name.
“All right, then, let’s take a look.”
Jane sat quietly while the doctor looked her over. “This cut on your face looks superficial,” she said. “I imagine it stung quite a bit but I don’t believe you’ll have a scar. I think I’ll order a tetanus shot under the circumstances, just to be safe.”
The doctor shifted attention to the bump on her head and Jane couldn’t contain a gasp at the pain at her gentle probing.
“I’m sorry. I’ll leave it alone now.” She stepped away. You said you don’t remember anything at all before Mason found you?”
Terror.
The bitter, metallic taste of fear in her mouth.
I have to get out of here. Help me. Oh, help me.
The impression slammed into her out of nowhere. She caught her breath, grateful she was sitting down.
“No,” she finally managed, frightened by the strength of the memory but somehow loathe to share it with the other woman.
The doctor studied her. “You’re obviously British, though you might be an expatriate, I suppose. Do you have any idea at all what you might be doing in our little neck of the woods?”
“No. It’s as if there’s a huge closet in my mind with all those memories jumbled away. I know it’s there. It has to be. But I can’t manage to fit the right key.”
She paused, then finally voiced the question that had haunted her since she’d opened her eyes on the road and found Mason Keller standing over her. “Doctor, will I ever remember?”
“I’m afraid I can’t give you a straight answer to that. All I can tell you is that you appear to have suffered a nasty head injury. It wouldn’t be unusual for such an injury to result in some degree of memory loss, but whether that’s permanent or not, I can’t say. I’m sorry.”
Jane hugged her arms around herself, cold suddenly even though the room’s temperature was comfortable.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. I’d like to take an X-ray and possible CT scan, just so we know for sure what we’re dealing with, all right?”
Jane nodded, though she doubted any medical test could explain away the fear that seemed to simmer just below the surface.
“It sure is good to have you back in town, Mase.” Lauren’s receptionist Coralee Jenkins beamed at him, her wide features friendly and open. “I know you were doing important work in the military—your dad was mighty proud of you for it—but we missed you while you were gone.”
Mason had to force himself to smile politely. The last topic of conversation he wanted to dig into was what he’d been doing with himself while he was away from Moose Springs.
He had always liked Coralee. He’d even dated her daughter for a few months back in high school, and Coralee and her husband Bruce had always gone out of their way to treat him better than an obnoxious punk like him had deserved.
Still, he had to wonder what Lauren’s receptionist would have to say if he filled her naive little ears full of his real activities during the last dozen years instead of the politely vague cover he provided to family and friends.
In her quiet, safe world, she would probably never believe the kid who had stoically endured a thirty-minute lecture from Bruce after he’d returned Sherry home fifteen minutes past curfew could spend more than a decade submerged deep in a shifting world of lies and deceptions.
Coralee would understand little of that world—and he had to admit, that’s just the way he liked it.
“How’s Sherry these days?” he asked, keeping one eye on Charlie and Miriam watching a television set in the corner of the waiting room where SpongeBob SquarePants was frying up Krabby Patties.
The question diverted Coralee, as he’d hoped. Her eyes lit up and she reached for a framed photograph on her desk. She handed it over the counter to him and he studied the picture for any trace of the perky, flirtatious cheerleader he’d dated in the suburbanite who beamed back at him, flanked by a handsome balding man and a trio of red-haired kids. He couldn’t see much resemblance to that girl he’d known, except maybe for a little devilish light in her eyes.
“Great,” Coralee said with a proud smile. “Just great. Married to an Ob/Gyn in Utah County and she keeps plenty busy raising my three grandkids. Aren’t they something? The baby just turned two. He’s a handful, I’ll tell you. Keeps her running all day.”
She went on to detail Sherry’s soccer-mom lifestyle that seemed completely foreign to him, but he surprised himself by managing to carry on a halfway coherent conversation anyway.
Adaptation.
That was the key to being a good counterintelligence agent. His first lessons after being recruited from the Army Rangers had focused on learning how to conform to his surroundings, to blend in and appear part of the landscape, whether that was a crowded Manila bar or a tiny fishing village in Mindanao.
He had been good at that part of the job. Whoever would have thought that subterfuge and deceit would come so naturally to a hick cowboy from Utah?
He had spent so long trying to be someone else, it was sometimes hard to remember who he was.
“Speaking of kids,” Coralee said suddenly, “those sure are a couple of cute ones you brought back with you.”
He ignored the blatant opening she gave him to spill the details he was sure she hankered after about Charlie and Miriam.
The Moose Springs gossip line was no doubt buzzing like crazy when he’d showed up after all these years with a couple of Filipino kids. A few trusted friends knew as much of the story as he could freely tell, but the rest of the town probably had all kinds of ideas about where Charlie and Miriam came from.
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
