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Helpless frustration washed through her and she let out a long breath. The lovely physician had said her memory would likely come back in a few days. She had to hang on to that hope. Worrying about something she couldn’t control would accomplish nothing and would only make her ill from the effort.
Dr. Maxwell said she needed to give herself time to heal and she resolved to do just that.
A few moments later, Mason turned the vehicle under an archway constructed of two massive upright logs topped by a horizontal one just as big with the word Bittercreek carved into it in letters that had to be at least two feet high.
The rather grand sign out front turned out to be fancy wrappings for old rubbish, she discovered as he drove up a long winding driveway. She was surprised to find Mason Keller’s ranch had a tired, worn-out feel to it—weathered outbuildings in want of paint, sagging fencelines, old rusted farm machinery hulking in fields.
Odd, that, when the vehicle they were riding in smelled new and had to have cost him a pretty penny.
Perhaps he spent all his money on vehicles—and on adopting two Filipino children.
The ranch house squatted square and solid at the end of the long gravel driveway. It looked to be two stories, with a trio of gables and a porch that stretched across the entire width of the house. The whole thing was painted a bright white that gleamed in the hot afternoon sun, even though she could see it needed a fresh coat.
Someone was making an effort to spruce up the place, she thought, if the raw plywood and cans of paint on the porch were any indication.
The children climbed out on the driver’s side after Mason but Jane remained seated.
She couldn’t seem to make her muscles cooperate. Her head still pounded and she was suddenly exhausted by all that had happened to her since she’d opened her eyes and found Mason looming over her.
After a pause while they waited for her, Mason finally walked around the truck and opened the passenger door. “Are you coming?” he asked.
Heat scorched her cheeks. He must think her a total idiot, which she was. “Ah, yes. Thank you,” she murmured.
She straightened her shoulders and slid out of the truck, where she wobbled just a little before finding solid ground.
“Welcome to the Bittercreek,” Mason said. His features were sardonic but she thought she detected something else. Not quite embarrassment, perhaps, but something close to it. “I’m afraid the red carpet is at the cleaners.”
“It looks very comfortable and the view is lovely.”
“I would apologize that it’s probably not what you’re used to. But since you claim not to be used to anything, I guess it doesn’t much matter how humble the accommodations might be, does it?”
“Anything will be fine.” She wasn’t at all sure how to respond to the low antagonism in his voice so she decided to simply ignore it. “You’re very kind to take me in,” she went on politely. “Especially as I know how inconvenient it must be.”
A muscle tightened along his jawline but he said nothing to either verify or deny her statement. “Sorry about the dust. We’re in the middle of about a hundred renovations. The place has been empty for a couple years and it seems like everything needs to be done at once.”
Why had the ranch been empty? she wondered. Where had Mason and the children lived before they came here to open up the Bittercreek again? She didn’t have a chance to ask before the children grabbed her hands, one on either side.
“Come, Jane.” Miriam gave one of those rare smiles. “You may sleep in my room.”
“That’s not necessary,” Mason said. “We can air out one of the empty bedrooms for her. There’s plenty of room.”
He led the way up the rickety porch steps to the front door and then inside. Instantly, the delicious scent of roasting meat and vegetables wafted to them.
Antimacassars spread across the backs of armchairs.
Tea in a silver pot gracing a carved wooden tray.
A plump striped cat sprawled out on a rug before a merry little fire to take the chill out of a damp and dismal afternoon.
The memories were tiny and fleeting, but they still stopped her in her tracks as she tried to pin them down.
“Everything okay?” Mason asked.
“I…yes. That smell seems very familiar, that’s all.”
He gave her an odd look. “Smells to me like Pam’s making a pot roast for dinner.”
“Pam? Is that your wife?”
A shout of laughter greeted her question. She followed the sound to its source and found a woman standing across the room. She was short and slightly plump with a wild, curling mass of vivid red hair in a shade that couldn’t possibly be natural. The woman laughed again, her expression friendly and open as she walked into the room.
“Better not let my Burnell hear talk like that. Though he’s never been the jealous type, he just might start if he thought a troublemaker like Mason Keller had designs on me.”
“Jane, this is Pam Lewis. She and her husband own the closest ranch down the road a way and they’ve been running things over here for me for the last few years. She’s helping me out with the kids and the cooking temporarily, until we find our feet.”
The woman stepped forward with a smile. “You must be our Jane Doe. You’re even prettier than I heard.”
Mason raised an eyebrow. “The Moose Springs grapevine has certainly been busy.”
“Mase, you know your sudden return to town is the most exciting thing to happen around here since Doolley Shaw hit the cold medicine a little too hard and drove his truck clean into the side of Ben Palmer’s barn.”
Pam grinned at him. “Anything you do starts tongues flapping. What do you expect the gossips to do when you show up at Lauren Maxwell’s clinic with a beautiful mystery woman on your arm? The phone lines are bound to start buzzing.”
“I figured I’d at least have an hour or so lead time.”
She laughed. “Coralee called to give me fair warning the minute you pulled out of the clinic’s parking lot.”
Mason’s handsome features tightened into a grimace. “Surely there’s something more exciting to gossip about.”
She shook her head. “I, for one, don’t know what that might be. I guess until Doolley gets the sniffles again, you’re all we’ve got, boy. Better get used to it.”
The woman shifted her attention to Jane and the amusement in her gaze gave way to compassion. “You poor little thing. You look dead on your feet. When was the last time you ate?”
Jane stared at her blankly and Pam slapped her forehead. “I’m such a dunce. You probably have no idea, do you? Well, are you hungry?”
She had to think about it. Though her stomach felt hollow, she wasn’t sure she would be able to keep anything down with her head still throbbing. She had to try, though.
Common sense told her her body needed food to heal and she had a feeling her mind wouldn’t heal until her body did.
“I am a little hungry,” she admitted. “And I must say, your roast beef smells delicious.”
“What you need is some food in your stomach and then a hot bath with a good book. I’ve got just the thing for you. Come on now, Auntie Pam will take care of you.”
The woman looped her arm through Jane’s and headed across the room. Left with little choice in the matter—and feeling rather as if she was caught in the whirl of a typhoon—Jane followed her with one last, bewildered look toward Mason.
Chapter 4
The Bittercreek ranch office was just down a short hallway from the kitchen. As Mason held the phone to his ear, waiting eternally on hold, he could hear through the open doorway the soft, musical voices of women and the occasional higher sounds of Miriam and Charlie chiming in.
He heard a small laugh, strangled before it really began, and realized it was Miriam’s voice. How long had it been since she’d even attempted a laugh? he wondered. She had been a silent, watchful wraith since the day he’d showed up at her school in Butuan with the grim news about her parents.
He wanted fiercely to hear her give in to it. What would he give to hear her giggle and laugh like any other nine-year-old girl? Would that day ever come? She sure didn’t laugh around him. She treated him with the same cool politeness he would employ with a slightly-less-than-adequate waiter.
The worst part was, he didn’t have the first idea how to reach her.
He’d contacted a couple of grief counselors over the Internet and they’d both said it would take time for the children to adjust to their new life. In the blink of an eye, the spark of a fire to plastic explosives, their lives had changed completely.
They had lost everything they knew. First their parents had died and then he had dragged them away from all that was comfortable and secure, into a strange country with different customs and even a new language.
How could he blame Miriam for being slow to accept some of the changes in her life?
The music in his left ear continued to drone on. Over it, he heard Jane say something in that proper British accent, though he couldn’t quite catch the words.
Low though it was, the sound of her voice seemed to slither through his skin and his insides clenched in response. This was getting ridiculous, he thought in disgust. It was only a voice. He had no business letting it slide across his nerve endings like a silk caress.
He couldn’t trust her. This whole situation bugged the hell out of him. Yeah, she had a head injury. X-rays and CT scans didn’t lie. But he still wasn’t buying the whole amnesia story. It seemed entirely too unlikely.
What reason would she have for concocting the story, though? What could she be hiding? And how had she ended up on that mountain road in the first place?
His mind couldn’t stop running through the possibilities, even as he waited on hold with the FBI. He couldn’t help it. He’d been wading in counterintelligence waters too long to turn off the tap at will.
Scenario one, she’d had a car accident somewhere up in the mountains and wandered away from the scene, disoriented and injured. That could certainly be possible, but only if Daniel’s deputies managed to stumble on to a damaged vehicle up there. Even if they did find a car, that still wouldn’t explain why she might have been driving the dirt backroads of Utah in the first place.
Scenario two, this one a whole lot less palatable. Somebody who wanted to get rid of her whacked her over the head and left her for dead up in the mountains. She needed a convenient hiding place and found it here at the Bittercreek.
He didn’t like considering that one. What could she have done to piss somebody off enough for that? If this theory were true, was anybody still looking for her? Was he placing the children in harm’s way by allowing her to stay at the ranch?
He pushed that theory away as the telephone music changed to a murdered Elton John tune. He winced and went back to his speculations.
Scenario three was his least favorite. What if Jane was faking the whole thing—the head injury, the amnesia, everything—for nefarious reasons he couldn’t quite work out yet?
He found it tough to reconcile the fragile, frightened-looking woman with someone who could carry out such a cold-blooded scheme, but those who could blend in and appear innocent on the outside always made the best operatives. Maybe she was just damn good at her job.
He had to admit, the whole thing smelled of a setup. But who could she be working for? Who would put so much time and energy into planting an operative on an isolated mountain road for the express purpose of having him find her?
He had more enemies than he liked thinking about—hostile operatives in organizations he’d worked to weaken like Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamayah in the Philippines and similar groups in other countries, but also a few within the U.S. intelligence community.
His whereabouts were supposed to be a secret from all but the top echelons of the Agency but leaks were as common in the spy business as flies in a manure pit. A government can’t expect to give its operatives the skills to infiltrate the organizations of enemy combatants without running the risk that they could turn those same skills inward and sneak through all the firewalls and safety nets.
He had angered a lot of people by dropping out of the Game. Mason couldn’t deny that. He’d been a key operative in Mindanao and his cover had been solid. Though there were layers and contingency plans built into the system, his exit would certainly leave a void, one that hadn’t gone over well with some.
As long as they kept their antagonism to themselves, Mason didn’t care if the entire Agency had him on their shit list. He had given twelve years of his life to the cause—and most of his soul. Yes, he believed the work was important. Yes, he had played a valuable part in protecting the security of his country. But he had wondered for a long time—well before Samuel and Lianne were murdered—if the cost was worth it.
The music in his ear stopped abruptly and Mason sat up straighter.
“Hello?”
Finally, just when he’d been about ready to give up in disgust, he heard the slight West Texas twang of one of his FBI contacts in the Salt Lake City field office.
“Hey, Davis. Mason Keller.”
Cale Davis had been sent to the Philippines as part of the FBI’s Crimes Against Children unit. He was investigating a sex-slave ring where homeless Filipino kids were being sold to wealthy international businessmen. Though it wasn’t typically his area of expertise, Mason, in his cover as an expatriate bar owner and sometimes arms trader, had found himself in a position to help the CAC investigation.
Their two worlds had collided and through it, he and Cale had somehow connected.
A long silence met his greeting and he could only guess what was running through the agent’s mind.
“Keller,” the other man finally said. “I’ve heard some interesting rumors about you.”
“I can imagine.”
“Did you really tell your division director to pull his thumb out of his ass before he dug around and found a terrorist cell up there?”
Mason grimaced. “Uh, something like that.”
“Man, you always did have stones as big as watermelons. I heard you’re gone from the Agency. Did they fire you?”
“I didn’t give them the chance. I submitted my letter of resignation before that little altercation with my superiors.”
“Why the grand exit?” Cale asked.
Mason thought of all the reasons he’d quit. The disillusionment. The grinding challenge of constantly playing a role, wallowing in filth and ugliness and unrelenting hatred every day of his life. The growing fear he was losing himself somewhere along the way.
Those were all secondary. He might have continued in counterintelligence forever, no matter the cost emotionally, if not for those two most important reasons now giggling in the kitchen with Pam and a strange Brit.
How to explain all this to Cale?
“Lianne and Samuel Betran are dead,” he finally said. The other agent had met them during his time in the Philippines. Though he couldn’t know the extent of their work for Mason, he would likely remember how instrumental they had been in his sex-ring investigation.
“I’m sorry,” Cale said after a moment. “They were decent people. I know they were good friends of yours.”
“They shouldn’t have died.” He pitched his voice low to ensure the children didn’t inadvertently overhear. “Samuel came to me a week before they were killed. He wanted help smuggling Lianne and the kids out of the country. He was afraid their cover had been blown and his contact in the Jemaah Islamayah was beginning to suspect he was working with the Americans.”
Acid washed into his stomach, as it did whenever he thought of the role he had played in their deaths with his helpless inaction.
“I tried to convince the brass but I couldn’t get anybody to listen. The Betrans were too valuable where they were, they said. It was hellishly difficult to infiltrate the JI and any of their satellite organizations, and we would lose years of effort without Samuel in place. An extraction at that time wouldn’t be in the best interest of our mission, they said.”
“They were important assets in the region.”
“They were people, damn it! A husband and wife who loved each other and their two kids, who thought they were doing something right and good. They believed in freedom and democracy and protecting the innocent and they spent ten years risking their lives for us! What did they get for it? When they needed help, we sacrificed them for the greater good.”
He knew he sounded bitter but he didn’t care. The fact that he couldn’t really blame anyone but himself left more than acid in his gut. He should have tried harder, should have told his superiors to go screw themselves and helped the Betrans catch the next boat out of Butuan, no matter the cost to himself or the mission.
Every time he looked at those two orphaned children, his own failure to act haunted him.
“I’m sorry, man,” Cale murmured.
“Yeah, me, too.”
