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.
