“That’s what your belt buckle says—probably a clothing brand. But I had to call you something.” June helped him lift his damp T-shirt over his head.
“Great.” His lips almost curved, then he sighed heavily, closing his eyes as he leaned back into the pillows.
His torso was sun-browned, as if he made a habit of working outdoors without a shirt. And his large hands were calloused—a man of physical labor, or a rancher perhaps? June didn’t peg this guy as the poolside-or beach-tanning type.
A thick scar curved down one side of his waist, as if he’d been gored by something. Another scar snaked up the inside of his arm.
June frowned. A violent life, or a bad accident of some kind?
But apart from the old scars there were no fresh swellings or lacerations that she could ascertain.
His chest hair was dark. June’s gaze followed the whorl of hair that ran down his washboard abs and disappeared seductively into his low-slung jeans. She needed to get him out of those wet pants, and the idea suddenly made her think of sex, which was ludicrous. She was a trained paramedic. The human body was part of her job. She never reacted like this.
Nevertheless, this rugged mountain man was doing it for her, and it made her uneasy.
She glanced up at his face. His eyes were closed, and he was breathing deeply, rhythmically, his bare chest rising and falling. He had a fine scar across his chin, too, and crinkles fanned out from his eyes—smile lines and sad lines. Deep brackets framed his mouth…a beautifully shaped, wide mouth. She couldn’t help noticing. Or imagining what it might feel like to have those lips brush hers.
She cleared her throat. “I’m going to get you out of your boots and jeans. Is that okay, Jesse?”
No response. Worry washed softly through her again, and inside her heart compassion blossomed.
She shook his shoulder. “Jesse?”
He nodded, eyes still closed.
“Are you just exhausted, or do you have pain anywhere else?”
“Tired,” he whispered. “Just…really tired.”
June removed his boots and wet socks and quickly unbuckled his belt once more. She edged his pants down over his hips and swallowed.
His thighs were large, all muscle, his legs in stunning shape apart from a massive scar across his left knee—looked as if he’d had some kind of surgery there.
She covered him with a soft blanket, pointedly ignoring the dark flare of hair between his thighs and trying not to think about how well-endowed he was. She put his wet boots in front of the cast-iron stove and hung his jeans over the back of a chair to dry. Flames glowed in the little stove window, and June realized she was perspiring, pulse racing.
She ran her hand over her damp hair, feeling edgy, perturbed. She hadn’t wanted sex since she’d lost Matt and had thrown herself wholly into cult and rescue work. And she preferred it that way. It helped her stay focused. She needed every ounce of her focus right now because that dark and rugged stranger lying naked on her bed could represent everything she’d devoted her life to fighting—he could be a cult enforcer, violent and potentially deadly to everyone she was trying to protect in this safe house.
June returned to his bedside and looked at him. He wore no wedding band, no jewelery, nothing that could clue her in to his identity. Apart from his watch. She removed it and studied it. It was high-tech, complete with altimeter, barometer and compass, the kind of equipment a serious outdoor enthusiast would wear. Her thoughts turned to his GPS and the route he’d save on it. She made a mental note to get it out of her pack and go through it thoroughly later.
“Do you need anything else?”
June spun round, startled by the male voice.
It was Davis. The middle-aged man had entered the room, placed a pile of clean clothes on the chair next to the bed.
June’s face felt hot. “Thanks, Davis. I think we should get someone out to stand guard at the canyon entrance for a while—I’m worried Samuel’s men might come looking for this guy, if he is actually one of them, and stumble upon our passageway. Can you do it?”
Davis looked at her oddly. “Are you okay, June?”
“I’m fine,” she said a little too crisply. Then she rubbed her brow. “I’m just really worried about Lacy and the twins. I should have found them by now. I—”
“You will find them, June. If anyone can, it’s you and Eager.”
Emotion surged into her eyes, and the burden of responsibility she’d undertaken, the amount of trust these people put in her, was suddenly overwhelming.
“Thanks, Davis.”
“I’ll take the first watch. Brad can replace me.”
“Don’t forget to take a radio. And one of the shotguns.”
He paused at the door. “You really think they’ll come?”
She glanced at Jesse. “I hope not.”
I hope I haven’t made the biggest mistake in my life by bringing him here.
“Make sure Molly has a receiving radio tuned in to the right frequency. Tell her to keep it with her at all times and to pass it on to someone else if she wants to sleep.”
Davis closed the door behind him as he left.
* * *
June busied herself cleaning and disinfecting the wounds on Jesse’s head and leg. She administered local anesthetic, stitched him up and applied dressing. He remained conscious but in a state of exhausted half sleep, which both puzzled and worried her.
She put dry track pants on him and took a moment to study the tattoo on his hip again.
With surprise she realized the D was fresh—maybe only seven to ten days old, the skin around the ink still pink and slightly inflamed.
She frowned. This didn’t fit the picture for one of Samuel’s henchmen. The enforcers Samuel used tended to be solidly entrenched Devotees who’d proved themselves to him and demonstrated they were able and prepared to defend Samuel’s empire violently. Or, at least, those were the henchmen she knew of.
June’s chest tightened with conflict as she covered the stranger with more blankets. She packed up her first-aid kit, and suddenly a wave of fatigue hit hard. She told herself it was just the adrenaline wearing off. She still had to go out and look for Lacy and the twins—she’d start along the west flank where she and Eager had found Jesse and his gun. There was no way she’d be able to put in even a cursory appearance with Fargo’s search party at this late stage of the morning, so she’d spend her time searching solo with her K9.
Molly entered the room carrying a tray with a bowl of steaming vegetable soup. She eyed Jesse with hostility as she set the tray on the table next to the bed.
June shook his shoulder, gently rousing him. “Jesse—Molly brought you some soup. I think you should get some warmth into you.”
His thick lashes fluttered and he turned his head from side to side.
* * *
He could hear her voice—soft, sexy, feminine—as if it were coming from a faraway place with warm light. He felt her hand on his bare shoulder—her skin soft, cool. So feminine. He struggled to swim up to full consciousness—to her—and his eyes fluttered open. But everything was a hazy blur, bright. Then slowly, the room came into focus. And he saw her, sitting beside his bed.
An angel. With flaming-red hair. Beautiful, fine-boned features. Porcelain-pale skin brushed by freckles, eyes the color of a pale summer sky that reminded him of the sound of bees and lawn mowers and watermelon by the pool. Her mouth was full, wide. Kissable.
He frowned, trying to place her face, his memories of summers past.
And, as he pulled things into focus, he realized her red hair was damp, tendrils drying in soft spirals around her face. The rest was pulled back in a braid, and there were bits of leaves stuck in it.
He remembered now—it had been pouri
ng. She’d had a peaked cap on when she’d found him, and a headlamp, shining down into his face. Where was he?
He tried to get up. But she gently placed her hand on his shoulder, her willowy body belying a resilient strength he could sense in her touch, see in her clear eyes. He sagged back into the pillows, feeling as though he’d been hit by a ten-ton truck. His head throbbed. His leg hurt—his whole body felt stiff.
“Christ, what happened to me?”
“You fell down a ravine, hit your head and gashed your leg. I’ve sewn you up and the injuries look fine, but you need to take it easy, Jesse. You’ve lost blood.”
Jesse. That’s right—she’d named him Jesse because he couldn’t the hell remember who he was, where he was going or where he’d come from. Despair sank into him, along with a bite of frustration.
She was watching him intently. So was the young woman with straight mousey-blond hair she’d referred to as Molly. The kid looked hostile.
What did the redheaded angel with the porcelain skin say her name was…June. She’d said she worked as a part-time paramedic in a town called Cold Plains. Thank God—he wasn’t completely brain-dead. And he could recall hiking with her assistance through a narrowing rock canyon, into a cave and a tunnel. After that his memory was black again.
Cold Plains. Why did the name of that town seem so familiar, yet not? Another name came to him. Samuel Grayson. Tension reared up inside Jesse along with a gnawing urgency. He struggled to sit up—he had to go somewhere, but he couldn’t recall where, and it had something to do with a man named Samuel Grayson.
June pressed him gently back against the pillows. “Do you recall those three words I gave you earlier, Jesse?”
What words? Oh, wait…he did remember. He cleared his throat “Radio, belt and—” he gave a wry smile “—Jesse.”
“Your short-term memory is intact. That’s a good sign.”
“Yep. Great.” Too bad about the rest.
“Do you remember anything else, like where you were coming from?”
Frustration heated his body. He tried to dig deeper into his memory, but all he got was a thick sense of fuzzy confusion.
“No, I—I think I was… No, I can’t recall a damn thing.”
“I checked your GPS. It appears you were traveling into Cold Plains over the north mountains. Do you remember how long you’ve been in the wilderness? Where you were going? Can you tell me why you have a D tattooed on your hip?”
“I have a tattoo?” Had June told him that already—or did the familiarity stem from a buried memory?
“He has the D because he’s one of Samuel’s enforcers,” Molly spat at him. “He knows exactly what you’re talking about, June—he’s lying that he doesn’t remember anything. Don’t fall for it.”
June said, quietly, without looking at the young woman, “Molly, can you please go to the kitchen and man the radio. Let me know if Davis reports in.”
Molly stomped out of the room and banged the door shut behind her.
“She’s afraid,” said June.
“Of me?”
“Of Samuel Grayson and whoever works for him, and if you’re one of his, that includes you.”
Samuel. Why did that name strike such a strident cord in him? “Did you tell me about him already, in the ravine?”
“Samuel is the leader of a cult in Cold Plains,” June said, assessing him carefully as she spoke. Jesse got the sense she was watching for some kind of reaction to her words, something that would show he was lying. Anxiety curled through him.
“He calls his followers Devotees,” she said. “And, as Molly pointed out, he personally tattoos a small D on the hip of each one of his true followers.” She paused. “None of this sounds familiar?”
The trouble was, it did. But he couldn’t figure out why.
“No,” he said.
Her mouth flattened and something in her eyes changed. “Earlier you were muttering about Samuel and something urgent you had to do.”
Jesse’s heart began to race. His mouth felt dry. He did recall that now. But he didn’t know what it meant. And he didn’t like what was happening here. He glanced at the pistol holstered on her hip, then his gaze went to the door. It struck him there were no windows in this room. Claustrophobia crawled around the edges of his mind.
“I don’t remember saying those things.” He was lying now, and he knew it. He felt in his gut he had to, but didn’t understand why.
“You pulled a gun on me,” he said.
Her gaze was steady, cool. “You grabbed me.”
He frowned. The action hurt his head. His hand went to his forehead.
“Don’t touch.” She got to her feet, went over to a dresser that had framed photographs on top. She brought him a handheld mirror.
“You can take a look.”
He took the mirror from her, his hand brushing against her cool, slender fingers as he did. Jesse saw a wedding band on her left hand, and felt a sharp and sudden stab of remorse, guilt. Shame.
He glanced at his own hand. No wedding band—not even a tan line. But he felt as if something should be there. A deep uneasiness bored down into him. Slowly, he looked into the small mirror.
The face that looked back was familiar. His. But he could attach nothing more to it. She’d done a neat job of the stitches along his brow. A memory hit him. A woman, brunette, running through the dark forest. Rain. She had two young children in her arms. She was screaming hysterically.
Bastard! No henchman is going to get my children!
She had hit him with a branch across his brow.
Gunfire. He could recall shooting. There were men—running through the forest. Then he was falling, falling. Pain in his leg.
Then nothing. Swirling mist, blackness.
Sweat broke out over his torso.
Slowly he lowered the mirror.
Those clear, summer-sky eyes were staring intently at him. She was waiting.
But he said nothing. He was afraid he might have done something—he felt bad about it and he didn’t understand why.
She sat on the chair next to the bed and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. A quiet urgency buzzed about her.
“If you remember anything, Jesse, you need to tell me—it could help the lives of a mother and her small children.”
He looked away. Her black Lab was lying in a basket by the stove, watching him, too. The bed he was lying on was queen-size. There was a closet at the far end of the room. The walls of this room were uneven, and he realized suddenly that they were rock.
“Where am I?”
“A safe place. Look, Jesse, before anything else, I need you to try harder. A young mother in her thirties, brunette, went missing with her three-year-old twin girls in these woods two nights ago.” She paused, her intensity sharpening. “Her name is Lacy Matthews and she runs the coffee shop on Main Street in Cold Plains. Her twins are in the local day care. Lacy was a Devotee. Like you, she has a D tattooed on her hip. But she wanted to get out of the cult. I was supposed to meet her to bring her to this safe house, but she never showed up.”
“You help people escape the cult?”
Her eyes narrowed, and he thought he detected a sliver of fear.
“Yes,” she said coolly. “This is a halfway house, a place from where escapees can access exit-counseling, and then go on to start new lives somewhere else.”
“You do deprogramming?”
“I’m trained to offer early-stage exit-counseling.”
The words cult, Devotee, henchman circled around and around in Jesse’s brain, as if they were important to him. But he couldn’t slot them into any bigger picture.
The image of the brunette screaming, fleeing from him
, sliced across his brain again, sharp, like pieces of broken mirror.
Jesse swallowed, met her gaze. Was he a bad guy—did he work for Samuel Grayson?
“Did you see Lacy and her daughters, Jesse?”
He cursed, suddenly agitated, angry. “I wish you’d stop asking me the same questions—I don’t remember a goddamn thing!”
She watched him in silence for several beats, as if weighing his words for truth.
“If you did see them,” she said very quietly, an anger now flickering deep in her eyes, “and if you told me where, I might be able save their lives, if they are even still alive.”
His heart hammered and his head pounded. She was repeating herself, pressing him as if she didn’t believe him. “Maybe if you searched where you said you found my Beretta,” he said quietly.
Her mouth flattened. “I never told you what kind of gun I found.”
He said nothing.
She lurched to her feet, hostility, determination in her movements.
“Well, that’s exactly where I’m going to start searching, Jesse. And believe me, if you’ve hurt them, I’m going to make you pay. I’m going to make damn sure you go down for it.”
He didn’t doubt her for a second.
She stalked toward the door, her black Lab surging instantly to follow at her heels, his claws clicking on the polished stone floor. She opened the door. Outside was a passageway, warm light. One hand on the door handle, she turned to face him.
“Someone will be armed with a shotgun and standing right outside. Try anything stupid and they’ll shoot you right through the door.”
“I’m a prisoner?”
“You’re tattooed with the D of a Devotee and you were carrying concealed, which implies you could be a cult enforcer. I don’t know if you’re playing me, or whether you actually have lost your memory, and I don’t know what you were doing in the woods where an innocent mother and her children went missing. Until I do know, you’re staying where you can’t hurt anyone.”
“You have no right to keep me locked in this…cave room, or whatever it is.”
“Until I can get the FBI, yeah, I figure I’ve got that right.”
Perfect Wyoming Complete Collection: Special Agent's Perfect Cover ; Rancher's Perfect Baby Rescue ; A Daughter's Perfect Secret ; Lawman's Perfect Surrender ; The Perfect Outsider ; Mercenary's Perfect Mission Page 75