RaeAnne Thayne - The Interpreter

She pressed a slim hand to her cheek and then to the back of her head as if she’d only just realized it ached. When she pulled her fingers away he saw more dried blood on her fingers.

“Let me see.” He stepped closer for a better look and she instinctively retreated from him, but she had nowhere to go with a throbbing pickup behind her.

He cupped her cheek in one hand and turned her head with the other. He was no medic but every intelligence agent had at least the bare bones of triage experience.

She had a nasty cut and what felt like a hell of a goose egg at the back of her head, just above where neck met skull. A head injury could explain the apparent memory loss, if that’s really what was going on here. If this wasn’t some elaborate ploy.

Why would anybody go to all this trouble to stage an accident? he wondered. He’d been in the game so long he suspected everybody of deception and subterfuge.

He was going to have to take her to help. Even if he didn’t completely trust her, he couldn’t leave a woman out here alone. It might be hours—or even days—before another vehicle traveled through this remote area.

Before he could explain that to her, he heard a truck door shut and he had time only for one bitter curse as Miriam and Charlie peeked around the pickup, anxiety in their dark eyes.

“Didn’t I tell you two to wait in the truck?” Mason asked. Was there not one part of his life under his control?

“Charlie was scared,” Miriam said in her native language. By the shadows in her eyes, he could see her little brother wasn’t the only nervous one. “We wanted to make sure the lady was all right.”

“I’m just fine,” his mystery Brit answered in perfectly accented Tagalog, smiling at the children. “And how are you?”

He stared at her. “You speak Tagalog?” he asked incredulously. What were the odds of finding a woman in the middle of a deserted Utah road who spoke the children’s language? This whole thing was beginning to seem more and more bizarre.

“Do I?”

He growled low in his throat in frustration. “You just did! How is it you know how to conjugate verbs in a foreign language but you apparently don’t know your own damn name or why you’re lying in the road in the middle of nowhere?”

She gazed at him, her blue eyes wide, distressed for several moments, with only the sound of his rumbling truck to break the vast silence, then he saw those eyes cloud with dismay and fear as the full reality of her situation soaked in.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember!”

Panic was a wild creature inside her, clawing and fighting to break free. She stared at the stranger watching her through dark, suspicious eyes. He was so big, at least six foot two. The cowboy hat and the hulking, rumbling truck behind him somehow made him seem bigger, huge and dangerously male.

She had a funny feeling she didn’t particularly care for large men. Or men who frowned at her with such ill-concealed vexation bordering on outright hostility.

She climbed to her feet as pain sliced through, making her head throb and spin like a whirligig. Despite the change in altitude, the man still towered over her.

“Are you telling me you don’t remember your own name?” he asked, his voice as hard as the mountains around them. Her splitting headache kicked up a notch and she was afraid wild hysteria loomed on the not-so-distant horizon.

She screwed her eyes shut as if she might find the answer emblazoned on her eyelids and searched her mind for any snippet of information, no matter how tiny. All she found there was a blank, vast field of nothing.

No name, no age, no nothing.

“What’s wrong with me?” she wailed. “Why can’t I remember?”

The two children exchanged a nervous look at her outburst. Though she regretted scaring them, she couldn’t seem to focus on anything but the pain in her head and her own burgeoning panic.

“Don’t cry.” The little boy spoke in Tagalog as he patted her hand. “It will be okay. You’ll see. Mr. Mason will make it all better.”

How perfectly ridiculous that she could find such comfort from this funny little creature with dark eyes and a win-some smile, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

“Miriam,” the American said in English, his voice deep and somehow calming, despite the suspicion in his eyes, “take Charlie to the truck and wait there. We’ll be along in a minute.”

The girl nodded and grabbed the boy’s hand, tugging him toward the pickup. She watched them climb inside the big cab, already missing the buffer they provided between her and this angry-looking stranger.

“What’s happened to me?” she asked when she was once more alone with the man. “Why can’t I remember anything?”

His silver-gray eyes narrowed with mistrust. “If this is some kind of game, lady, you won’t get away with it. I find you’re trying to play me, and you can bet I’ll be on you like a magpie on a June bug.”

She wasn’t sure what a magpie or a June bug might be but she sensed the metaphor wasn’t intended to be pleasant. “It’s not a game, I swear to you. I can’t remember anything.”

“You don’t have the first clue what you’re doing out here miles from anywhere? Come on. Think.”

She would like to, but her brain seemed to have gone on holiday. Maybe she could hold a coherent thought if it weren’t for the excruciating pain squeezing her skull.

She wanted nothing so much as to curl up again in the dirt until everything disappeared—the noisy truck growling behind her, this terrifying, suspicious American, and especially the hot stab of pain searing her skull.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I told you that. Why won’t you believe me?”

He appeared to consider her question. “I’m not sure about the U.K.,” he finally said, his voice dry, “but here in America women don’t just drop out of the sky. How did you get here?”

All she wanted was a lie-down. Her head seemed to be inhabiting another postal code entirely from the rest of her body and she absolutely did not want to be standing here in the middle of the wilderness exchanging words with an arrogant cowboy who seemed determined to think the worst of her.

“I don’t know,” she repeated, pain and frustration and that skulking panic making her testy. “Perhaps I was abducted by little green spacemen who sucked out my memory before conking me on the head and tossing me out of their flying saucer.”

He gazed at her out of those suspicious gray eyes for another moment and then she could almost swear she saw fleeting amusement flicker in his expression. At this point, she wasn’t sure she really cared. Her small moment of defiant sarcasm seemed to have sapped her last bit of energy. She could feel herself sway and took a deep breath, forcing her knees, spine and shoulders to stiffen on the exhale.

“I’m sorry to have troubled you.” She tried for as much dignity as she could muster. “If you could be so kind as to point me in the direction of the nearest town, I’ll just be on my way.”

He stared at her in disbelief for about half a minute then shook his head. “The nearest town is about seven miles that way on a dirt logging road. You really think you’re up for that kind of hike in your condition?”

Daunted but determined, she nodded. “Certainly.”

She could only wish her knees weren’t so damned wobbly and her head wasn’t throbbing like a finger slammed into an automobile door. She managed to take about five shaky steps before the American gave a put-upon sounding sigh and scooped her into his arms.

Her head whirled as the rapid shift in position exhausted all remaining equilibrium.

“Excuse me!” she still managed to exclaim hotly.