On the curb, Mulhay directed her to a patrol car and a tall, clean-cut black officer who waited beside the vehicle. But before she could get into the passenger side, a familiar dust-covered SUV pulled up.
The window glided down and Kino Cosen gave her a winning smile that should not have made her stomach tighten, but it did. The seat beside him was empty.
Cosen did not even speak to her, but directed his comments to the two officers.
“I got her.”
Mulhay and the other officer glanced at each other then back to him.
“You sure?” asked Mulhay.
“Yeah. Where’s she going?”
Apparently she’d become invisible. She was about to object, but a part of her wanted very much to crawl into his car. Much as she might wish to deny it, she was relieved to see him, which made no sense at all.
“She’s going to Pima.”
“Fine.” Kino leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door, then glanced at her and raised his dark brows in invitation.
She didn’t know this man well. But she knew where he came from and she knew that he’d done what he’d felt was right to protect her.
Lea walked around to the passenger side with Mulhay trailing behind. She let him open the door, but her attention was already on Cosen.
He gave her a warm smile as she slipped into the cab. She smiled in return. One glance at the gun on his hip made her lose her smile and recall herself. This man’s job was to hunt people and he clearly thought nothing of shooting at them. He was handsome and fit and he’d shown her a compassion that seemed contrary to her initial impression of him as a badass. But he wasn’t like her. No, Kino Cosen was a warrior. She needed to remember that.
Mulhay stepped back. “Take care, Miss Altaha,” he said and closed the door.
A moment later they were rolling out of the station.
“Where’s your sidekick?” she asked Kino.
“Clay? He had some paperwork to do.” He smiled then asked, “Miss me?”
She frowned and refused to answer that. Instead she told him where she lived. He nodded, turning onto the highway.
“So, the RV park.” He lifted his brows in speculation.
“Nothing but the best for Oasis.” She grinned. “We don’t have fancy new housing like BP. Where do they have you?”
“Not in that new housing. We have a place in Pima, on Artists Road. It’s Indian housing but it has a shower and the AC works.”
Cosen stepped on the accelerator. The air conditioner blew cool on her flushed skin, but it did nothing to stem the heat building between them. She needed to get out of this car because Kino Cosen was not in her future. She would make certain of that.
They rolled toward Pima, Arizona, the only city on the Tohono O’odham reservation.
She tried to keep her eyes on the road but they kept sliding over to the strong, muscular arms that held the wheel. He was still wearing the uniform of the Shadow Wolves, and only now that she was looking closer did she notice the Taser on his utility belt. Her attention quickly fixed on the knife with an antler handle.
“Why do you need a knife when you have all that?”
He touched the shaped horn lovingly. “This? Clay made it for me from one of his kills. I’ve got another in my moccasin.”
She scowled. The man had as many weapons as a porcupine had quills.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I’m not used to seeing all this.” She motioned at the weapons ringing his waist.
“Really? Don’t you have tribal police on Salt River?”
“Yes, but I don’t know any of them.”
“Then they’re not doing their jobs. Community outreach is half the battle. My brother is the chief of police in Black Mountain. Gabe is all about the community. Little League, boys and girls club, schools. He’s in the schools more than he’s in his squad car.”
Chief, a job keeping the peace through force. Lea shook her head in dismay. But maybe he wasn’t like that. Maybe back at Kino’s home he had a job that didn’t involve guns and violence. She held out hope as she asked.
“What about you? What do you do back on the rez?”
“Tribal police, too. I’m a patrolman. Just started, actually. Been on the job ten months. Passed the test on the first try.”
Her heart gave a tiny ache and she rubbed her knuckles over her chest. He was a man who lived by violence. She needed to stop hoping otherwise.
Beyond the windows the desert flashed by golden in the late afternoon. She found herself searching for people walking in single file. But there was nothing, no one, that she could see.
“Is Clay on the force, too?” she asked.
He flinched and then shook his head. “No. He works for the tribe’s cattle association. And he’s a big-game scout for the tribe. Takes out tourists on hunts.”
More killing, only this time animals, she thought.
Kino continued. “Just Gabe and me on the force.”
“How many brothers do you have?” she asked.
“Three. The oldest, Clyne, is on the tribal council. He’s only thirty-three.”
“Young for a tribal leader.”
“Yeah. Youngest on the council.”
“All boys,” she said wistfully. “Must have been a handful for your mother.”
Kino shifted in his seat and his silence made her wonder what she had said. Finally he took a deep breath as if she had startled him awake.
“My mom died in a vehicular accident in South Dakota when I was ten. Drunk driver.”
Lea’s stomach tightened as she absorbed that information. Was this why he had become a police officer, to protect people from such threats as drunks behind the wheel?
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“My mom was a barrel racer. Fast as lightning. She was up there for the big Fourth of July powwow. She also was a dancer—fancy shawl and jingle. She won a lot of contests. She died on the Fourth. I hate the Fourth. Anyway, after that my grandmother raised us.”
She wanted to ask about his father but was afraid of what he might say.
Kino wiped his mouth and then gripped the wheel with two hands. “And as for all boys, well, I have a sister. She was with my mom.”
Lea found herself gripping the armrest for support, bracing for what she expected him to say next. A child, his sister, dead beside her mother on a highway hundreds of miles from home.
“She survived the accident.”
Lea’s grip on the armrest slackened and the blood returned to her fingers, but one look at Kino and she was squeezing again.
“What happened to her?”
His mouth pressed tight for a moment and his fingers flexed on the wheel. “That’s the thing. We don’t know. She was three when I last saw her, trying on her first jingle dress, spinning and jumping to make all those silver cones rattle. That was nine years ago. After the accident, we didn’t find out for several days. When we heard, my grandma drove up there with my eldest brother, Clyne. See, my mom didn’t have her ID with her. It was back in their camper. So by the time they figured it out and called us...well, my mom was buried and we thought my sister was, too. At the time, they told my grandmother that there were no survivors, but they had made a mistake. My sister survived.”
“How could they do that?”
“We don’t know. Really, we only just found out that she survived the accident. My grandmother wanted to mark the tenth anniversary of their passing with a small stone lamb to be placed on their headstone. She called the cemetery and found out they only had my mother buried up there.”
“But where is your sister?”
“We don’t know. All we do know is that the cemetery buried one Indian on Sioux land. One. A woman. My brother Gabe thinks the B
IA took Jovanna out of the car. He says the troopers should have called them right off, soon as they saw the child was an Indian.”
Lea knew from personal experience that BIA had a long track record of screwing things up.
“That’s terrible.”
“Jovanna is still lost. If she’s alive, she’d be twelve now.”
Lea knew what that meant for an Apache girl. The Sunrise Ceremony was approaching—the sacred passage of a girl into womanhood. Lea thought of her own ordeal. Four days of dancing, prayer and instruction. It was one of her fondest memories. But still, even after completing the ceremony, she never felt completely one of them. Would she ever?
“No wonder your grandmother wants her back.”
“Yeah. We got to get her pretty quick. My grandmother wants her before next July, so she’s sent my older brothers up there to find her.”
“I hope they can.”
Kino glanced at her. “I still see that little girl in that pink dress. I wish I could have stopped them from going up to that rodeo.”
Lea placed a hand on his thigh, feeling the muscle jump under her light touch. A moment later his hand covered hers, fingers entwined.
“Your brothers will find her.”
“I hope so. I dream of seeing her at her Sunrise Ceremony. Of beating the drums as she dances.” He let Lea go and returned his hand to the wheel.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“For taking my mind off what happened today. I’m grateful.”
He gave a shrug as if it was nothing and silence filled the cab for a moment.
“Why did you come down here, instead of joining them?” she asked.
His wistful expression vanished and his face hardened into an icy determination. “Got business down here, too.”
He didn’t elaborate and she didn’t press. Somehow she felt she didn’t want to know this particular business because she knew it had to do with the man he hunted.
“Will you answer one more question, Officer Cosen?”
“I will if you call me Kino.”
“Okay. Kino.” It sounded right. The unusual name fit him somehow since he was like no man she’d ever met. “Did you really intentionally shoot out my mirrors and windshield?”
“Had to. He was going to kill you, right?”
“Were you trying to kill him or distract him?”
“Distract him.”
She breathed away her relief. So he had acted in violence only in defense.
“But only because I didn’t have a shot.”
Lea cast him a reluctant look. Why had she allowed herself to hope otherwise?
“He deserves killing, Lea.”
Did he? Did anyone? And was that really up to him?
She felt a cold wave of fear as the moment replayed in her mind. The gun aimed at her head and the expression of indifference on the shooter’s face. In the past, she had considered what she might do if threatened. Then when the time came she had done nothing. It had been easier than she’d expected not to fight for her life.
She stared at the road, lost in her recollections. She had been a pacifist since she was ten, though she hadn’t known the name for it then, or that there was an entire group of people who, like her, believed that fighting for any reason or any circumstance was wrong.
Kino had a different world view.
She looked back at him, alert as he glanced in the rearview and then back to her. “How did you know that guy would be there? Did you know about the...bodies?”
“We got a tip from a friend about the smugglers. A trucker. He’s from Black Mountain, originally.” Kino’s expression was stormy again, but she couldn’t tell if it was the topic or subject that touched a nerve. “He brings supplies to gas stations along the border. He sees a lot. This time he saw a line of men cross the road, all in camo.”
“Camo. Is that important?”
“The cartels supply their smugglers with camo backpacks and shirts. Makes it harder to see them moving in the rough. They also give them those carpet slippers. Darn hard to track.”
She recalled now the odd footgear on the feet of the dead men. She hadn’t registered it at the time, but she remembered that they’d looked as though they’d been made to wear for dusting floors. “I haven’t seen any of those guys before or ones like them.”
“You will if you stay here very long. They’re dangerous. If you see them, go the other way and call us.”
She nodded and glanced out at the desert, the fading light making the saguaros look like giant sentinels casting long shadows ahead of them. Lea rubbed her hands together, the air-conditioning suddenly as cold as the blood in her veins.
Kino’s unit radio crackled on, broadcasting information about apprehensions and calling for transport.
“Do you have to respond to that?” she asked.
“Off duty,” he said. “How long you been here?”
“Three weeks. I’m here on an internship. It’s my last course before graduating. Community service and some anthropology all in one. I’ll be here through mid-July.”
Kino cast her an appraising look. “From college?”
“Yes.” She let the pride in saying so show in her smile.
“Good for you. I finished police academy, but that’s it.”
“Better than most.” She didn’t have to tell him how many of their people dropped out before they earned their high school diploma.
He asked her about her family and she told him most of it. Not about her mother, of course, or her elder sister. But the rest. That she had two younger sisters and one older. Her father worked for HUD—Housing and Urban Development—fixing all sorts of problems, and her mother worked in the office registering payments and such.
“We got over a thousand people back there in Black Mountain waiting for housing.”
“Yeah. It’s bad on Salt River, too.” She wondered if she should tell him about her dad. No, she decided. It was too sad.
“I’ll bet your dad is plenty busy working for HUD,” said Kino.
She looked away. HUD oversaw the public housing projects that made up the bulk of all homes on the rez. Most of the housing was lousy and in short supply. Her dad had been part of the solution. He had been.
“Yeah. Something is always broken.”
“You know, last winter, up on Black Mountain, they had to give away wood because so many of the people couldn’t afford it and their pipes froze in the cold. HUD couldn’t keep up with all those ruptured lines. It was cheaper to give away firewood.”
“Same in Salt River. Plus, somebody keeps setting fires to one of the houses. Just one, but they’ve burned it down three times. My mom says they can’t catch the guy and are considering just plowing it under. But they really need every house.”
“It’s like the old joke,” said Kino. “One guy says, ‘The food here is terrible.’ And the other guy says, ‘Yeah, and the portions are too small.’”
She chuckled at that. “Exactly.”
He’d done it again, she realized. Taken her mind away from her troubles. He had a natural way of speaking and an earnest style of listening that put her at ease. She had expected him to interrogate her as the border agent at Cardon had, but he’d kept the conversation casual, sharing some of what he knew about the area as they drove toward town, like where to have breakfast and who made the best coffee. He surprised her by telling her which church he attended, not that it was surprising that he was Christian. Since the Spanish had come with their missions more than five hundred years ago, many of the Apache people were Catholic.
Her stomach rumbled.
“Wow. We need to get you fed,” he said.
She realized she hadn’t eaten anything since...before she’d left for the water station.
Lea pressed a hand over her noisy tummy as the day’s events closed in on her again.
This time she couldn’t control the shakes, so she gripped her hands into fists.
Kino steered to the shoulder and pulled her into his arms. She needed the strength of him and the solid reassurance of his touch.
“Come here,” he whispered and she leaned toward him. He gathered her in.
He stroked her head as she allowed herself the indulgence of tears.
“It’s all right. I got you.”
If only that were true. But his recent charm was offset by the man she’d seen in the desert, the hard, cold man who hated what she did and what she represented. She pressed one hand against his chest, intending to move away. His grip tightened and she was trapped between the solid muscle of his chest and the strength of his arms. She found this was exactly where she needed to be.
“Give yourself a minute, Lea. You’re entitled.”
How did a man, no older than she was, get to be so wise? She relaxed, letting him hold her, calm her with the gentle stroking of his hand over her back. He didn’t try to kiss her. Maybe, just maybe, he was really a gentleman who was putting her needs above his.
When her breathing lost its hitch, she wiped the moisture from her eyes. He let her go with a kiss on the top of her head. As she pulled back, all Lea could think was how much she wanted to kiss that wide, generous mouth. She stared at him a moment and he sat quietly for her perusal.
“You’re very brave,” he said at last.
“Brave?” she choked out. “I’m crying.”
“You don’t need to be brave now. But when you needed your strength, you had it. I saw you face that gunman. Like a true Apache woman.”
She was hardly that. Even her Sunrise Ceremony could not change the truth of her origins. “I was terrified.”
“But you didn’t fall to pieces. And when the windshield went out you dove away from him and took cover. You used your radio to call for help. You survived him. That’s not just luck.”
Harlequin Intrigue, Box Set 1 of 2 Page 42