“I don’t know how that can be,” she answered, her pulse quickening. She had reached out in sympathetic gesture, but the instant his hand had closed over hers and he’d looked at her, the contact transformed into a fiery, physical awareness. She didn’t react this way to other men and she didn’t want such a response with a man who was danger personified. Besides, as she dimly recalled, Colin had a fiancée in his past.
He was not wearing a wedding ring, but she would not be surprised to hear that he was married by now.
“Why didn’t you let your family know you were alive?”
He dropped her hand. “It’s a long story,” he said in a tone so filled with bitterness she was sorry she had asked.
“So you got over the amnesia,” she prompted, wanting to hear the rest of his story and why her brother and his friends might be in danger.
“Somewhat,” he said, taking another bite of potato. “I remember most everything except the explosion and a couple of weeks afterward.”
“That was a long time ago. Why does it matter now?”
“The ringleader of the terrorists escaped the blast, but I’m sure he doesn’t want me to live—I’m the witness who can identify him if I can just remember what went down. My memory is gone. No one knows when it might fully return. If it does, I may also know enough to identify a double agent who was involved. Someone tipped the terrorists about our plan to rescue the hostage, who was a U.S. agent. There’s a good chance the spy was one of our own men and he wants me dead.”
“How do you know a double agent was involved?”
“Someone had that meeting set up to kill us and the hostage. If we had all gone in together as we’d originally planned, they would’ve succeeded. Someone arranged things a little too well—it had to be an inside job.”
She shivered. “That’s dreadful. Someone you worked with set all of you up?”
“Right. The CIA suspect they have a double agent high up in the ranks. Secrets are getting out that have hurt them. Men like us have been killed because their cover has been blown.”
“That’s dreadful, but if my brother and Mike and Jonah weren’t there with you and the hostage, why are they in danger?”
“For that, we need to go back to when I was injured. After the explosion, I was in a foreign hospital for over a year. It was a while before I knew who I was.”
“You were an American. Didn’t they try to contact someone about you?” she asked.
He stopped to take a long drink of beer, wiping his mouth and eating a bite of roast. After a moment he continued. “When I began to remember enough to know who I was, I contacted—” He stopped abruptly and looked away. A muscle worked in his jaw and she realized he still was emotionally entangled in the memories of his past.
She was uneasy, a chilling fear growing that even though he didn’t want to bring trouble to them, he had. But maybe, as he was trying to tell her, the trouble was already here and his news would help alert Boone, Jonah and Mike.
Colin was silent so long, she wondered if he had forgotten what he was saying. “You said you contacted—whom?” she prompted him. “The army?”
“No. Danielle, my fiancée. She was my first thought when I regained my memory. I thought if I could just reconnect with her, I’d be okay. But she had gotten married. The hostage exchange was to take place in one of those obscure Eastern European countries near Russia. I was brought into the hospital with no identification and no memory. Since I could speak fluent Russian and no authorities or military were looking for me, I was pretty unimportant. Those people had their own civil war going on and there was so much unrest and turmoil going on that I was hardly worth any interest at the time,” Colin said quietly between clenched teeth. He had stopped eating and was staring into space again. “After that I didn’t care then whether I lived or not. Nothing made sense. To most of the world, my family, my friends, the army, I was dead. So, as far as I was concerned, I was dead.”
“That’s terrible! Colin, your family was so hurt. They were at Mike’s wedding and they were still grieving.”
“I know and I regret their hurt. I was in and out of surgery, had to go to therapy, had setbacks. Then, because of the political situation, I was put into prison. I didn’t care and wanted to die.”
“Things went from bad to worse for you!” she exclaimed, knowing how tough all four men were and amazed that Colin had succumbed to grief. Then she realized how vulnerable he would have been with a memory loss and injuries and on medications and totally cut off from family and friends. “I’m sorry.”
“No need for you to be sorry. You had nothing to do with any of what happened. I finally managed to contact the military. They got me out of there and to a hospital on a U.S. base in Germany.”
“Why didn’t you contact your family at that time?”
“I hurt and didn’t care to live, and for a time, didn’t know whether or not I would survive. If I didn’t get well, I didn’t want my family to go through losing me twice. Maybe it was wrong, but my thinking was fuzzy. Half the time I was medicated too much to think clearly.”
“So what happened?”
“Once the military got into it, things changed. I got good medical care and had a lot of reconstructive surgery. Actually, they did a fair job on my face. They had to rebuild my cheekbones and my jaw and my nose.”
“They did a great job. You don’t have any visible scars on your face at all.” Isabella reached out and touched the tips of her fingers to his cheek. “Actually, you’re still a very good-looking guy,” she said lightly.
He focused on her to the extent that she wished she hadn’t admitted the last. That she hadn’t touched him.
“Thank you,” he replied. “I suspect you’re saying that because I’m Boone’s buddy and you’ve known me forever. But that’s all right.”
Isabella had been talking with him not quite an hour, yet she could see he had become bitter, cynical and hard. She was saddened by his words, because even in this brief time, she could tell that Colin was not the man she’d once known. She remembered that day at the fair. Boone had ridden the roller coaster with Vince while Colin had ridden with her. Colin had been a fun-loving, carefree, easygoing man who’d always laughed a lot and made the others with him laugh. Now he wouldn’t even smile.
“Go on, Colin. Finish your story,” she said, dropping her hand back to her lap and sipping her tea.
“The military wanted me to keep my survival quiet, even from my family. Special Forces started me working again on ferreting out the CIA double agent. I was flown to Langley and looked at pictures of everyone in the agency, studied their whereabouts at the time of the explosion, talked to psychiatrists. Doctors did all sorts of things to trigger my memory. Most of it gradually returned. Everything in my life except the explosion and about a month afterward. To this day I don’t remember the blast. When, and if, my memory does return, it might not help. On the other hand, I may have seen something that would help identify the spy.”
“So where do Boone, Mike and Jonah fit into this?”
Colin finished eating and pushed back his chair. She stood to remove his plate and clear the table.
“Sit down, Isabella. I’ll help in a minute.”
She sat again. “Go ahead with your story.”
“Not long ago, I was in Virginia. Someone tried to run me down. They came close enough to put me back into the hospital with bruises. Someone was trying to kill me, which meant whoever the double agent in the agency was, knew about me. That knowledge narrowed the possibilities. He knew I was still alive. We assume he was bound to know that my best buddies were Mike, Boone and Jonah.”
“So