Читать книгу Marching Orders - Delores Fossen, Delores Fossen - Страница 13

Anna’s hands throbbed from the death grip she had on the gun. A dull ache drummed in her head, and her heart. What was left of her breath was lodged in her throat.

But those were the least of her worries.

Aches and throbs were nothing in the grand scheme of things. Not when her world had just spun completely out of control.

She tried to blink back the tears but failed. One slid down her cheek, and she feared others would follow.

“You’re, uh…” He let out a ragged breath. “Pregnant?”

Anna nodded, not risking her voice. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that. It’d been a secret, something wonderful and precious that she’d hoped to share with Rafe on their honeymoon. Instead, she’d shared it with this man.

This stranger.

He reached behind him, fumbled around until he located the bed, then sank down onto the mattress. He groaned and buried his face in his hand.

“Pregnant,” he repeated. “Judas freaking priest! Why didn’t somebody bother to tell me before now?”

His reaction confused her even more. He seemed far more concerned about her pregnancy than the fact she’d just discovered that he was an imposter.

“Who are you?” Anna asked.

He looked up at her and mumbled some words of frustration. “Why don’t you put the gun down, and then we’ll talk?”

“No.” She had no intention of letting go of that gun. Not anytime soon. She already felt vulnerable enough standing there in the flimsy gown that she’d put on for what was supposed to be her wedding night.

Oh, God.

Her wedding night. And this man was supposed to be her husband. He wasn’t. Anna was sure of that. But it suddenly didn’t matter who he was. Because if he was there with her, then where was Rafe?

“Is Rafe dead?” She dreaded the question, but dreaded the answer even more.

He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. “I knew this would happen. I just knew it.”

That didn’t do a thing to ease that ache. “Is he dead?” she repeated.

“No. Hell no.”

She believed him. Or maybe she just wanted to believe him. It didn’t matter. Anna latched on to that thread of hope. Rafe was alive, and as long as he was alive, somehow she would find him.

He opened his eyes, and his gaze snapped to hers. “I have to call someone. I’d rather you not shoot me when I try to do that. Deal?”

The almost arrogant request didn’t sit well with her. Of course, at this point nothing would sit well except maybe to see the real Rafe come walking through the door.

“I’m not in a deal-making kind of mood.” Anna raised the gun so he’d remember that she was the one in charge here. “Where’s Rafe?”

He tapped his forehead. “Right here, darling. And before we start a game of twenty questions, Colonel Shaw needs to know about this, understand?”

So, Colonel Shaw was in on this—whatever this was. It made the cut even deeper since she’d known him since she was a child. It didn’t help, either, that she was holding a gun on a man who was a dead ringer for someone that she loved more than life itself.

Ignoring her and the weapon, he snatched up the phone and punched in some numbers. Anna didn’t have time to threaten him again, and from his resolute expression, it wouldn’t have mattered. If this man was some spy, or some enemy combat specialist, then he likely knew that she couldn’t pull the trigger.

Not with that too-familiar face staring at her.

It would be like shooting Rafe.

“We’ve got a huge problem,” he said into the phone, then hung up. “Colonel Shaw will be here in a few minutes,” he relayed to her.

“I don’t want to wait for him. I want answers now. Why are you doing this? Who are you, and what have you done with Rafe?”

He began to button his shirt. What he didn’t do was even spare her a glance. “That’s a real long story. Best to put away that gun before you do something we’d both regret.”

“I won’t regret shooting you if you’ve harmed Rafe,” she informed him.

He laughed, a short burst of sound, but there was no enjoyment in it. “God, you do love him, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for her to confirm it. “Believe me, I’m sorry about that. Sorry about the pregnancy, about everything. If I could have done this a different way, I would have. You deserve better than this.”

Anna pushed his apology aside. “Where is he?”

She’d meant to make that question sound more like a demand, but her voice crumbled. More tears welled up in her eyes. It was hard to stay resolute when her heart was breaking into a thousand pieces.

“Please,” Anna begged. “I need to know what’s happened to him.”

He lifted his hands in a why-me gesture. “I didn’t lie about that.” He tapped his forehead again. “He’s here. I’m here. Things are just a little messed up right now.”

She shook her head, not understanding. A whirlwind of emotions went through her. Fear. Doubt. Dread. Mostly dread. If this was Rafe, then obviously something terrible had happened. “Did they brainwash you?”

“Not exactly.” He motioned toward the gun.

“Look, why don’t you put that down—”

“Not until you answer me, damn it!”

“All right.” He stood and crammed his hands deep into his pockets. He didn’t avoid looking her in the eye this time. “You want the story? Well, here it is. My captors used a so-called truth serum. A nasty barbiturate cocktail that did a real number on me and some of my brain cells. It had an unexpected side effect—retrograde memory loss—and the neurologist here at the base hasn’t been able to reverse it.”

She stared at him, afraid to feel relief that Rafe was alive, after all. “You have amnesia?”

He angled his head back and grimaced. “No. Well, not in the strictest sense of the word. Basically, I can remember everything except the last year of my life.”

The last year. Twelve months. That didn’t take long to sink in.

“We’ve known each other only a little more than a year,” Anna mumbled.

He nodded.

And that brought her to the next logical conclusion. “You don’t remember me?”

“No. Not really.”

He didn’t add anything to that for several long moments. Anna didn’t dare try to speak. She just stood there, the gun gripped in her hand, and waited while her world fell apart.

“I remember meeting you right after I was stationed at Stennis Air Force Base,” Rafe continued.

“When I reported in to Colonel Shaw, you were in his office. You’d stopped by to tell him about a big assignment you’d just gotten.”

Yes. She remembered. And that was several weeks prior to Rafe’s and her first date.

Because she had no choice, Anna dropped down into the chair across from him. She fought hard to keep what little composure she had left. “Why didn’t you tell me? Rafe, you married me, and you don’t even know who I am.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. And shook his head. What he didn’t do was offer anything else. No explanations. No assurances. Nothing.

There was a sharp knock on the door. The sound rifled through the silence and sent her stomach to her knees.

“That’ll be Colonel Shaw,” Rafe said. He glanced at the door and then at the gun. “It’s a good time to put that away.”

He was right. The gun wouldn’t solve any of this. Maybe nothing would. She was married to a man who didn’t even know her.

Anna slowly released the grip she had on his pistol. Rafe eased it from her hand and placed it back in the holster on the nightstand.

There was another knock, but he ignored it. Standing over her, he reached out and brushed his knuckles over her cheek.

Anna flinched. “Don’t,” she insisted.

She had no idea what she should be feeling, but she knew for certain that she didn’t want Rafe or anyone else to touch her. Too bad just looking at him caused her body to betray her. She had to battle the urge not to lean into his touch. To lean on him. Somehow, she had to convince her body that this wasn’t the man her heart had fallen in love with.

He picked up his dark blue mess dress jacket from the foot of the bed and draped it around her shoulders. Only then did Anna remember that she had on just a nightgown. A nearly transparent one. She slipped her arms into the sleeves and hugged it to her so she was at least partly covered.

The jacket smelled like Rafe.

That too-familiar scent stirred an ache deep inside her and spelled out the hard reality of her situation. The man she loved hadn’t come home to her, after all.

Rafe answered the door, and she heard him whisper something to the colonel before Shaw entered. She didn’t look at either of them. She couldn’t. Anna kept her attention focused on the medals on the jacket.

“Pregnant?” Shaw whispered.

The barely audible conversation continued for several minutes, but Anna didn’t even try to listen. She hated that the intimate details of her life were now part of some official discussion between two men she wasn’t sure she could trust.

“I’m sorry, Anna,” Shaw volunteered. “I didn’t know about the baby. And I’d hoped things wouldn’t have to come to this.”

It wasn’t the right thing to say. Her fear instantly turned to anger. “Did you think I was so stupid that I couldn’t figure out something was wrong?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Shaw placed his hand on her shoulder. “We’d hoped that the blank spots in Rafe’s memory would correct themselves by now.”

“Blank spots,” she repeated through slightly clenched teeth. The man was batting a thousand on the worst possible things to say. “I’m a blank spot, Colonel. And so is this baby I’m carrying. How the heck could you have let me go through with the wedding when you knew Rafe didn’t remember me? I thought we were friends.”

“We are.” Shaw stepped around the chair where she was seated and stood in front of her. “Rafe was only following orders. My orders.”

Anna looked at Rafe, but he didn’t verify that. In fact, he kept his expression blank just as he’d done in the church during the attack.

“I can’t explain everything that you probably want to know,” the colonel continued. “But I can tell you that this is all part of a classified mission that involves other hostages—two CROs—who are being held by the same group of rebels who had Rafe.”

Her fingers stilled on the Purple Heart medal that she was fondling. “What could our wedding possibly have to do with that?”

Rafe turned and faced her. “I have information the rebel leader, Len Quivira, wants to make a swap for those two hostages.” He paused, glanced at the colonel, and Shaw nodded. “But there’s a problem—I don’t remember the information he wants. If he learns that, then he’ll execute the men he’s holding.”

Anna hadn’t thought things could get worse, but he proved her wrong. She clutched the jacket against her heart. It was as if she’d awakened in the middle of a nightmare. God. People’s lives were at stake just as Rafe’s had been only days earlier.

Shaw took up the explanation where Rafe left off. “The wedding had to go on as planned so we could make it seem as if everything was back to normal. The neurologist thinks Rafe’s memory loss is temporary, that he should regain everything in the next couple of days.”

“And if it’s not temporary?” Anna asked.

Shaw never even hesitated. “We’re working out a contingency plan. But we need some time.”

Yes, and that’s what her wedding had bought them. Time. Too bad it’d bought her much more than that. She was married to a man who didn’t have a clue who she was. And she was pregnant with his child. A child he didn’t even know he’d fathered. Heck, he hadn’t remembered even making love to her.

She tried to bolster her expression before she looked at Rafe. A nearly impossible task. Everything about him—his face, his voice, his hands—everything reminded her that he was the man she loved. The man she wanted. And yet he wasn’t that man at all.

“You could have told me all of this,” she insisted.

“I would have gone through with the pretense of the wedding to protect those men.”

“We couldn’t risk that,” Shaw explained.

“But you could risk this?” She gestured toward the champagne and the bed. “Did you order Rafe to sleep with me as well?”

“No,” the two men said in unison. It was Rafe who continued. “Buchanan was going to come over here with some bogus emergency. He’d have stayed until morning.”

“Well, that would have taken care of ten hours or so. And then what, huh?”

Rafe shrugged. “And then there would have been another fake emergency, and then another, until either my memory returned or until we managed to free the hostages. I wouldn’t have slept with you.”

That confession didn’t do a thing to ease the ache in her heart. “Well, we’ll never know, will we?” she snapped.

Rafe met her gaze head on. “I know.” He turned away from her and strolled toward the window. “I’m attracted to you. Maybe more than attracted, and I don’t need a memory to tell me that. But I wouldn’t have acted on that attraction without you knowing the truth.”

She swallowed hard. Even with the memory loss, he still felt the heat simmering between them. Heck, so did she. Anna cursed herself. Even now, she felt it. It was like a fire always smoldering inside her. That didn’t mean, however, she would give in to it. After all, he’d lied to her about one of the most important things a person could lie about.

Colonel Shaw caught onto her hand. “We wouldn’t have done things this way if there weren’t so much at stake.”

No, she didn’t imagine he would. But she could guess where the rest of this conversation was leading. “What do you want me to do—pretend I’m Mrs. Rafe McQuade?”

“For starters,” the colonel said, “I need three days to put a plan into action. I can’t negotiate with Quivira. That’s against foreign policy. So, I’m stalling him, but he’s suspicious because he knows what those truth drugs are capable of doing. Even if Rafe’s memory returns, I probably can’t trade that information for the hostages. In other words, I need a way to get my men out of there and put Quivira out of commission. All I’m asking is that you give me some time.”

It was essentially an ultimatum. One she couldn’t refuse. Either she continued this charade, or else she’d be responsible in part for those men’s deaths.

Rafe was still at the window. He turned toward her and caught her gaze. The look that went through his eyes had her shivering. And aching.

Rather than speculate with a dozen different scenarios, none of which she’d probably like, Anna took the direct approach. “There’s more?”

Rafe took a deep breath and strolled toward her. “We have an informant within the rebels’ organization.”

Anna shook her head. “Well, that doesn’t sound like bad news—”

“The rebels plan to kidnap you,” Rafe interrupted. “They want to use you for leverage to make sure I cooperate.”

That nearly knocked the breath out of her. “Oh, God.” Anna slid her hand protectively over her stomach. “When? How?”

“They won’t get to you,” Rafe assured her.

“That’s why we’re here. I won’t leave you unguarded until all of this is over.”

It was too much for her to absorb. Anna blinked back the tears and cursed them. How had things gotten so twisted? A few hours ago, she was a happy bride. Now not only did her husband not remember her, they were all in danger. That included her baby.

“I know this is a shock, but here’s what I need you to do,” the colonel explained. “Tomorrow afternoon, Rafe and you will drive out to his aunt and uncle’s cabin in the Hill Country near Canyon Lake. No one’s using the place so you’ll stay there until the situation with the hostages is contained.”