The Texas Lawman's Last Stand

Delores Fossen

About the Author

Imagine a family tree that includes Texas cowboys, Choctaw and Cherokee Indians, a Louisiana pirate and a Scottish rebel who battled side by side with William Wallace. With ancestors like that, it’s easy to understand why Texas author and former air force captain DELORES FOSSEN feels as if she were genetically predisposed to writing romances. Along the way to fulfilling her DNA destiny, Delores married an air force top gun who just happens to be of Viking descent. With all those romantic bases covered, she doesn’t have to look too far for inspiration.

The Texas

Lawman’s

Last Stand

Delores Fossen

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Prologue

San Antonio Maternity Hospital

The gunshots stopped.

With her heart in her throat, Mattie Collier waited for more rounds of fire. They didn’t come, thank God. And judging from the scene unfolding on the live news report on TV, this was the end of the hostage standoff.

The nightmare was over.

Well, one nightmare anyway.

Blinking back tears, Mattie knew it was time for her to die, again.

Another faked death, another run for her life. She’d done it before when she’d gone into the Federal Witness Protection Program six months earlier.

This time, it would be much, much harder.

Harder, because of her newborn baby. Her precious daughter was a mere two hours old. She was too young to be in the path of danger, and Mattie knew it was too big a risk to try to escape with her. If she failed, if they caught her, the unthinkable could happen.

On the muted TV in the nurses’ lounge, Mattie could now see the police and firemen outside the four-story hospital. Reporters, too. They had their cameras aimed at the building where Mattie and the others were still hiding and waiting for the official end of the nine-hour hostage standoff.

Their captors, the gunmen who’d terrorized them for those nine hours, had stayed concealed behind ski masks, and Mattie had only gotten a glimpse of them before she and another patient had escaped and hidden in the nurses’ lounge at the end of the maternity ward hall. Now, without explanation, their captors had apparently given up and perhaps even managed to get out of the building despite every attempt to stop them.

Any minute, San Antonio PD would storm the hospital to look for injured patients or perhaps even another gunman. The officers would eventually make it to the fourth floor, where she was, and if Mattie allowed them to rescue her, the photographers who were no doubt waiting outside could snap her picture. The wrong people could learn that she wasn’t dead after all.

And that was a sure way to get her and her precious daughter hurt, or worse.

With her baby cradled in the crook of her arm, Mattie got to her feet. Not easily. She was still dizzy and weak from the long labor and the stress of not knowing if the gunmen were going to kill them all. The adrenaline had come and gone, leaving her with the bone-weary fatigue and sickening dread that came with an equally sickening reality. She’d barely had enough strength to change into the green scrubs that she had found in a nurse’s locker, and she wasn’t expecting to regain her strength anytime soon.

A fire alarm sounded and was quickly followed by water falling from the overhead sprinklers.

She glanced up at the ceiling. There were no sprinklers here in the lounge, and that gave her a jolt of panic. She cracked open the door, barely a fraction, and looked out. There were no signs of fire, just the faint smell of smoke. Thankfully, her fellow patient and she were far enough away from that smoke, and the sprinklers would hopefully smother any flames before the firemen could come in and do their thing.

Mattie took some steps, staggering. Neither the pain nor the dizziness would stop her. She knew what had to happen. And it would be the hardest thing she would ever have to do.

Mattie made her way to the leather sofa where Nadine Duggan was asleep. Mattie hadn’t known the petite blonde before they’d been taken hostage whi