What am I doing here?
When Shanghai pulled up at his motel, Mia was awash in second thoughts again. She knew better than to trust herself to get out and go in with him. And yet…
I will lose him if I do this. I’ve been too eager too long.
He shut off the engine and turned toward her in the darkening twilight. His face was carved into hard lines. He looked as uncertain as she felt.
Long minutes passed while they sat in silence, neither touching nor speaking. Cars whizzed past on the highway behind them. Soon the air between them was thick and heavy.
He took her hand in his and drew it to his lips. When his mouth blew warm air between her fingers, she shuddered. The whole time she had been married to Cole and had slept alone, she had dreamed of this. In Mexico, she had dreamed of Shanghai, too. All her life, when he’d been away, she’d thought of him. He’d been with her always, if only in her imagination. There had been times when she’d felt like his spirit had called to hers; times she’d thought maybe he’d missed her a little, too. Not that she’d ever let herself believe that he was willing her to think of him as she’d willed him to remember her.
Now he was here, really here, for what might be a brief time. She knew how foolhardy it was to give her body and risk her heart, but she didn’t want to spend another day without him.
He kissed each of her palms, causing her flesh to tingle beneath his mouth. In a hush she turned toward him, feeling more alive and hopeful than she’d ever believed she’d feel again.
All he’d ever had to do to add meaning and depth to who she was, was to look at her or touch her or speak to her. Theirs wasn’t just a sexual attraction. The emotional bond was equally intense, at least, for her.
She didn’t know why he mattered so much to her. She only knew that if he left again, he would take a big part of herself with him, and she wouldn’t feel whole. But such was the risk of loving him.
She clenched her hands for the briefest moment. Not to love him was to refuse life itself.
Hardly knowing what she did, she began to unsnap the top buttons of his Western shirt.
He sucked in a swift breath.
Ripping the edges apart, she buried her lips against the corded hot skin at his waist.
“Darlin’,” he growled in a low guttural tone as she began to kiss him, her fingers sliding inside his belt an inch.
Faster than lightning, he slammed out of the truck and hauled her out with him. Bringing her close against his body, he moved his cheek across hers. Then he pressed her into the back truck door and held her against his long, lean body for an infinite time, his heat burning into her.
“I thought you were never coming back,” she whispered against his throat, her voice low and desperate.
“I was a fool.” His hands were in her hair. His leg moved between hers, parting them.
A maid came out of a room and stood perfectly still, watching them as she clutched a large bundle of sheets.
“You comin’ in with me or am I driving you home?” he whispered raggedly.
She giggled and clung tighter to him.
“That’s a yes, I guess.” His grin lit her heart.
Then they were inside the motel room, both frantic the moment he bolted the door. He tossed his keys on the dresser, and as if that were a signal they began tearing off their clothes and throwing them into a heap until they were both naked with a rumpled mountain of garments pooled between them.
He stepped over the clothes. Gathering her in his arms, he carried her to the bed. Lowering her onto the mattress, he kissed her again, feasting on her mouth and nipples with his lips like a man who’d been starved. Soon her skin was wet all over from his tongue. He worked his way down her belly, licking and kissing her everywhere until he parted her legs and began to stroke her.
Her body heated when she felt his eyes looking at her. She went wild when his tongue finally delved inside her. Even when she tugged his head closer and started screaming, he kept licking her, stopping only when she’d climaxed several times and finally lay limp. Still clutching his head against herself, she shook until she was so utterly exhausted she could barely breathe. Then she flung her arms out and didn’t move. Not even when he covered her with the sheets and blanket and pulled her into his arms and held her quietly.
A long time later, she got up and took a shower. Drained, but happier than she’d ever been and yet scared, too, she leaned against the wet tiles and let the warm water stream over her.
Maybe she should be ashamed to let him do that the first day she’d seen him, but she wasn’t. Not really. He’d made her feel beautiful and adored in the most intimate way possible. She’d always felt ashamed of that part of her body, always wanted to keep it hidden. If she never had him again, at least she would have the memory of these fleeting moments when he had worshiped her and made her feel so absolutely feminine and gorgeous even there.
“You okay?” he called when the hot water had grown so cold that she’d turned off the faucet.
“I think so.”
He laughed. “Don’t use up all the hot water.”
She giggled. “I already have.”
“Come out then. I have something for you.”
“I don’t think I can walk.”
“Then I’ll carry you.”
Two seconds later he opened the shower door and wrapped her hair in a towel. Stepping out, she wrapped herself in the other towel and tiptoed back to the bed.
“You used all my towels, too,” he said.
“I’ll bet management has more.”
“I’m not complaining.” He pulled her into his arms. “Besides, I want you to make yourself at home.”
“So much for not being easy where you’re concerned,” she said.
“You can’t help yourself, apparently.”
She blushed. His words were too true.
“You’re too conceited for words,” she said.
“A failing of most famous bull riders, I’m afraid. We’re a flawed bunch of arrogant, foolhardy idiots.”
She licked her lips, reveling in the warmth and affection in his low tone.
“Marry me,” he said, sliding a black velvet box across the sheet toward her. When she just stared at it and then at him, he opened the lid. “I know I should go down on bended knee, but the mood to ask you right now just hit me.”
The large diamond twinkling at her made her gasp.
“I already bought the ring…before we had sex. Or rather you had sex.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. You owe me one, darlin’. But the point is, I was already going to ask you….”
When she didn’t say no, he lifted the ring out and pushed it over the knuckle of her ring finger.
She shook her hand and made it flash. “I can’t believe you just went out and bought this without even asking me.”
“I’m asking you.”
When she tried to tug it off, it was so tight, it wouldn’t slide back over her knuckle.
“Looks like a yes to me.” He grinned. “I guess we’re stuck with each other.”
“Is that how you feel? Like you’re stuck? Do you have any other feelings?”
Such as love, she thought, her heart aching to hear such words from him.
“I told you about those men who tried to kill Wolf in Dallas. Well, Wolf told me they had machine guns. They were like sharks, hunting their prey in a pack. All I’ve been able to think about ever since is that I want to be here if more guys like that come after you.”
“You’re afraid for Vanilla?”
“And for you.” He kissed her forehead lightly. “I want to marry you. Sometimes guys like Tavio lose interest if a woman’s married because then they see her as another man’s possession.”
“I won’t be your possession—or his or any other man’s—not ever. I’m still struggling to find myself after being held as Tavio’s prisoner in Mexico. Really, I’m not over that experience. In fact, I don’t think I’m in any shape to marry anybody.”
“I want you to sign papers that Vanilla’s legally my child.”
Was he thinking that Tavio might succeed in killing her?
Clearly he wanted Vanilla, and he didn’t want to fight her family for custody if she died. She couldn’t really blame him for that. He was Vanilla’s father. His request was both understandable and legitimate—no matter how much it hurt.
He hadn’t mentioned love, but if she married him, he’d stay…at least for a while, and Mia could pretend they were a real family. Vanilla would get to know him.
But then he’d leave them all over again, and they’d all have to deal with that. She was too confused to know what was best.
“I’ll give you a divorce when this is over,” he said, not looking at her now as he traced her hand with a fingertip. “If that’s what you want.”
“Is that what you want—a divorce?”
“No. I’m just saying this doesn’t have to be permanent. I won’t use this to try to own you or control you.”
She nodded, feeling strange and sad even as she wondered how he really felt.
“It just has to look permanent. I’m not after the Golden Spurs anymore. So don’t worry about that, either. This marriage is about protecting you.”
“And Vanilla?”
“Of course. I went to Mexico to make you safe. Why would I want you both at his mercy now?”
When he looked up and smiled at her, she clenched the sheets.
She wanted more. So much more. Was that wrong?
“I never thought I’d even consider marrying a man who doesn’t love me.”
“What about Cole? You married him fast enough, didn’t you?”
She inhaled a sharp breath. Cole was different because she’d never imagined herself in love with him, never considered theirs a real marriage.
As if Shanghai sensed her disappointment in his proposal his voice softened. “It’s hard for me to make promises when nobody I counted on ever kept theirs to me.”
She nodded, struggling to understand.
“My mother ran away. My father was a drunk.” There was a wealth of pain in his low voice. “Hell, maybe he wasn’t even my father.”
“I know how that feels. I’m sorry about all that. But I’m not going to treat you the way they did.”
“I’m trying to explain why this is the best I can do right now. I don’t want you building false hopes about me or this marriage.”
She knotted the sheets even more tightly.
“I don’t want to build up false hopes, either,” she said, remembering how she’d chased her father and then him, always longing for them to love her.
“Good.”
Too bad for her she’d already built up false hopes. It was the way she was. She couldn’t seem to stop herself from chasing men who were doomed to run. His lovemaking had left her feeling cherished and awed and now he was speaking in such cool, practical terms, asking her to marry him because he wanted to protect her, and yet offering to divorce her as soon as possible.
“I still don’t want to marry a man who doesn’t love me.”
“Fair enough. You decide.”
She stared straight in front of her for a long while. Finally she said, “If I marry you, I won’t sleep with you again.”
When he moved his leg against hers, she jumped. “You wanna bet?” he murmured dryly.
“I’m warning you, don’t marry me because you think you’ll get a lot of easy sex.”
“That’s your rule. Not mine, darlin’. How can you dream up a scheme to torture me when you know how crazy I am about you that way?”
Before she realized what he was about, he’d grabbed her, cupped her head between his hands and kissed her.
“Stop it right now. I’m warning you—”
His mouth was so searingly hot, his kisses soon had her breathless.
“We’re not married yet, so I guess the rule’s not in force yet,” he teased.
When he angled her head to one side, she sighed and quit fighting him.
His hand closed over one of her breasts and reshaped it to fit his brown, callused palm. Deftly he began caressing her nipple.
The blood began to roar in her ears. “Oh, Shanghai.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“I wish.”
He laughed. “You’re so damn sexy.”
“But not easy.”
“No, definitely not easy,” he agreed as he leaned over and she licked her way down his abdomen to his shaft. “No other woman has ever been more trouble, I assure you.”
After her lips circled him, it wasn’t long before he was breathing too hard and too fast to debate the issue.
Feeling strangely jumpy because the dogs had stopped barking, Guillermo hurried a sleepily yawning Marisol across his tiny living room. Because he hadn’t wanted anybody outside to see a light and be warned they were up, they’d dressed in total darkness in his bedroom that had wall-to-wall mattresses as flooring. She was carrying her shoes because she hadn’t been able to stand up on one foot on the mattresses to put them on.
“Put on your shoes and hurry,” he whispered, his voice tight with impatience as he cracked the front door an inch. “We’ve got to leave before the sun comes up and my neighbors begin to stir.”
“I don’t care about the neighbors. I’m sleepy—” Her voice was cross from having been awakened.
Clamping his fingers around her wrist tighter, Guillermo slipped his gun out of his shoulder holster and stared down the street for a long time. The houses were quiet and dark, the unpaved road dusty and barren except for Paco, the skinny black dog, napping in the middle of it.
Paco always barked at strangers. So did the dogs on the roofs of the other houses. Still, the utter soundlessness of the street bothered him.
He reholstered his gun, telling himself there was nothing to worry about. Tavio’s escape simply had him spooked.
Tavio couldn’t possibly know about this stylish casita where he brought all his young loves. At the thought of his house, Guillermo’s mind turned to happier thoughts.
How many comandantes had taste like he did? He’d studied pictures in fancy magazines. Thus, the small rooms of his small house were decorated with oriental rugs, and the walls hung with eastern tapestries. Sometimes he imagined himself an Arab sheikh or an ancient chieftain when he brought a new girl here.
Here he seduced, treating his women to beer or wine and to delicacies like thick juicy steaks. And siempre, always, he was very careful not to be followed when he drove them here.
Marisol fought to tug her hand loose. “I said I’m sleepy. Why can’t we stay all night?”
“Shh.”
“What are we waiting for?”
He didn’t like whiny women. “Be quiet, puta.”
“Puta? You never called me that before.”
“That’s what you are, mi amor.”
She hissed in a breath.
Tonight he’d gotten her very drunk. He’d taken pictures of her dancing naked, of her butt cheeks spread wide with various objects inserted inside her, frontal shots as well with the pouting lips of her vulva spread, too.
She was only sixteen. She’d been a virgin. Still, he’d taken her every way a man could take a woman, causing her to weep several times.
Por supuesto, after tonight she was a puta. Turning virgins into whores had long been a favorite sport of his.
“You think you are a big man, but now I know better.”
He swung around violently. “What do you know?”
“You’re scared because everybody says Octavio Morales is going to kill you. That’s why I had to stroke you so long with the jelly. That’s why you wake me in the dark.”
He slapped her twice. When she fell down screaming he grabbed her and shook her until her eyes grew huge. Then his hand closed around her mouth. Still she fought him, biting at his fingers.
“Don’t make me really hurt you,” he growled and was gratified when she went limp.
A minute or two passed while she gasped for every breath and stared at him with those big dark eyes of hers like a paralyzed mouse about to be scratched to pieces by a long-clawed cat. He felt his cock grow big. Who needed a hand job or a pill to get hard now? If it wasn’t so late, he’d rape her right here.
When she was still and silent for a long time, and he finally released her, she fell to the floor.
“A man in my position can’t be too careful.”
She stared up at him with bruised, dark eyes that had sparkled and flirted with him earlier. Both cheeks were scarlet where he’d struck her. Skin like hers bruised easily.
Something to remember him by.
Good. Now she knew how tough he was. He could be nice to her again. Until their final fuck. He would celebrate that by branding her left butt cheek with the tip of his cigar.
“It’s just that I want to protect you, querida.”
“From Morales?”
“Shut up about him, and be quiet when we go outside to my car.”
He opened the door wider. “Go! Now!”
Like a child she sprinted ahead of him. He watched her, delighted with the way her hips moved in the tight red dress. She was a puta, and there were many pretty putas in Ciudad Juarez. Usually he passed his used whores on to Enrique and treated himself to a new one.
Dios, but he was hard again because of her cowering. He would keep her for a while. Sex after such a spat always held an added thrill. He knew that she would be submitting, that he’d taken something from her she’d never get back.
He would give her flowers tomorrow, maybe a shawl and a pretty silver ring. And some cash. Fifty dollars cash.
Putas loved money. She’d be all giggles and jiggles again tomorrow night.
As Marisol ran toward his car, he saw the adobe house and the dusty street as if they were part of a scene in a movie. A terrible premonition hit him. Suddenly she was Apollonia in The Godfather, and he was his favorite film star, Al Pacino, playing Michael Corleone when he’d been hiding out from his enemies in Sicily.
With a scream in his throat, Guillermo turned. Horrified, he yelled to her to stop, but it was too late.
He was already running away from the car when his Toyota exploded and the black sky became flame and shards of flying glass and burning metal.
Oblivious to the greasy feel of taco juice dribbling down his chin, Guillermo grabbed a stale tortilla only to stare at the splatter of cold, yellow egg on his plate. The stench from his armpits was spoiling his appetite. He smelled worse than a well-used whore. When he lifted a napkin to his jaw, the bristle from his three-day stubble tore the flimsy paper.
He hadn’t slept since the explosion, nor eaten since noon yesterday. For three days, Enrique had been moving him from safe house to safe house if you could call this squalid, eroding sandbox at the end of a dirty street in a bad neighborhood safe.
One minute Guillermo was wrapping his flour tortilla around a glob of cold egg and greasy chorizo. In the next he saw a big black van barreling up the dirt road so fast, chickens and dogs and brown-legged children went flying before it.
Morales.
The pendejo had found him.
Guillermo got up so fast his chair fell over backward. Still clutching the tortilla with dribbles of egg falling out of it, he ran out the back door in his bare feet.
Behind him men in uniforms shouted.
“Stop! Or we’ll shoot!”
Despite the hard rocks and thorns cutting into his feet, he ran for many blocks, weaving in and out of the narrow streets until finally he found himself breathless, trapped like a rat in a maze. His street had dead-ended into a wall of dank-looking adobe shacks jammed together.
Seeing a narrow, corrugated drainage pipe filled with garbage beneath the dirt road, he dove for it, yanking out handfuls of shitty diapers and rotting food and a dead rat. Then he jumped into the pipe backward, pulling the rotten fruit and dirty pampers back in front of himself.
He shut his eyes and prayed.
Ten men ran up and down the street. Knocking on doors with the butts of their guns, they quickly entered and searched the houses. When the people didn’t answer, they kicked the doors in and searched them anyway. When one man argued, Guillermo cringed at his cries when he heard them beat him nearly to death.
“He’s got to be here!” Tavio’s voice rang in the street. “What’s that over there?”
Men ran over to Guillermo’s hiding place. One of them stood so close, Guillermo could have grabbed the man by the ankle of his boot.
“Nothing, Tavio. We find nothing!”
“Pull this shit out of this pipe!”
When one of the bastards reached inside the pipe with his hand, Guillermo bit his finger halfway off.
The man screamed and drew back, but another one came up and sprayed the pipe with bullets. After that Guillermo couldn’t feel anything from the neck down. They dragged him out by the hair, and he was helpless to resist them.
“Tie his legs to the back of my Silverado!” Tavio yelled, while big-eyed people from the houses watched from behind their windows. “If there’s anything left of him when we get to the desert, we’ll finish him off there.”
“Tavio…please…”
“I trust you. You attack me at my rancho in front of my women. You put me in prison. You ruin my business. You drink with me. You take my presents, but you are not my friend. You know what is wrong. You show me no respect. Today I teach you respect.”
Ten miles outside of Ciudad Juarez, when Tavio’s men finally cut him loose in a dusty area filled with low mesquite and grease-wood bushes, Guillermo was barely conscious when Tavio spoke to him again.
“Too bad the ladies can’t see you now, eh, Guillermo. You like to brand women with your cigar, no? You like fire? You like to hear them scream?”
Guillermo tried to move his hands. He strained to make nerves and muscles work. His heart pounded. His blood pumped.
Nothing. Nothing except Tavio’s laughter.
Tavio grabbed a bottle of tequila and took a long pull. Guillermo squinted but he couldn’t bring him into sharp focus. Still, he could see his dark hand lift one of his crack-laced cigarettes to his nose and then put it back in his shirt pocket.
“Dig a shallow ditch around him,” Tavio ordered. “Then get out the drums of gasoline.”
“No…Please…” Guillermo begged, his voice a pitiful squeak.
Tavio strode closer and leaned down. “You think you’re a tough gangster now?”
“No…Please…” Frantically Guillermo tried to move.
Tavio’s men dumped armfuls of branches on top of him, and Guillermo was helpless to stop them. Next they emptied two drums of gasoline into the pit where he lay soaked in the foul-smelling stuff.
“No…Don’t burn me alive!
Tavio struck a match. He stared at him for a long moment. “I thought you were my friend,” he whispered. Then he leaned down. “I will tell you a little secret. I do not like to kill or to rape or to burn women.” His dark eyes full of regret, he stood up again. “I like you.” Then almost carelessly he flicked the match toward Guillermo.
Guillermo began to scream even before the explosion that shot sparks and flame and roared so loud none of the men standing around the fire could hear his cries.
The last thing he saw through the flickering orange glow was Tavio’s grim face as he smoked his crack-laced cigarette.
“I’ll see you in hell!” Guillermo screamed as Tavio’s face blackened and was lost in darkness.