by Ann Major
“Your home is with me,” he whispered, his narrowed eyes glittering. “I’m almost glad of this. You leave me no choice. Tonight you’re mine, Mia Kemble.”
Ignoring, the armed men, who’d sprayed them with bullets, he lowered his mouth to hers.
“Not so fast, Morales.” A short, cocky fellow strutted up behind them.
“Is that you there in the dark, Guillermo?” Morales’s voice held friendship and affection. “This is one woman I won’t share—even with you.”
“We’ve got you surrounded, Tavio. You don’t have a chance,” Guillermo said in a small, shaking voice.
“What?” Finally comprehending that Guillermo and his men had come on a raid, Tavio let go of her slowly. Then yelling expletives in Spanish, he lunged for Guillermo’s throat.
“Seize him!” Guillermo screamed as the bigger man hurled him to the ground. “Get his gun!”
Four young policemen ran forward, grabbed Tavio’s gun, and then tried to pull him off their comandante. Morales wouldn’t let go of the man’s throat. Fighting them like a dozen cougars, Morales kicked, punched, bit and choked the men. It finally took ten of them to push him facedown into the dirt and cuff him while Guillermo lay beside him choking and retching.
“You will die for this, gringa,” Tavio muttered as the little comandante, who’d finally gotten his breath, struggled to his feet and dusted off his uniform. Then he began to tweak his mustache. “And you, too, Comandante Gonzales.”
Guillermo strode over and kicked him in the stomach, causing Tavio to grunt like an injured dog.
“It is not for you to say who will die anymore!” To his men he shouted, “Throw him in my truck! His woman, too! We’re hauling them to prison!”
Three men grabbed her and cuffed her and threw her down in the dirt beside Tavio.
“Cállate, puta!” When the comandante kicked her, Terence threw his gun down and climbed out of the truck to make sure she was all right.
Forgetting Mia, the comandante turned to the girl cowering in the front seat. “For a long time I’ve wanted to know why Chito thinks you’re so special. Put her in my personal truck. Delia is my reward.”
“No!” Delia tried to run, but his men caught her and dragged her back, screaming.
“Let her go,” Mia pleaded as Delia struggled.
The comandante laughed. “ No te preocupas. Tonight she will fall in love with me. All the women fall in love with me, gringa. She will forget she ever knew Chito.”
“And you, gringo, eh?” The comandante whirled on Terence, who was kneeling beside Mia.
His men raised their guns and strutted toward him.
“You write bad things about me, no? About my men? What the hell am I going to do with you?”
BOOK TWO
Smart Cowboy Saying:
The meanest bronc can be broke, a bit at a time.
—L.D. Burke Santa Fe
Eight
Las Vegas, Nevada
No matter where he was or what he was doing Shanghai hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Mia. As he stepped out of his hotel room into what looked like the longest hall in the universe, he was filled with relief that she was alive and with anger, too—anger because he still gave a damn.
The phone rang before the door shut. Thinking it was Abby again, he loped back inside, flung his hat onto the bed and picked up the receiver. He might as well take the hell she was bent on dishing out now rather than later.
“Shanghai, it’s me—Cole.”
At the sound of Cole’s deep, familiar voice on the other end of the line, all the old bitternesses that had to do with Cole marrying Mia curdled Shanghai’s stomach.
He had a rodeo to win and a fat paycheck to collect. He needed to focus on the rodeo, not on the brother who’d married the woman he’d loved.
Loved? He wished he could reject that as merely an inane thought.
“Damn,” he said, and loud enough to tick Cole off.
Ever since Mia and Octavio had started making the newspapers, his love for her was like a virus getting a death grip. He was half sick to death over her. Now Cole was calling him, too. Shanghai didn’t like it. Not one bit. He wanted to be free of Mia Kemble.
“Catch you at a bad time?” Cole asked. Not that he sounded like he much cared.
One helluva bad time.
Shanghai had taken a bad fall off a bull in front of thousands of fans not an hour ago, and his hands still stung like ants had bitten them.
“I thought you were Abby, my girlfriend,” Shanghai said.
“Sorry,” Cole said.
No sooner had Shanghai made it to his room at The Golden Nugget than Abby had called from her dad’s in El Paso. She should have known better than to bring up Mia again.
“Dad says that Mia Kemble was really something. Tavio’s men were buzzing him with cattle prods and drowning him,” Abby had said. “She set a truck on fire and saved his life.”
“If she’s so great why the hell’s she in jail?” Shanghai had demanded.
“Dad says somebody ought to do something—”
Shanghai had lost all patience with her. “Look, I can’t be thinking about her. My hands feel funny, and I’m only ahead by a thousand dollars. Trevino’s ridin’ like a bat out of hell. I’ve got to focus on bulls, not Mia Kemble.”
He’d hung up on Abby because he was bent out of shape about Mia, and now he needed to eat and get to bed early. He didn’t have time for distractions. Especially not his brother!
“Cole, can we put this on hold? I’ve got a lot on my mind…friends waiting for me in the bar.” He shook out his right hand because it was going numb on him again.
“Mind if I join you?” Cole said.
A vein in Shanghai’s head throbbed.
Yeah, he minded. “What the hell? You’re in town?”
“I’ve got to see you,” Cole said.
“You should have called before you wasted plane fare. My calendar is jammed.”
“Unjam it. This is urgent.”
“I don’t hear squat from you for what is it—fifteen years—now you want to see me in thirty damn minutes?”
“You’re the one that left Dodge without ever even sending your brother one lousy postcard.”
“My handwriting’s so bad you probably couldn’t have read it anyway.”
“Mia’s alive.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. My girlfriend’s dad wrote the breaking story about her. Then Morales kidnapped and tortured him. Maybe she masterminded that crime, too.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Mia’s got nothin’ to do with me now.”
“She’s rotting in a Mexican prison, and Morales has ordered a hit on her. We’ve got Mexican attorneys and hostage negotiators, but we’re getting nowhere fast. The police have charged her with trafficking.”
“Any woman who’s been living with and working for Morales and lettin’ her family think she was dead deserves what she gets.”
“Those charges are trumped-up horseshit! She was his prisoner.”
“She was kissing Morales when the cops caught them. Morales says she was working for him before that plane crash.”
“He’s lying because he doesn’t want her to get out of Mexico alive. She hates drugs. She wasn’t a trafficker. She was raising horses and taking care of Vanilla. She went down with me in my plane. It’s a miracle either one of us is alive. I don’t know how she got tangled up with Morales, but I’m not going to sit in judgment of her until I get the facts.”
“She could have run Morales down when she got Abby’s father out, but she didn’t.”
“So—she’s not a killer.”
“Collins says Morales was besotted with her.”
“You’re mighty pissed at her for a man who doesn’t give a damn.”
“Hell, she left me for you! She’s been living with that outlaw and probably screwing his brains out. A woman like that doesn’t deserve the time of day.”
“Shut up and listen. I want you
to go down there with me and help me get her out before Morales kills her.”
“You’ve got some nerve. You married her. She’s your problem.”
“You ever wonder why she married me?”
“Yeah!” Shanghai slammed the receiver down. “To piss me off royally! Which she did! And so did you!”
He grabbed his Stetson with his lucky turkey feather off the bed and slapped it on his head.
When the phone rang again, he stalked out of the room, kicking the door shut behind him.
Mia was sleeping when suddenly her blanket was jerked off her and thrown onto the filthy concrete floor.
“Tavio Morales is going to keel you,” shrieked a stick of a woman with a mashed-in-nose, missing front teeth and tangled black hair. “Everybody in El Castillo knows it.”
“Raquel?”
Raquel was the lunatic from two cells down, who restlessly wandered about the prison, stealing anything that wasn’t tied down. She liked matches and set fire to other inmates’ hair and punched them when they weren’t looking.
“You won’t need a blanket after they cut you up,” Raquel whispered.
Blinking as well as yawning, Mia grabbed her blanket back and pushed Raquel away with the flat of her hand. The woman howled as if she’d been mortally injured and pulled even harder at her corner of the blanket.
“Leave me alone, you insane witch! Go back to your own cell!”
“Nobody snitches on Morales and lives. He’s already got somebody inside. They sneak heem in through the…”
“Shut up!” Roselia said.
“He’s short and dark and wears a dead man’s bones around his neck!”
“You’re lying!” Mia whispered.
“With the right connections and enough pesos, anybody can buy their way in here, especially now!” Raquel started cackling.
A chill raced through Mia. “It wasn’t my fault Morales was captured. Go away and tell that to your friends.”
“He was good to the poor. You deserve to die for what you did—gringa!”
Mia yanked her blanket free of the woman. Wrapping herself with it, she lay back down and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at Raquel or the bugs on the dirty walls or the bars.
Would her family ever come? Did they believe the Mexican police? Foolishly Mia had hoped the cops were the good guys and that they would release her after she’d told them who she was. But that wasn’t the case. Comandante Guillermo Gonzales had ogled her when he’d questioned her and smiled when she’d blushed.
When he’d finished interrogating her, he’d said, “I cannot let you go.” Then he’d handed her Tavio’s signed confession in which Tavio had written that she’d been living with him for over a year and had been working in his smuggling operation in Texas before that.
At first she’d thought her arrest was a mistake or a joke. Then panic had set in when the cops had kept her in handcuffs and had stared through her like she was garbage.
“I want a lawyer. Morales is lying. And…and…I saw you at his house, comandante. Which means—”
“Be careful who you accuse, señorita. In Mexico prisoners, even gringas, are believed guilty until they prove their innocence.”
“What did you do to Delia?”
“Take her away,” he’d said to his guards.
“Where is Delia?”
“Why you worry about her? You have bigger problems than she has.”
That night they’d brought her to El Castillo on the edge of Ciudad Juarez. She’d been strip-searched while the comandante leered. Then she’d been given a blank confession to sign. When she’d refused to sign it, two guards had said they’d be back to interrogate her. Then they’d thrown her in a cell.
The guards’ threats seemed to have been made days ago, but she wasn’t sure of anything anymore. The window high above her cell had been boarded up. Without daylight or darkness to guide her, she’d lost all sense of time.
That first night the prison had seemed a madhouse. Women had screamed or wept all night. Babies had cried. She’d lain on her cot, longing for Vanilla, a constant choking fear as well as a fierce longing gripping her. She’d thought surely she’d lose her mind. But slowly she’d gotten used to the other women, and they’d grown accustomed to her and had even confided to her their dismal stories.
Muttering to herself, Raquel drifted out of her cell, and Mia closed her eyes, trying to shut the nightmare out. When she woke up again hours later, this time from a pleasant dream, a guard was shaking her, jolting her back to harsh reality.
Were they going to interrogate her—translation: torture her—until she signed their blank confession?
“You have a visitor.” The guard’s black eyes radiated loathing.
“Who?”
“Get up. Hurry.”
She was led down a long straight corridor, past many cells. Then they left the building and went into a courtyard out into the sunshine. Mia looked up at the blue sky and the clouds drifting above her and felt a sense of freedom. She ran her hands through her tangled hair and tried to neaten it. She hadn’t showered or changed clothes since coming here. She stank, too.
“Venga.”
The guard grabbed her arm roughly and then pushed her towards an administration building and then into a small, poorly lit visiting room where a tall woman stood waiting in a dark corner. The low-wattage lightbulb was behind her, and her face was in shadow.
Mia would have known her anywhere.
“Mother!” she cried. “You came!”
“Darling!” There were tears in her mother’s soft voice.
Neither could stop staring at the other. Her mother looked younger, more glamorous somehow. Her hair was redder and streaked, and yet her eyes were luminous with pain.
“I couldn’t bring Vanilla, but I brought pictures of her.” Joanne spoke in a low, halting tone. “You won’t believe how she’s…”
Mia moistened her lips with her tongue and then nodded. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, but, of course, a thick, lank clump fell back.
“I must look—”
“Don’t—” Her mother began sifting through the pictures. “Cole built this play set for her behind the house with swings and tunnels and stairs. She plays on it every day.”
Lines of sorrow were etched in her mother’s face.
Suddenly the faraway world that had once been her real life seemed very near. They moved closer. Mia had never felt such love as she experienced now for her mother even though she felt reticent, too. She felt intensely anxious, almost overwhelmed, at the prospect of seeing pictures of her little girl.
“I—I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you…or her again. Oh, Mother…”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Mia took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. “I hope you don’t believe what they’re…”
Shaking her head, her mother’s fingertips touched her lips to hush her daughter. Next her hands clasped her to her, and Mia clung tightly as if she’d never be able to bear to let her go. Mia shut her eyes and felt calmed by her mother’s embrace.
She caught her breath, afraid she’d open her eyes and her mother’s dear presence would be a dream. A drug lord had imprisoned her and terrorized her. He’d told the authorities she’d been his partner in crime. Now Mia was in a Mexican prison, and if the Mexican authorities had their way, she’d be here until she was an old woman. Worse than anything was the loss of her family. A wave of homesickness crushed her. She wanted to be home; she wanted her life back.
“I—I don’t know how this happened to me. I—I don’t know…”
“We’re going to get you out. We’ve hired attorneys.” Joanne looked around, her eyes glancing worriedly at the video camera in one corner. “One way or the other Cole’s going to get you out.” Her mother leaned closer, her voice low, her expression guarded. “Be watchful…ready for anything.”
When the guard shifted from one foot to the other, her mother let go of her han
ds and placed three pictures on the table beside them.
The first one was of Vanilla sliding down a big red slide.
Her hand shaking, Mia lifted the picture. “Oh, she’s beautiful! Her hair…”
“She has natural curls…just like you did.”
In the next picture Vanilla was climbing a plastic mountain with handholds. By the time Mia flipped to the last picture, her cheeks felt hot and damp and her chest was so tight she could barely breathe. Her little baby had grown up without her.
In the final shot a smiling cherub splashed in a swimming pool with a float around her plump tummy.
“She looks so happy and trusting, so carefree and positive,” Mia said. “Like she thinks the world is a wonderful, safe place.”
“She’s going to love you so much.”
“Mother, I’m sorry to cause—”
“You haven’t done anything. It’s just so wonderful to be with you now.”
The guard looked at her watch. Then she got up and clamped a heavy hand on Mia’s shoulder, signaling them that the visit was over.
As her mother turned to go, Mia’s eyes burned. It took all her willpower not to scream or to chase after her. When the guard opened the door, Mia had never felt so alone or so weak.
The door closed without Joanne ever looking back. The last thing Mia saw was her mother’s ramrod straight spine.
When the guard grinned at Mia, she notched her head higher before walking out the door to make her way back to her cell. In the courtyard, once again, she paused to stare up at the blue sky. Three black grackles flew by squawking.
In her cell, she sank onto her cot and gazed up at the boarded window.
She could give up.
Or she could go on.
She had come this far. Somehow she would get through this awful time.
Somehow she had to hang on.
She remembered the comandante kissing Delia and bit her lips. She couldn’t think about Delia. She simply couldn’t.
Her mother had told her to be ready for anything.
The comandante’s waiting room was dingy and old, the puke-green walls yellowed from smoke. Its atmosphere was oppressive.
Joanne had been sitting in the unvarnished wooden chair so long, she felt stiff. Most of the other women waiting to see the comandante were peasant women dressed in black with dark shawls. They bounced wriggling children in their laps. A few men in ragged pants and stained shirts and huaraches hunkered low against the back wall, smoking and muttering amongst themselves without the slightest animation lighting their faces or eyes. Watching them, Joanne thought they had the look of men who’d been downtrodden their entire lives.