Out of the Storm (Buckhorn, Montana #1) - B.J. Daniels Page 0,77
have taken it from her then.
Now he was going to have to get an advance from Gerald to even leave Canada. The humiliation of it galled him. Not to mention this latest setback. When he caught up with Kate—and he would—he was going to strangle her the way Jon Harper had him. Only he wouldn’t stop until she gasped her last breath.
He would find her, too. Somehow. Find her like Jon had found the two of them. The thought brought him back to the question of how Jon Harper had found them at this rental house in a quiet neighborhood outside of Moose Jaw. Collin was sure he hadn’t been followed and Kate hadn’t told.
Which meant... He let out a litany of curses and headed for the garage. Snapping on the light, he looked around for a flashlight. There was one sitting on the workbench. The batteries were half-dead, but there was just enough light that he knew he could find what he was looking for.
Collin located the tracking device and swore before ripping it from the vehicle’s frame and crawling back out from under the SUV. The bastard had put a tracking device on his car? When? He had to have done it the night before they’d left. Which meant he’d been planning to come after Kate all along.
That didn’t make Collin as angry as the fact that once he knew the man had been a cop and maybe worse, he should have checked. He swore again. What kind of criminal was so stupid?
He crushed the device under his boot, not that it did any good now. What an amateur mistake that had been. If he wanted to play in the big league, he had to at least pretend to be shrewder than he was. He hated to think about what Gerald was going to say about all of this.
How was he going to explain it to Gerald? He’d have no choice but to tell the truth and hope it didn’t get him killed.
* * *
“ARE YOU DANIEL JACKSON?” Kate asked, her voice breaking with emotion.
He stretched out his legs. The left one ached. He tried not to flinch, tried not to let her see that he wasn’t the strong, capable man she thought he was—let alone the one she wanted him to be. “I don’t know who I am.” He saw her disbelieving expression.
“Collin said you worked at the refinery in Houston,” she challenged.
He nodded. “I did. Apparently I was caught in the explosion. I woke up in a hospital room with a bandage around my head and no memory of what had happened—or who I was. So many people were killed or injured. There was a lot of confusion. I didn’t know anything about myself, but I wasn’t badly injured like a lot of others, so I was moved to another hospital. It was there that I was told that I was Justin Brown. I had no reason to believe it wasn’t true. Justin Brown had no family, so it all added up when no one came looking for me.”
“I went to one hospital after another,” Kate said, her voice breaking. Hadn’t she sensed this was what might have happened to him? But she’d been asking for Daniel Jackson—not Justin Brown. “So you just believed that was who you were?”
“Apparently Justin Brown had only been working at the refinery for a short period of time and staying at some fleabag hotel. When I went there after I was released from the hospital, they let me into Justin Brown’s room. I had no photographs, nothing but some clothing and a little money. There was no wedding ring and no wife waiting for me, so I assumed I wasn’t married.”
“You left your wedding ring by the soap dish in the bathroom that morning,” she said. “They found your wallet in the debris. That’s why they were so convinced that you were dead.” She’d often wondered in her darkest hours if he’d planned to walk away that day and had left the ring behind.
“If you don’t know who you are, then how can you believe that you’re not Daniel Jackson?”
His sympathetic look seized her heart in a death grip. “Because I can’t fathom the thought that I wouldn’t have remembered you and my children. I would have known there was someone out there who would be looking for me, missing me, wouldn’t I?”
She didn’t know what to say even if she could have spoken around the lump in her throat.