Back on Bittercreek Ranch

by RaeAnne Thayne

  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!”

  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.

  No name, no age, no nothing.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she wailed. “Why can’t I remember?”

  The two children exchanged a nervous look at her outburst. Though she regretted scaring them, she couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the pain in her head and her own burgeoning panic.

  “Don’t cry.” The little boy spoke in Tagalog as he patted her hand. “It will be okay. You’ll see. Mr. Mason will make it all better.”

  How perfectly ridiculous that she could find such comfort from this funny little creature with dark eyes and a win-some smile, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

  “Miriam,” the American said in English, his voice deep and somehow calming, despite the suspicion in his eyes, “take Charlie to the truck and wait there. We’ll be along in a minute.”

  The girl nodded and grabbed the boy’s hand, tugging him toward the pickup. She watched them climb inside the big cab, already missing the buffer they provided between her and this angry-looking stranger.

  “What’s happened to me?” she asked when she was once more alone with the man. “Why can’t I remember anything?”

  His silver-gray eyes narrowed with mistrust. “If this is some kind of game, lady, you won’t get away with it. I find you’re trying to play me, and you can bet I’ll be on you like a magpie on a June bug.”

  She wasn’t sure what a magpie or a June bug might be but she sensed the metaphor wasn’t intended to be pleasant. “It’s not a game, I swear to you. I can’t remember anything.”

  “You don’t have the first clue what you’re doing out here miles from anywhere? Come on. Think.”

  She would like to, but her brain seemed to have gone on holiday. Maybe she could hold a coherent thought if it weren’t for the excruciating pain squeezing her skull.

  She wanted nothing so much as to curl up again in the dirt until everything disappeared—the noisy truck growling behind her, this terrifying, suspicious American, and especially the hot stab of pain searing her skull.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I told you that. Why won’t you believe me?”

  He appeared to consider her question. “I’m not sure about the U.K.,” he finally said, his voice dry, “but here in America women don’t just drop out of the sky. How did you get here?”

  All she wanted was a lie-down. Her head seemed to be inhabiting another postal code entirely from the rest of her body and she absolutely did not want to be standing here in the middle of the wilderness exchanging words with an arrogant cowboy who seemed determined to think the worst of her.

  “I don’t know,” she repeated, pain and frustration and that skulking panic making her testy. “Perhaps I was abducted by little green spacemen who sucked out my memory before conking me on the head and tossing me out of their flying saucer.”

  He gazed at her out of those suspicious gray eyes for another moment and then she could almost swear she saw fleeting amusement flicker in his expression. At this point, she wasn’t sure she really cared. Her small moment of defiant sarcasm seemed to have sapped her last bit of energy. She could feel herself sway and took a deep breath, forcing her knees, spine and shoulders to stiffen on the exhale.

  “I’m sorry to have troubled you.” She tried for as much dignity as she could muster. “If you could be so kind as to point me in the direction of the nearest town, I’ll just be on my way.”

  He stared at her in disbelief for about half a minute then shook his head. “The nearest town is about seven miles that way on a dirt logging road. You really think you’re up for that kind of hike in your condition?”

  Daunted but determined, she nodded. “Certainly.”

  She could only wish her knees weren’t so damned wobbly and her head wasn’t throbbing like a finger slammed into an automobile door. She managed to take about five shaky steps before the American gave a put-upon sounding sigh and scooped her into his arms.

  Her head whirled as the rapid shift in position exhausted all remaining equilibrium.

  “Excuse me!” she still managed to exclaim hotly.

  “You really think I’m going to let an injured, delusional Brit loose in these mountains? You need a doctor.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but she couldn’t seem to form any coherent thought, not when the cowboy held her so close. Heat radiated from him and he smelled earthy and masculine, of leather and sandalwood and something else ineffable.

  Anyway, it was ridiculous to squabble with the man, especially when he was perfectly right. She wasn’t sure she could have made it another step, much less trudged seven miles to the nearest town.

  Her eyes drifted closed as he carried her to the large vehicle. Though she told herself it was to hold the vertigo at bay, in truth she was aware of a wonderful—but supremely foolish—sense of safety in his arms.

  The cowboy opened the passenger door to the lorry and ordered the children to slide over, then set her inside with a careful gentleness that for some ridiculous reason brought tears to her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He paused, studying her with an inscrutable look, then with an odd sigh he closed the door, walked around the vehicle and climbed inside. He worked the gears and the lorry surged forward. A moment later he had turned the huge beast around and they were headed in the opposite direction.

  They rode in silence for several long moments. Through the ache in her head, she was aware of furtive looks sliding in her direction with some frequency from the two younger occupants of the vehicle.

  They were darling children, small and slender with huge dark eyes. Given their use of Tagalog, she had to assume they were Filipino and she wondered what they were doing with this large, formidable man.

  “I am Miriam Betran,” the girl said after a few more moments. She spoke in solemn, careful English, as polite as if she were performing introductions at a garden party. “This is my brother, Charlie. I am nine, he is only five.”

  “Almost six,” the little boy piped up.

  “Hello,” she replied, wishing she had some kind of name to offer in return.

  “Our mama and papa are dead. Mr. Mason says he is our papa now. That is why we come to United States.”

  She shifted her gaze to Mr. Mason and saw a muscle twitch in that masculine jaw. He offered no explanation and she couldn’t summon the energy to request one, even if any of this had been her business.

  “Thank you for helping me, Mr. Mason,” she said instead.

  “Just Mason. Mason Keller.”

  “Are you a cowboy, Mr. Keller?”

  His mouth curved slightly. “Something like that. My family ranch is on the other side of these mountains.”

  “I’m sure it’s lovely,” she murmured.

  “I don’t know about that. Mostly sagebrush and dust. But I like it.”

  She wanted to answer but couldn’t seem to make her brain communicate with her mouth to squeeze the words out. She also couldn’t for the life of her figure out why she was so drowsy suddenly but her eyelids seemed to weigh five stone each.

  The urge to close them was overwhelming. Perhaps only for a moment, just long enough to ease the strain a bit….

  She must have drifted to sleep. Her dreams were full of fear that tasted like bile in her mouth and the rapid pulse of blood through her veins. She needed to run, to get away. From what?

  A sudden cessation of sound and movement finally awakened her,
to her vast relief. She opened her eyes and found her escort had parked before a small single-story building of pale-red brick. A carved wooden sign out front proclaimed the structure to contain the Moose Springs Medical Clinic. Below it was the name Dr. Lauren Maxwell.

  “She is awake, I think,” the boy pointed out, peering around his sister to be sure.

  “Yes. I’m awake. I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

  “It would really make my day if you could tell me you woke with crystal-clear memory of who you are and what you were doing in the Uintas,” Mason Keller said.

  She poked around in her mind again but found it empty beyond that moment earlier when she had opened her eyes and found him staring down at her. That beastly panic returned to gnaw at her control. “No,” she whispered, her head still pounding.

  He blew out a resigned breath. “Yeah, I figured that’s what you’d say. Let’s go see if Lauren can fix you up.”

  “The doctor is nice,” Charlie confided in Tagalog. “She gives candy if you do not cry.”

  She had to smile at the little boy, despite the nerves fluttering in her stomach. “I’ll try not to cry, then,” she responded.

  The something-like-that cowboy climbed out of the truck then moved around to her side to open the door. He reached a hand inside to help her out and she had to admit she was grateful. Without his assistance she would have stumbled on knees that seemed as wobbly as a bowl of pudding.

  The medical clinic was airy and bright, painted a cheerful yellow. The reception area seemed empty of patients but two women stood talking behind a desk, a matronly brunette who looked to be in her fifties and one at least a couple of decades younger, wearing jeans and a casual T-shirt.

  She would have guessed the older woman to be the doctor but soon learned her error. The young woman’s features lit up when she saw Mason and the children, and she came out into the reception area through a door to the left of the desk.

  She smiled at the children, touching Miriam gently on the shoulder. “Hey, kids. Great to see you again!”

  The girl gave her a tiny smile in return, but Charlie turned suddenly shy, hiding behind the tall cowboy.