Maddie’s eyes glowed with happiness.
“I’ve been house-hunting.”
House-hunting. Jake almost groaned aloud. Why couldn’t she just stay on post where she belonged? If she moved into town, Jake would bump into her even more often than he did already.
Just yesterday he’d seen her at the offices of Children of the Day, an international Christian charity founded five years ago by Prairie Springs resident Anna Terenkov to assist innocent victims of war. He liked Anna, but lately she’d been getting on his nerves because she couldn’t stop talking about her new friend Maddie. She was so sweet, Anna’d gushed. So eager to help everyone. It had been pointed out on more than one occasion that a man would have to be dead not to notice how pretty she was.
Jake definitely wasn’t dead.
Homecoming Heroes: Saving children and finding
love deep in the heart of Texas
Mission: Motherhood—Marta Perry
July 2008
Lone Star Secret—Lenora Worth
August 2008
At His Command—Brenda Coulter
September 2008
A Matter of the Heart—Patricia Davids
October 2008
A Texas Thanksgiving—Margaret Daley
November 2008
Homefront Holiday—Jillian Hart
December 2008
BRENDA COULTER
started writing an inspirational-romance novel the same afternoon she finished reading one for the first time. Less than a year later, she had a completed manuscript and an interested publisher. Although that first book went on to win both a HOLT Medallion and a Romantic Times BOOKreviews Reviewers’ Choice Award, it took three rejected manuscripts before Brenda figured out what she had done right the first time. She did it again, resulting in another sale to Steeple Hill Books. That second novel was a finalist for Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award.
Married for over thirty years, Brenda and her architect husband have no pets because, after bringing up two rascally boys, they have earned a rest.
At His Command
Brenda Coulter
Published by Steeple Hill Books™
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Brenda Coulter for her contribution to the Homecoming Heroes miniseries.
You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed
my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
that my heart may sing to you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever.
—Psalms 30:11–12
With gratitude to every hero who stands ready
to protect the freedoms I enjoy as an American,
and with love to James E. Riley (U.S. Air Force,
1951–54), Kenneth D. Coulter (U.S. Air Force,
1947–51) and John Stokes (U.S. Marines,
1943–45; U.S. Army, 1947–49).
Contents
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
Questions for Discussion
Chapter One
Texas attorney Jake Hopkins was severely allergic to two things: peanuts and a sweet young army nurse named Madeline Bright. Travis Wylie, Jake’s law partner, took the peanut problem seriously because he’d once had to call 9-1-1 when Jake suffered a life-threatening anaphylactic reaction during dinner at an Austin restaurant. But while Travis readily acknowledged that certain women possessed a knack for turning a man every which way but loose, he steadfastly maintained that Jake couldn’t be allergic to a member of his own species.
Jake knew better. There was nothing imaginary about the symptoms he suffered whenever he was in close proximity to Maddie. All he had to do was clap eyes on the chestnut-haired, blue-eyed beauty and his pulse raced, his throat closed up and his brain stalled out. Since that was pretty much what happened whenever Jake got too close to a peanut, he figured the evidence spoke for itself.
It had been four years since the sudden onset of his peanut allergy, and in that time he’d learned to give a wide berth to foods containing even a trace of the offending legumes. In the past month, he’d trained himself to be just as assiduous about avoiding Maddie.
“Madeline,” he said aloud, correcting himself as he swung his black BMW convertible into the grocery-store parking lot. Using her nickname was flirting with emotional intimacy, and Jake wasn’t that kind of man anymore.
Maybe he never really had been that kind of man. His wife had hinted at that more than a few times when she was alive. Or maybe he and Rita just hadn’t been a good match to begin with. Jake had known she was dissatisfied, and sometimes he wondered if she would have gone so far as to divorce him if a freak boating accident on Lake Travis hadn’t ended her life.
Poor Rita. For three years she’d clung to the stubborn belief that being married ought to temper Jake’s passion for flying helicopters. She’d wanted him out of the army and out of the sky, but Jake was a second-generation West Point graduate, and a life without flying wasn’t any kind of life at all.
He’d had to adjust his thinking on that after he’d awoken at a combat support hospital in the Middle East and learned he’d never walk again, let alone fly. He’d been transferred to the Army Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany for more surgery, and a week later they’d drugged him up and loaded him on a hospital plane headed for Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
Noah Bright, his copilot-gunner and his best friend for fifteen years, had already been shipped home to Texas in a flag-draped casket.
Jake spent several weeks at Walter Reed. During that time, Rita visited twice. After she’d gone back to Texas, she drowned when a ski boat she was riding in capsized.
Jake had missed her funeral, too.
After numerous surgeries and skin grafts, Jake was finally sent home to Texas, where despite the gloomy predictions of his doctors, he learned to walk again. He wasn’t terribly graceful about it, but with the help of a cane he could get around okay. Once he was, quite literally, back on his feet, his father had suggested law school.
It was a cruel irony that if Rita had lived and stuck it out with Jake, she would now have everything she’d wanted. She’d be living deep in the heart of Texas with a newly minted civilian attorney who had ruthlessly trained himself not to think about helicopters. Jake didn’t even look up when one flew overhead, which was no small