The Stealth Commandos Trilogy Read Free Page A

his leg where the knife blade had caught him. His heart was thundering as he walked to the door and swung it open, breathing in hot, pine-sharpened summer air and struggling to make sense of the situation. There had to be a logical explanation, but try as he could to come up with something, only one answer made sense. Who, besides a muckraking reporter, would have any interest in bringing up the Costa Brava mission? And who else would know the details? She must have got her information from newspaper reports, sketchy as they were.
    “Why won’t you believe me?” she said, a hurt quality to her voice. “I’m telling the truth.”
    He turned back to look at her and saw that she’d lifted herself up with some effort and was resting her shoulder against the log wall of the cabin. Her eyes were expectant and fearful, but they were also suffused with another emotion that tugged at him. Desperation. She was pleading for something, but what was it? Recognition? What did she want from him? With a massive effort of will he hardened himself against the vulnerability that drenched her blue gaze like a summer shower.
    “I’m telling the truth, too, Annie Wells. As sure as I’m standing here, I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
    She couldn’t be who she said she was, Chase told himself. That girl was dead, God help her. Dead with her blood on his hands. He’d been the one driving when the jeep had gone off the embankment. He searched his memory for an image of the teenager, anything he could use to prove to himself that this women couldn’t be her. But all he got were fuzzy shapes and outlines. The high fever and bouts of delirium he’d suffered during the mission had impaired his memory—and undoubtedly his judgment. The car wreck had finished the job, leaving him with nothing but occasional flashbacks that were too stark, yet fleeting, to understand.
    He had told Annie Wells the truth, but not the whole truth. He couldn’t remember the young woman whose life he’d saved, and then destroyed. He couldn’t even remember her name.
    “I’ll prove it to you then,” she said, almost defiantly. “Ask me anything, anything at all.”
    “I intend to ask you plenty,” Chase assured her. He didn’t make a habit of terrorizing vulnerable women, but he was going to get some honest answers, even if he had to put the fear of God into her. He’d been working for the Cattlemen’s Association since he’d settled in Wyoming, and he’d flushed out plenty of cattle thieves and horse rustlers in that time, even put a couple of them away, in self-defense. He could sure as hell handle one tiny female.
    “Keep talking,” he said quietly, taking his shotgun from its holster. He rubbed the barrel across the leg of his jeans as though the metal needed polishing. It was a casual move, even offhand, but the gun took on a presence all its own in that small, still room. “And make it a damn good story.”
    Annie Wells couldn’t seem to breathe deeply enough to fill her lungs. She’d had some fearful premonitions about what might happen if and when she found Chase Beaudine, but never this. Never that he wouldn’t believe her. He didn’t even appear to remember her, which seemed impossible to her. How could he have forgotten what they’d been through together? The hell ... the heaven. She would never be able to escape the memories, no matter how long she lived, or how far she traveled. Her only safe course now was to stick to the facts, to relate exactly what had happened.
    “Your wound turned bad,” she told him, severely curbing the emotion she felt. “Infections are deadly in a subtropical climate. You could have died of the fever alone, so I took you to a priest—”
    “For what? Last rites?”
    “This priest had been a curandero —a Spanish medicine man—before he converted. He knew how to use medicinal herbs and plants. He gave you an infusion of arbuto roots for the fever, and then he made an antibiotic salve out