HE AWOKE GASPING, HIS HEART hammering so hard his chest felt as if it would explode from the pressure. Visions of fire and blood and bullets flew through his mind like a cyclone, all mayhem and madness and speed. Too fast for him to decipher. Too horrifying for him to want to.

Then soft hands covered his, held tight in a night that was warm and dark but for a pale light burning nearby in the cave.

“You are safe, askar,” a woman whispered in Pashto.

You are safe, soldier.

“You are safe,” she repeated, her voice soothing and sleepy, as though she had recently awakened.

Rabia.

His heartbeat slowed fractionally, then started to settle when he realized it was her. She’d come to him again in the cave. No. Wait. He opened his eyes. Not the cave. The ceiling above him was whitewashed plaster, not dingy, dripping rock.

Slowly, so as not to wake the vertigo, he looked around. Walls. Structural walls, not made of rock. A window was covered with fabric. A soft light burned from a small wooden table. An intricately patterned rug hung on the wall.

He remembered now. She had moved him out of the cave. She’d brought him to her father’s home in the village.

“How long?” he asked through a scratchy throat as his breathing stabilized.

“One hour. No more.” She offered him water. He drank gratefully as she held his head, then carefully resettled him on the pallet.

“No. Not how long was I asleep. How long have I been here?”

“Four days only.”

Painstakingly slow, he turned his head so he could look at her. And felt his heartbeat quicken again.

The burqa was gone. She didn’t wear it in the house. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen her face, but each time he did, it was a fascinating revelation. One that held him in thrall and incapable of looking away, even though he saw that his scrutiny made her uncomfortable.

“I will leave you now.” She moved to go.

“No.” He reached for her hand. Held on with as much strength as he could muster. “Please… please stay. Just a little while.”

With reluctance, she stopped resisting as he continued to stare unapologetically at the woman who represented the sum total of his life.

She was incredibly beautiful. Night-black hair, long and loose and falling over slim shoulders. Most Afghan women were easy on the eyes—God only knew how he knew that—and she was no exception. Clear olive complexion, delicately arched brows over dark, intelligent eyes that had once been angry and cold but now offered compassion. Her reaction to him made her uncomfortable, though. Clearly, she struggled with what she felt.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to stare. It’s… it’s just that I wondered what you looked like for so long. It’s still new to me every time I see you.”

She looked away, then rose to her knees, her soft white gown falling over her bare feet. “I must go back to my bed now.”

She looked tired, so he let her go. She needed sleep, even if he wasn’t going to get any. After one of his nightmares, he never slept. He was afraid to.

“Why do you do this, Rabia?” he whispered, aware of her father sleeping across the small room. “Why do you take care of me?”

She looked from the hands she’d clasped at her lap to his face, then back to her hands again. A heartbeat passed while she decided what to say. “Because you invoked Pashtunwali.”

“Yeah, so you told me.” She’d explained how she’d found him and he’d asked for refuge. He didn’t remember. Had no idea why he even knew that word. Another mystery. Like the mystery of why both English and Pashto words mixed together in his head. So much muddled together that when they spoke now, it was in an odd blend of English and Pashto that somehow worked.

The bigger mystery was that he didn’t think it was only Pashtunwali that compelled her to help him. There was more to it now. When she had first come to him, she’d been hostile. Hell, she’d hated him. Barely tolerated him and clearly felt burdened by his presence.

That had changed over time. What he sensed from her now felt very much like concern and caring—and God, he needed to believe that, because without it, he was completely alone.

He needed it so much that he didn’t trust the feeling completely. Maybe there were ulterior motives. Did she and her father plan to ransom him? If so, to whom? The U.S. government? Hell, if someone from the military knew he was alive, they would have already moved heaven and earth to find him. No man left behind. It was the Special Forces credo.

The thought hit him like a tank.

Was he Special Forces? If not, why would that particular spec-ops credo step front and center? Why not Navy SEAL or Marine Force Recon or Army Ranger or Delta?

Special Forces. Army. It felt right that he’d worn a green beret.

Or maybe it was wishful thinking because he’d like to believe he’d been so much more than the weak, useless excuse for a man that he’d become.

A familiar pain knifed through his head, reminding him that isolation was not a small house made of mud bricks and straw plaster in the middle of a war-torn country. Isolation was crippling vertigo, fading eyesight, and not knowing your own damn name. Not knowing if you had a family, if you had a life worth going back to, or if you even had a dog.

He forced a deep breath. Then another. He couldn’t go there. He had to deal with now. Only now was as unknown as his past.

“I must go,” she whispered again, and this time, he stopped her with a request.

“Tea. Please?”

While they never spoken of it, he knew she mixed opiates in a concoction of tea and honey that did little to disguise the bitter taste of the poppy.

She glanced toward the cooking room, then back to him. “Do you need it?”

Yeah. He needed it. He needed the haze of nothingness the drug spread through his mind and body. The need made him a weak man. He knew that. He knew he needed to resist.

Would tonight finally be the night? Could he do it?

With remnants of the nightmare hovering just out of his grasp, he knew he should at least try. If his head cleared, maybe he would remember something. Maybe tonight he didn’t want to.

“Yes, please,” he said, ashamed to be so deep into the drug that he craved it more than his strength or the life he’d lost.

Tomorrow, he resolved, as she rose on quiet feet and walked out of the room to make his tea. Tomorrow he would try. Tonight he wanted only relief.

FOUR MORE TOMORROWS passed before he finally found the courage to let go of the opium.

“You are sure, askar?” Rabia asked with concern in her eyes.

“I’m sure.”

She didn’t ask again. She understood. She knew he had to do this.

Once he’d said no more, the tea had become sweeter.

Life had not.

He’d thought he’d known pain. But the withdrawal was beyond anything he could have imagined. Cold sweats, tremors, vomiting, anxiety, and his old friend insomnia. And then there was the pain—muscle, bone, hair, teeth, everything hurt with unconditional torture.

All in a day’s work, if you were a junkie kicking the habit.

Through it all, Rabia stayed by his side.

She bathed him.

She cleaned up after him.

She held him while he shook until his bones ached.

She soothed his brow through the night terrors.

And when he finally slept, the nightmares shot at him like bullets. Fragmented images cut into his mind like daggers, waking him to his own screams as he faced fire and smoke and IED blasts until exhaustion sucked him under again.

“HOW ARE YOU this morning, askar?”

He opened his eyes slowly. Sunlight slanted in beneath the meager drape of fabric covering the small window. “I don’t know. How long has it been?”

“Since the tea became sweet?”

He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Immediately, she knelt beside him and tipped a cup of water to his lips.

“Yes,” he croaked after taking a small sip. “Since the tea became sweet.”

“Seven days.”

Seven days of hell. But he was alive. "Let's not do that again real soon.”

“Oh that, we agree.”

Because he heard a soft smile in her voice, he smiled, too, something that he realized he hadn’t done since he’d come to, chained by his ankle in that cave.

Suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for all she had done for him, for all she had been to him, he reached for her hand. “Thank you.”

She wove her fingers through his, squeezed, and inexplicably, the darkness in his heart lifted. He didn’t think about it. He brought their linked hands to his mouth and kissed the back of her knuckles.

The action was spontaneous and achingly intimate.

Just as suddenly, it was over.

She tugged her hand out of his. “I must prepare the morning meal.”

Then she was gone, leaving him wondering what the hell he’d been thinking. Well, that was pretty damn clear. He hadn’t. He hadn’t thought at all. For an instant, neither had she. For once, she’d responded in a way that wasn’t an offer of comfort or aid. She’d touched him out of affection. He’d reacted in kind.

And it had scared the hell out of her.

Hell, it scared him, too. And, unexpectedly, aroused him.

He stared at the ceiling, experiencing what it felt like to be a man responding physically to a woman and instinctively knowing he had not lived his life in a sexual vacuum. There had been women. Possibly one special woman. Was one waiting for him even now? Would he ever remember her if there was? And what would it matter if he never got out of this damn country and reclaimed his life?

Frustrated, fighting defeat, he willed his thoughts away from the softness of Rabia’s body and the fullness of her lips. Thinking of her that way was one-hundred-percent out of line. Thinking of her that way would not happen again.

But the house was small, the walls thin. There was no way to distance himself physically or mentally. For long moments, he listened to her speak softly to her father in the cooking room. For the first time in seven days, the smells coming from her kitchen didn’t nauseate him.

And for the first time since he’d come to in that cave, he decided that it was time to see his own face.

He stared at the wall beside his pallet and the small mirror that hung above the wooden table. Flat-out, unadulterated fear accelerated his heart rate. What if he didn’t recognize his own face?

What if he did?

What if seeing his image triggered his memory and he didn’t like the man he’d been? What if who he’d been was so horrible that his mind had been protecting him with the amnesia?

There was only one way to find out.

He lay there a little longer, gathering his courage, then, moving slowly and carefully, struggled to sit up. Winded and weak, he gripped the table for support and eventually made it to his knees. Several steadying breaths later, when the vertigo hadn’t reared its ugly head, he managed to get one foot under his weight, then the other, while constantly repeating his mantra.

No sudden movements.

Do not dip your head.