Green Beret Bodyguard. Carol Ericson

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      Chapter Two

      The woman’s soft lips parted beneath the loose clasp of his hand, her lipstick sticking to his palm. He clicked the safety of his unloaded weapon in case she got any ideas about laying on the horn. Her hands grasped the steering wheel, her knuckles white against the black leather.

       God, he felt like the slime of the earth, but he needed to take her by surprise so she couldn’t warn anyone, couldn’t warn his enemies. Her bottle-green eyes, wide above his hand clamped over the bottom half of her face, met his gaze in the rearview mirror.

       “I’m sorry. I need information from you. I’m not going to hurt you.”

       Air escaped noisily from her nose and her hot breath condensed on his palm. He cupped his hand, giving her space to breathe. “I’ll remove my hand from your mouth if you promise not to scream. Can you promise me that?”

       She nodded, and dark strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail tickled the back of his hand. He slid his fingers across her soft cheek and held his breath.

       Crying out, she scrabbled for the door handle and he cinched her upper arm with his fingers. “I’m Jack Coburn.”

       The utterance of his name had a powerful effect on her. She fell back against her seat and jerked her head around to face him. “Y-you’re Jack Coburn? Prove it.”

       Out of all the passports and IDs in the black duffel bag, not one had his name printed on it. But he had something better. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and withdrew the crumpled letter. He held it out to her, and she snatched it from his hand.

       She smoothed out the single sheet of paper against the steering wheel, and Jack coiled his muscles in case she went for the horn. She didn’t.

       Her brow creased as she scanned the letter. “I wrote this…to Jack Coburn. But I’ve never met him before, so how do I know you’re Jack?”

       He lifted his shoulders, the gun dangling from his fingers, the barrel pointing to the floor of the car. “I don’t know how to prove it to you. I got it straight from an Afghan boy, but I couldn’t bring him with me as a character reference.”

       The woman, Lola, curled her slim fingers around the sheet of paper, crumpling it into familiar lines. “What are you talking about? You need someone else to tell you who you are?”

      Okay, time to play the pity card, and maybe she won’t scream bloody murder and escape from the car.

       Massaging his temple, he dropped his eyelids, peering at her through slits. “Yes, I do. You see, Lola Famosa—” the name rolled off his tongue “—I can’t remember a damned thing about myself or what I was doing in Afghanistan, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with you and this guy Gabriel you wrote about in your letter.”

       Was Gabriel her husband? Jack studied Lola’s profile with its firm chin at odds with the pert nose, and the long black lashes that blinked in confusion. If so, Gabriel was one lucky guy…or not. Where the hell was Gabriel, anyway?

       She swung around suddenly and jabbed her finger in his chest. “Are you putting me on? What are you doing here? Why did you choose this method—” she waved her hands around the interior of the car “—to contact me? Once you located me, you couldn’t leave me a note at the hospital? You had to go skulking around the morgue?”

       The morgue? Jack let that one pass. “The reason I have amnesia is because someone pushed me off the side of a mountain and then left me there to die. When I made it back to the town, the Afghan boy, Yasir, found me. He told me I was some kind of spy. I’m thinking maybe I can go directly to the U.S. Embassy or somehow contact the CIA, but I suspect neither of those august institutions would be thrilled to find me alive.”

       Lola gasped. “You think the United States government is after you?”

       “I’m on some airport security watch list.” He grabbed her fingers, fiddling with the cup holder in the console. “What does it mean? What was I doing in Afghanistan?”

       “It’s true, isn’t it?” She shifted in her seat and studied his face with her wide eyes. “You don’t know.”

       Tilting his chin toward the letter abandoned in her lap, he said, “I know you were willing to pay me a million dollars to bring your husband home safely.”

       Those long lashes swept her cheeks and her bottom lip trembled. Her voice choked. “And you obviously didn’t bring Gabriel with you.”

       Before he could stop himself, he traced the soft curve of her cheek with his fingertip. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know who or where Gabriel is, if I ever did.”

       A visible shudder coursed through her frame, and then she straightened her shoulders. “Oh, you knew, Mr. Coburn. I paid you a million dollars up front to retrieve Gabe from Afghanistan, to negotiate his release.”

       He branded this new bit of knowledge into his brain. One more tiny piece of the puzzle falling into place. “His release from whom?”

       “Terrorists.” She lifted her doe eyes to his face, and the look in their depths made him want to take her in his arms and shield her from the world and every bad thing in it.

       A car two spaces down roared to life, and Lola stiffened and grabbed the steering wheel. She looked like she could use a drink. First he’d scared the hell out of her and then had to admit he hadn’t a clue to her husband’s whereabouts.

       “Do you want to talk somewhere else? Maybe if you can fill me in on some details, I can start to remember.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. And if she didn’t want to fill him in?

       He’d come home without her husband. She didn’t owe him anything, and there was no way he was going to force information out of her. He’d done enough damage to her nerves for one night by pulling this stunt in her car.

       “Sure. There’s a little bar not too far from the hospital.” She ran both hands across her face as if wiping away tears, when not a single one had spilled onto her cheek.

       “Can I sit up front?” He balanced a knee on the console between the two front seats. “I left the gun on the floor. It wasn’t loaded.”

       “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.” She dragged her purse by its handle from the passenger seat, and Jack squeezed his large frame into the front.

       “Lo siento. If I could’ve done it any other way, I would have.”

       Cranking on the engine, she raised one dark brow in his direction. “You speak Spanish?”