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“Out where?” I asked, wanting specifics.

“Out driving. It’s mostly desert.” She shrugged.

“You brought me back here?”

She nodded. “Took forever to get you into the Jeep.” Her smile was amused.

For a moment, her upturned lips distracted me, creating a stirring of desire deep inside me. But that wasn’t what was important now.

“I was alone?” That didn’t feel right. I shouldn’t have been alone.

“Yes.”

Dread and worry speared me. I felt sudden anxiety about being here.

“I have to go,” I hurried to say, looking around for anything I might need to take with me. Then I remembered I had nothing at all.

Her eyes, eyes that purposely avoided me, now snapped up to mine. “Where are you going to go?”

“To find my team. They need me.”

“Who is your team?”

I paused. I wasn’t sure.

She took my silence as a sign I didn’t trust her. Maybe I didn’t.

“Look, I drove around for a while that day. You’re the only soldier I saw.”

“I’m not a soldier,” I said automatically.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re wearing half of a military uniform.” She pushed out of her chair. “Are you American?” Something in the air shifted. I inhaled. Rachel was frightened, and I could
smell
it. Was it possible to smell someone’s fear?

“I’m an American. And I am in the military, but we aren’t soldiers.”

“Then what are you?” She was still frightened, but not as much as before.

“I… uh… I’m not sure.”

Her eyes widened. They were a deep green around the rims but a light green in the center. “Do you remember what happened to you?”

I shook my head.

“Do you know why you were here?”

I shook my head again.

“Do you remember your name?” she pressed.

That I did know, and my shoulders sagged in relief. “Vance.”

She nodded. “Vance. What’s your last name, Vance?”

I tried to remember. I searched my memory until there was nothing left to search. Then I shook my head.

“It’s okay,” she said. “From the shape you were in, you must have really hit your head. You just woke up. I’m sure it will come back to you.”

What if it didn’t?

*    *    *

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember. Sure, basic information was there, but the details—the parts that made life, that made
me
—weren’t there. They were just out of reach.

I sat on the cot, staring at the dirt floor, begging myself to remember. Why couldn’t I? My head didn’t hurt; my body wasn’t even stiff after moving around a bit. I had no clue how I got here, but I knew this wasn’t where I was supposed to be. It was beyond frustrating.

A power bar appeared under my nose. I glanced up. Rachel was holding it out, waiting for me to take it. “I’m sorry. I wish I had more supplies.”

I took the bar from her hands and slid it onto the nearby table. “It’s okay. I’m not hungry anyway. I’m still kind of nauseous from whatever happened to me.” It was a lie. I was actually starving. My stomach felt like it might eat itself and something inside me felt restless…
caged
.

But I wasn’t about to take the food from a young woman—a civilian—who already admitted to being low on supplies.

“You haven’t eaten in days. Your stomach is probably upset because it’s empty.”

“Maybe later,” I murmured, watching her step away to sit at the table. She was thin, thinner than I liked my women.

The thought caused me to sit back. Since when did I refer to strangers—to
any
woman—as mine? Did I have a woman out there somewhere, wondering, waiting? No. I dismissed the thought. If I had a woman, I wouldn’t forget her.

“What are you doing here, Rachel?”

The question seemed to catch her off guard. She was used to asking the questions. But I didn’t have any answers.

“What are you doing here, in Kuwait?”

“I’m a photographer.”

“And you thought Kuwait would make a great place to take pictures?” I asked doubtfully.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m a freelance journalist, but I’m also writing a book.”

“A book?”

She nodded. “On war and the troops. On the conditions they are living in.”

So she was a reporter. I felt my back teeth come together. It annoyed me that people like her were allowed in places like this. I mean, didn’t they understand this wasn’t a place for pictures and newscasts? Most of her kind—the media—were defenseless, untrained, and had no idea what they were in for. Was her life really worth a story? A picture in a book?

“I know what you’re thinking.” She sniffed, her chin lifting as her green eyes narrowed. “It’s nothing I haven’t heard or been told before. No, I’m not a member of the military. No, I don’t fight on the front lines, but what I do here is important.”

I opened my mouth to tell her she didn’t owe me anything. It was I who owed her—after all, she saved my life. But she wouldn’t stop talking long enough for me to say anything. Like a bulldozer, she rolled right over my attempts to make her point.

“I bring hope to the American people back home. I show them irrefutable proof that we are making progress here. I also make sure they know what the military is sacrificing, how essential they—that
you
have been in making our country safe. The military gets paid so little for what they do. This is one way I can make sure they at least get recognition.”

“Fair enough.” She had passion. I liked passion.

A brief image assaulted me. It was of a woman, tall and blond. She was looking at me with passion in her eyes. But then the image changed… It was of the same blonde, but there was no longer passion in her eyes, but disgust. Something inside me twisted, and I closed my eyes against the memory.

“Vance?” Rachel asked. “Are you all right?”

My name on her lips caused the image to completely fall away. “Yeah,” I answered, gruff. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“Eat this.” She pushed the power bar toward me.

I shook my head. She sighed and pulled a huge bag from beneath the table and unzipped it, showing me the inside. It was full of power bars. “We have plenty, and we’ll be long gone by the time we run out.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice.

I grabbed up the bar and tore the wrapper away with my teeth. A low growl escaped my throat when my teeth sank into the food. It was peanut butter and chocolate flavored. I loved peanut butter. Why could I remember that, but not the important stuff?

When I finished, I balled the wrapper in my fist and another bar appeared before me. I began to shake my head, but she made a noise and ripped open the wrapper, shoving the bar at me.

“You’re huge; one of those things probably is like a crumb to your stomach.”

I felt the side of my mouth kick up. That one bar kind of was like a crumb in my gut. So I took it and thanked her. We sat in silence for a few minutes, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. There was something about her presence that was calming. She made me feel less restless somehow.

“Are we on a military base?” I asked.

“No. There is one here, though. It’s about a forty-minute drive.”

“You have a Jeep?” I asked, remembering what she said about getting me into it.

She nodded. “They left it here for me when they left.”

“Who?”

“I was here with a whole crew. There were a few journalists, a news anchor, a writer… They left yesterday to catch a flight back to the States,” she said, running her hand through one of the pigtails falling over her shoulder.

Damn, pigtails were sexy.

Focus.
I ordered my brain. “You were supposed to go with them?”

She wrapped her fingers around the paper cup and nodded.

“Then why didn’t you?” Why the hell would anyone—especially a woman—want to stay in a hellhole like this alone?

Her eyes rose to meet mine. Realization hit me. “You stayed here because of me?”

She nodded.

I pushed off the cot to pace the tiny room. All the calmness I felt just moments ago vanished, leaving me feeling agitated. “Why would you do that?”

“Because you were injured, passed out. I had no idea what was wrong with you.”

“But now you are in this godforsaken hole-in-the-wall country alone!”

“I’m not alone,” she said quietly. “And the base is only forty miles. There’s another flight leaving in two days. I can get on that one.”

“Why wouldn’t you just take me to the base, leave me there and go home?” I demanded.

Her emerald eyes affixed to the tabletop. Again, the air changed and I could smell her renewed fear.

“Are you afraid of me?” I asked quietly. Just the thought of her being frightened of me made my gut tighten with regret. I didn’t want Rachel to be afraid of me. I wanted… Ah, hell, I didn’t know what the hell I wanted.

“I don’t know you,” she stated, still not looking at me. “I wasn’t about to take you onto a US base without knowing anything about you. You could be a terrorist in disguise. You could be a solider gone AWOL…”

“I am
not
a soldier,” I insisted.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “I couldn’t very well pack you up and take you around with my friends, around the people here who are already in enough danger. For all I knew, you could have woken up and went crazy and tried to kill everyone.”

“Yet you still brought me here. You still looked after me.” For such a skinny thing, she had guts. I liked guts.

“Yeah, because there was a chance you were a wounded sol—I mean—troop that needed help. I couldn’t just leave you there to die.”

I wouldn’t have died. Something inside me told me that even if she had left me, I would not have died. But that didn’t mean some extremist group couldn’t have happened along to kidnap me.

“So you risked your own safety for someone who may or may not be on your side and who may or may not try to kill you?” I asked, maddened and amused at the same time.

“That about sums it up,” she said. She tugged at the end of one of her pigtails again. This time it wasn’t sexy, though. This time it was a motion I found strangely endearing.

I didn’t know what to say. What she had done was beyond what anyone else would have done. “Thank you.”

My sincere gratitude brought her eyes up and she finally looked at me. “You’re welcome.”

Rachel stood and went toward the back of the tent, toward the basin where I had washed up. She rummaged around in yet another packed bag—proof that she had indeed been ready to leave—and pulled out a shirt. It was the same army green color of the one I had been wearing.

“Here, one of the guys that had been here left this behind. It probably will be too small, but it’s better than nothing.”

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” I drawled. “Is all this”—I gestured to myself—“making it hard to concentrate?”

She snorted. “Like I haven’t seen muscles before.” She pretended to be unimpressed, but I knew better. I was very impressive.

I smirked and accepted the shirt from her hand. I couldn’t help but notice how she went out of her way to be sure our fingers didn’t touch.

The shirt was too small, but I put it on anyway. All joking side, it was clear my bare chest was a little too much for her to handle at the moment. I stretched out the fabric the best I could and the seams around my biceps ripped, but I left them that way.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Go?” she asked, startled.

“To the base.”

She looked at me like I had three heads.

I sighed heavily. “I’m not going to murder anyone.”

Her teeth were straight and white when she laughed, and the smile lit up her whole face. “The sun just set an hour ago. It’s dark.”

“So?” I failed to see her point.

Her smile faded. “So this is a dangerous place. We can’t go driving around at night. It’s asking to be killed or taken hostage.”

“I’ll protect you.” I didn’t know much, but that was one thing I was sure I was capable of.

“Do you remember your last name, what platoon you were with? What rank you are, what branch of service you’re in?” she asked.

I searched my memory and let out a frustrated sound. “No.”

“That’s just going to make things harder when we get to the base. They’re going to have to hold you until they figure out who you belong to…”

Something about that caused a little panic to rise within me. No one was supposed to know about us. About me.

“Why don’t we spend the night here? Maybe after a night’s rest and some more food, you will remember and then we can drive to the base.” Rachel suggested.

Her suggestion wasn’t unreasonable. In fact, it was a smart plan. I ignored the fact a little part of me was a little gleeful that I was getting to spend more time alone with her in this cramped, crappy space.