Secret Identity (12 page)

He turned to look at her. “I didn’t even think of that.”

“I didn’t until it was too late,” she admitted. But she should have. She’d spent a lot of time over the past three years worrying about collateral damage—had she put her neighbors in Thurlow Gap in danger just by living among them?

“My guess is, he’ll be okay. They didn’t come after me in the motel—they went after you. They know exactly who they’re looking for, and they’re not going to make a big scene and draw attention by ambushing some poor farmer in a pickup truck who’s just going on with his daily business.”

Amanda hoped he was right. But she couldn’t help worrying about the farmer.

Or whoever Rick was talking to on his cell phone when she woke from a light doze almost an hour later in time to overhear him say, “We’re about twenty minutes away from your location. Thanks for the escort in.”

“Twenty minutes from where?” Amanda asked, her voice thick with sleep.

“Fort Payne, Alabama,” he answered, ending the call. “That was my sister Isabel. She and my brother Wade are meeting us there to give us a security escort to Chickasaw County.”

She shook her head, wincing as the movement intensified the pain savaging her skull. “Don’t involve anyone else—I should just…” The world outside the car seemed to be moving in a dizzying rush, the blur of colors making her light-headed.

“Amanda?” Rick’s voice, heavy with alarm, seemed to come from miles away.

She closed her eyes against the kaleidoscope of images assaulting her throbbing brain. If she could just shut it out for a little while…

Blackness descended, and for the first time in a long time, she sank gratefully into the abyss.

SHE WAS BURNING UP, so feverish that her flesh almost seemed to sting his fingers where he touched her. On a hunch, he tugged up the sleeve of her jacket and saw that the skin outside the bandage over her bullet graze was turning a purplish-red from infection.

She’d gone too long without cleaning the wound. Longer than he had, and he’d been careful to protect his own injury from contamination, keeping it covered by his shirt.

There was a temporal thermometer in the first-aid kit. At the first opportunity, he pulled off to the side of the road and tested her temperature, trying not to wake her. She was asleep, not unconscious—she’d roused and grumbled a little earlier when he’d felt her forehead—and he knew that rest was almost as good a remedy for infection as antibiotics.

He checked the thermometer when it beeped. Her temperature was nearly 104 degrees. Too high.

The small scenic overlook where he’d parked to take her temperature was empty of other cars. Not that having an audience would have stopped him from what he was about to do, but he knew Amanda would probably prefer not to be stripped naked with people watching.

He went around to her side of the car, carrying a couple of ibuprofen, a bottle of water and a clean washcloth he kept in his larger camping kit packed in the trunk of the car. First coaxing her to take the ibuprofen with a few sips of the water, he then turned his attention to bringing her fever down. He planned to strip her to her underwear and bathe her with the wet washcloth. The cool water and the mild March morning temperatures should be the next best thing to an ice bath.

But Amanda’s fierce reaction when he started to remove her T-shirt caught him by surprise. She swung at him weakly as he pulled the hem up to her breastbone. “No!” she cried, slapping at his hands.

But he didn’t drop the hem, his gaze snared by what he saw along the edge of her rib cage. Fending off her struggle, he turned her until her back was bared to him from the shoulder blades down.

Still-healing red scars crisscrossed her back like a roadmap of hell. Rick had seen scars like that before, in any number of war-torn snake pits and soul-rending refugee camps.

Whip scars. A sign that she’d been beaten, at the very least. But beatings almost always came with other kinds of torture in places like Kaziristan.

He let the T-shirt drop and laid his hand on her face, soothing her back to a calm slumber, while inside, his heart felt as if it had been shredded and left to bleed.

“Oh, baby,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her hot forehead, “who did this to you?”

Chapter Seven

“So this is her.” The voice was low-pitched and female, with a hint of a Southern accent.

“She’s going by Amanda Caldwell,” Rick’s voice answered the female voice. “She doesn’t want to be called Tara.”

He sounded sad, Amanda thought. Sad that she didn’t want him to call her Tara anymore? Or was his sadness a sign of something worse?

Was she dying? She felt as if she were dying, the way her head pounded as if someone were drilling a jackhammer into the top of her skull. And where she’d been so cold just a little while ago, now she was flushed and sweaty, her T-shirt clammy against her skin.

She tried opening her eyes and regretted it. Light assaulted her pupils, making them contract painfully. She squeezed her eyes shut.

“She’s awake.” That voice was all male and as Southern as turnip greens, delivering the news of her awakening in a flat, just-the-facts tone.

Amanda forced her eyes open again. The light didn’t seem as painful this time. Her vision was a little blurry, but when Rick’s familiar face came into view, her eyes focused enough to see his look of relief.

“Hey there,” he said quietly, sitting next to her. She was in a bed, she realized. Not a hospital bed—the mattress under her was soft and comfortable. As home should be.

She was in a bedroom, large and casually pretty, with walls painted a soothing eggshell-blue and plain brown curtains flanking the tall windows. She tried to sit up but stopped immediately as a wave of nausea pulsed through her gut.

“I need a trash can,” she moaned.

“Here.” The owner of the female voice thrust a small garbage can, lined with plastic, into Amanda’s hands. Just before her stomach rebelled, Amanda caught a glimpse of the woman who went with the voice, a tall, striking woman with curly dark hair and sympathetic eyes the color of strong tea.

There was nothing left in her stomach, so she had to wait through a series of dry heaves before she could finally sit back, moaning, and wait for the gnawing pain in her gut to subside. She looked up at Rick, mortified. “I’m sorry.”

It was the woman who answered her, tugging Rick out of his position beside the bed. She sat in the place he’d vacated, offering a wet washcloth to her. “No apology necessary. You’ve been running a high fever for the past couple of hours. Rick says you haven’t eaten since sometime yesterday?”

The thought of food made her stomach cramp, but she nodded.

“You want to try a little beef broth?”

Amanda started to shake her head no, then realized that her nausea might be exacerbated by hunger. So she changed the gesture to a nod.

“Rick, there’s a can in the cabinet. Go heat it up.” Isabel flashed him a wry smile. “Oh—and empty that trash can for me, will you? Wade,” she added, turning to the other person, a dark-haired man a couple of inches shorter than Rick, “you head back to the office and let everyone there know what’s going on. And grab Eric—I think she needs him to take a look at her.”

Both men headed out of the room—Wade walking with a distinct limp, Amanda noticed—leaving Amanda alone with the woman, who watched her with gentle eyes.

“You must be Isabel,” Amanda rasped, her throat sore from the dry heaves.

“Yes. I’m Rick’s sister. And the other guy was our brother Wade.” She patted Amanda’s leg. “You feeling any better? You still look pretty pale.”

“Has my fever broken?”

Isabel touched Amanda’s forehead with the back of her hand. “You feel cooler. And you’re sweating now—that’s a good sign.”

“Who’s Eric?” Amanda asked, remembering what Isabel had said to her brother Wade.

“He works with us at Cooper Security. Used to be a Navy medical officer, then he joined our agency. Sort of our private physician. Plus he’s our go-to guy on medical-related investigations. He’ll assess your condition and tell us whether you need to go to the hospital.”

Amanda shook her head, ignoring the resulting pain. “No hospital.”

“Look, I get that you don’t want to be found. From what Rick tells us, I understand completely. But letting yourself die of an infection doesn’t solve anything.”

“I’ve had worse wounds,” Amanda answered flatly.

Isabel’s eyes softened even more. “We saw the scars.”

Amanda’s heart sank. “Rick saw them?”

Isabel nodded. “You don’t get scars like that unless you’ve been tortured.”

Amanda pressed her lips into a tight line, aching with humiliation. “It’s over. I survived.”

“Where did it happen?”

She shot Rick’s sister a warning look.

Isabel sat back, her expression shifting to neutral. “Okay. We’ll get you back on your feet again and then you can decide what you want to do next. Sound like a plan?”

Amanda didn’t want to like Isabel Cooper, but she found the woman’s matter-of-fact approach and calm demeanor soothing. She didn’t want to be coddled or treated like a victim, and Isabel seemed to get that.

It made Amanda all the more curious about the thread of sadness she saw in Isabel’s dark gaze. Maybe she was battling a few demons of her own.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“My house.” Isabel looked around the room, a faint smile of affection curving her mouth. “It’s really too big for one person, but it was so homey and comfortable. And it’s about ten minutes from the office and just down the street from where my dad lives. I couldn’t pass it up.”

“Last I knew, you were in the FBI,” Amanda commented. “At least, that’s what Rick said.” She couldn’t really be sure how much of what he’d told her in Kaziristan was the truth. In a lot of ways, he’d been as much a secret-keeper as she’d been.

“I was.” Isabel’s tone held a touch of bleakness, and Amanda realized she’d stumbled onto a clue to the sadness she’d seen in the woman’s eyes. But she was in no position to ask any questions, given how she’d blocked Isabel’s attempts to learn more about her own scars.

“So you quit to work for your brother?”

Isabel’s tone returned to normal. “Yes. About five months ago. I needed a change, and Jesse’s trying to build Cooper Security into a top-notch agency.”

“I guess grabbing an FBI agent away from the bureau might be quite a coup,” Amanda ventured.

Isabel laughed. “We’re like a big ol’ bowl of alphabet soup,” she answered, her Alabama accent stronger than before. “Former FBI, DEA, DSS, ATF—and Wade swears one of the former Special Forces guys we hired was really working for the CIA in Afghanistan.” She lowered her voice, her eyes glittering with humor. “But if Mac told us the truth, he’d have to kill us.”

Rick came back into the room, stopping in the doorway as if to make sure it was all right to enter. Amanda met his gaze, wondering if she’d see pity there, now that he’d seen her scars.

She didn’t know if she could bear his pity.

But his expression, while sympathetic, also seemed tinged with admiration, as if he were more focused on her survival than the ordeal itself. She wanted it to stay that way. It’s how she managed to deal with life these days, herself—by concentrating on how far she’d come from the trembling, broken creature who’d managed to break out of her prison and struggle to freedom only moments before, she was convinced, she’d have sunk into irretrievable madness.