Marching Orders. Delores Fossen
She remembered. And that was several weeks prior to Rafe’s and her first date.
Because she had no choice, Anna dropped down into the chair across from him. She fought hard to keep what little composure she had left. “Why didn’t you tell me? Rafe, you married me, and you don’t even know who I am.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. And shook his head. What he didn’t do was offer anything else. No explanations. No assurances. Nothing.
There was a sharp knock on the door. The sound rifled through the silence and sent her stomach to her knees.
“That’ll be Colonel Shaw,” Rafe said. He glanced at the door and then at the gun. “It’s a good time to put that away.”
He was right. The gun wouldn’t solve any of this. Maybe nothing would. She was married to a man who didn’t even know her.
Anna slowly released the grip she had on his pistol. Rafe eased it from her hand and placed it back in the holster on the nightstand.
There was another knock, but he ignored it. Standing over her, he reached out and brushed his knuckles over her cheek.
Anna flinched. “Don’t,” she insisted.
She had no idea what she should be feeling, but she knew for certain that she didn’t want Rafe or anyone else to touch her. Too bad just looking at him caused her body to betray her. She had to battle the urge not to lean into his touch. To lean on him. Somehow, she had to convince her body that this wasn’t the man her heart had fallen in love with.
He picked up his dark blue mess dress jacket from the foot of the bed and draped it around her shoulders. Only then did Anna remember that she had on just a nightgown. A nearly transparent one. She slipped her arms into the sleeves and hugged it to her so she was at least partly covered.
The jacket smelled like Rafe.
That too-familiar scent stirred an ache deep inside her and spelled out the hard reality of her situation. The man she loved hadn’t come home to her, after all.
Rafe answered the door, and she heard him whisper something to the colonel before Shaw entered. She didn’t look at either of them. She couldn’t. Anna kept her attention focused on the medals on the jacket.
“Pregnant?” Shaw whispered.
The barely audible conversation continued for several minutes, but Anna didn’t even try to listen. She hated that the intimate details of her life were now part of some official discussion between two men she wasn’t sure she could trust.
“I’m sorry, Anna,” Shaw volunteered. “I didn’t know about the baby. And I’d hoped things wouldn’t have to come to this.”
It wasn’t the right thing to say. Her fear instantly turned to anger. “Did you think I was so stupid that I couldn’t figure out something was wrong?”
“That’s not what I meant.” Shaw placed his hand on her shoulder. “We’d hoped that the blank spots in Rafe’s memory would correct themselves by now.”
“Blank spots,” she repeated through slightly clenched teeth. The man was batting a thousand on the worst possible things to say. “I’m a blank spot, Colonel. And so is this baby I’m carrying. How the heck could you have let me go through with the wedding when you knew Rafe didn’t remember me? I thought we were friends.”
“We are.” Shaw stepped around the chair where she was seated and stood in front of her. “Rafe was only following orders. My orders.”
Anna looked at Rafe, but he didn’t verify that. In fact, he kept his expression blank just as he’d done in the church during the attack.
“I can’t explain everything that you probably want to know,” the colonel continued. “But I can tell you that this is all part of a classified mission that involves other hostages—two CROs—who are being held by the same group of rebels who had Rafe.”
Her fingers stilled on the Purple Heart medal that she was fondling. “What could our wedding possibly have to do with that?”
Rafe turned and faced her. “I have information the rebel leader, Len Quivira, wants to make a swap for those two hostages.” He paused, glanced at the colonel, and Shaw nodded. “But there’s a problem—I don’t remember the information he wants. If he learns that, then he’ll execute the men he’s holding.”
Anna hadn’t thought things could get worse, but he proved her wrong. She clutched the jacket against her heart. It was as if she’d awakened in the middle of a nightmare. God. People’s lives were at stake just as Rafe’s had been only days earlier.
Shaw took up the explanation where Rafe left off. “The wedding had to go on as planned so we could make it seem as if everything was back to normal. The neurologist thinks Rafe’s memory loss is temporary, that he should regain everything in the next couple of days.”
“And if it’s not temporary?” Anna asked.
Shaw never even hesitated. “We’re working out a contingency plan. But we need some time.”
Yes, and that’s what her wedding had bought them. Time. Too bad it’d bought her much more than that. She was married to a man who didn’t have a clue who she was. And she was pregnant with his child. A child he didn’t even know he’d fathered. Heck, he hadn’t remembered even making love to her.
She tried to bolster her expression before she looked at Rafe. A nearly impossible task. Everything about him—his face, his voice, his hands—everything reminded her that he was the man she loved. The man she wanted. And yet he wasn’t that man at all.
“You could have told me all of this,” she insisted.
“I would have gone through with the pretense of the wedding to protect those men.”
“We couldn’t risk that,” Shaw explained.
“But you could risk this?” She gestured toward the champagne and the bed. “Did you order Rafe to sleep with me as well?”
“No,” the two men said in unison. It was Rafe who continued. “Buchanan was going to come over here with some bogus emergency. He’d have stayed until morning.”
“Well, that would have taken care of ten hours or so. And then what, huh?”
Rafe shrugged. “And then there would have been another fake emergency, and then another, until either my memory returned or until we managed to free the hostages. I wouldn’t have slept with you.”
That confession didn’t do a thing to ease the ache in her heart. “Well, we’ll never know, will we?” she snapped.
Rafe met her gaze head on. “I know.” He turned away from her and strolled toward the window. “I’m attracted to you. Maybe more than attracted, and I don’t need a memory to tell me that. But I wouldn’t have acted on that attraction without you knowing the truth.”
She swallowed hard. Even with the memory loss, he still felt the heat simmering between them. Heck, so did she. Anna cursed herself. Even now, she felt it. It was like a fire always smoldering inside her. That didn’t mean, however, she would give in to it. After all, he’d lied to her about one of the most important things a person could lie about.
Colonel Shaw caught onto her hand. “We wouldn’t have done things this way if there weren’t so much at stake.”
No, she didn’t imagine he would. But she could guess where the rest of this conversation was leading. “What do you want me to do—pretend I’m Mrs. Rafe McQuade?”
“For starters,” the colonel said, “I need three days to put a plan into action. I can’t negotiate with Quivira. That’s against foreign policy. So, I’m stalling him, but he’s suspicious because he knows what those truth drugs are capable of doing. Even if Rafe’s memory returns, I probably can’t trade that information for the hostages. In other words,