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He had to wonder what the gossips would say when word got out that he’d found a mystery woman up in the mountains.
Somehow his plans to come back to a quiet, uneventful life on the ranch weren’t exactly coming to fruition.
He was spared from having to come up with a polite answer to Coralee’s conversational probe by the door opening. A moment later the Moose Springs sheriff sauntered inside, looking big, bad and hard as a whetstone.
The other man took one look at Mason and narrowed his gaze. “I should have known trouble would follow your sorry ass back to town.”
Mason slowly straightened. “You got a problem with my sorry ass coming back to your town?”
His cool tone had the children looking up warily. Before he could reassure them, the sheriff’s stern expression melted into a grin and he slapped Mason on the back, the male equivalent of a hug.
“Damn, it’s good to see you, man!” Daniel Galvez exclaimed. “How long has it been? Three years? Four?”
“Something like that.”
Mason hated that he had come to avoid his good friends over the years. Friends tended to ask the kinds of questions he couldn’t answer honestly, like what he was doing with his life. Since he hated lying to his friends the way he did to everyone else, it had become easier just to stay away.
“How’ve you been?” he asked Daniel.
“Good.” His grin slipped a little but Mason pretended not to notice. “Dispatcher tells me you’ve got a mystery on your hands.”
“Not my hands. You’re the law around here, hard as that still is for me to believe.”
“That’s what they tell me, anyway.”
Mason quickly explained the events of the last three hours.
“Whereabouts did you say you found her?”
“I’ve got the GPS coordinates out in the truck. But you’ll know where it is without them. Do you remember that time in high school we camped up near Sulpher Springs with Truman and Fricke? This was about a mile down from where we camped.”
“Yeah, I know the area. Give me the coordinates and I’ll send a deputy up there to see if he can find any kind of vehicle pulled into the brush or down a ravine or something. I can also check missing persons reports in the region, although it may be a day or two before anything turns up. What do you plan to do with her in the meantime?” Daniel asked.
Mason frowned at the odd question. “Do with her? Not a blasted thing. I drove her down the mountain for medical attention and brought in the authorities. As far as I’m concerned, my work here is done. I’ve got enough on my plate without adding this, too. I’m done with it. The woman is your problem now.”
He heard a small noise in the doorway, just a strangled gasp. He waited about five seconds, then shifted his gaze to the doorway where she stood, his Jane Doe, looking pale and fragile.
He had no doubt that she’d overheard his callousness, heard him referring to her like a piece of garbage nobody wanted.
Damn.
Chapter 3
“I’m sorry I’ve been such a bother to everyone.”
That low, proper voice sent an oddly tangled shaft of guilt and heat through him. He didn’t care for either emotion. He had no business being attracted to this woman, not when the only thing he knew about her was that he couldn’t afford to trust her. And he certainly had nothing to feel guilty about, not when he had two children to protect.
“We all just want to help you, Jane.”
While Lauren spoke to the mystery woman, the reproach in her eyes was for Mason alone.
“Jane?” Mason seized on the last part of Lauren’s comment. “That’s her name? Is she starting to remember?”
Lauren shook her head. “Not yet but we have to call her something. Jane fits as well as anything else.”
He swallowed his oath as the physician greeted Daniel with a cool wariness at odds with her usual cheerful demeanor. Where did that come from? Mason wondered.
He didn’t have time to puzzle that out before the sheriff stepped forward, studying the mystery woman with interest.
“Hello.” His pleasant smile seemed to put the mystery woman at ease. “I’m Daniel Galvez, the Moose Springs sheriff.”
Mason watched closely for any sign of nervousness in her expression, the usual telltale signs of a person who might have something to hide from law enforcement. She was good, he’d give her that much. If she was hiding something, she didn’t betray it by so much as a blink.
“What did the examination show?” Daniel asked.
Lauren’s mouth tightened and Mason thought for a moment she wouldn’t answer him, then she shrugged. “The CT scan showed a definite head injury, relatively mild but still serious enough to warrant close observation. I don’t believe she needs to be hospitalized at this point, however.”
“What about the amnesia?” Mason asked. Is it real or some kind of scam? he thought but didn’t add.
“Memory loss is certainly a possible side effect of her kind of head injury.”
“Temporary or permanent?”
Lauren gave her patient a quick sidelong look, then shifted her gaze to his and he couldn’t miss the warning signals there for him to have a little more tact.
“At this point it’s too early to answer that with any degree of certainty. I have every reason to believe it’s a temporary condition but I can’t say how long that particular side effect may linger.”
“Can you give a ballpark figure?”
“No,” Lauren said firmly.
“Did you find any identifying features?” Daniel broke in. “A tattoo or a scar or anything?”
The doctor shook her head. “She seems in good condition. Other than the cut on her cheek and a little bruising on her arms, she doesn’t have any other injuries. I did find evidence of a broken arm that was poorly set and a couple of fingers that have been broken in the past but that’s all.”
Daniel wrote that down. “What about age, height, weight? Any idea?”
“I would guess her age somewhere between twenty-five and thirty.” She glanced down at the clipboard in her hand. “Five feet three inches tall and a hundred ten pounds.”
“You all do know I’m standing here, don’t you?” Jane asked suddenly, her voice tart and her cheeks slightly pink.
Lauren winced. “I’m sorry. We were talking about you a bit as though you weren’t here, weren’t we? Do you have any other questions?”
“No. I just want this to be over.”
Daniel gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll put out some feelers, see if we can find out who you might be. Somebody’s probably looking for you, and I doubt it will take long to solve this mystery. But in the meantime, we need to find somewhere for you to stay.”
Daniel and Lauren turned toward Mason in unison, as if they were bobblehead dolls on the dashboard of a jacked-up GTO doing a fast turn around a corner.
He looked from first one to the other. “What? Why are you looking at me?”
“Finders keepers.”
Despite the fact that Daniel was one of his oldest friends, Mason wondered if punching him would wipe that grin off his face.
“That’s fine for pennies you pick up outside the hardware store,” he muttered, “but not so appropriate when it’s a strange woman you’re talking about.”
“She has to stay somewhere. I can’t put her in jail since she hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“Perhaps there’s a hotel I could check into somewhere close by.” Jane’s features suddenly clouded over. “Though I suppose without a purse, I have nothing to pay them with, do I?”
Lauren shook her head. “Even if we had a hotel in town, I wouldn’t be able to recommend that. You’ve had a head injury and while you don’t need hospitalization at this point, you do need someone close by the next few days to keep an eye on you. I would take you to my house but I’m heading to a conference in Ogden for the weekend.”
“And I’m working double shifts all week,” Daniel added.
In desperation, Mason turned to Coralee, who had been eavesdropping shamelessly on the whole conversation. The receptionist shook her head firmly. “Sorry. No can do. Bruce and I are spending the weekend in Vegas for our thirty-fifth anniversary.”
Damn. He was stuck with the woman. As if he needed a headache like this in his life right now.
“I’m sorry to be such a bother,” she whispered again. To his dismay, her chin started to wobble a little and tears welled up in the depths of those blue eyes.
Mason frowned, horrified that all he seemed to want to do was wrap his arms around this small, fragile creature and pull her against him. Anything to keep those tears away.
He wasn’t sure where all these protective impulses were coming from but he’d better do his best to get rid of them.
“I guess she can stay at the ranch for a few days.” His voice came out gruff but he was still rewarded with a pleased nod from Lauren, a measuring look from Daniel and a watery smile from Jane Doe herself.
At least at the ranch, he could keep an eye on the woman, he thought. He was a highly trained intelligence operative for the United States government. If she was up to something, he would do everything in his power to find out what.
The children were thrilled to have the woman they considered their own personal discovery riding home with them.
Charlie bounced in his seat and chattered a mile a minute to her in his native language and even Miriam consented to give a few hesitant smiles to their guest.
Those smiles made his gray mood even darker. It was all he could do to get the little girl to look at him, forget about smiling. This strange woman waltzes in and suddenly she becomes the children’s best friend without even lifting a finger.
“We were going to catch a fish today but we found you instead,” Charlie said in Tagalog.
“English,” Mason said, a little more curtly than he intended. His reminder earned him long-suffering looks from Charlie and Miriam and a decidedly annoyed look from his mystery guest.
“What harm can it do for them to speak their native language?” she asked him quietly.
Mind your own damn business, he wanted to say. He wasn’t about to get into this with her in front of the children—especially since Miriam, at least, understood a great deal more English than she let on.
He could smile, too, when the occasion called for it so he pasted a polite one on his face.
“Despite the fact that Tagalog speakers suddenly seem to be dropping out of the sky today,” he said dryly, “for the most part no one around here will understand them if they don’t learn English. They won’t have friends and they won’t be able to keep up in school. I’ve told them they can speak Tagalog to each other all they want but I want them practicing English with me and with others as much as possible before school starts.”
She opened her mouth and he saw arguments brewing in her eyes. Don’t do it, he thought.
He was in no kind of mood for a lecture and the last thing he needed was parenting advice from a stranger who claimed she didn’t even know her own name. He felt inadequate enough about this whole fatherhood gig. He didn’t need her making it worse.
Instead, she surprised him. “Yes, I can see the wisdom in your approach,” she murmured, her expression thoughtful. “I’m sure they will learn English more quickly and efficiently if it’s spoken to them often. Being a child in a new country where one doesn’t know the language can be quite lonely.”
“How would you know that? The voice of experience?” Maybe this was a clue to her past, one he should mention to Daniel.
Her brow furrowed and he could almost see her trying to concentrate. “I don’t know, precisely. Just an impression.”
Mason seemed content to let the matter drop, to her vast relief. Trying to probe around in her mind only made her head throb with tension. Still, she couldn’t seem to keep from it. Without a past, she had nothing. She was nothing.
She forced her mind away from those kinds of grim thoughts and turned her gaze out the window, letting Charlie’s aimless, cheerful chatter soothe her spirit.
They drove through a raw-looking landscape of foothills covered in little more than a silvery-green brush—sage? she wondered—and dust. The landscape seemed huge here, wild and almost savage. If not for the occasional vehicle passing in the other direction, she would have thought they were alone out here save for the cattle; huge dark beasts contained by rusty barbed-wire fences.
This all seemed so alien to her, vaguely frightening in its vastness and isolation. She had to wonder if the strangeness of it was due to her memory loss or whether she would have found it disconcerting even if she remembered everything.
It was wild and harsh-looking, she thought after a few more moments of gazing out the window, but there was a raw and almost painful beauty to the landscape.
“Can you tell me where we are?” she asked after a moment. “I seem to remember something you said earlier about Utah, but would you mind perhaps being a little more specific?”
The look Mason sent her was full of suspicion. What made him so mistrustful? she wondered. Was it something about her or did he behave that way with everyone? It seemed a dreadful way to live, if the latter was the case.
“The town you just left is Moose Springs, population about three hundred, give or take a few,” he said after a moment. “We’re about an hour northeast of Salt Lake City.”
Useful information, she thought. If only she knew anything about Salt Lake City.
“The ski resort community of Park City is just over those mountains as the crow flies but more like a half-hour if you’re in a car,” he went on. “The road we found you on was inside the Uinta Mountain Range, in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest, a vast tract of land that includes a wilderness area of about half a million acres.”
For some reason, her stomach clenched at that. She had a feeling she wasn’t particularly enamored of anything with the word wilderness in its descriptor.
“And where are we going now?” she asked.
“My family’s ranch, the Bittercreek. It’s about three miles out of town. We should be there in a minute.”
She had the sudden disquieting thought that she was traveling with a man she’d known less than a few hours to stay with him at his ranch, out in the middle of nowhere. She knew nothing at all about him. Perhaps she might have been better to throw herself on the mercy of the law officer back at the clinic.
“Mr. Mason, he has many of the horses and cows,” Charlie Betran said in his careful English.
“They are very big,” Miriam added.
“You’ll get used to them,” Mason said to the girl with a surprising gentleness. “Like I’ve told you, once you’ve been here awhile you won’t be so nervous around them. I know you’ll like the horses once you let me take you for a ride. Charlie likes them, don’t you, bud?”
The boy nodded his head vigorously, beaming at Mason.
What was the story here, she wondered. Why did this strong, masculine cowboy have custody of these two children who seemed so far from home? They seemed such an odd mix for a family.
At least they had each other.
She had no one, she thought. At least no one she remembered. What a demoralizing thought. Could she have a child somewhere? A husband who might be looking for her?
