Cindy Dees - The Spy's Secret Family

“But Adam needs Super Mommy.”

Laura’s voice cracked, sending a glass shard of pain through him. How was she ever going to move past the fact that he’d done this to their child? Even assuming Adam returned home safe and sound—and he refused to consider any other possibility—how were they going to move forward as a couple?

He asked slowly, “Do think you’ll ever forgive me for all of this?”

She stared across the dark interior of the car at him a long time before she answered. “I don’t know. After you lied to me in Paris and then spent the past year knowing you were living under an assumed identity and never told me, I don’t know how I’m going to trust you again.”

If only he could remember why he’d deceived her in Paris! For the first time, he regretted not really trying to work with the doctors who’d attempted to help him regain his memory.

“Now what?” Laura asked.

What indeed.

Dear Reader,

I cannot tell you how much fun it is to get to revisit a few of my favorite characters of all time, and to get to write about babies and children again, all in one book! I was absolutely thrilled when I was asked to write another book in the TOP SECRET DELIVERIES series. Thanks so much to you for supporting these books and giving me and my fellow authors an opportunity to play in this universe again.

There’s nothing quite as powerful as the love of a parent for their child, and it was a challenge to combine this with a grown-up love story and a tale of suspense and danger. Thankfully, Nick and Laura knew exactly how they planned to proceed. It seemed like every day when I sat down to write, certain I knew what was going to happen in that day’s work, those two up and took me in some completely different direction altogether.

So, I take no credit for this book. This is truly Nick and Laura’s story. I was just the typist along for the ride. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Happy reading!

Cindy Dees

CINDY DEESstarted flying airplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three and got a pilot’s license before she got a driver’s license. At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan where she grew up to attend the University of Michigan. After earning a degree in Russian and East European Studies, she joined the US Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in its history. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest airplane. During her military career, she traveled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories. Her hobbies include medieval re-enacting, professional Middle Eastern dancing and Japanese gardening.

This RITA ®Award-winning author’s first book was published in 2002 and since then she has published more than twenty-five bestselling and award-winning novels. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com.

Cindy Dees

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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This book is for Shana Smith because it absolutely,

positively couldn’t have happened without her. Truly.

You’re the best!

Why wasn’t he dead?

Nick stared up at the featureless white ceiling of his hospital room as the beeping of a heart monitor punctuated the panic flowing through his veins. Why hadn’t they killed him? Why five years of captivity instead—in a shipping container, on a cargo ship, floating around in international waters?

And why couldn’t he remember what came just before his kidnapping? The doctors told him he’d sustained a serious head injury at some point during his incarceration. Whether a captor had hit him during an interrogation or he’d fallen during one of the massive open-sea storms that had tossed him like a cork inside his steel prison, he had no recollection.

He coughed thickly. Supposedly, his pneumonia was mostly under control now. It had been touch and go there for a while. But the worry lurking in his nurses’ eyes had eased in the past day or so. He gathered he was out of the woods, which was good news.

They were still working on clearing his body of various other infections and trying to restore normal function to his digestive tract. The only way he was putting on weight was via the massive calorie infusions running through his IV.

They’d cut his dark hair and shaved off his matted beard, revealing the unnatural paleness of his usually olive complexion. The psychiatrists said he might never remember the lost time, a memory gap spanning approximately two years prior to his capture and the first three years or so of his imprisonment. Funny how the shrinks were trying so hard to retrieve those memories and he was trying equally hard not to retrieve them. Absolute certainty vibrated ominously in his gut, warning him that whatever lurked in that black hole of lost time was best left there.

Was whatever he’d forgotten the reason he was still alive? Had his captors been waiting for him to remember something? Or was there some other, more sinister reason that someone had been hell-bent on imprisoning him?

Maybe he was just being paranoid. Although it wasn’t paranoia if someone was really after him. Even now, he expected his keepers to burst into his hospital room and haul him back to his box. The idea actually made a certain sick sense. If his captors had orders to keep him alive and he’d gotten too sick to treat on the ship, they could’ve cooked up this whole rescue ruse to fatten him up and get him healthy enough to toss back in Hell.

Laura Delaney—the woman who’d rescued him from his metal prison and one of the only faces he remembered from the lost years—claimed the two of them had been lovers before he’d disappeared. She’d introduced him to a little boy who looked so much like him it was hard to discount her story that he was the child’s father. He desperately hoped it was true.

She was an extremely attractive woman. It wasn’t difficult to imagine dating someone like her. But was she for real? Or was she part of his captors’ evil head games? Was she here to trick him into revealing whatever secrets his subconscious was guarding so fiercely?

If only there was someone he could trust, really trust , to tell him what was real and what was not.

And then there was the troubling fact that he knew for certain his name wasn’t Nick Cass. Nor had he grown up entirely in Rhode Island. But Laura apparently believed both to be true. He must’ve told the lies himself. But why? If he and Laura were lovers like she claimed, why hadn’t he told her his real name or the most basic facts about his past? Why the deception?

Everywhere he turned, there were only questions and more questions. Frustration sang through his blood as sharply as his secret hope that his freedom, at least, was real. But he dared not share that hope with anyone. Not until he knew if anyone at all was telling him the truth.