The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (29 page)

“Don’t ask me to make the third time standing up, that’s all.” Two weeks of missed conversation, a mistake because of his fears, but he hadn’t lost her. He was lucky. “I should have called you. I’m sorry.”

“Did you really think whether you healed perfectly or not would matter to me?” She gazed at him, eyebrows raised, and then glanced down the length of the couch. Her pink-tipped toes stuck out from the blanket to snuggle against his calf. “Look at us.” She paused. “You and I became
us,
you know.”

“You became part of me.” His thumb circled the thin silver band she wore and he had a terrifying urge. Something he hadn’t done since Nora, not even when he’d asked Berthilde to go gallivant with him. “Should we make it official?” Where had his suave charm sunk to? “Would you do me the great honor of agreeing to marry? I would be law-abiding and very serious, always. I’ll even promise to pay for my next automobile.” His lips twitched, hoping she’d laugh and agree.

He registered her stillness when his arm across her waist didn’t rise, but then she exhaled and started to breathe again. Gamblers shouldn’t pop questions they didn’t know the answers to, because the agony was more than a well-regulated heart could bear.

“I-I...” she stumbled.

He turned his head, the only thing that could move when his body was trapped between hers and the couch back. “I apologize for...” For what? Hoping? Man’s natural condition, just not his until tonight, and she had to scotch it. Well, bugger it all. He struggled to sit.

“No! Stig! I don’t mean no. I mean, yes.” She sucked in a ragged breath that sounded exactly like how he felt. “I mean, I don’t know you, but I love you, but I— Oh, I don’t know what I mean!”

“Right, then.” He let himself go slack. He’d forgotten that his urge to stretch every moment of time with her, because hers would be so short, was perceived differently from her end. He could adapt. “Shall we take it one day at a time?”

“Yes.” She feathered her lips over his cheeks. “Yes.”

“No plans.” If that was what she wanted to hear, he could say it. At this point his own plan involved sleep, somewhere other than on leather upholstery with his trousers half-masted.

She set her teeth on his earlobe, one iota past gentle. It was electrifying. “No plans. None.”

“We tackle problems as partners.” What would that make her do?

She stopped kissing him and rested her forehead on his. “I have so many that need your help. Starting with saving the business, then how to convert that five million into a legal down payment, and moving on to my uncle. I could keep going, but I’m pretty sure you can tell me what to do with the overseas bank account.”

“You have one less problem than you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you see the envelope taped to the back of the painting?” he asked.

“I came looking for you.”

He kissed her, this one an attempt to express what words couldn’t, how that simple description of her choice made his heart swell. She had looked for him, and he would always look for her, partners in the truest sense. “Read the papers inside. When I explained your status problem to Ivar, and that you’re too old for your government’s random half-in, half-out citizenship proposal, he and I located a bit of lost paperwork that might interest you.”

“What?” Her eyebrows were adorable when she was puzzled.

“Your adoption packet from November 1995.” Pointing out that her mouth hung open would embarrass her, so he continued. “Forensic analysis shows that the paper has a watermark for a type of fine bond sold only until 1996. The printer used lacks the modern micro-identity dots that colored printers currently deploy on each page they print. And thin layer chromatography tests would match the pen Frank Mancini and his witnesses, all of whom are unfortunately deceased, used to a popular pre-1995 standard ink formulation. So even one of your FBI document experts, if called to testify, would be likely to say the adoption papers were indeed created and executed no later than 1995.”

“That means...” Her head tilted to the side as his gift sank in.

“Citizenship is a few formalities away.”

“Uncle Robert has nothing to hold over Manny and me?” Her voice rose with excitement.

“No one does. You’re Christina Mancini, like you always were, but now you have the right to shout it.”

She cradled his face in her hands and stared into his eyes, a huge smile lighting from her soul outward. “Geoffrey Morrison, we’re going shopping. You’re going to help me spend five million dollars on the new Double M vineyard.” The depths of her brown eyes pulled him to a new shore, a new start. “I need the Morrison half of this partnership to stick around, now that I know I can.”

He reached up to stroke the hair away from her face. “He’s yours. All yours.”

Epilogue

The balcony of Elaine and Jack Johnson’s San Diego waterfront condo on a fall afternoon was the perfect place to read and sip wine. After she poured two glasses, Elaine set the bottle of chardonnay in front of her husband. “I can’t wait until Christina has her own label up and running.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Jack was deep in one of his oil industry periodicals.

When he was distracted was the perfect time to mention her investment idea. “I thought I might put a little money into her new winery. A percent or two of my stock.”

That induced her husband to lower his magazine and stare over his reading glasses. “One step ahead of you. Geoffrey said no to outside investors.”

“How?” Christina had talked about her dream for years, but Elaine knew money didn’t tumble past when the wind blew.

“Five million dollar settlement from the insurance company of those detectives who falsified the suitcase of records.”

“Jack Johnson! When in the tarn-hill were you going to tell me?”

“It’s confidential, but he shared the information when I inquired about investing.” That exact grin was the reason she’d married him when she was a nineteen-year-old sorority girl and he was a pipe-fitter working for her father. Forty years on, and his smile still made her heart jump.

Elaine covered her fluster with another sip. Christina never failed to send the perfect wines. “Wasn’t that terrible? Imagine. Faking a bunch of papers just to make headlines. I’m grateful things like that don’t happen in America.”

Jack continued to stare at her. “You’re teasing me, right, sugar?”

She smiled along the rim of her glass and took another sip. “What do you think,
sugar?
”

“I think a wise man would trade his magazine for his glass and then ask his wife about her day.”

“I definitely married a wise man.”

“Your friend Christina seems to have roped one too.”

Elaine felt as if a glow to rival the sun reflecting off the white sand was shining from her heart. “And I was responsible for them finally noticing each other’s interest that night at Bodeby’s, I’m certain of it.”

“Of course you were, darling.”

* * * * *

Excerpt

First to Burn

Available Now

A soldier with secrets. Immortal Viking Wulf Wardsen once battled alongside Beowulf, and now serves in Afghanistan. He’s trusted the mortal men on his elite special operations team to protect his secret, until an explosion lands Wulf in a place more dangerous to him than a battlefield: a medevac helicopter.

A doctor with questions. Army captain Theresa Chiesa follows the rules and expects the same from others, even Special Forces hotshots like Sergeant Wardsen. She’s determined to discover the secret behind his supernaturally fast healing, and she won’t allow his sexy smile to distract her.

An enemy with nothing to lose. Even as Theresa’s investigation threatens to expose him, Wulf is stirred by her passion. Dreaming of love and a normal life, he wants nothing more than to build a future with her. But the lost Viking relic needed to reverse his immortality is being hunted by another—an ancient enemy who won’t hesitate to hurt Theresa to strike back at Wulf.

Book one of the
IMMORTAL VIKINGS
series.

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Author’s Note

Thank You!

I’m thrilled you chose to share Stig and Christina’s romance
and adventures. If you’d like to know more about The Immortal Vikings, my other
books and new releases, please sign up for my newsletter at
www.annarichland.com
. You can also like my author pages at
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.

Reviews are a great way to help other readers. I encourage
you to share your opinion of
The Second Lie
at any review site, because
your thoughts matter to readers and to authors.

I’m hard at work on the third Immortal Vikings book, but if
you missed
First to Burn,
visit
http://bit.ly/First2Burn
or read on for
an excerpt of Wulf and Theresa’s story. The related novella
His Road
Home
is the story of Wulf’s mortal special ops teammate Rey Cruz and
the life-changing event that created an accidental engagement. You can read more
at
http://bit.ly/HisRoad
.

Chapter One

Wulf clawed a path to consciousness, embracing the grinding pain in his left leg as a sign that he’d emerged from oblivion, until the engine whine and floor vibrations warned him of a problem worse than his injury. He was trapped in the second most dangerous place in Afghanistan for a man like him: a U.S. Army medevac helicopter.

“Easy, Sergeant.” The flight medic who leaned into view squeezed a bag connected to the mask covering Wulf’s mouth. “You’re safe.”

While oxygen inflated Wulf’s lungs, a functioning corner of his brain demanded answers. His commander would never call an evacuation chopper for him, so who else had been hurt? Struggling against the painkillers, he tried to remember everyone’s last positions. Kahananui had been on his right.
He has two little girls.
Five meters ahead, Cruz had taken point. Was it Cruz?
He pays for his mother’s diabetes drugs.

Wulf tried to turn his head and search for his teammates, but he couldn’t move. He tensed his abs and lower back and jerked to lift his shoulders, but again he couldn’t move. The certainty that one of his men needed him struck like a spear between his ribs, but no matter how he strained his arms and chest, he could not move. Not his arms, not his body, and by the gods, not his legs, despite the agony that intensified in his left one as the painkillers faded.

“Stop fighting, Sarge.” The medic was young, mid-twenties at most, but his voice carried over the chopper racket with the confidence shared by those who served in aviation.

Free of morphine fog, Wulf understood he wasn’t paralyzed, only slapped into a neck collar and strapped to a stretcher, complications that, like his injuries, weren’t insurmountable. But his teammates couldn’t conquer wounds so easily. “Whoshhurt?”

“I know it hurts, man. We’re eighteen minutes out from Camp Caddie, so hang on.”

Dammit, the medic didn’t understand him through the oxygen mask. He needed to see
who
was in this helicopter. Not knowing compressed his chest until he groaned.

“This will help the pain.” One of the man’s hands reached for something outside Wulf’s circle of vision.

Skīta.
He didn’t want the guy to up the intravenous dope before he could discover who’d been hurt. The last thing he remembered was freezing in place when the team’s German shepherd had hunkered in a bomb-alert position in the middle of an apricot orchard.

Like their dog Garbo, they’d stopped. All, that is, except an Afghan training with them who’d been distracted by lighting a cigarette and had moved forward two more paces. The blast had thrown Garbo against a stone wall. Rocks, dirt clods and metal packed around the improvised explosive device had pounded Wulf’s helmet and body armor, mangling his leg.
Fucking smoker. Could’ve killed us.

This time Wulf spaced his words as carefully as sniper shots. “Who. Else. Hurt.”

The medic’s eyes flickered to the port side of the Black Hawk helicopter. “Two Afghans. At least one’s not going to make it. And your dog.”

Relief that he’d been swept up with an evacuation of Afghan National Army soldiers, not one of his own men, crested with the newest wave of meds. Temporarily woozy, he slurred his next question,
howshGarbo,
but this time the medic understood.

“Ear and head lacerations, possible broken leg, but the pooch armor did its job.”

His system processed this smaller dose faster than the earlier morphine, providing only minutes of peace before the torment of growing fresh bone, a torture he imagined to be comparable to a drill bit tunneling through his shin, crested.

Locking his jaw stifled his groan, but barely. He hadn’t endured a lost leg since Antietam. He’d forgotten. “Hurts.”

“More?” The medic calculated with his fingers. “Sergeant, you have more pure in you than Keith Richards.” Eyebrows lost in the top of his helmet, he shook his head. “Can’t believe you’re lucid.”

This agony blended with memories of a September afternoon in high corn, moaning next to other Union volunteers as blood-frenzied flies circled. His pain had been caused by healing. Theirs, by dying. When he’d recovered enough to carry his unit’s drummer off the field, the ten-year-old’s eyes had no longer blinked at the sun. Some hurts were worse than regrowing bones, took longer to mend. At least today he didn’t face such a loss.

Instead, he gritted his teeth, concentrated on the pain of his nails digging into his fisted palms and planned. Without being able to test his strength or see his leg, he wouldn’t know the extent of his progress until the itching started. Didn’t matter. The moment the flight medic transferred him to someone who hadn’t seen his original injury and the straps were unbuckled, he’d walk away. He’d done it other times. He had to be ready because under no circumstances could he end up in the most dangerous place for an immortal soldier: a hospital.

* * *

“A transtibial with hemorrhaging!” The rage in her chief surgeon’s voice as he yelled at someone on the other side of the camouflage netting froze Captain Theresa Chiesa. Past the curtain was Camp Cadwalader’s emergency receiving. On this side, three surgical pods showed no signs of recent patients, and definitely not evidence of a soldier with a below-the-knee amputation and a big bleed. “Are you the one who called that shit in? What were—”

“Yessir, I reported the sergeant’s injuries.”

Whoever the other voice belonged to, he had balls to interrupt Colonel Loughrey. Nobody on the fifty-person combat hospital staff interrupted the boss. Not if they wanted to leave Afghanistan with their army careers intact.

“Well, Tinker Bell, lay off the fucking morphine. Your call mixed up the dead Afghan and a soldier with a two-inch incision on his fucking calf! Our guy didn’t even have a fucking concussion!” Something metallic banged, then crashed to the floor. It wouldn’t be the first time her colonel had kicked a folding chair or a rolling cart. “Wardsen put on his own butterfly strips before he waltzed out.”

Wardsen. That name was familiar. She flicked through the papers in her hand, orphans she’d gathered from random shelves and desks in the medical office. Filing wasn’t an officer’s job, and other doctors actively shirked administrative tasks, but she hated messy documentation. In a place as isolated as Camp Cadwalader, filing and labeling medical records as directed by Army Regulation 40-66 beat watching dust dry. Despite searching for half an hour, she hadn’t found any intake forms, charts, discharge records or follow-up notes to match the two inbound medevac calls about Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen, Operational Detachment Alpha-5131, 5th Special Forces Group. It was as if he’d walked off the helicopter into the sunset both times.

“Sir, I assessed him in-flight—” The voice contradicting Colonel Loughrey belonged to a flight medic. She’d wager her silver captain’s bars that the new total of incoming without follow-up was three. What was going on?

“Assessment! Piece of shit. Shitty as a latrine. Shitty as this whole fucking war! Sh-iii-t.” Her commander worked the word. Six months into the hospital team’s yearlong deployment, some doctors had begun smoking to relieve stress. Others had succumbed to profanity, none more than the colonel.

“Sir, I don’t understand.” The medic’s rising voice sounded confused, and she stepped closer to the curtain to listen. “Wardsen’s leg was fully opened. I held the bone—”

“What you held was your own dick.”

Theresa respected the pilots and medics who brought out the wounded—a riskier job than hers. Whatever problem had the boss worked up, she doubted the fault was medevac’s. Three bad calls could only be Special Forces covering for something, or for someone. They might be the toughest guys on the planet, but they shouldn’t be allowed to mess up hardworking troops like this medic.

“I won’t have my staff pulled off other soldiers—ones with real fucking injuries—or the night shift woken up from sleep—for your piece-of-shit calls.”

She evaluated the loose papers in her hand. Her commander was a surgeon, and that meant his picture popped up when someone searched for the word
perfectionist.
At the best of times, he detested incomplete data and vague conclusions. Right now she suspected he wouldn’t like anything less than a ticket home.

“Fuck up again and I will personally see you grounded.” Colonel Loughrey would, but not out of vindictiveness. Out of concern that incompetence would kill someone. He printed the name of every soldier they hadn’t saved on an index card he carried inside his helmet. Last week she’d seen him write the first name on the back. He was a good man, and a good leader, but he was wrong to blame the flight medic. Something bigger was going on, something that seemed to have happened before, although she didn’t know what. The name Wardsen was her first clue.

As silently as combat boots allowed, she retreated. She’d meet with the big guy when she had more answers. This afternoon she had only questions.

If you want to keep reading
FIRST TO BURN
,
visit Anna’s website at
http://bit.ly/First2Burn
.

You can also read an excerpt from
HIS ROAD HOME
,
the story of Sergeant Rey Cruz’s accidental engagement
to a complete stranger, at
http://bit.ly/HisRoad
.