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Internal Affairs
Jessica Andersen


Internal Affairs
Jessica Andersen


www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Table of Contents
Cover (#ud0488c8c-4636-5d42-9b08-7c4d281c29ec)
Title Page (#u2fcaadcb-906f-594c-9151-94a5749ee071)
About the Author (#u5fcdd934-d495-5237-b68b-14561c0467b1)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, JESSICA ANDERSEN is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say hi!

Chapter One (#ubbce542e-7bcc-5f71-b318-db67c9dc6712)
The pain speared from his shoulder blade to his spine and down—raw, bloody agony that consumed him and made him want to sink back into unconsciousness. But at the same time, urgency beat through him, not letting him return to oblivion.
The mission, the mission, must complete the mission.
But what was the mission? Where was he? What the hell had happened to him?
Cracking his eyes a fraction, careful not to give away his conscious state if he was being watched, he surveyed his immediate surroundings. Tall pine trees reached up to touch the late summer sky on all sides of him, their bases furred with an underlayer of smaller scrub brush. There was no sign of a cabin or a road, no evidence of anyone else nearby, no tracks in the forest litter but his own, leading to where he’d collapsed.
He was wearing heavy hiking boots, dark jeans and a black T-shirt, all of which were spattered with blood. Something told him not all of it was his, though when he moved his arms, the agony in his right shoulder ripped a groan from his lips. He felt the warm, wet bloom of fresh blood, smelled it on the moist air.
Shot in the back, he knew somehow. Bastards. Cowards. Except that he didn’t know who the bastardly cowards were, or why they’d gone after him. More, he didn’t know who the hell he was. Or what he’d done.
The realization brought a sick chill rattling through him, a spurt of panic. His brain answered with I’ve got to get up, get moving. I can’t let them catch me, or I’m dead.
The words had no sooner whispered in his mind than he heard the sounds of pursuit: the sharp bark of a dog and the terse shouts of men calling to one another.
They weren’t close, but they weren’t far enough away for comfort, either.
He struggled to his feet cursing with pain, staggering with shock and blood loss. He didn’t know who was looking for him, but there was far too much blood for a bar fight, and the pattern was high velocity. Had he killed someone? Been standing nearby when someone was killed? Had he escaped from a bad situation, or had he been the bad situation?
He didn’t know, damn it. Worse, he didn’t know which answer he was hoping for.
The mission. The words seemed to whisper from nowhere and everywhere at once. They came from the trees and the wind high above, and the bark of a second dog, sharper this time, and excited, suggesting that the beast had hit on a scent trail.
One thing was for certain: he needed to get someplace safe. But where? And how?
Knowing he wasn’t going to find the answer standing there, bleeding, he got moving, putting one foot in front of the other, holding his right arm clutched against his chest with his left. The world went gray-brown around the edges and his feet felt very far away, but the scenery moved past him, slow at first, then faster when he hit a downhill slope.
He saw a downed tree with an exposed root ball, thought he recognized it, though he didn’t know from when. His feet carried him away from it at an angle, as though his subconscious knew where the hell he was going when his conscious mind didn’t have a clue. Urgency propelled him—not just from the continued sounds of pursuit, which was drawing nearer by the minute, but also from the sense that he was supposed to be doing something crucial, critical.
His breath rasped in his lungs and the gray-brown closed in around the edges of his vision. He tripped and staggered, tripped again and went down. But he didn’t stay down. He dragged himself up again, levering his body with his good arm and biting his teeth against the pained groans that wanted to rip from his throat.
Instead, staying silent, he forced himself to move faster, until he was running downhill through trees that all looked the same. He saw nothing except forest and more forest. Then, in the distance, there was something else: a rectangular blur that soon resolved itself into the outline of a late-model truck parked in the middle of nowhere.
Excitement slapped through him, driving back some of the gray-brown. He didn’t recognize the truck, but he’d run right to it, hadn’t he? It stood to reason that was because he’d known it was there. More, when he’d climbed into the driver’s seat, he automatically fumbled beneath the dashboard and came up with the keys.
It took him two tries to get the key in the ignition; he was wobbly and weak, and he couldn’t lean back into the seat without his shoulder giving him holy hell. But he had wheels. A hope of escape.
He couldn’t hear the dogs over the engine’s roar, but he knew the searchers were behind him, knew the net was closing fast. More, he knew he didn’t have much more time left before he lapsed unconscious again. He’d lost blood, and God only knew what was going on inside him. Every inhalation was like breathing flames; every exhalation a study in misery. He needed a place to crash and he needed it fast.
After that, he thought, glancing in the rearview mirror and seeing piercing green eyes in a stern face, short black hair, and nothing familiar about any of it, I’m going to need some answers.
Knowing he was already on borrowed time, he hit the gas and sent the truck thundering downhill. There wasn’t any road or track, but he got lucky—or else he knew the way—and didn’t hit any big ditches or deadfalls. Within ten minutes, he came to a fire-access road. Instinct—or something more?—had him turning uphill rather than down. A few minutes later, he bypassed a larger road, then took a barely visible dirt trail that paralleled the main access road.
The not-quite-a-road was bumpy, jolting him back against the seat and wringing curses from him every time he hit his injured shoulder. But the pain kept him conscious, kept him moving. And when he hit a paved road, it reminded him he needed to get someplace he could hide, where he’d be safe when he collapsed.
Animalistic instinct had him turning east. He passed street signs he recognized on some level, but it wasn’t until he passed a big billboard that said Welcome to Bear Claw Creek that he knew he was in Colorado, and then only because the sign said so.
His hands were starting to shake, warning him that his body was hitting the end of its reserves. But he still had enough sense to ditch the truck at the back of a commuter lot, where it might not be noticed for a while, and hide the keys in the wheel well. Then he searched the vehicle for anything that might clue him in on what the hell was going on—or, failing that, who the hell he was.
All he came up with was a lightweight waterproof jacket wedged beneath the passenger’s seat, but that was something, anyway. Though the fading day was still warm with late summer sun, he pulled on the navy blue jacket so if anyone saw him, they wouldn’t get a look at his back. A guy wearing dirty jeans and a jacket might be forgotten. A guy bleeding from a bullet wound in his shoulder, not so much.
Cursing under his breath, using the swearwords to let him know he was still up and moving, even as the gray-brown of encroaching unconsciousness narrowed his vision to a tunnel, he stagger-stepped through the commuter car lot and across the main road. Cutting over a couple of streets on legs that were rapidly turning to rubber, he homed in on a corner lot, where a neat stone-faced house sat well back from the road, all but lost behind wild flowering hedges and a rambler-covered picket fence.
It wasn’t the relative concealment offered by the big lot and the landscaping that had him turning up the driveway, though. It was the sense of safety. This wasn’t his house, he knew somehow, but whose ever it was, instinct said they would shelter him, help him.
Without conscious thought, he reached into the brass, wall-mounted mailbox beside the door, found a small latch and toggled the false bottom, which opened to reveal a spare key.
He was too far gone to wonder how he’d known to do that, too out of it to remember whose house this was. It was all he could do to let himself in and relock the door once he was through. Dropping the key into his pocket, he dragged himself through a pin-neat kitchen that was painted cream and moss with sunny yellow accents and soft, feminine curtains. He found a notepad beside the phone and scrawled a quick message.
His hands were shaking; his whole body was shaking, and where it wasn’t shaking it had shut down completely. He couldn’t feel his feet, couldn’t feel much of anything except the pain and the dizziness that warned he was seconds away from passing out.
Finally, unable to hold it off any longer, he let the gray-brown win, let it wash over his vision and suck him down into the blackness. He was barely aware of staggering into the next room and falling, hardly felt the pain of landing face-first on a carpeted floor. He knew only that, for the moment at least, he was safe.

Chapter Two (#ubbce542e-7bcc-5f71-b318-db67c9dc6712)
Chief Medical Examiner Sara Whitney’s day started out badly and plummeted downhill from there.
It wasn’t just that her coffeemaker had finally gone belly-up. She’d known it was on its last legs, after all, and simply kept forgetting to upgrade. Sort of like how she kept forgetting to replace her anemic windshield wipers because they only annoyed her when it was raining. Or how she hadn’t yet gotten around to having the maintenance crew that served the Bear Claw ME’s office fix her office door, which stuck half the time and randomly popped open the other half.
No, it wasn’t those petty, mundane, normal irritations that had her amber-colored eyes narrowed with frustration as she worked her way through her sixth autopsy of the day, dictating her notes into the voiceactivated minirecorder clipped to the lapel of the blue lab coat she wore over neatly tailored, feminine pants and a soft blue-green shirt that accented the golden highlights in her shoulder-length, honey-colored hair.
No, what annoyed her was the memo she’d gotten from Acting Mayor Proudfoot’s people, turning down yet another request to hire new staff, even though she’d only proposed to replace two of the three people she’d lost over the past year—two to the terrorist attacks that had gripped the city in the wake of a nearby jailbreak, one to the FBI’s training program. What annoyed her further was the knowledge that she was going to have to work yet another twelve-hour day to catch up with the backlog. It didn’t help that her three remaining staffers—receptionist Della Jones, ME Stephen Katz, and their newly promoted assistant, Bradley Brown—were all taking their lunch breaks glued to the TV in the break room, with the police scanner cranked to full volume as they followed the manhunt that was unfolding in Bear Claw Canyon, not half an hour away.
Sara didn’t want to think about the manhunt, or the fact that the combined Bear Claw PD/FBI task force had lost two men in an op gone bad, leading to the manhunt. She didn’t want to think ahead to those autopsies, and felt guilty for hoping the dead men weren’t any of the cops or agents she knew. She also didn’t want to think about the fact that until terrorist mastermind al-Jihad and his followers were brought to justice, people in and around Bear Claw were going to keep dying.
She didn’t want to think about it, but she had to, because it was happening even as she stood there, elbowdeep in the abdominal cavity of an overweight, chainsmoking sixty-three-year-old man whose badly clogged arteries suggested an all too common cause of death. The autopsy was routine, but the events transpiring outside Sara’s familiar cinder block world were anything but.
Bear Claw City was at war.
It had been nearly ten months since al-Jihad had managed to escape from the ARX Supermax Prison north of Bear Claw Creek, gaining freedom along with two of his most trusted lieutenants. Since then, it had become clear that al-Jihad’s network was deeply entrenched in Bear Claw, twining through both local and federal law enforcement.
Each time a conspirator was uncovered and neutralized, new evidence surfaced indicating that the internal problems extended even further, and that al-Jihad was continuing to unfold an elaborate, devastating plan that the task force just couldn’t seem to get a handle on. The cops and agents had uncovered pieces and hints, but the terrorists’ main goal continued to elude them, even as the groundswell of suspicious activity seemed to suggest that an attack was imminent.
Of course, the general population knew only some of what was going on. Sara knew more than most because her office was intimately involved with the BCCPD, and because she was close friends with a tightly knit group of cops and agents, three couples plus her as a spare wheel.
The seven friends had banded together the previous year when FBI trainee Chelsea Swan—though back then she’d been one of Sara’s medical examiners—had fallen in with FBI agent Jonah Fairfax. Fax had assisted in the jailbreak in his role as a deep undercover operative, only to learn in the devastating aftermath that his superior was a traitor and he’d been unknowingly working on al-Jihad’s behalf. Sara, Chelsea, Fax and the others had managed to foil al-Jihad’s next planned attack, but they’d only managed to capture one of the terrorists, Muhammad Feyd, who’d proven to be a loyal soldier and had defied all efforts to get him talking.
Al-Jihad and his remaining lieutenant, Lee Mawadi, along with Fax’s former boss, the eponymous Jane Doe, remained at large even now, ten months later. In that interim, there had been other, smaller incidents, along with a deadly riot at the ARX Supermax. Which Sara so wasn’t thinking about right now.
She didn’t want to remember the men who’d died in the riot, or the one man in particular whose death had hit her far harder than it should have.
Focus, girl, she told herself. The day’s only getting longer the more you stall.
Concentrating on the innards at hand, Sara went through the process by rote, weighing and sampling, dictating notes as she worked. But although the actions were automatic—they ought to be, after six years on the job, two heading the Bear Claw ME’s office—they weren’t without compassion. Sara’s top-flight surgeon mother might consider her daughter’s medical skills wasted on the dead, but Sara knew she worked for the families as much as the corpses, and took satisfaction from providing answers, shedding light onto causes of death that might otherwise be misinterpreted.
Contrary to what some popular TV shows might portray, only a small fraction of the bodies coming through the ME’s office were instances of foul play. The vast majority was made up of an almost equal balance between natural causes and accidental fatalities. Her current case fell into the former, i.e., a catastrophic cardiac event brought on by a high-risk lifestyle and inconsistently treated hypertension.
As she stripped off her protective gear and headed for her office to finish up the necessary paperwork, Sara found herself wishing that more of her recent cases had been so straightforward. It wasn’t that she wanted her life to be easy or boring, but she’d gone into pathology because she’d grown up a passenger of her parents’ roller-coaster ride of emotions, and she hadn’t wanted the highs and lows of living medicine.
Little had she known she’d wind up in the middle of a terror threat that had the entire city by the throat, and that she’d be far more enmeshed in the case than she would’ve preferred. Granted, the investigation had moved away from her office in the months since the prison riot, but her close ties to members of the task force kept her involved, as did the caseload she’d been forced to assume in the face of a serious manpower shortage.
The lack of staff members in the ME’s office was yet another of Acting Mayor Proudfoot’s unsubtle efforts to get rid of all the young, energetic hires made by his forward-thinking predecessor, who had been disgraced and ousted when damning photographs had surfaced involving the mayor and several girls of questionable age.
That had been too bad as far as Sara was concerned; she didn’t condone the former mayor’s ethical lapses, but she thought he’d been taking the city in a positive direction by bringing fresh blood into the crime scene unit, the ME’s office and several other tech-based divisions of city government. Since the ex-mayor’s departure, Proudfoot had been undoing those advances, piece by piece, making no bones about the fact that he intended to return Bear Claw Creek to the “good old days”—i.e., the days of minimal technology and pay-to-play politics.
Proudfoot’s efforts had been blunted somewhat by the terrorist threat, but his image lurked at the back of Sara’s mind on a daily basis. She knew he was just waiting for her to mess up badly enough that he could get rid of her and return the ME’s office to the age of dinosaurs, with his cronies in charge.
“Which is another thing that belongs in the category of ‘things I don’t want to think about right now,’” she said to herself on a long sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose to stave off the headache that always encroached when she thought about all the things she was trying not to think about these days.
The list was long. And frankly, it didn’t leave her much to think about.
“Hey, boss.” The hail came from Stephen, the sole remaining medical examiner beside herself. He was tall, lean and graying, a good ten years older than her own thirty-five, and had worked in the Bear Claw ME’s office for nearly a dozen years. Miraculously, though, he didn’t seem to resent that Sara—young, female, relatively inexperienced—had been hired in above him as his boss. If anything, he seemed happy to let her have the headaches that came with the position.
“Hey yourself.” Sara didn’t ask about the manhunt, didn’t want to know. “You’re headed out early today, right?”
He nodded, a soft smile touching his lips, lighting his usual neutral expression. “Celia and I are bringing Chrissy for a checkup.” Chrissy was the change-of-life baby, nearly twenty years younger than their eldest, who had surprised Stephen and his wife the year before. By all indications, little Chrissy would grow up dearly beloved by their entire extended family, and most likely spoiled rotten.
The quiet joy on the older man’s face squeezed at Sara’s heart. She nodded, forcing herself to feel happy for him rather than sorry for herself. “Tell Celia I said hi.”
“I’ll do that. I can come back after, if you want me to.” He glanced at the wipe board that hung in the hallway opposite their office doors, where the pending cases were listed. “Things are backing up.”
They were, indeed, and a large part of Sara wanted to keep the office running around the clock until they’d cleared the board and gotten ahead of the looming mountains of paperwork. But logic said that Proudfoot wouldn’t be impressed with that show of efficiency. If anything, he’d take it as an indication that she’d manage just fine with an even smaller staff.
She shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but no. Head on home. I’ll clear what I can, and we can start over tomorrow.”
He sent her a long look. “Promise me you won’t stay past normal human quitting time? It is Friday. You know…the weekend?”
She winced. “You got me. We’ll start over on Monday.” Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t be in over the next two days. She had abolished the weekend and overnight shifts due to staff constraints, but she still liked to come into the office herself, when everything was relatively quiet.
Two years earlier, it would’ve been easy to promise Stephen she’d leave for the weekend, because she would’ve known there was someone waiting for her at home—someone to cook with, eat with, laugh with, love with.
Even a year ago, having more or less recovered from the catastrophic implosion of that relationship, she would’ve had plans of some sort. She and Chelsea would’ve hooked up with Cassie Dumont-Varitek and Alyssa McDermott, their friends in the BCCPD crime scene unit, and had a girls’ night out. Or maybe they would’ve “double dated,” with Cassie and Alyssa pairing up with their husbands, while Chelsea and Sara hung together.
It wasn’t the same these days with Chelsea gone into the FBI training program on the East Coast, though. Sara had tried going out with the others, and had felt like a fifth wheel. Chelsea had been the glue holding them together. Without her, it felt as if the rest of them were trying too hard. Even when Chelsea and Fax came back to the city, they were most often there on task force business, maybe with a little wedding planning snuck in on the side.
Things had changed. The others had moved on, leaving Sara behind.
Summoning a smile, she waved Stephen away. “Go on, get moving. You wouldn’t want to keep your women waiting.”
But he didn’t move. Instead, he gave her a long, intense look. “I’ll do the agents when they come in, if you’d like. I can be here tomorrow morning, assuming they release the bodies that early.”
He was talking about the manhunt, the men who’d died. She closed her eyes, feeling guilty over the stab of relief brought by the offer. “Have they announced the names?”
“Not yet.”
She nodded, knowing that even though she hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, the knowledge of the deaths, and the echoes it brought, had permeated her. “I’ll let you know.” Which was as close as she was going to get to confessing that she couldn’t handle how close the terrorists were hitting, and how much it bothered her that things seemed to be ramping up rather than settling down these days. It was hard not to wonder where it would all stop, and how many would die in the attack most of the task force members thought was imminent.
Her mother and father were in rare agreement that she should give notice and get the hell out of Bear Claw Creek. Sara had seriously considered the option…for about thirty seconds before coming to the realization that she couldn’t do it. This was her home; she wasn’t giving up on it. And what was more, she wasn’t walking away from her job or her remaining staff members.
This was her department, damn it. She might be going down, but she was going down fighting.
After another long look, Stephen headed out. Telling herself she appreciated his concern, that it didn’t make her feel even lonelier than she had before, Sara completed the necessary paperwork on the cases she’d autopsied so far that day, then suited back up and returned to work.
She processed three more routine cases over the remainder of the day and did her best to tune out the news bulletins when she passed through the break room, or got near Della’s desk, where the fiftysomething admin assistant had a police band radio turned low. Still, Sara couldn’t avoid knowing that the senior agents had called off the op, that the search dogs had followed two different trails ascribed to the terrorists, both of which had dead-ended in vehicle tracks heading for the main roads.
It seemed that the op had been a quick scramble into the state forest, based on intel that several of al-Jihad’s people were holed up in a remote cabin, strategizing. Sara didn’t want to know but couldn’t help hearing that the two agents had lost their lives in pursuit of a small knot of men who appeared to have been carrying bodies, while a lone man had escaped in the opposite direction, and vanished into the wind. She didn’t want to know that the cabin had been stripped bare, and had burst into flames within minutes of the terrorists’ escape, torched by a hidden incendiary device.
As usual, al-Jihad’s people had been well prepared. Sara wasn’t sure what the op had aimed to do, or what the terrorists had planned or accomplished in the forest, but she knew the names of the dead men now, whether she wanted to or not. Both FBI agents, they weren’t among her friends or acquaintances, but they’d had their own friends and families, their own loved ones who’d been cruelly left behind. More bereaved to add to the list that had grown over the past ten months.
Sadness beat through Sara as she kept working, starting another case because it wasn’t as though she had any pressing reason to go home, Friday night or not.
Della and Bradley clocked out around five-thirty and left arm in arm. Bradley had been mooning after Della—who was a good decade his senior and the mother of two grown children—for as long as he’d been working there. Sara smiled, her heart warming at seeing them so obviously together, though she found herself wondering how she’d missed that change in relationship status. Then she had to remind herself not to dwell on the fact that everyone around her seemed to be pairing up these days. Everyone but her.
Biting back a sigh, she got back to work. By the time she called it a night, around 7:00 p.m., her shoulders, back and neck were burning from the strain. She would’ve killed for a massage, or at least an hour in a whirlpool, but she couldn’t bring herself to hit the gym this late on a Friday.
There was a fine line between being single and being pathetic.
Consoling herself with the thought of a long, hot bath, she collected her hybrid from the parking lot, which was located between the BCCPD’s main station house and the connected building that held the ME’s office.
The twenty-minute drive home was an easy one, and the sight of the small stone-faced house eased something inside her, even in the darkness.
She’d fallen in love with the place on her first drive through the city. The cottagelike house had been way out of her budget, but she’d taken an uncharacteristic leap and bought it on an adjustable mortgage, then switched over to a fixed loan as soon as she was able to afford the higher payments. These days she was managing the expenses, though there wasn’t much left over at the end of the month for extras or savings. She didn’t regret the purchase for a second, though. It was her home, plain and simple.
The house was easily big enough for two people—hell, for a small family—but she’d resisted the option of taking on a roommate because she liked to keep her space the way she liked it, with none of the rapid changes she’d endured during childhood. The one person she’d shared her home with—albeit for only a few months—had fit into her world so seamlessly, despite their obvious differences, that she’d thought it would last. It hadn’t, of course. And the final words between them had been angry ones.
“Stop it,” she told herself as she parked the hybrid near the house, then gathered her bag and coat to head for the kitchen door.
She didn’t know why her ex was so much in her mind lately, but enough was enough. He wasn’t coming back, and they hadn’t been together for the year prior to the prison riot that had taken his life. His death had been tragic, but it didn’t magically erase his sins, didn’t erase his betrayal. Not by a long shot.
Muttering under her breath, she fished in her bag for her keys, unlocked the door and let herself through. Two steps into the kitchen, with the door swinging shut at her back, she stopped dead as the smell of blood tickled her nostrils. It was a familiar odor, of course, but it wasn’t one that belonged in her house.
She stayed frozen for a moment, adrenaline kicking her heart into overdrive.
Logic said she should get out of the house, get somewhere safe and call for help. But something she couldn’t name—anger at the growing suspicion that an intruder had broken in, maybe, or a complete and utter lapse of her usual good judgment—had her flicking on the lights and moving farther into the house.
She didn’t see anything out of place in her pretty kitchen, but the back of her neck prickled, warning her that someone had been there who shouldn’t have been. Holding her breath, she eased through the doorway connecting the kitchen to the living room. And froze in horror.
A man lay on the floor beside her sofa, blood soaking the carpet beneath him.
Sara stifled a scream, swallowing it in a bubble of hysteria. Her saner self said, Run! Get the hell out of here! But something had her stalling in place as her heart hammered in her chest.
Her brain racked up impressions in quick succession: the big man lay motionless, but he was breathing. He wore jeans, a dark blue jacket and boots with soil and gravel embedded in the treads. She could see their bottoms because he lay on his face, hands outstretched, one nearly touching a pen and notepad as though he’d dropped them when he fell.
Her panicked brain replayed info from the radio bulletins: a group of men had disappeared in one direction, carrying a couple of bodies. A single man had gone off alone. Having spent the day listening to snippets about the dead agents and the unsuccessful manhunt in the forests of Bear Claw Canyon State Park, Sara knew damn well she should be running for her life, screaming her head off, doing something, anything other than standing there, gaping. But she didn’t move. She stayed rooted in place, staring at the notepad.
She knew that writing.
Emotion grabbed her by the throat, choking her and making her heart race even as logic told her it was impossible. That wasn’t his writing. Couldn’t be. The man lying there, bleeding, was a stranger. A danger. Get out of the house, she told herself. You’re imagining things.
But she didn’t run. She edged around the man and leaned down to read the note. It said: Nobody can know that I’m here. Life or death.
Sara reached for the notepad, then stopped herself. Her hand was shaking and tears tracked down her cheeks unheeded.
“No,” she whispered, the single word hanging longer than it should have in the silence. “He’s dead.”
But she knew that writing, had seen it on countless notes tucked under her coffee mug, or left beside the phone, telling her where he was going, when he’d be back, or that he’d pick up dinner on the way. Love notes, she’d liked to think them, even though he’d never said those exact words.
Hope battered against what she knew to be true. He’s dead, she thought. I went to his funeral.
Yet she reached out trembling fingers to touch thick, wavy black hair that was suddenly, achingly familiar. And stopped herself.
All rational thought said she should call for help. The note, though, said not to. She wouldn’t have hesitated, except for the damn writing. It was shaky, but it was his. She’d swear to it.
She could turn him over and prove it one way or the other. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere fast. He was out cold, his back rising and falling in breaths so shallow they were almost invisible. Blood soaked the rug beneath him; the smell of it surrounded him.
Sara’s inner medical professional sent a stab of warning as she dithered on one level, assessed his injuries on another. He’s pale, probably shocky. If you don’t do something soon, it won’t matter who he is because he’ll be dead.
“Call 9-1-1,” she told herself. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Instead, she reached out and touched him—his stubble-roughened cheek first, then the pulse at his throat. As she did so, she tried to get a sense of his profile, tried to see if it was—
No. It couldn’t be.
Yet her heart sped up, her head spun and her breath went thin in her lungs as she debated between checking his spine—which was the proper thing to do before moving him—and turning his face so she could see, so she’d know for sure.
Then he groaned—a low, rough sound—and said something unintelligible in a voice that was achingly familiar. Heat raced through her. Hope.
He moved his right arm and let out another groan of pain. Then, as though sensing that she was there, he shifted, snaking out his left hand to grab her ankle—not hard, more looping his fingers around her, touching but not restricting her.
Sara squeaked and would have jerked away, but once again she was frozen in place, paralyzed by the memory of a lover who’d kept a careful distance between them when awake, but in sleep had always wanted some part of him touching some part of her, as though reassuring himself she was still there.
“Romo?” she whispered. The single word burned her lips and hurt her chest.
Then he shifted again, this time turning his face toward her, so she saw him in profile against the bloodied carpet.
Her throat closed on a noise that might’ve been a cross between a scream and a moan if it had made it past the lump jamming her windpipe. As it was, the cry reverberated in her head.
She knew that profile—the clean planes of his nose and brow; the dark, elegant eyebrows; the angular jaw. If he was awake and smiling—or snarling, for that matter—at her, she would’ve known his square, regular teeth and the glint in his dark green eyes. It was really him, she realized, her chest aching with the force of holding back the sobs.
Detective Romo Sampson. Internal affairs investigator. Live-in lover-turned-nemesis. And a dead man back from the dead.

Chapter Three (#ubbce542e-7bcc-5f71-b318-db67c9dc6712)
In that first moment of recognition, Sara’s brain threatened to overload with shock and an awful, undeniable sense of hope. She wanted to scream, wanted to laugh, wanted to shriek, “What the hell is going on here? Where have you been? What have you been doing? Why did you let us—let me—think you were dead?”
Instead, she forced herself to do what she did best—she buried her emotions, smoothing out the roller coaster.
Clicking over to doctor mode, she shoved her feelings aside, bundling them up along with all the questions that echoed inside her skull. Where had he been for the past four months? What had happened to him? Whose grave had she stood over, dry-eyed but grieving? Whose blood was spattered on his face, arms and hands? It wasn’t all his, that was for sure.
He couldn’t answer those questions now, though, and might not ever be able to unless she worked fast. Instinct told her he was close to dying a second time.
Sara’s heart stuttered a little when she cataloged Romo’s injuries and vitals. His breathing was too shallow, the pulse at his throat too slow. And his eyes, when she peeled back his lids, were fixed, the pupils unequal in size, indicating a concussion, or worse.
Shock, she thought, head injury, and… She checked him over without rolling him, hissing in a breath when she zeroed in on the wet seep of blood beneath the jacket. A gunshot wound.
The hole was ragged at the edges, indicating that the bullet hadn’t been going full power when it hit him, and the bruise track suggested it had deflected off his shoulder blade and done more damage to his trapezius muscle than his skeleton. The skin around the injury was inflamed and angry, the blood clotted in some places, still seeping in others. She pressed on his back near the wound, digging into the lax muscles on either side of his spine, hoping the bullet had stayed close to the surface, praying it hadn’t fragmented and deflected into vital organs.
He groaned in obvious pain, but didn’t move. His hand had fallen away from her ankle, as though having made that effort he’d lapsed more deeply unconscious.
She couldn’t find the bullet, but confirmed that his reflexes were decent in his legs, and, having removed his boots, his feet. Her brain spun. The basic exam didn’t indicate an immediate spine injury, but the bullet could lie near the vital areas, poised to shift and impinge on the critical nerves if she made a wrong move. She needed more information, needed an X-ray, needed—hell, she needed a doctor who had more experience with living tissue than dead, one who wasn’t faintly unnerved to feel warmth beneath her fingertips.
The heat of him, so unlike the refrigerated flesh she touched on a daily basis, unsettled her. More, it wasn’t just any living body. It was Romo’s living body, which should’ve been impossible.
Where the hell have you been? she wanted to shout at him. How could you let everyone think you were dead?
By “everyone” she meant herself and his parents, because while the funeral had been well attended, and dozens of cops, agents and other staffers had railed against the prison riot that had taken his life, as far as she’d been able to tell, she had been one of the few who had truly mourned his death, one of the few who’d truly considered him a friend, even after everything that had happened between them.
His parents had been there. They’d been shattered and disbelieving, and Sara hadn’t had the strength to say anything to them, hadn’t wanted to try to define her nonrelationship with their son. And maybe she hadn’t wanted to admit that she’d been grieving more for what she and Romo’d had in the past, for the man she’d thought him, not the man he’d turned out to be.
Who, apparently, was alive, though not well.
Crouched beside him, one hand on his warm, bloodsoaked shoulder, Sara fought an inner battle. She should call for an ambulance, get him to the hospital. The surgeons could deal with the bullet, the cops with his fate. She didn’t owe him anything.
But instead of reaching for the phone, she picked up his note and scanned it a second time. Nobody can know that I’m here. That was straightforward enough, though difficult under the circumstances, when she needed to get him to an ER. Life or death. But whose life or death. Hers? His? A larger threat?
Prior to his death—or what she’d thought was his death—Romo had been working with the BCCPD and occasionally the FBI, using his undeniable computer skills in an effort to ferret out the suspected terrorist conspirators within the BCCPD. Though he’d set his sights on Sara’s office as the center of the conspiracy—no doubt thanks in part to Proudfoot’s influence—Romo had also been looking at other departments, other cops. Then he’d been killed—supposedly—in the prison riot.
The rumors had said his death had been no accident, that he’d been getting too close to the conspirators and they’d managed to take him out.
From there, Sara realized, it was a short leap to believing that his apparently faked death was related to the case, too. What if he’d used it to drop under deep cover? Chelsea’s fiancé, Fax, had pretended to be a killer in order to get himself incarcerated in the ARX Supermax, in an effort to get close to al-Jihad. It was certainly possible that Romo, though a detective rather than an agent, had done something similar. If she assumed he was the lone man who’d escaped the net of the manhunt, then maybe he’d fled the terrorists because they’d found him out, or betrayed him.
But if that were the case, why hadn’t he turned himself in to the members of the task force? If not during the chase itself, then why not later? Why had he come to her? Why tell her to keep his presence a secret?
Damn you, she thought as she stared down at him, trying to figure out if that scenario really made sense, or if she just wanted it to. Her hypothesis did fit the evidence, she decided, but the same evidence would also support the reverse, namely that he’d faked his death so he could drop off the grid entirely and go to work for the terrorists, then got separated from them in the melee of the task force raid on the terrorists’ cabin.
Both hypotheses fit, but which was the right one? Or was there yet another explanation she hadn’t come up with?
“That doesn’t matter right now,” she said aloud. “What matters is what you’re going to do with him.” She glanced at the note, brain spinning.
She knew Romo, knew what he’d been through as a child, and how those experiences had shaped the man he’d become. That, more than anything, told her logic favored the undercover theory. The Romo she’d known had been all about justice, sometimes to the exclusion of all other, softer emotions. She had to believe he’d been working for the good guys. That didn’t explain why he wanted to stay in hiding, but it did suggest that if the wrong people found out he was still alive, he could be in very real danger.
Which, if she followed that line of thought to its conclusion, explained why he’d come to her if he felt he couldn’t go to whoever he’d been working for. She’d had her full medical training before deciding to specialize in pathology, and kept a small set of supplies on hand in case of emergencies. He would’ve known that, would’ve known she could patch him up. And, damn him, he would’ve known that she’d be unable to turn him away.
Shaking her head, Sara stared down at him. “You’re really a bastard, you know that?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t even twitch. Which was so not helpful.
She could call an ambulance, then dragoon one of her trusted cop friends to watch over him. There might be suspicions of complicity within the BCCPD and local FBI field office, but she knew for a fact that Chelsea, Fax, Cassie, Seth, Alyssa and Tucker were among the good guys. There was no way any of them were involved with the terrorists. They’d help keep Romo safe.
But Sara stalled, because he’d come to her. He’d asked her to keep his presence a secret. Maybe, just maybe, it made the most sense to follow his instructions for the moment, and make her decisions once he was conscious and could fill in some of the blanks.
Warning bells chimed at the back of her brain, but she couldn’t deal with them just then. She needed to make a decision, and it had better be the right one. Except when she came down to it, she knew she’d made her decision the moment she stepped toward him rather than away; the moment she’d touched his injured shoulder and felt warm skin, and remembered what they’d once been to each other.
“Fine,” she said, her words seeming too loud in the silence of her secluded home. “Have it your way. You always did.” Reaching for a double handful of his clothing—and steeling herself to be a doctor rather than a woman who still, inexplicably, wanted to weep—she said, “I need to roll you. This is going to hurt.”
She doubted he could hear her. The warning was more for her own sake than his, because she wasn’t used to dealing with patients who still had their pain responses intact.
Doing her best to minimize the amount she twisted and moved him, in case the bullet had ended up someplace grim, she levered him partway up and checked for an exit wound or other injuries on the front of his body. She didn’t find either, which was both good news and bad: good news because his injury seemed localized and treatable, assuming the bullet hadn’t punched through to something internal; bad news because she didn’t know where the damned thing had gone.
Easing him back down onto his flat stomach, trying not to remember how he’d slept like that, his face smashed into the pillow, his long limbs sprawled toward her, onto her, some part of him always touching some part of her, she rose and headed deeper into the house, through the smallish, oddly arranged rooms that she’d decorated to blend one into the next, with neutral, mossy colors and richly patterned curtains.
She took the stairs leading up to her office and the bedroom, and tried not to remember the night she and Romo had made love on the landing, early in their relationship. They’d been out with her friends, teasing each other with looks and touches, with no question in either of their minds where and how the night would end. They hadn’t even made it all the way up the stairs before they’d collapsed, twined together, needing each other so much it had seemed like madness.
Blushing, she stepped into her office, crossing quickly to the locked gun cabinet in the far corner, where she kept not only the small .22-caliber handgun she’d purchased just after al-Jihad’s reign of terror began, but also her medical supplies. The elegant cabinet was far more graceful—and much less expensive—than a safe. She dialed in the combination and popped the door, then stood and stared for a second at the large tackle box she’d outfitted as a field kit.
She’d freshened her supplies regularly over the past year. With al-Jihad hitting targets in and around Bear Claw, she’d wanted to be prepared for emergencies. She’d never actually used the thing, though. Had hoped she’d never have to. She couldn’t handle the immediacy of living medicine, the emotions. Now, facing the prospect of working on a man she’d known intimately, a man she’d loved, she quailed. She’d never understood how her mother reveled in the godlike act of cutting into living flesh. Then again, she’d failed to understand a number of her mother’s choices over the years.
You can do this, she told herself, squaring her shoulders and reaching for the medical kit. You have to do this. He’d trusted her enough to put his life and safety in her hands. She would reward that trust by patching him up. Then, once he’s awake, I’ll get some answers out of him, she thought as she returned to his side. Now that she had a plan of sorts, her emotions were starting to shift from dizzying relief at finding him incredibly, impossibly alive…to anger at the deception he’d perpetrated, and his presumption that she’d take him in and treat his wounds on the basis of a note that explained less than nothing.
Leave it to slick, handsome, charming Romo Sampson to assume she’d take care of him after what he’d done to her.
“Bastard,” she muttered under her breath, holding on to the anger because it steadied her hands as she cut away his jacket and black T-shirt, revealing the strong lines of his back, the angry bullet wound and the streaks of forming bruises.
She removed the bulk of his clothing, save for his boxers, which were cheap chain-store wear, and nothing like what he would’ve worn before.
Shoving that thought aside, she piled several blankets over him, then turned up the heat in the living room. She had to get him warm and find a way to get his fluid volume up. But at the same time, she knew she had to be smart, too; she needed to protect herself if things proved more complicated than her more optimistic hypothesis—that he’d been undercover, the blood spatter was from a clean kill of one of the terrorists, and he was in the clear, fully sanctioned for whatever he’d done.
A quiver in her belly warned that the explanation, when she got it, probably wouldn’t be that neat. Romo had never been one to make things easy—either on her or on himself.
His clothes were damp with sweat and blood, and streaked with dirt and other substances. His pockets were empty save for her spare key; a quick search revealed that he wasn’t carrying any wallet, ID, or weapon. She placed his clothes and boots in a paper bag and taped it shut, signing her name across the tape. Then she locked the bag in the gun cabinet. It wasn’t a perfect chain of evidence and probably wouldn’t be admissible in court, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.
It’s just in case, she told herself, and worked very hard not to think about what some of those cases might be.
Returning to him, she found that his color was a little better, his flesh a little warmer beneath the blankets. It seemed very strange that her patient’s skin was flesh-toned and body temperature, but she shoved aside the oddity, locking it down along with her emotions and telling herself to woman up and do what needed doing.
She set him up on a portable monitor that told her what she already knew: his blood pressure, pulse and respiration were all dangerously depressed. Knowing she needed to get his vitals headed on the upswing, she started him on a saline drip. If it came to it, she’d transfuse him with her own blood. She was a type O, a universal donor. But God help her, she hoped it didn’t come to that. She’d already given him everything she intended to of her inner self.
Soon, though, his numbers started coming back up, and his skin and gums pinked, indicating that the shock was fading. Which left her with the bullet wound.
She followed the bruise tracks with her fingers, probing as deeply as she dared. She found three spots where she was pretty sure she felt something. The bullet had fragmented. Damn it.
Doing the best she could, she pulled on sterile gloves, cleaned and numbed the three spots, then chose one and used a scalpel to dissect away the skin and muscle. Without clamps or suction, blood welled immediately, obscuring her working field. She cursed and blotted it with a sterile pad, but gave that up almost immediately as pointless. Instead, she resigned herself to working blind, probing with the scalpel, then forceps.
“Come on…come on…” She was breathing heavily, sweating more from nerves than exertion. Then she felt the forceps lock on to something hard and metallic. “Ah! Gotcha.”
She dropped the bloodstained fragment in a specimen jar, used stitches to close the muscle and incision and then repeated the process twice more. By the time she was done, she’d nearly gotten used to the fact that when she cut into him, he bled. Yet although his vitals had stabilized where they needed to be, he hadn’t moved or made a sound. He just lay there, breathing. In and out. In and out.
Forcing herself not to watch the rhythmical fall of his back, she returned to her work, stitching up the last of the three cuts before turning her attention to the recovered fragments. When she pieced the ragged bits of metal together in their specimen jar, it looked as though she’d gotten all of the projectile. The metal was deformed, making it impossible for her to be sure, but without an X-ray, there wasn’t much more she could do.
She cleaned the entry wound as best she could, then closed it as well, leaving a spot at the bottom for drainage. Finally, she hit her patient with a whopping dose of a broad-spectrum antibiotic. That, plus crossing her fingers, was going to have to be enough. She debated over the painkiller choices she had on-hand, and went with the mildest. He’d be hurting when he awoke—she deliberately thought “when,” not “if,” as though positive thinking would be enough to pull him out of the deep unconsciousness that continued to hold on to him. But it was that very unconsciousness that meant she couldn’t give him one of the stronger painkillers, which had sedative effects.
She needed him to wake up, needed to get a grip on whether the head injury that had blown his pupils to uneven sizes had caused serious damage. If it had, she’d be doing him a major injustice keeping him hidden. But it wasn’t as if she had a CAT scan or an MRI handy.
Her training warred with her conscience. She knew she should take him to the ER, where he could be properly cared for. But at the same time, despite what had happened between them, she had to believe that Romo never would have perpetuated a fraud of any sort—never mind faking his own death—if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary.
As a child, he’d lived through scandal and a trial when his businessman father had been framed for embezzlement by a coworker. Thanks to solid police work and an ambitious public defender on her way up the political ladder, Romo’s father had been acquitted, the other man jailed. Gratitude, and that early exposure to justice, had set Romo on his path to a career in law enforcement.
Sara had heard the story for the first time at his funeral. She also hadn’t realized he’d come to Bear Claw via the Las Vegas PD. That it’d taken his funeral for her to learn that much about his past had bothered her. At the same time, it’d made her wish she could have one last chance to confront him. She’d imagined herself demanding to know what had gone wrong between them, why he’d done what he’d done, even knowing about her past and how badly his actions would hurt her.
Now, though, her sketchy knowledge of his childhood only served to reinforce Sara’s instinct to follow the instructions in his note. He’d gone into police work looking for justice, undoubtedly moving into internal affairs for the same reason. And though he might leave something to be desired on a personal level, she simply couldn’t see him joining the terrorists’ cause.
Having done what she could for him, she leaned back on her heels and considered her options. She couldn’t lift him by herself, and even if she could, she’d risk tearing the heck out of the stitches. So he’d be staying on the floor for the time being. She did manage, through a combination of leverage and no small amount of tugging, to get a thin camping mattress underneath him, helping keep him warm as well as getting him off the bloodstained floor.
“I’ll deal with the cleanup later,” she said aloud, wrinkling her nose. But, the immediate issues dealt with, she became aware that she was a mess, and the room didn’t smell all that pretty. Maybe she should deal with cleanup sooner than later. This was her home, after all.
Trying not to wonder why he’d come to her rather than whoever he’d been working with since his faked death, she moved around the house, closing the curtains and shutting the blinds, lest a casual—or not so casual—observer chanced to look in the windows. As she did so, small shivers marched their way along her skin, warning her that she hadn’t yet thought through all the ramifications of what she’d done, or the question of what she was planning to do next.
Life or death, he’d written. If the terrorists knew about him, if he feared they would kill him if he surfaced, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’d be looking for him? But if that were the case, why wouldn’t he want Fax, Seth and the few other agents he trusted to know he was alive? Again, why had he come to her?
That made her pause. What if he really had been working for—
“No,” she said aloud, refusing to go there. The Romo she’d known would never in a million years have switched sides. She knew that for certain. Everything else was just going to have to wait until he woke up.
Still, partly because she didn’t want him hurting himself if he started thrashing, partly because her head wasn’t quite as sure of him as her heart wanted to be, she pulled a couple of bungee cords from the camping equipment she kept piled in her office closet. Wrapping the cords around his waist and over his wrists, she bound his arms, then did the same with his ankles.
He didn’t stir over the next couple of hours, as she showered and changed, made herself a quick dinner and then freshened the living room as best she could. Finally, near midnight, her body drained of the frenetic, nervous energy that had been driving her up to that point, and she sagged with a sudden onslaught of fatigue.
Romo was stable enough for her to detach the monitors and saline as he moved into the recovery phase of his injuries, when she’d need to be watching for infection or other signs that she’d missed something with the relatively crude care she’d been able to provide. Telling herself it only made sense to stay near him, in case problems arose during the night, she clicked on a night-light in the kitchen to provide a low level of illumination, and bedded down on the couch with a couple of pillows and a thick, soft afghan.
Although she ached with fatigue, her brain kept her restless and wide-awake for far too long. It took almost superhuman effort not to watch him sleep and wonder what had happened to him, what would happen next. It was even harder to keep herself from remembering their times together, both good and bad, all of them tainted with the ache of betrayal and heartache. Eventually, though, she dozed. As she did, she let her hand dangle off the edge of the couch, so her fingertips just brushed the edges of his blanket. Finally, she slipped into a deep sleep.
She awoke hours later, roused by a sound, or maybe just an instinct. Going into doctor mode, she rolled over and moved to rise, opening her eyes as she did so. She froze for a half second at the sight of the empty spot where Romo had been.
Panic sluiced through her and she moved to react, but it was already too late. A man’s figure rose above her, silhouetted in the dim light. She saw the glint of his eyes and teeth, and the shadows of his hands as he reached for her, grabbed on to her, his grip hard and hurtful.
Screaming, she exploded from the couch, but it was already too late. His hands covered her mouth and pressed her back down into the cushions, cutting off her air. Smothering her.

HE BORE DOWN while his enemy grabbed his hands, his wrists, her fingernails digging in as she fought, squirming and bucking against him. And yes, it was a woman, though that didn’t make her any less the enemy. Why else had she kept him bound as she slept? She was one of them. One of the ones who hunted him, who wanted him dead. One of the ones whose faces had haunted him in his nightmares and dragged him back to consciousness.
“Who are you?” he said, his voice rasping with the effort his weakened self was expending to hold on to her, as sharp pain flared in his shoulder.
She whiplashed against him, her legs kicking out and meeting nothing but air. Not a trained fighter, his brain cataloged, but he already could’ve guessed that from the way she’d bound him, with cords that had stretched easily under pressure.
He must’ve been weaker than he’d thought, though, because seconds later she got away from him, clawing and kicking. She hit the floor hard, scrambled up and bolted for the door, screaming.
“Damn it!” Heart hammering—and not just from the fight—he lunged and his legs folded beneath him. Landing hard, he reached out with his good arm, snagged her by an ankle and yanked, bringing her down with him. Strength failing, head pounding with a relentless beat, he went with expediency and lay full length atop her, pinning her with his weight.
She struggled, still screaming, though her screams had turned to words. A name. Romo.
He didn’t know the name, not really, but he was starting to remember the room. They had fallen halfway into a kitchen; a small night-light was on, allowing him to see more details of the homey, feminine space, and triggering the memory of coming to the house earlier in the day, knowing he’d be safe.
But if he was safe, why the hell had she tied him up? And why the hell was he practically naked?
Scowling, he glared down at his captive. She’d gone still and had stopped screaming, but her face was pale even in the diffuse light, her eyes stark and staring. And a hell of a face it was, too, even terrified.
He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes or hair, beyond knowing that they were both light-hued. But the dimness didn’t detract from the elegant lines of her face and swanlike neck, the sculpted arches of her eyebrows and the wide bow of her mouth. Beneath him, her body was lithe and strong—he could feel that strength in the sore places on his shin and arms, and the burn of his injured shoulder where she’d yanked against him in her struggles. But although she was strong, she was also wholly feminine, her curves pressing against him, bringing a stir of memory—this one older and more deeply buried.
As he lay atop her, he belatedly realized that he’d come here, to this woman, because he’d trusted her to help him.
Shame washed through him. Guilt. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he didn’t let her up. “I was dreaming. Nightmare. Then I woke up, not sure where I was, and my arms and legs were tied.”
She took a shallow breath and he thought she might scream again. Instead, she said, “Your note didn’t give me much to go on. I was trying not to be stupid. Apparently, the bungees were borderline on the stupid factor.” He gave her credit for guts, though even as she tried to play it cool, her voice shook.
A roil of memories he couldn’t pin down, couldn’t place, had him stilling and loosening his hold, then rolling onto his side, taking her with him. She was free to move away, but she didn’t. Instead, she lay there facing him, her eyes searching his.
“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice hitching on a suppressed sob. “What happened to you?”
I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am. Who you are. Who we were together. That was what he should’ve said. Instead, he found himself staring, filling himself with the sight of her. Though he was no longer touching her, he felt her curves as though they’d been imprinted on his flesh, creating new memories to replace the ones that were gone. A wellspring of loneliness surged from nowhere and everywhere at once—an ache of longing and a deep sense of loss.
He reached for her blindly, moving purely on instinct. Incredibly, she met him halfway in a kiss that started soft and gentle. Then her lips parted on a small moan of surrender and he slipped his tongue inside to touch hers, tangle with hers. He stroked her hair, her face. She cupped his cheek in her palm.
And, for the first time since he’d regained consciousness in the forest, he felt as though he was exactly where he belonged.

Chapter Four (#ubbce542e-7bcc-5f71-b318-db67c9dc6712)
Sara had seen the kiss coming, and could’ve pulled away if she’d wanted to. Nothing was holding her in place…except her own memories of the two of them together, and the grief she’d felt standing at his graveside. He’d been dead. Now he was alive.
That was why, when he leaned in, she met his kiss. That was why, when he touched his tongue to hers, she returned the move in kind and crowded closer to him so their bodies aligned, though lightly. And that was why, when her blood and body heated at the feel of his bare skin beneath her fingertips and the taste of him on her tongue, she didn’t retreat as she knew she should. Instead, she crowded closer, mindful of his injuries but wanting for a moment—just a brief, beautiful moment—to pretend that the past year or so had been a bad dream.
His taste was sharp with pain and fear, but underneath those flavors was that of the man she’d known, deep and complex, rich and multilayered. Her heart kicked in her chest as she soaked in the sensation of touching him and being touched, cherished his soft groan, and the softening of his caress to one of pleasure, and acceptance.
She let herself linger a moment more, then ended the kiss. Regret pierced her as she drew away from him—or had he pulled away first? She didn’t know, knew only that now they were lying on her living room floor facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes, and he was there, really there after all these months.
And, she realized with a bite of disquiet, he still had the power to make her forget her better intentions, at least for a while.
Damn him.
Fanning the anger because it was a far safer emotion than any of the others he brought out in her, she sat up and glared at him. “If you tore your stitches, I’m going to leave you leaking.” Which wasn’t the most important issue by far, but was somehow the first thing that had come out of her mouth.
He just looked up at her for a moment, all hard muscles and man, sharp facial angles and clever dark green eyes, with a layer of masculine stubble on his square jaw and the thick dark hair that she’d delighted touching as they’d kissed, as they’d made love. No, she told herself, don’t think about that now, don’t remember those times. The present is far more important than the past, under the circumstances.
But before she could demand an explanation of where he’d been for the past several months, he said, “I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t clear whether he was apologizing a second time for grabbing her, for disappearing and faking his own death, for kissing her or for potentially having messed up her stitches. Since she wasn’t actually sure which she would’ve preferred, she let it go, asking instead, “What happened to you?”
“I…I’m not sure.” He sat up slowly and started climbing to his feet, dragging one of the blankets with him in the absence of clothing. He was clearly feeling his injuries now that his body was draining of the adrenaline spike that must’ve powered him to this point.
Sara rose and gripped his good arm when he swayed, even though her own legs were far from steady. Forcing herself to focus on the practical stuff when nothing else seemed to make any sense, she said, “Come on. As long as you’re on your feet, let’s get you to the bedroom.” She had a feeling he’d be headed for a collapse once the last of the adrenaline had burned off, and would rather he didn’t wind up on the floor again.
He leaned on her heavily as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. She told herself to ignore the fact that he was mostly naked, that her hands gripped the warm, lithe flesh that had brought her such pleasure in the past. She watched his face as they crossed the spot where they’d made love so long ago. When his expression didn’t change, she cursed him for being an insensitive ass, and cursed herself for caring when they’d been broken up for more than a year, and he’d been dead—in theory, anyway—for nearly half that time.
He hesitated at her office door, and she urged him past it to her bedroom, where he lay facedown on the bed with a grateful, pained sigh. He stayed obediently still while she checked his wounds, which were inflamed and angry, but showed little sign of additional damage.
“You got lucky,” she said, pulling the blanket up over him. “The stitches held.” Then, feeling unaccountably jittery, she sat on the edge of the bed they used to share, spinning to face him and perch there, cross-legged. He looked at her, expression unreadable, as she inhaled a deep breath and let it out again in a slow, measured exhale that did little to settle her sudden nerves. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I didn’t call an ambulance or the cops, and I didn’t tell anyone you were here because of your note, and because we have enough of a history for me to give you the benefit of the doubt. But also considering our history, I think you’ll agree that I don’t owe you much more than that. So if you want me to keep helping you out, you’re going to have to give me a reason and some explanations, starting now.”
Although he was lying in her bed, injured and lacking the strength to stand on his own, his expression was intense as he reached out to her with his good hand and gripped her fingers in his. “Thank you for not turning me in.”
Something shivered down her spine at his choice of words. “Tell me you’re going to call Fax and Seth now, or whoever you’ve been working for within the PD.”
He grimaced. “I’d like to say yes, but…” He trailed off, his expression clouding. After a moment, he said, “Okay, I’m going to tell you the truth because whatever the details, I apparently trust you more than I do anyone else in the area.”
She frowned, confused. “I…I don’t know what that means.”
He tightened his fingers on hers. “It means that I don’t know your name. I don’t know my own name. I don’t know what we were to each other, or why our relationship—judging from what you just said, anyway—ended. And I damn sure don’t know who shot me, or why.”
Sara felt the blood drain from her face, and imagined she’d just gone very pale. Which was okay, because she had a feeling she was about to faint. “You don’t…”
He shook his head. “Not a clue. I’ve got nothing. Why don’t you tell me what you know about what I’ve been up to lately, and we’ll see if anything jogs a memory.”
A bubble of near-hysterical laughter pressed on Sara’s windpipe. “You…you don’t remember any of it?”
He turned one hand palm-up. “Obviously I remember the walking-around skills, like how to drive, and that it was a damn good idea to cover up with the jacket so nobody would see my back. But that’s survival stuff. I don’t—” He broke off, throat working. “I don’t remember the things that make me an individual.” He tried for a grin. “The only thing I know is that I’ve got good taste in beautiful, capable women who deal well in a crisis.”
“Good taste, maybe, but also a roving eye,” she said quellingly, trying not to let him see how much the words cost her. “But that was more than a year ago. In the interim, you died in a prison riot. I watched your parents bury you.”
Whatever he’d been about to say in regards to his fidelity—or lack thereof—died on his lips, and his face went blank with shock. “You’re kidding.”
“That’s so not something I would kid about.”
“Why in the hell would I fake my own death?”
Sara hesitated, trying to sublimate her own swirling emotions to the practicalities demanded by the situation. As a doctor, she knew she should let him rest. Retrograde amnesia, whether from a head injury or mental trauma—or both—could pass quickly…or it could prove permanent. If she bided her time, the memories might start coming back on their own, with less shock than she was likely to cause by telling him about the terrorists, the prison riot and his own disappearance. Unfortunately, she didn’t think she had the luxury of time to let him remember on his own. The amnesia fit into her theory that he’d been undercover, explaining why he hadn’t gone to whoever had been overseeing the operation. But it also fit into the less-likely-seeming possibility that he’d been with the terrorists voluntarily, then run from them during the chaos of the manhunt. He hadn’t known which side he was working for, or even what was going on.
In either case, she realized, the terrorists and cops would both be looking for him. And she couldn’t do the logical thing and turn him in to the task force, because al-Jihad’s people had infiltrated the official response at almost every level. Until they knew who Romo had been reporting to, and whether he trusted that contact, keeping him hidden could truly be a life-or-death scenario, as his note had said.
She had to tell him about the situation, she decided, and hope the information would help him remember who he could trust. But that left the question of where to begin the story.
As if reading the question in her face, he said softly, “Start with the two of us. Why did I come here?”
That was easy. “We were lovers. You even lived here for a few months before we broke up. That was about a year ago.”
“You said I had a roving eye,” he said. “I was unfaithful?”
“Once.” Which had been enough for her. She’d made a point never to give second chances in situations like that. She wasn’t her mother. “It was a long time ago, though, and not really pertinent to what’s going on.”
Rather than dragging him through a one-sided postmortem of their yearlong love affair, she told him about how al-Jihad, Lee Mawadi and Muhammad Feyd had orchestrated simultaneous bombings in shopping malls across Colorado just prior to Christmas several years earlier, killing hundreds, including a large number of children who’d been waiting to see the mall Santas.
She described how, after a lengthy trial during which Lee Mawadi’s ex-wife, Mariah, was briefly suspected of complicity and then exonerated, the three powerful terrorists were convicted for the Santa Bombings and sent to the ARX Supermax Prison north of Bear Claw City. There, through the sort of clandestine communication network that tended to exist in supermax security prisons despite the inmates’ isolation, al-Jihad made contact with Jonah Fairfax, who was supposedly doing life without parole for killing two federal agents during a raid on an antigovernment cult up in Montana. In reality, he was a deep undercover operative tasked with ferreting out al-Jihad’s contacts within federal law enforcement. In that guise, his handler encouraged him to help al-Jihad and his lieutenants escape. That same handler, Jane Doe, had been working with the terrorists all along. Fax had turned out to truly be one of the good guys, despite Sara’s concerns when her best friend, Chelsea, had fallen for the escaped-convict-maybe-undercover-agent. He and Chelsea’s friends had banded together to foil a terror attack on a local concert, recapturing Muhammad Feyd in the process. The others—including Jane Doe—had remained at large, though, and intelligence suggested they had fled the country.
A few months later, Lee Mawadi had reappeared in the Bear Claw area, gunning for his ex-wife, Mariah. Sara was less clear on the details, except to say that the ex was now engaged to one of the FBI agents on the task force. The two had been instrumental in foiling a planned attack on the prison, though they hadn’t stopped the riot that had killed—supposedly, anyway—Detective Romo Sampson of the BCCPD’s internal affairs department. Who patently wasn’t dead.

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