was inordinately pleased to have her back, but mostly was engrossed by the two sets of wide brown eyes as the twins slowly shook their heads.

  “It’s a medal only the bravest and strongest soldiers earn. And as a sergeant, I decide sometimes who gets one. While I can’t give you an army one, because, well, you aren’t in the army, I’ve decided, as sergeant, to give you my very own Colton Purple Hearts for what you did the other day.”