Back on Bittercreek Ranch
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RaeAnne Thayne
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CHAPTER 1
She was in a regular bloody mess.
Bound and gagged in the back of what she thought must be a rented lorry, Jane Withington bit the inside of both cheeks in a vain attempt to keep the panic at bay.
It didn’t work. Though she was gnawing hard enough to draw blood, savage fear still prowled in her chest, in her head, through her veins—doing a much better job of choking her than the dirty kerchief they had stuffed in her mouth.
How could she not panic? Any sane woman would, knowing she was on her way to certain death, all because she had never been any kind of a decent poker player.
She wouldn’t be in this mess if only she had selected a different Park City restaurant for dinner on her evening off from her duties as an interpreter at the International Trade Summit—if only she hadn’t been seated at the booth next to the quartet of men with the low, intense voices, one of whom she recognized, first by his voice and then when she confirmed her suspicions by a furtive look behind her on the pretext of dropping her serviette.
None of this would have happened if she had been able to sneak away without Simon Djami, the Vandelusian trade minister, seeing her—or if she wasn’t so damn brilliant with languages and didn’t know a word of Vandish, the obscure Southeast Asian dialect they were speaking.
But she did know Vandish. And she knew herself well enough to be certain she hadn’t been able to hide her shock and horror at what she heard them planning.
“All is in place,” one of the Vandish men had said, not even bothering to lower his voice.
“Ah, wonderful,” Simon Djami had said. “You have indeed pleased me, my friend. Months of preparation will result in this grand protest, all for the glory of Vandelusia. We will show them the people of Vandelusia are not puppets to be yanked about by godless, unclean western hands.”
“It is good you have bought the loyalty of your two FBI lapdogs. With their help we will have the nerve gas canister by Sunday night and will be ready to prepare the detonation device for Wednesday’s treaty signing.”
Nerve gas? Detonation devices? Good Lord, they were planning a terrorist attack.
The quite pleasant roast duckling she had been enjoying up to that point now congealed in her stomach in a big greasy ball. She had to get out of here, to warn someone!
It was just her bad luck that before she could frantically summon the waitress for her bill so she could escape, Djami walked past her on the way to the men’s room. Though she tried to hide behind the book she had brought to keep her company at dinner, she hadn’t moved quickly enough.
For one tiny instant, their gazes collided. As she looked into his cold eyes, she saw recognition flicker there—recognition of who she was and exactly what she must have overheard and understood.
She was likely the only person outside of those four men in the entire western United States who spoke Vandish, and in that cold gaze, she saw that her fate had been sealed.
Now, hours later, the lorry hit a deep bump suddenly and Jane gasped as the jarring movement smashed her against unforgiving metal. Her head connected with a crack and for an instant, pain and fear made her woozy. She blinked away the dizziness, then felt warmth trickle down her face. Was she bleeding? She had hit something sharp as she had been jostled against the lorry wall. A screw, perhaps?
She tried to rub her cheek against her shoulder but with her tightly bound hands behind her back, she didn’t have the range of motion necessary to staunch the dripping blood.
It seemed the last straw. The fear she had been trying so hard to contain growled and snapped at its leash.
She was utterly helpless in a crisis. Always had been. And this particular crisis was bound to paralyze her. All of this—the gag, the restraints, the awful fear—was too much like before, that terrible time she had fiercely tried to wipe from her memory, impossible though that task was.
Just as in her nightmares, she was fifteen again in a foreign country, in the midst of hostile, angry enemies, praying to whoever would listen to her pleas to extricate her. Then, as now, she was a pawn in a game much bigger than she was.
And then, just as now, she had been completely worthless, unable to focus on anything but the rampaging terror.
Oh, this was horrible. She wanted to curl up into a tight little ball and let the jostling of the lorry rock her to sleep. Dying would be so much less terrifying if she could only sleep through it.
Buck up, darling.
Though she knew it was only her imagination, she could suddenly hear her father’s voice in her ear, gruff and hearty and wonderful.
Be strong for me, Janie-girl. You know you’re clever enough to get yourself out of this.
She wasn’t strong, though, or particularly clever. Harry Withington had always been the brave one, the forceful one in their little family unit of two. She had so wanted to be like him, reckless and brash and bold. Even with the rest of the world exploding around him in chaos, Harry was inevitably a rock of stability and good sense in a storm-tossed sea. He thrived on those situations that tended to send her spiraling into panic.
Heaven knows, he spent his whole life seeking them out, traveling to all the world’s hotspots. She sometimes used to think he much preferred the tumult to the calm.
The thought of her father brought her once more directly to that memory she wanted so desperately to forget. The last time she saw him alive, he had given her much the same advice as he did now in her imagination. Buck up. Be strong for me. I’ll get you out, Janie-girl. You know I will.
He’d kept that promise as he did all his others—though in the end it had cost him his life, snuffing out all that strength and vitality forever.
She drew in a shuddering breath. She couldn’t think of that now, of her last view of her father while she ran for her life with a squadron of American and British commandos as Harry had been viciously attacked on all sides by her kidnappers.
If she couldn’t force that image from her mind, she would never find the courage to escape—and she had to get away, no matter what it took.
She didn’t want to die. Not here, not like this.
The lorry rattled across another bump and the door shook on its hinges, separating enough to let in a thin crack of moonlight.
Where were they? she wondered. They had started this journey on highway roads but some time ago her kidnappers had left the relative smoothness of pavement for this jerky, rutted dirt road. The stifling heat inside the lorry had abated somewhat, making her wonder if they had ascended into the coolness of the Utah mountains.
It would make a grim sort of sense. They would want to dispose of her body somewhere remote and isolated where she wouldn’t be quickly discovered.
She drew in another sharp breath through the acrid gag. Stop thinking about it and do something!
What, Harry?
Her mind raced as she considered her options. Another drop of blood tickled as it slid down her neck, and the sensation reminded her of the screw that had cut her head. If it was sharp enough to break through flesh, perhaps it could be used to sever the nylon cord securing her arms.
She rose on her knees as best she could, and with her bound hands she searched the general location where she had bumped the inside wall of the lorry. Long moments passed until at last the sharp edge poked the pad of her thumb.
Her heart pumping, Jane dragged her hands across it again and again. For what felt like hours, she fought the jostling of the vehicle until she felt the cord begin to fray. The minor success accelerated her efforts and a few frantic moments later her hands at last slipped free.
Sweet relief washed through her as she ripped away the gag and quickly worked the knotted cords around her ankles.
Good girl, her father’s voice in her head praised.
Now what? She sat back on her heels, considering her options. The lorry rattled over another bump and the rear doors jostled open again slightly, spilling that thin slice of moonlight inside.
Could she push them open from the inside? she wondered. It was worth a try. She had nothing to lose, after all.
She scrambled toward the doors, looking out that narrow window at the world outside. All she could see were trees—dark forests of evergreens and the spindly, ghostly trunks of aspens.
There were bound to be wild animals out there. Deer, elk, badgers. Did they have bears in this part of Utah? she wondered.
Jane gnawed at her lip. What a lowering reflection on her psyche that she found that vast, dark wilderness outside almost more terrifying than what inevitably awaited her at the end of this journey.
No. She was Harry Withington’s daughter. She couldn’t just cower and let these men kill her to hide their evil plans. For once in her cowardly life, she would force herself to draw on whatever tiny portion of courage and strength her father had passed on to her.
She knew nothing about cargo lorry doors but she had to assume these either weren’t bolted properly or the bolt had loosened from the rutted road, otherwise she likely wouldn’t be seeing this moonlight. At the next bump when the doors separated slightly, she threw all her weight against them. They quivered but held fast.
Come on, she prayed. To her everlasting relief, someone must have heard her. It shouldn’t have worked but by some miracle, it did. At the next rut, she pushed harder with her shoulder, pounding with every ounce of strength, and to her amazement, this time the bolt gave way and the doors flapped open.
Already in motion, Jane was unable to check her momentum. Newton’s first law—an object in motion remains in motion—and all that. Even Harry Withington’s daughter couldn’t fight the laws of physics. Her arms flailing for balance, she tumbled out the open doors of the lorry at an awkward sideways angle.
Nor could she catch herself in time to avoid the rugby-ball-size rock wedged into the dirt road.
Her head connected with a hollow thud and the terrifying Utah mountains faded to black.
* * *
For a man who had spent most of his adult life staring into the gaping maw of danger, dealing with two little kids ought to be a piece of cake.
So why did he feel as if every step he took led him further and further into a hazardous minefield of emotion? Mason Keller wondered as he gazed at the girl and boy in the seat next to him in his pickup truck, one so grave and quiet, the other fidgeting like he’d just sat in a nest of fire ants.
“English, Charlie,” he told the wiggler, trying his best to keep the weariness out of his tone at having to issue the too-frequent reminder to the boy again.
Charlie Betran sighed heavily, as if he carried the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders.
“Yes, sir. I forget,” he said, each word precise and carefully enunciated.
“I know you do. You’re doing great, though.” Mason’s smile encompassed both of them. Charlie smiled back but Miriam just gave him her usual solemn gaze.
Maybe he shouldn’t push the two so hard to learn English. He could speak their native language, if not fluently, at least conversationally. But he knew Charlie and his older sister Miriam would be in for a mighty lonely existence if they couldn’t communicate with their peers by the time school started in a few months.
“Why do we go on this road?” Charlie asked in English. “It is bumpy like a goat trail.”
“I told you earlier. We need to check on my cattle grazing up here and then we’re going fishing.”
“Why?”
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!”
