LITMIR.BIZ

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if he gave it to her?” one of them asked, only to be answered with a curse.

      As the men searched the house, she hugged her daughter tightly, determined to protect her child as she had since Elena’s birth, feeling as defenseless and trapped as she always had.

      The men eventually searched the attic, including the bureau drawers, while she’d held her breath and prayed they wouldn’t find her and Elena crouched in the darkness and dust.

      She took hope when she sensed the men were losing momentum, their movements less frantic but no less angry and frustrated.

      “He wouldn’t hide it in the house,” one of the men snapped in Spanish. “He was too smart for that. So why are we wasting our time? He gave it to the woman and kid to hide somewhere for him.”

      “Shut up!” the nervous one growled. “Keep searching.” But he said it as he tromped back down the stairs and soon the others followed.

      She waited until she thought they’d left before she crept from the hiding place and stole with her daughter down one floor to her bedroom. With a chilling calm that frightened her more than the men had, she packed a bag with a few belongings.

      She started at a noise behind her. Click, click, click. Someone was still downstairs, she thought, glancing at the phone beside her bed. It was making that faint clicking sound as the extension downstairs was being dialed.

      With that same cold calm, she carefully picked up the extension. Two voices. One coarse as sand. The other nervous and quick and now familiar.

      “I want my money, Ramon,” the coarse one snarled.

      “The woman must have taken it and the child with her.”

      “Find them. Make them tell you where Julio hid the money he stole from me. Then bring them and the money to me. Comprende?”

      “Si, Señor Calderone, I understand.” The man named Ramon promised on his dead mother’s grave.

      She hung up the phone and finished packing. Since the day she’d awakened in the hospital after the house fire to find Julio beside her bed, she’d suspected her husband was involved with drug lord Tomaso Calderone.

      She’d awakened in pain. From her injuries and the surgeries. From the confusion in her mind.

      But it was awakening to find herself pregnant that made her close her eyes and ears to Julio’s dealings, thinking only of her baby, her sweet precious daughter. Julio had never shown any interest in either of them, leaving her alone to cook and clean and raise the child he wanted nothing to do with.

      Once she got some of her strength back physically and Elena was old enough to travel, she’d tried to leave her marriage. But Julio had caught her and brought her back, warning her that she and Elena could never leave. They were his and he would rather see them both dead than ever let them go.

      She had looked into Julio Montenegro’s eyes and known then that he felt nothing for her or Elena, something she had long suspected. She and Elena were his prisoners for reasons she could not understand. But for Elena’s sake, she’d never tried to escape again.

      Instead, without realizing it, she’d been biding her time, waiting. She hadn’t known what she’d been waiting for. Until today.

      With the bag in one hand and Elena’s small hand in the other, she crept down the stairs as soon as the lower floor grew silent again.

      Julio lay sprawled on the white tile floor of the kitchen in a pool of blood, his eyes blank, his body lifeless.

      Shielding Elena from the sight, Isabella moved to him, her gaze not on his face, but on the knife sticking out of his chest.

      With a cold, calculating detachment she hadn’t known she possessed, she grasped the knife handle in both hands, and pulled it from her husband’s chest. Then she calmly wiped the knife clean on his shirt and slipped the slim blade into her bag.

      She looked down at his face for a moment, wishing she felt something. Then, like a sleepwalker, she knelt and searched his pockets, lifting him enough to remove the small wad of pesos his business associates had obviously passed up as too trivial to bother with from his hip pocket.

      It wasn’t much money. Not nearly enough to get her and Elena out of Mexico, let alone to some place safe in the States. But was there any place safe from Calderone and his men?

      She started to rise, then noticed that when she’d lifted Julio, she’d also lifted the edge of the rug under him. The corner of a manila envelope was now visible beneath the rug.

      With that same chilling calm, she raised Julio enough to free the parcel from beneath him and the rug. She stared at the large envelope, then the fire he’d built in the stove. Had he been planning to burn the envelope? Why else would he have built a fire in a room already unbearably hot?

      She looked again at the envelope. She knew it didn’t contain the missing money. It was too lightweight, too thin, to hold the amount of money she feared Julio had stolen. But maybe it had information about where he’d hidden the drug money. Why else would he try to burn it just before he’d been killed, if not to protect his ill-gotten gains?

      She grasped the hope. If she had the location of the stolen money, then maybe she could buy her freedom and her daughter’s from Calderone.

      As she lifted the parcel to look inside, something fell out and tinkled to the tiles. The tiny object rolled to a stop and as she stopped to pick it up, she saw that it was a silver heart-shaped locket. It had no chain and the silver was tarnished and scratched, making it hard at first to read the name engraved on it.

      Abby.

      She stared at the locket. Should that name mean something to her? Was it one of her husband’s mistresses? One of her lost relatives?

      She pried the two halves open and stared down at a man’s photo inside, her fingers trembling. Not Julio. Not any man she’d ever seen before. She felt Elena beside her and tried to shield her from the body on the floor, but saw that her daughter was more interested in the locket—and the photo inside.

      “Papacito,” Elena whispered, eyes wide as she stared down at the photo of the stranger.

      “No, my little bright angel,” she said softly, sick inside. For the first time, she let herself hate Julio. She’d never wanted him as a husband, but he could have been a father to Elena, who desperately needed a father’s love.

      Instead their daughter preferred to believe a total stranger in a small black-and-white photograph was her father rather than Julio Montenegro, the unfeeling man who’d given her life.

      A car backfired outside, making her jump. Hurriedly, she shoved the locket back into the envelope with the official-looking papers. Like the weapon she’d taken from Julio’s chest, she put the parcel into her bag. As she turned to leave, she saw her daughter’s lost rag doll and, wondering absently how it had gotten there, she scooped it up from the floor, took her daughter’s small hand, and ran.

      JAKE CANTRELL stood back, sipping his beer, watching the wedding reception as if through binoculars. The Smoking Barrel Ranch had taken on a sound and feel and level of gaiety that seemed surreal, as if it had an alternate personality—one he didn’t recognize.

      He hadn’t been brought here for this and right now, he just wanted it to be over. Not that he wasn’t happy for Brady and Grace…now Catherine. He was. He just didn’t believe in happy-ever-after anymore. Mostly, he told himself, he was just anxious to get back to work.

      But that was a lie. All day he’d felt an uneasiness he couldn’t shake. Like when he felt someone following him or waiting for him in a dark alley. The feeling hummed like a low-pitched vibration inside him, making him anxious and irritable and wary.

      Mitchell had called a meeting later tonight. Jake wanted a new assignment, something that would take him away from the ranch for a while. Away from everything. Work kept him sane—relatively sane. It was also the only thing that kept him from

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