he had been following me that closely, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. He wouldn’t have waited until I got here. I’ve been damn careful—which you may not believe since you almost pulverized me.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I said before, I know that you could have stopped me. You just didn’t want to hit a woman. It sounds like you’re involved in some serious stuff, right up to your chin. Are you bringing trouble to my brother and Mike and Jonah?” she asked bluntly.
“That’s the last thing I want to do, which is why I went to so much trouble to keep my tracks covered and to slip into this house and contact Mike at night when no one else would see me. I don’t want to increase the danger to any of them.”
“’Increase the danger,’ she repeated with arched eyebrows. “So why did you come then? Why do you want to see them?” she asked with curiosity.
He knew she was worried about her brother. “I need to warn Mike, Jonah and Boone. I know I’m in danger. I think the three of them might be in danger, too.”
Chapter 2
“Why would they be in danger?” Isabella demanded, chilled enough to rub her arms. Colin’s smoke-colored eyes were as cold as marble. None of her brother’s and his Special Forces friends were prone to exaggeration and she might not have seen Colin in years, but she doubted the man would be here without a good reason.
“All of them have been out of the military, away from that life, for a long time now,” she commented while Colin ate his dinner. “They have their lives and have been in the spotlight with this inheritance. Their lives are open and if anyone wanted to find them, it would be an easy thing.”
“It’s something that goes back to the explosion when everyone thought I’d been killed.” Putting down his fork, he gazed beyond her, a distant look coming to his eyes as if he had forgotten her existence or even where he was. “I died then in many ways,” he said so quietly that she had to lean closer to hear him; she was certain he had forgotten her presence.
“For a long time, I didn’t want to live.” With each word his voice grew more harsh, increasing the coldness surrounding her. “I still don’t care if I live or not, but I’m concerned about my friends. I don’t want anything to happen to them.”
As he talked, she studied his rugged yet appealing features. She had seen all the scars on his chest and back, but he was lean and muscular and looked incredibly fit. She was responding to him physically in a way she shouldn’t be. For all she knew, the man was married. Yet he certainly was sexy, dressed in black from head to toe. Dangerous and tough. There was no denying what those smoke-colored eyes could do to her pulse….
“That last mission I was on was covert. The four of us were to rescue an agent who had been taken hostage by a criminal terrorist.”
She remained silent. Boone never talked about his missions, especially that one, and she had only a sketchy knowledge of what had happened five years ago.
“I was the first to get to the building where they held the hostage. The other guys were behind me. As I went in, someone detonated a bomb. The hostage and I were closest to it.”
“That’s dreadful!” she exclaimed, half not wanting to hear what had happened and half of her needing to know.
“Someone had tipped the guys off. If the bomb had blown seconds later, all of us would have been killed.”
“But why didn’t anyone know you were alive?”
“When the car bomb exploded, I was directly in its path. The others knew they had to run for it. Mike, Jonah and Boone probably would have looked for me, but they saw me take the blast. They had to run for it. From what I pieced together later, the news reports had listed five men killed in the explosion, one unidentified. So, they would have assumed I was dead.
“From what I learned later, when the local authorities found us,” Colin continued, “they thought I was dead, but then someone detected a heartbeat so they rushed me to a hospital.”
His attention returned to Isabella and he focused on her as if realizing her presence again. “I was told all that much later. I had amnesia and to this day do not remember one thing from the moment of explosion until long afterward. Long, long afterward.”
“Colin, I’m sorry,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand. Instantly his fingers closed over hers and he held her hand firmly, his gray eyes focusing intently on her. Electricity streaked from his touch over every cell in her body.
“You make me feel like I’m home even more than when I saw my family and really was at home.”
“I don’t know how that can be,” she answered, her pulse quickening. She had reached out in sympathetic gesture, but the instant his hand had closed over hers and he’d looked at her, the contact transformed into a fiery, physical awareness. She didn’t react this way to other men and she didn’t want such a response with a man who was danger personified. Besides, as she dimly recalled, Colin had a fiancée in his past.
He was not wearing a wedding ring, but she would not be surprised to hear that he was married by now.
“Why didn’t you let your family know you were alive?”
He dropped her hand. “It’s a long story,” he said in a tone so filled with bitterness she was sorry she had asked.
“So you got over the amnesia,” she prompted, wanting to hear the rest of his story and why her brother and his friends might be in danger.
“Somewhat,” he said, taking another bite of potato. “I remember most everything except the explosion and a couple of weeks afterward.”
“That was a long time ago. Why does it matter now?”
“The ringleader of the terrorists escaped the blast, but I’m sure he doesn’t want me to live—I’m the witness who can identify him if I can just remember what went down. My memory is gone. No one knows when it might fully return. If it does, I may also know enough to identify a double agent who was involved. Someone tipped the terrorists about our plan to rescue the hostage, who was a U.S. agent. There’s a good chance the spy was one of our own men and he wants me dead.”
“How do you know a double agent was involved?”
“Someone had that meeting set up to kill us and the hostage. If we had all gone in together as we’d originally planned, they would’ve succeeded. Someone arranged things a little too well—it had to be an inside job.”
She shivered. “That’s dreadful. Someone you worked with set all of you up?”
“Right. The CIA suspect they have a double agent high up in the ranks. Secrets are getting out that have hurt them. Men like us have been killed because their cover has been blown.”
“That’s dreadful, but if my brother and Mike and Jonah weren’t there with you and the hostage, why are they in danger?”
“For that, we need to go back to when I was injured. After the explosion, I was in a foreign hospital for over a year. It was a while before I knew who I was.”
“You were an American. Didn’t they try to contact someone about you?” she asked.
