Child Bride Read online

  Chase felt as though he’d been blindsided. Memory rocketed him back to a time and place he’d made a concerted effort to forget. The mission in Costa Brava had been a nightmare for him personally. He and his partners in the recovery operation, Johnny Starhawk and Geoff Dias, had been sent to the tiny Central American republic to liberate several American scientists trapped during a rebel insurrection. Once inside the country, they’d split up, trying to locate the Americans. The only survivor he had found was a teenage girl hiding in a bombed-out convent. Tragically he hadn’t been able to get her out of the country alive. She’d been killed in a car accident on the way to the border. And he, too, had nearly been killed.

  “You’ve got the wrong man,” he said harshly, trying to shut off the disturbing wash of memories and the surge of mixed emotions accompanying them. Disbelief, anger, guilt, welled up in him. Who the hell was this woman?

  “No, it was you—Charles Beaudine. The man who rescued me had your face, your eyes. He called himself Chase. He even used a bullwhip. Oh, please, you must remember! I was hiding in a convent near San Luis when you found me. I’d been there a month, ever since my parents were killed by guerrillas.” Her voice cracked slightly, as if it was difficult for her to continue. “I remember every detail. You were wounded in a fight with one of the rebels. He had me in his rifle sights, and you took the gun out of his hands with your bullwhip. He pulled a knife, remember? He cut you.”

  Chase felt a spark of pain from the scar on his leg where the knife blade had caught him. His heart was thundering as he walked to the door and swung it open, breathing in hot, pine-sharpened summer air and struggling to make sense of the situation. There had to be a logical explanation, but try as he could to come up with something, only one answer made sense. Who, besides a muckraking reporter, would have any interest in bringing up the Costa Brava mission? And who else would know the details? She must have got her information from newspaper reports, sketchy as they were.

  “Why won’t you believe me?” she said, a hurt quality to her voice. “I’m telling the truth.”

  He turned back to look at her and saw that she’d lifted herself up with some effort and was resting her shoulder against the log wall of the cabin. Her eyes were expectant and fearful, but they were also suffused with another emotion that tugged at him. Desperation. She was pleading for something, but what was it? Recognition? What did she want from him? With a massive effort of will he hardened himself against the vulnerability that drenched her blue gaze like a summer shower.

  “I’m telling the truth, too, Annie Wells. As sure as I’m standing here, I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  She couldn’t be who she said she was, Chase told himself. That girl was dead, God help her. Dead with her blood on his hands. He’d been the one driving when the jeep had gone off the embankment. He searched his memory for an image of the teenager, anything he could use to prove to himself that this women couldn’t be her. But all he got were fuzzy shapes and outlines. The high fever and bouts of delirium he’d suffered during the mission had impaired his memory—and undoubtedly his judgment. The car wreck had finished the job, leaving him with nothing but occasional flashbacks that were too stark, yet fleeting, to understand.

  He had told Annie Wells the truth, but not the whole truth. He couldn’t remember the young woman whose life he’d saved, and then destroyed. He couldn’t even remember her name.

  “I’ll prove it to you then,” she said, almost defiantly. “Ask me anything, anything at all.”

  “I intend to ask you plenty,” Chase assured her. He didn’t make a habit of terrorizing vulnerable women, but he was going to get some honest answers, even if he had to put the fear of God into her. He’d been working for the Cattlemen’s Association since he’d settled in Wyoming, and he’d flushed out plenty of cattle thieves and horse rustlers in that time, even put a couple of them away, in self-defense. He could sure as hell handle one tiny female.

  “Keep talking,” he said quietly, taking his shotgun from its holster. He rubbed the barrel across the leg of his jeans as though the metal needed polishing. It was a casual move, even offhand, but the gun took on a presence all its own in that small, still room. “And make it a damn good story.”

  Annie Wells couldn’t seem to breathe deeply enough to fill her lungs. She’d had some fearful premonitions about what might happen if and when she found Chase Beaudine, but never this. Never that he wouldn’t believe her. He didn’t even appear to remember her, which seemed impossible to her. How could he have forgotten what they’d been through together? The hell ... the heaven. She would never be able to escape the memories, no matter how long she lived, or how far she traveled. Her only safe course now was to stick to the facts, to relate exactly what had happened.

  “Your wound turned bad,” she told him, severely curbing the emotion she felt. “Infections are deadly in a subtropical climate. You could have died of the fever alone, so I took you to a priest—”

  “For what? Last rites?”

  “This priest had been a curandero—a Spanish medicine man—before he converted. He knew how to use medicinal herbs and plants. He gave you an infusion of arbuto roots for the fever, and then he made an antibiotic salve out of jungle fungi and lichens for your wound. When you didn’t respond, he lit candles and prayed to the saints.”

  “Nothing like a fallback plan,” Chase said dryly.

  “Don’t be so quick to scoff. You’re alive.” She hesitated, fingering the collar of her sweater uneasily. “He offered to help me, too, since I had no papers and no way to prove I was an American citizen. As a priest, he had access to certain kinds of documentation.”

  “What kinds of documentation?”

  She answered immediately, afraid if she hesitated she might never get the words out. “In this case, a certificado matrimonio—a marriage certificate,” she said, watching his reaction. “With an American as my husband, I would automatically get citizenship. If we were stopped by the military—or even by the rebels—there was a far better chance they wouldn’t detain me if I was your wife. Without the papers I had no identity, no country. They could have held me indefinitely—”

  “My wife?” he echoed softly.

  Annie took some hope from the thoughtful way he said the words. “Yes, the priest insisted we take the vows. In Costa Brava priests are authorized to perform civil ceremonies, and he wouldn’t give us the papers without one.

  “So you’re saying that I married you?”

  He was rubbing his thumb along the wooden butt of the gun, and Annie could tell he still didn’t believe her. Or perhaps he actually didn’t remember. He’d been ill, delirious. “I know it sounds crazy,” she admitted. “But it was only a formality, a means to an end. We both understood that.”

  “Maybe you understood it, lady,” he said, his voice going cold. “But as far as I’m concerned, it never happened. The only vow I ever took was at the age of eight, when my father and mother tried to kill each other with the broken whiskey bottles they’d just emptied. Damn shame they didn’t.”

  His eyes cut into her like the shards of glass he spoke of. “That was the day I vowed to die unmarried,” he added quietly. “So tell me, Annie Wells, why would I break that vow for you?”

  From across the room, Shadow, the collie, made a pleading sound in his throat, as if he could sense his master’s turmoil.

  Annie shuddered involuntarily. She had no idea how to respond to what Chase had just told her. “I don’t know why you did it,” was all she could manage to get out. “Maybe you were grateful.”

  “Grateful for what?”

  Her chest felt full and tight. She wanted to tell him it was because she was the one who had kept him from dying. It was she beside him when the fever spiked and sent him into convulsions; it was she holding him. How could he forget?

  “The priest gave you the medicine,” she said at last. “But someone had to be there, night and day, until the fever broke.” She averted her eyes, knowing
she couldn’t go into the details of that ordeal now. She was too emotionally shaken to describe the things she’d had to do.

  Fatigue overtook her then. She let her head fall back and closed her eyes. It was agony being in the same room with him again after so many years. His nearness was dragging her back to a time when her feelings for him were raw and sweet and powerful. She’d been in love with him once, the way only a terrified young girl can fall in love with a man who risks his own life to save hers. Perhaps it was hero worship, but it was achingly real to her then. And it had nearly destroyed her when she thought he’d left her behind, escaped to freedom and safety without her. Not knowing whether to love or hate him, she did the only thing she could do, wait ... wait for him to come back for her.

  Now, as she forced herself to open her eyes, look up at him, meet his wary gaze, she wondered how she could have been so tragically naive. He hadn’t come back for her. He’d obviously never intended to. A wave of bitterness swept through her as she tried to push the painful memories out of her mind. If she’d been harboring some childish notion all these years that he shared her feelings, she could certainly see now that he didn’t.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked her. He swung the shotgun around and set the butt down on the floor, propping the barrel against the rocker.

  “An honest answer.” She probed his dark gaze, praying it didn’t reflect the state of his soul. “Do you know who I am, Mr. Beaudine? Do you remember me at all?”

  There was only one honest answer to that, but Chase didn’t intend to reveal it. He was staggered at how much she knew about the mission, and until he learned exactly who she was and what she wanted, he wasn’t going to feed her any more information.

  He recalled waking up in an American hospital after the accident. His partners, Geoff and Johnny, had filled him in on the details of the mission, explaining that they’d found him in the demolished jeep at the bottom of a deep ravine. Trees and jungle undergrowth had kept the jeep from rolling into a turbulent river, but the girl had been thrown free in the fall. Her body was never recovered, but one of her shoes was found floating in the shallows.

  That accident had haunted Chase, perhaps all the more so because he couldn’t remember what caused it. But what haunted him now was the girl’s story. She knew too much, things she couldn’t possibly have learned from newspaper accounts.

  The sound of breaking glass jerked Chase out of his reflections. When he glanced up. Annie Wells was tucked into herself and shaking violently. On the floor in front of her was the shattered water glass she’d just knocked off the table, apparently while trying to take a drink.

  “Hey, easy does it,” said Chase, distinctly uneasy at the prospect of dealing with a distraught woman. “It’s just water. I’ll get you some more.”

  He strode to the sink and pulled another glass from the cabinet, wondering how he was going to calm her down. As he twisted the water tap, his mind jolted him with a strange and mesmerizing image ... a redheaded girl lying warm and soft against his body, pressing herself to him, whispering something unintelligible in his ear.

  The wet glass nearly slipped through his fingers.

  It could have been anyone, he told himself, any of the women he’d been with over the years. But his stomach muscles tightened. As he filled the glass, he felt the shock of cold steel pressing between his shoulder blades. A gun barrel.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” Annie Wells warned, “or I’ll blow your head off.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m a desperate woman, Mr. Beaudine,” she said, her voice ominously soft. “I’ve been searching for weeks, and I’ve traveled thousands of miles to find you. So you’re going to hear me out. And when I’m done, you’re going to give me what I want.”

  Two explosive clicks sounded as she cocked the pump-action shotgun. Chase set down the glass and raised his hands.

  Two

  “OKAY, LET’S HEAR it,” said Chase, carefully tempering his voice. There was a shell in the chamber of the twelve-gauge shotgun she’d jammed into his shoulder blade, and the last thing he wanted to do was rile a woman holding a loaded gun. “Just what is it you want?”

  “My birthright,” she said, her breath shaking slightly. “I have no way to prove I’m an American citizen. You’re the only person I know who can help me.”

  The last thing Chase wanted to do at the moment was argue with her, but he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. He’d suspected she was sunstruck. Now he was sure of it.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “Because I’ve got a piece of paper in my pocket that says you’re my husband. I’ve got nothing else to prove who I am except that. And it’s no good unless you say it is.”

  “Paper?” Chase tried to turn around, but the gun barrel dug a hole in his shoulder. “What piece of paper?”

  “The certificate the priest gave us.”

  “The marriage certificate? It couldn’t be valid. I was delirious, and you were just a kid.”

  “I was sixteen. Fourteen is the age of consent in Costa Brava. The marriage was legal there, and that makes it legal here.”

  “Legal?” Chase was more aware than ever of the twelve-gauge at his back. She was giving new meaning to the term “shotgun wedding.” “You’re sure about that?” he said. And then he caught himself. He was talking as if he believed her story! A flash of something close to panic hit him as he considered the possibility that everything she’d been telling him was true. They’d told him the girl had been killed, that she couldn’t have survived, but maybe they’d been wrong. At any rate the woman holding him at gunpoint had a problem. And her problem had become his problem.

  “What about a birth certificate?” he asked, searching for any other solution than the one she’d come up with.

  “I don’t have one. Or a passport. I don’t even have an I.D. card with my name on it.”

  “You were born, weren’t you? There must be a record of it somewhere.” Again Chase started to turn around. Again cold metal dug into his back. She was beginning to annoy him.

  “I was born all right,” she said, her voice oddly hushed, “in the wilds of Costa Brava, in an area so remote, the only access was by boat or airdrop. My parents worked with the indigenas, the local Indian tribes. They were medical missionaries, and I guess they weren’t in the mood to trek across three hundred miles of jungle to register my birth with the consulate. Either that or my records got destroyed when terrorists bombed the consulate for the third time that year.”

  Anger suddenly stole through her softness. “How I became a woman without a country is beside the point, Mr. Beaudine. The fact is, I am one.”

  The information didn’t entirely surprise Chase. He’d been told by his partners that the Pentagon hadn’t been able to track down any information on the girl who’d died during the mission. The consulate in Costa Brava hadn’t been able to determine her identity either, but Chase had assumed it was because he couldn’t provide them with a name or a description.

  “What about relatives?” he asked.

  “My dad’s folks were missionaries. Died of a tropical disease, both of them. We lost touch with my mom’s parents. They retired, somewhere in the West Indies, I think. There’s no one else that I know of. “So ... ” Her voice was expectant, almost breathy. “Are you going to help me? Or am I going to shoot you?”

  Some choice, he thought. “You said you had proof, a certificate. I’d like a look at it.” As the pressure of the gun barrel lightened, Chase heard rustling noises behind him.

  “Turn around,” she ordered. “Slowly. No tricks.”

  Chase left his hands in the air, and as he turned to face her, he was aware of two distinct impressions. First, he’d never been held at gunpoint by a woman before, and second, the experience wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Especially when the woman at the other end of the barrel looked like an angel gone slightly berserk. He’d thought of Annie Wells as plain when he first saw her. N
ow her eyes were glittery with determination and her hair, catching the sunlight, was a flash fire.

  The transformation was striking, and he had no way to explain it except for the desperation that must be driving her to take such crazy risks. She wasn’t hedging her bets. She was going for broke, and as much as that must have frightened her, apparently it also excited her. She was sending up more sparks than a summer brushfire on a dark night.

  “Here,” she said, holding out the document for him to inspect as she wielded the shotgun with one hand. “Go ahead and read it, but stay there, right where you are.”

  The crumpled piece of paper Chase scanned was printed in Spanish and bore two signatures at the bottom. One of them stood out dramatically, a broad sprawl of loops and bars that was unmistakably his. He knew enough Spanish to verify that the form was what she said it was—a marriage certificate. Trouble, Beaudine, he thought. Big time.

  “What do you plan to do now?” she asked.

  For a fleeting second triumph sparkled in her alert gaze. It was gone almost before Chase caught it, but he recognized the implicit message. She had him, and she knew it. His neck muscles began to tingle, tensing ever so slightly. If there was one thing Chase Beaudine hated, it was being had.

  “Probably not a whole lot while you’re holding that gun on me,” he said, letting his eyes slide up the barrel to where the wooden butt was cushioned against her shoulder. Her stance pulled the sweater tightly over her breasts, practically inviting him to check out curves that seemed indecently lush on so slender a frame. He flexed his hand with the memory of touching her there and felt an answering contraction deep in his gut. His thoughts steamed up immediately, and the heat must have shone in his eyes as he looked up at her.

  “Did we consummate the union?” he asked.

  She looked startled. “What?”

  “Consummate. Did we do the deed? Did I get into your blue jeans, Annie?” He hesitated, his voice dropping lower, becoming huskier, as he stared into her widening eyes. “Did I get into you?”