Chapter 6

 

Hope kept watch through the night, sleeping lightly, always listening for trouble outside or inside the cave, and rising as soon as the sun warmed the sky. Stretching her arms overhead, easing the kink from her stiff neck, she glanced over at the stranger—Owen—pleased to see his face relaxed, a low snore occasionally punctuating his even breathing.

The first night she’d hidden here tending to him, she’d thought she’d heard a search party move by. The voices had been faint, any words blurred by the wind. Still, it had been tempting to take a closer look, maybe even ask for help, but some deep-seated intuition had kept her in the cave.

Out of supplies, they definitely had to get moving today. She was grateful Owen had had an uneventful night. Though she’d wrangled him into this shelter, she’d never be able to transport a man his size to civilization. “Please let him be strong enough to make good time today,” she murmured as her stomach rumbled.

How could he rouse himself mid-fever to tell her to leave, only to wake clear-eyed and not remember much of anything? Not even his last name, she recalled. Brains and brain injuries were tricky. Anyone who participated in or watched sports knew that much. Factoring in all the symptoms and fragments of information, she wasn’t sure which version of Owen scared her more: the cold, relentless hunter or the friendly, rather charming man.

He shifted in his sleep as if he felt her staring, but didn’t wake.

Again, she found herself torn over her decision to pull him out of the creek. On foot at a normal pace, it would take a few hours to hike back to her campsite for supplies and transportation. What would she do if somewhere along the way he remembered he’d wanted to kill her?

Well, at least he wouldn’t be armed. She had no intention of handing those guns back to him and making it easy for him to turn on her if his memory returned. He had the advantage in height and brute strength and, based on her first sighting, he had enough stamina for ten men when he was fit. She had survival training, self-defense skills, and an understanding of the terrain.

While she watched, he rolled over and she saw the stains on his skin, his collar, where his wounds continued to weep. She’d long since used the last of the gauze in her day pack first aid kit. The persistent bleeding was so strange.

“Nothing about him is normal,” she reminded herself. Not his appearance on the reservation, his taking notice of her, his violent response, or his weird symptoms as he recovered. She studied his form, stretched out in the small pocket of rock on the other side of the banked fire. Though he was dressed now she remembered uncovering every inch of his stunning body, despite the fair skin. He was a work of art, even injured and feverish. In another time and place she might have asked him to model for a shoot. In her mind, she was already setting it up: outdoors, in rugged terrain, a deep lake behind him.

Suddenly, his body stiffened and he emitted a low, pained moan. Before she could reach for anything to soothe him, he sat up, clutching his stomach.

Curled away from her, she could see fresh bleeding from the cut behind his ear where his head had collided with a rock after she’d struck him. “Owen?”

He spun around in a crouch, his blue eyes turning wild and feral as a wolf when his gaze lit on her.

“Owen.” Voice calm, she suppressed the scream building in her throat and the urge to run jolting through her body. She reached back, put her hand on the knife.

His lip curled, violence shining in his eyes, muscles coiled to strike. Whatever was happening to him, twisting him into one man and then another, she wished like hell she’d snuck away in the night. She doubted there was much chance of outrunning him when he was in ‘relentless hunter’ mode.

“Think, Owen,” she said. “You’re safe. Look around.”

Clutching his side, his gaze darted around the small space. “No, Hope. Not safe.”

He uttered the words as if chewing gravel. She couldn’t imagine what had set him off. “Are you in pain?”

“Leave.” He closed his eyes tight, obviously fighting some internal battle. “Go!”

Whatever he was going through, he was trying to protect her. “I will,” she promised. “As soon as you tell me who I should call to come help you.”

“No calls,” he rasped. Shaking his head, he dropped to his knees. When he looked up at her, his eyes were clear. “You need to get far away from me.”

Three days ago she would have believed him. After nursing him through a glassy-eyed fever, sharing food with him, and learning his first name, she wanted to see this through. If she left him now, who would escort him to safety? “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

“It goes deeper than pain,” he admitted. “Every nerve is on fire.”

Within the context of the fever, the nausea, and the confusion, the symptoms added up to withdrawal. She just didn’t know how to factor in the wounds that wouldn’t heal.

“Can you walk?”

He nodded.

“Then we’ll leave together.”

“No.” He tried to stand, winced and fell back to his knees. “Hope, you really need to distance yourself. The people who sent me here…” He doubled over again like he’d taken a punch and straightened with an agonized groan. “They will come back.”

“Then we’d better not leave them a trail.” She hoisted her pack onto her shoulders and unfolded her trekking poles. “These should help.”

The idea of leaving what shelter they had when she wasn’t sure how far or how fast he could travel didn’t appeal. But they were out of food and she had to do something. She doused the fire, and shrugged into her pack. Urging him out of the shelter, she knelt at the creek to refill the canteen and water bottles. All she left behind was his rifle. Both her pistol and his were safely in her pack, his knife on her belt. Once they parted ways, assuming they both survived, she’d consider returning his weapons.

He did better than she expected once they were out in the air. She’d chosen a direct route to the campsite, avoiding the area where she’d left her tripod. Setting a slow pace, she increased it gradually as they went along. Walking put some healthy color into his pale skin and the earlier waves of pain seemed to recede. Maybe the sweat and movement were purging whatever he was fighting.

“Where are we headed?” he asked almost an hour later when they stopped to rest and hydrate.

“My campsite,” she replied, braced for a negative reaction. He simply stared back the way they’d come. “From there we can take my truck to the nearest clinic.” Again, no reaction. “Does any of this terrain strike a chord with you? Remind you why you were out here?”

“Not really.” He pressed the heel of his hand against the seeping wounds and added another stripe of blood on his pants as he wiped it off. “I remember a voice in my ear giving commands and counting off time. There’s a strange dread when I think about it, try to bring it into focus.”

“Then don’t push it.” Her first goal was getting them both to her truck in one piece.

Wary of another feral outburst, she’d noticed the way his gaze kept drifting over the land and up to the sky. More than once he’d mentioned the beauty and peacefulness of the area. In her experience it required a special person to appreciate the vast and challenging environment that was southern Montana and the home of the Crow Nation.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t believe me,” he said as they started hiking again.

“I believe you.”

“Why?”

“Because I saw you before you turned on me and after,” she said. “The disconnect—”

“Hang on.” He stopped short, his gaze locked onto her. “What do you mean I turned on you? Why would I do that?”

“I, um… I don’t know.” She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her whole. When she imagined the potential dangers of his memory returning, she hadn’t anticipated she’d be the spark. “I told you the details, but that was when you had a fever.”

Slowly, hands balanced on the trekking poles, he turned away from her. His gaze scanned the area, the hills and pockets of trees breaking up the wide expanse of spring grasses. He shifted again, facing west for a long moment, his back to her.

While she waited, afraid to move, she heard the calls of the migrating longspur she’d been waiting for. Naturally the flock would arrive when she had to be elsewhere. According to the background provided, they’d be here for at least a week. She had time to take care of Owen and get back out to the fields. After she ordered a new camera and tripod, she thought with some frustration.

“Is your cell phone still off?”

Lost in her thoughts, his voice gave her a start. “Yes,” she answered belatedly.

“Good.”

His voice and stance had changed again. When he turned to her, his eyes were almost impossibly blue. Alert, neither ruthless nor friendly, this facet of Owen was detached and analytical. “What’s going on?”

“I tracked you. Shot at you,” he said. “I missed.” Clearly annoyed, he swiped at the oozing wound at his ear again. “I never miss. Then you got the drop on me at the creek.”

“Why did you shoot at me?”

“Orders,” he replied as if that was a sufficient explanation. “Why didn’t you leave me in the creek?”

“Stupidity.” She resumed the hike toward her campsite. “Along with a hefty dose of guilt.” Guilt she barely understood herself, so she didn’t try to explain it to him.

He caught up with her in a few strides. “That’s my knife on your belt.”

“It is.”

“Where’s my rifle?”

“I left it behind.” She was feeling marginally guilty about that now too. “Your pistol is in my pack, loaded, along with two full magazines.” She reached for the pack, prepared to open it and return his handgun.

“That’s something.”

Surprised he hadn’t wanted the gun back, she secured the straps and resumed the brisk pace. “What else do you remember?”

“You weren’t my original target.”

“Good to know.” Though she waited, he didn’t elaborate as to why he’d been running across the reservation. “I sat with you those first two nights.” And he’d mumbled about some strange, impossible things during his fever. “You’ve clearly been through some rigorous physical training.”

“I’ve been through something all right,” he muttered. “It’s not all clear to me just yet, but every instinct I have says I should be dead. They expect me to be dead.”

“Who is they?”

“Better if you don’t know,” he said, hiking on.

It didn’t take long for her to realize he was over the worst of his mysterious symptoms. He asked her questions about why she’d been out in the field alone and expressed a convincing interest in her work as a photographer.

The relatively normal conversation made the time pass quickly, though she had to hustle to match his stride now that he was eager to leave the area. There was no doubt both his eyesight and hearing were far better than hers. He navigated the area as if he’d been the one born here and often turned, claiming to have heard a sound that was simply part of the background to her ears.

They came over a rise and the campground she’d made her base for this assignment came into view. The end to this bizarre situation in sight, she started forward.

“Wait.” Owen caught her arm in a gentle, firm grasp.

She couldn’t ignore the tingle his big palm and long, callused fingers created or the sweet, shivery response that danced along her skin. “What’s wrong now?” To her eyes, everything looked the same as when she’d left.

Releasing her, he stretched out on his belly, eyeing the campground. “This isn’t where you were camped three days ago, when I crossed your path.”

She didn’t want to know how he knew that detail. “No. It’s where I left my truck and extra gear. We need to get you to the clinic and it’s too far to hike without supplies.”

“Any other RV places like this one?” His gaze roved over the sprawling campground.

“Not on this side of the interstate,” she said.

His golden eyebrows flexed into a frown. Was he planning an assault or did he see a risk that was invisible to her?

“You lead,” he said. “Just don’t go directly to your campsite.”

“Why not?”

He aimed a cool stare at her. “Hope, if there is a problem I want time to get you and any other bystanders clear.”

His penetrating ice-blue gaze stirred a strange fizz that bubbled up from her toes. She wasn’t sure if she should blame the sensation on her increasing paranoia or fascination. “All right,” she agreed. “But you might want to remember I’m no slouch in a crisis.”

“I got that.” His mouth curled up at one corner.

“Want your gun?”

He shook his head and then swiped at both leaking wounds. Standing, he took her hand in his and adjusted his stride so they walked casually toward the campground as if they’d always been a couple of carefree nature-lovers.

She drifted on the whimsical fantasy of how it might feel to have a real lover to hike with, to talk with about nothing in particular. Someday she’d find the right man to come home to after her long, lonely assignments. A man who understood the tightrope she walked between wilderness and civilization, between her native ancestry and the modern world.

His big palm tensed suddenly, nearly crushing her smaller hand. “Owen?”

“It’s nothing,” he said through gritted teeth. “Just getting used to the noise.”

She couldn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. His grip eased, only to tighten again as they reached the nearest camp sites.

“Damn it.” He tilted his head, reminding her of animals trying to assess the direction of a potential threat. “They’re here.”

She still had no idea who ‘they’ were, but when Owen pulled her around a mint-green tear-drop camper and kissed her hard, she went with it.

*

Owen had a split-second to decide how to mitigate the risks as information flooded his system. A burly, redheaded man he recognized from the proving grounds, a man who would never be mistaken for a casual weekend outdoorsman, had turned their way. He would be part of either a two-man or four-man team.

His enhanced senses let him know this little trailer at Hope’s back was empty and could be either a diversion or hiding spot. If the tracker they’d planted on him was working, they would have come at him long before now.

Above all, his instincts clamored for him to protect Hope. If the men hunting him saw her, she’d never survive the day.

So he kissed her. In the part of his head processing survival, it had cropped up as the best option. Logical. Winging it was the only advantage he had left.

Neither the man in the gray suit nor any of the teams in or out of the lab would expect him to be with anyone. They’d trained him to follow orders to the letter or die trying.

Owen had definitely caught her off guard, her mouth and body stiff with shock at first. Then she was kissing him back, her tongue a not-quite-shy query across his lips before he parted his lips and answered that subtle plea. She linked her hands behind his head arching her body close as he changed the angle and lost himself in the pulsing heat of the moment.

How long had it been that a kiss left him feeling like a scrawny teenager again? Kissing Hope jacked up his heart rate, left him breathless with need. The scents of the fire and last night’s storm clung to her hair. It took phenomenal willpower to keep his hearing tuned to the search closing in on them.

Fumbling, he found the latch for the door. Pulling her close, he opened the door behind her and then nudged her back. “Get inside and stay there.”

She licked her lips, her eyes wide, and he nearly followed her in, to hell with the trouble tapping at his shoulder.

“I can call—”

“No,” he cut her off. “They’re monitoring everything.”

“Owen. Talk to me.”

“I will,” he promised. “Trust me, Hope. I know what I’m doing. I’ll come back for you as soon as it’s safe.”

He pressed a hard kiss to her lips, slipped the knife from its sheath at her waist, and pushed the door closed between them before she could argue. If he could have locked her inside, he would have done it. She’d saved his life when she should have left him for dead and he would not repay that kindness by letting the ruthless Unknown Identities team capture her.

With the drug out of his system, details of his recent circumstances were returning to his mind like popcorn bouncing around. He could pick the lies from the truth now and the way he’d been manipulated filled him with a cold, bitter rage. The program name had come back to him as well as his own name. The court martial and conviction for a murder neither he nor his friends committed. Then the fog-blurred time in the lab, the testing and training, and the bizarre new senses he possessed.

He’d thought all of it was tied to the drug that kept him in that haze, but as he stalked the UI team, planning his attack, he realized those new skills were part of the man he was now.

Good.

Owen moved away from Hope’s hiding place, weaving between campsites and listening to the redhead gripe about the mission.

“This is bullshit,” Ginger said. “Almost forty-eight hours of lousy campers and s’mores and no sign of him.”

“Be patient,” came the reply. “Prime area for shelter and supplies. I’d stop here if I got hurt.”

Owen wanted to cheer that his enhanced hearing allowed him to pick up the full conversation over the comm link in Ginger’s ear. He waited for others to chime in, but it seemed only the two men were watching for him to pass by this area.

“Pointer doesn’t stop,” Ginger chided. “Intel says he was off the charts on stamina. He missed the ex-fil and Messenger hit the kill switch.”

What did that mean?

“Shut your mouth and keep your eyes open.”

Eyes open or shut wouldn’t make any difference, Owen thought, crouching in a shadow as Ginger turned. They were working the campground in a familiar pattern and for the first time, Owen was grateful for the brutal training sessions UI preferred.

“He’s not here,” Ginger groused. “I’m telling you he’s dead, just like he’s supposed to be.”

“Until we have a body, we keep looking. I’ve cleared the sites on this end, come on back.”

Owen trailed along. Cleaner all around if he could take care of the team in their own campsite. Less risk for witnesses and collateral damage.

Ginger’s boots bit into the gravel path as he walked the perimeter. “Then let’s give them a body. If they get what they want we can get the hell out of here.”

The other voice called Ginger a few choice names and Owen agreed, though he wasn’t sure if the insults were due to the idiotic idea or because they were on a comm link monitored by UI. Either way, it appalled him to think an innocent man might die so this team could return to what they considered civilization.

Clearly aggravated, Ginger stalked back to an RV and opened the door. “We need someone tall, y’know?” he continued. “We can burn away the rest, but Pointer was a tall son of a bitch,” he said as he opened the door.

Owen pounced on the opening. “A little taller than you.” He drove his knife through the top of Ginger’s shoulder as he shoved the dying man into the RV and let the door slam behind him.

The man died almost immediately, slumped between the narrow counter and table, an oath on his lips and a small blood stain on his shirt. A string of curses and threats aimed at Owen came through the dead man’s comm link. Owen paused, listening. Then he smiled at the sound of running feet as the second man raced back to the RV to confront him.

His smile faded when the door opened and he recognized the second man storming in. They’d been pitted against each other in training time and again. Everyone at UI called him Bruce, because he fought like Bruce Lee. His small compact body was deceptively lethal. Owen had seen him deal fatal blows to trainees on more than one occasion, including the last friend he’d had before his memories were erased by the drug.

Bruce’s focus wasn’t distracted by memory or hate. He drove Owen straight back through the narrow kitchen on an impossible surge of speed, and managed to get a foot into Owen’s face. Turning with the blow, the worst of the powerful kick missed, but it connected enough to throw off his balance. The knife skittered across the floor and under the table as he fell. Bruce executed a wicked takedown and with both hands landed hard strikes to the sides of Owen’s head, followed by a series of punches to Owen’s torso before he could buck the smaller man up and off.

Owen caught Bruce’s ankle as the smaller man scrambled to his feet. He yanked hard and got enough leverage to pin him. Size, stamina and reach were often negated by Bruce’s powerful, lightning-quick strikes. The limited space of the RV hampered Owen even more. He took a knee to the kidneys and more fists to his face as he struggled to get the upper hand.

“Where is the kill switch?” Bruce demanded as Owen dodged another blow aimed at the side of his head.

“Right ear.” The stoic, female voice that replied had been in Owen’s ear during his last operation. The job that had gone off the rails when he’d spied Hope on his run to the rendezvous.

Owen plowed a fist into Bruce’s jaw, knocking out a tooth. The man’s body went lax under him, but having seen Bruce fight, Owen wasn’t fooled. He drove a knee into Bruce’s belly and then wrapped his hands around the man’s neck, squeezing. Bruce’s eyes popped open and Owen saw true fear as he squirmed and fought to survive.

Owen couldn’t allow that. If Bruce lived, the UI team would eventually find Hope and kill her. Blanking his emotions, he squeezed harder, leaned in with all his weight on straight arms. Frantic, refusing to die, Bruce wriggled and rocked, hands grasping high and low, searching for any advantage against the death-hold.

The gunshot startled Owen, abused his ears as a single bullet strafed his side. He’d never expected Bruce to bother with a gun. A moment later the body finally went limp under his hands. Windpipe crushed, Bruce’s lifeless hand fell to the floor, dropping the pistol he’d fired.

“If anyone can hear me,” Owen said close to Bruce’s comm link, “You can pick up your dead from the tribal police.”

Recovering his knife, he ran. He had to get Hope out of here before the noise of the fight and gunfire drew a crowd.