Paula Graves - Secret Keeper

“Take a look at her face.” Aaron moved the beam of the flashlight over the woman’s face again.

She had turned back toward them, some of the blood on the side of her face smeared away by the leaves on the ground, revealing more of her features.

Wade’s breath caught. “Son of a bitch.”

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Aaron asked.

Wade nodded, gazing at the pale oval face of the woman he and his family had spent the last three weeks trying to find.

Melissa looked up at them. “Who?”

“Annie Harlowe,” Wade answered. Daughter of the missing Air Force general.

Aaron looked at Wade, his expression grim. “So if she’s here, where the hell’s the general?”

Chapter Two

Annie couldn’t remember the dream, only that it had left her heart thundering in her chest and her stomach roiling with nausea. She woke to pain—in her shoulders, her wrists, her knees and especially her head, which felt as if it had been hollowed out and filled with burning agony.

For some reason, she expected to open her eyes to bright lights and chaos, but the room around her was blessedly dark, save for a faint light seeping in from the doorway several feet away. The unfamiliar bed supporting her weakened body was uncomfortable, the gloom-shrouded surroundings dull and sterile.

A shadow moved to her right, and her heart skipped a beat.

“You’re awake.” The voice was low and soft, broadened by a southern accent.

“Who are you? Where am I?”

“I’m Wade Cooper,” the shadow answered. “And you’re on the fourth floor of Chickasaw County Hospital.”

The pain made a little more sense. “How’d I get here?”

“I found you semiconscious in the woods near Gossamer Lake.”

She narrowed her eyes and instantly regretted it as agony streaked through her forehead. She lifted her hand to the aching spot and found a bandage. “What happened to me?”

“Don’t know yet,” Wade said. “Think you can handle the light?”

She wanted to say no, as she was pretty sure the last thing her throbbing brain could handle was anything bright. But she didn’t like talking to a shadow, so she said, “Yes.”

He rose to his feet and turned on a light over the bed. After the initial shock, her eyes adjusted quickly to the mercifully dim light and the headache settled into bearable territory. Her visitor sat down, giving her a better look at him. Early thirties, she guessed. Lean and fit, with broad shoulders and a pugnaciously masculine jaw. In the low light, his eyes looked coal-black and mysterious, but his calm, neutral expression suggested her mind was playing tricks on her.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think so.” She noted his clothing—jeans and a green plaid shirt under a faded denim jacket. “You’re not a doctor.”

He smiled, flashing a set of straight white teeth. “No ma’am, I’m not.”

“Where did you say I am, Chickasaw County? In Georgia?” She couldn’t remember if there was a Chickasaw County in Georgia. She seemed to have a lot of gaps in her memory all of a sudden.

“Chickasaw County, Alabama,” he corrected.

“Alabama?” She frowned, the movement sending another dart of pain through her injured scalp. What the hell was she doing in Alabama?

“You don’t remember how you got here?”

Before she could answer the question, the door to the hospital room opened and a man in green surgical scrubs entered, holding a chart. His eyes widened with surprise when they met hers. “You’re awake.” He glanced at Wade. “And you have a visitor,” he added, his tone disapproving. “Well past visiting hours.”

Wade looked briefly sheepish but didn’t move. “I didn’t want her to wake up in the hospital all alone.”

Annie slanted a quick look at him, surprised by the kindness in his voice. She worked in Washington, D.C., where random acts of kindness weren’t exactly the norm, at least not in the circles in which she ran.

“Nice of you,” the doctor said without much sincerity in his clipped tone. “But I need to examine my patient now.”

Wade started moving toward the door. For the first time, Annie saw that he walked with a visible limp.

“Wait,” she said as he reached the exit.

He turned in the doorway, his powerful shoulders and lean hips silhouetted by the light from the corridor. Built like a cowboy, she thought, her dry lips curving at the notion. “Yeah?” he said.

“Are you leaving? The hospital, I mean.” Hating the neediness she heard in her voice, she told herself she’d be better off if he said yes.

“No, I reckon I’ll stick around a bit.” His face was in shadow, but she thought she could make out a smile.

Then he was gone, leaving her alone with the doctor.

“I didn’t get your name,” she said to the doctor.

“Dr. Brady Ambrose,” he answered briskly, reaching for her wrist to check her pulse. Even the skin of her wrists hurt when he touched them. “How long have you been awake?”

“I don’t know—a few minutes?”

He checked her eyes with a pen light. “Headache?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Anything else hurt?”

“Everything else hurts,” she admitted. New aches and pains seemed to be cropping up with each passing second. She looked at her wrist, which still stung from the doctor’s touch, and saw a deep purplish-red bracelet of bruises and abrasions. She lifted her other hand and found the same marks.

Those were ligature marks, she realized with rising alarm.

“What day is it?” she asked.

“Friday.” The doctor looked at his watch. “Actually, Saturday by now,” he added with a rueful smile.

“The date, I mean.”

“September 8.”

Her alarm exploded into full blown panic. “September?” That wasn’t possible. Just this morning, she’d flown from D.C. to Chattanooga to meet her parents at the airport for the drive to their vacation cabin north of Dahlonega. The last thing she remembered was—

What? What was the last thing she remembered?

Nothing. The airport was the last thing she remembered. Walking through the terminal, grabbing her suitcase from the baggage carousel and heading off to look for her parents, who would be waiting to pick her up.

That had been August 18.

Almost three weeks of her life were missing.

* * *

“S HE SEEMS LUCID ,” Wade told his brother Jesse, who sat across from him in the fourth floor waiting room. “But I don’t think she remembers what happened to her and her parents. It would have been the first thing she’d have asked about, don’t you think?”

Jesse ran his palm across his face, his eyes dark with frustration. “So it’s not going to be the lead we hoped.”

Next to him, their sister Megan shot Jesse a sharp look. “A woman I was pretty sure had to be dead turned out to be alive,” she said flatly. “That’s not nothing.”

“Of course not,” Jesse agreed with a faint smile. “But we aren’t any closer to decoding General Ross’s journal than we were before.”

“Maybe she doesn’t remember now,” Megan said, “but that doesn’t mean she won’t remember eventually. Remember when Hannah was attacked and lost some of her memories? They eventually came back.”

“Eventually,” Jesse agreed. “But three weeks have already passed. And apparently she escaped from her captors, which may put her parents in even graver danger.”

“She’s not out of danger, either.” Wade looked toward the waiting room door, remembering the look of confusion and vulnerability in Annie Harlowe’s caramel-brown eyes. “If she escaped, she may know something that could lead us to the kidnappers. And they’ll be looking to stop her from telling what she knows.”

“The kidnappers won’t be the only people who’ll want custody of her,” Jesse warned. “I imagine the Pentagon will want to know everything she knows about what happened to her father, too.”