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The kid’s favorite question, in English or in Tagalog. He had become mighty damn tired of that question in the last three weeks since he’d managed to bring them out of the Philippines—and the two months before that, spent doing his best to get them all to this point.
Mason swallowed his sigh as his fingers tightened on the steering wheel. He could spot a hostile operative in a crowd of a thousand people, could sniff out a few ounces of plastic explosives like a bloodhound, but he felt like a complete idiot when it came to dealing with these children.
“It’s fun, that’s why. Trust me, you’ll like it.”
He hoped.
It was worth a try anyway. He had vivid memories of early-summer fishing trips with his own father up here amid the aspens and willows. Here in the Uinta Mountains was where he and his father connected best—one of the only places they managed that feat—and he supposed on some level he hoped he and Charlie and Miriam could forge the same bond.
He and the kids had to build a life together somehow. For the last ten weeks they had tiptoed around each other, afraid to breathe the wrong way, and it had to stop.
Mason was uncomfortable with children, especially these children. Whenever he looked into their dark eyes, he couldn’t help thinking about Samuel and Lianne, their parents—two of the most courageous, most honorable people he had ever been privileged to know.
Assets, the intelligence community called them, but they were far more than that. They were friends, friends who risked their lives for years so they could feed him vitally important information about terrorism activity in their country.
He knew he shouldn’t have come to care for them, just as they knew the dangers going into it. When the pair began to suspect their carefully woven cover had begun to fray, Samuel had begged Mason for help in sneaking his family out of the country. He had tried, but in the end his superiors had said they believed the Betrans’ worries were unfounded and they were too valuable where they were.
After all their years of service, the people they had risked their life to help had turned on them and Mason counted himself among that number. He had done nothing to help them. Guilt and fury still overwhelmed him when he thought of their violent deaths in a car bombing two months earlier.
He hadn’t been able to help the parents, but he’d be damned if he was going to leave Samuel and Lianne’s children in some crowded, dirty Philippine orphanage.
What else could he do but bring them home to the Utah ranch where he’d been raised?
He’d hoped that after a few months as the children’s guardian he would be better at the job but he still felt as stiff and awkward with them as a squeaky new boot.
Miriam and Charlie would always grieve for their parents just as he would always be consumed with guilt over the deaths of his friends. But the three of them had to go on from here. They couldn’t live in this tense détente forever.
The pickup hit a rut on the dirt road and jostled them all together. Miriam’s eyes widened nervously but Charlie giggled.
“I like this bumping. It tickles here,” the boy said, pointing to his stomach.
Mason summoned a smile. “You’re a little daredevil, aren’t you? You ever been on a roller coaster?”
He had to laugh at the boy’s blank look. He was trying to think if he’d ever heard a Tagalog word for roller coaster when Miriam sat forward suddenly.
“Sir! Look out!”
He jerked his attention back to the road, barely in time to slam on the truck’s brakes. The big three-quarter-ton pickup fishtailed to a stop just inches before he would have plowed over a woman lying in the middle of the dirt road, as if it was the ideal spot to take a little nap.
What in the hell?
He gazed through the windshield at the woman, but she didn’t move even with the growling diesel engine practically crawling up her ear.
“She is dead, yes?” Miriam asked. There was resignation in her voice and Mason’s jaw clenched. The girl had become obsessed with death since her parents had been killed. He supposed it a natural byproduct of what she’d been through but it still broke his heart.
“I don’t know. I’ll find out, though,” he promised. “You two stay right here. Don’t move.”
He repeated the command in Tagalog to make sure they understood before he unlocked the jockey box for his Ruger and then stuffed in a couple of cartridges.
The woman didn’t move even when he shut the door with a loud thud that seemed to echo in this quiet solitude. He approached warily, his weapon ready at his side. He might be overreacting, but a man with his life experience didn’t take stupid chances.
One of the first rules of espionage. Anything out of the ordinary attracted attention, just as it should. And a woman lying in the middle of such an isolated mountain road was pretty damn extraordinary.
She definitely wasn’t dead. Though she was laid out just like a corpse in a casket, her slight chest beneath her folded hands rose and fell with each breath.
She wasn’t a hiker who had fallen, he saw as he approached. Not in those sandals and those dressy summer slacks. He scanned the mountains, looking for any sign of what might have brought her here. A car, a bicycle—a helicopter, for Pete’s sake—but he saw nothing but trees.
Mason turned back to the woman, cataloguing her pretty features with dispassionate eyes. She looked to be mid- to late-twenties maybe, Caucasian. She had straight brown hair with streaky blond highlights, a small straight nose, a generous mouth, high cheekbones—one of which had traces of dried blood, he noted.
He did a quick visual scan for more injuries but couldn’t see anything from here.
What was she doing here? He looked around again, his shoulder blades itchy. This would be a hell of a place for an ambush, isolated and remote enough to leave no witnesses.
Good thing there were no rebel fighters hanging out in Utah. Nothing stirred here but a few magpies chattering nearby and the wind moaning in the tops of the trees and fluttering the bright heads of the wildflowers that lined the road.
Still on alert, he engaged the safety on his weapon and shoved it into the waistband of his Levi’s at the small of his back, then crouched near her and picked up one slim hand.
“Ma’am? Are you all right?” An inane question, he thought, even as he asked it. She obviously wasn’t all right or she wouldn’t be lying in the middle of an isolated mountain road.
She didn’t respond so he gave her shoulder a little shake. That seemed to do the trick. The woman opened her eyes. They were blue, he noted. The same clear, vivid blue of the columbines growing wild all around them, and fringed with thick dark lashes.
She stared at him for just a moment and blinked a few times with a vague kind of look and then she smiled. Not a casual smile but a deep, heartfelt, where-have-you-been kind of smile and Mason wondered why he felt as though he’d just been punched in the stomach.
He had thought her pretty at first glance but with that smile, she was stunning.
“Hello,” she said in a voice that sent chills rippling down his spine. If he were the kind of man who had ever had any inclination to try phone sex, he had a feeling her voice would have been just the thing to make him hotter than a two-dollar pistol—low, a little raspy, and sheathed in an oh-so-proper British accent.
His sudden, unexpected reaction to that smile and that sexy voice ticked him off. He rose to tower over her, angry at himself for his loss of self-control and at her for being the catalyst.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing out here? I just about ran you over, lady. Don’t you think you could have found a better place for a nap than the middle of the frigging road?”
She blinked at his harsh tone, then her eyes shifted to look around at the sage-covered mountains, the scattered stands of towering pine, the dusty road that stretched over the horizon, the complete absence of anything resembling civilization, except for one big rumbling pickup truck.
The woman’s gaze shifted back at him and the blank, baffled expression in her eyes raised the hairs at the back of his neck.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she whispered. “I don’t even know where here is.”
“You’re in the middle of the Uinta Mountain Range.”
“Wh-where is that?”
He frowned. What the hell was going on? “Utah. About an hour east of Salt Lake City.”
Those blue eyes widened. “Why, that can’t be possible. I’ve never been to Utah in my life. Have I?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Though I just set eyes on you five minutes ago and have no idea where you have and haven’t been, ma’am, I’m going to take a wild guess here and say a big yes to the Utah question. See that license plate on my truck?”
Her gaze shifted from him to his pickup and he saw the beginnings of unease stir on her expression. “What am I doing here? In Utah?”
With that upper-crust British accent, she made the word sound like a distant planet. A bizarre foreign planet in some galaxy far far away.
“I believe that was my question,” Mason growled. “Why don’t we start with your name.”
The blank gaze shifted back to him. “My…name?”
Okay. He did not need this, one more complication in an already entangled life.
“Your name. First name. Last name. Anything.”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Seems to me you don’t know much,” he snapped.
She scrambled to her feet, the beginnings of panic in her eyes. As she rose, he saw she was no taller than perhaps five foot four, slender and fragile-looking, especially with the dried blood on her cheek.
She was obviously injured somehow, he reminded himself. And he was interrogating her like she was some kind of enemy combatant. He moderated his tone. “Are you hurt anywhere besides your face there?”
She pressed a slim hand to her cheek and then to the back of her head as if she’d only just realized it ached. When she pulled her fingers away he saw more dried blood on her fingers.
“Let me see.” He stepped closer for a better look and she instinctively retreated from him, but she had nowhere to go with a throbbing pickup behind her.
He cupped her cheek in one hand and turned her head with the other. He was no medic but every intelligence agent had at least the bare bones of triage experience.
She had a nasty cut and what felt like a hell of a goose egg at the back of her head, just above where neck met skull. A head injury could explain the apparent memory loss, if that’s really what was going on here. If this wasn’t some elaborate ploy.
Why would anybody go to all this trouble to stage an accident? he wondered. He’d been in the game so long he suspected everybody of deception and subterfuge.
He was going to have to take her to help. Even if he didn’t completely trust her, he couldn’t leave a woman out here alone. It might be hours—or even days—before another vehicle traveled through this remote area.
Before he could explain that to her, he heard a truck door shut and he had time only for one bitter curse as Miriam and Charlie peeked around the pickup, anxiety in their dark eyes.
“Didn’t I tell you two to wait in the truck?” Mason asked. Was there not one part of his life under his control?
“Charlie was scared,” Miriam said in her native language. By the shadows in her eyes, he could see her little brother wasn’t the only nervous one. “We wanted to make sure the lady was all right.”
“I’m just fine,” his mystery Brit answered in perfectly accented Tagalog, smiling at the children. “And how are you?”
He stared at her. “You speak Tagalog?” he asked incredulously. What were the odds of finding a woman in the middle of a deserted Utah road who spoke the children’s language? This whole thing was beginning to seem more and more bizarre.
“Do I?”
He growled low in his throat in frustration. “You just did! How is it you know how to conjugate verbs in a foreign language but you apparently don’t know your own damn name or why you’re lying in the road in the middle of nowhere?”
She gazed at him, her blue eyes wide, distressed for several moments, with only the sound of his rumbling truck to break the vast silence, then he saw those eyes cloud with dismay and fear as the full reality of her situation soaked in.
“I don’t know. I can’t remember!”
Chapter 2
Panic was a wild creature inside her, clawing and fighting to break free. She stared at the stranger watching her through dark, suspicious eyes. He was so big, at least six foot two. The cowboy hat and the hulking, rumbling truck behind him somehow made him seem bigger, huge and dangerously male.
She had a funny feeling she didn’t particularly care for large men. Or men who frowned at her with such ill-concealed vexation bordering on outright hostility.
She climbed to her feet as pain sliced through, making her head throb and spin like a whirligig. Despite the change in altitude, the man still towered over her.
“Are you telling me you don’t remember your own name?” he asked, his voice as hard as the mountains around them. Her splitting headache kicked up a notch and she was afraid wild hysteria loomed on the not-so-distant horizon.
She screwed her eyes shut as if she might find the answer emblazoned on her eyelids and searched her mind for any snippet of information, no matter how tiny. All she found there was a blank, vast field of nothing.
No name, no age, no nothing.
“What’s wrong with me?” she wailed. “Why can’t I remember?”
The two children exchanged a nervous look at her outburst. Though she regretted scaring them, she couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the pain in her head and her own burgeoning panic.
“Don’t cry.” The little boy spoke in Tagalog as he patted her hand. “It will be okay. You’ll see. Mr. Mason will make it all better.”
How perfectly ridiculous that she could find such comfort from this funny little creature with dark eyes and a win-some smile, but she couldn’t seem to help it.
“Miriam,” the American said in English, his voice deep and somehow calming, despite the suspicion in his eyes, “take Charlie to the truck and wait there. We’ll be along in a minute.”
The girl nodded and grabbed the boy’s hand, tugging him toward the pickup. She watched them climb inside the big cab, already missing the buffer they provided between her and this angry-looking stranger.
“What’s happened to me?” she asked when she was once more alone with the man. “Why can’t I remember anything?”
His silver-gray eyes narrowed with mistrust. “If this is some kind of game, lady, you won’t get away with it. I find you’re trying to play me, and you can bet I’ll be on you like a magpie on a June bug.”
She wasn’t sure what a magpie or a June bug might be but she sensed the metaphor wasn’t intended to be pleasant. “It’s not a game, I swear to you. I can’t remember anything.”
“You don’t have the first clue what you’re doing out here miles from anywhere? Come on. Think.”
She would like to, but her brain seemed to have gone on holiday. Maybe she could hold a coherent thought if it weren’t for the excruciating pain squeezing her skull.
She wanted nothing so much as to curl up again in the dirt until everything disappeared—the noisy truck growling behind her, this terrifying, suspicious American, and especially the hot stab of pain searing her skull.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I told you that. Why won’t you believe me?”
He appeared to consider her question. “I’m not sure about the U.K.,” he finally said, his voice dry, “but here in America women don’t just drop out of the sky. How did you get here?”
All she wanted was a lie-down. Her head seemed to be inhabiting another postal code entirely from the rest of her body and she absolutely did not want to be standing here in the middle of the wilderness exchanging words with an arrogant cowboy who seemed determined to think the worst of her.
“I don’t know,” she repeated, pain and frustration and that skulking panic making her testy. “Perhaps I was abducted by little green spacemen who sucked out my memory before conking me on the head and tossing me out of their flying saucer.”
He gazed at her out of those suspicious gray eyes for another moment and then she could almost swear she saw fleeting amusement flicker in his expression. At this point, she wasn’t sure she really cared. Her small moment of defiant sarcasm seemed to have sapped her last bit of energy. She could feel herself sway and took a deep breath, forcing her knees, spine and shoulders to stiffen on the exhale.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you.” She tried for as much dignity as she could muster. “If you could be so kind as to point me in the direction of the nearest town, I’ll just be on my way.”
He stared at her in disbelief for about half a minute then shook his head. “The nearest town is about seven miles that way on a dirt logging road. You really think you’re up for that kind of hike in your condition?”
