by Rebecca York
Then, all at once she knew where she was. Miguel’s clinic. He had told her about it, and she had come to see for herself. Yet she didn’t want to see. She didn’t want to be here.
“No!” she gasped out
No one answered.
An ugly lizard skittered across her path, then a large black spider. She tried to drag her feet, but she couldn’t stop herself from stumbling toward the open door that loomed like the mouth of a skull. She grasped the doorframe with desperate fingers. But it was no use. Some invisible force tugged on her, pulling her forward until she had stepped from sunlight into shadow.
At first she could see nothing except the vague outline of a car shining in the moonlight—the same car that had been sitting across the street from her house. It dissolved into vapor, and the real contents of the room swam into focus. A scream ripped from her mouth as she saw the first body sprawled in a pool of blood. Another body lay farther into the room. And another. Two men and two women.
She knew their names because Miguel had told her. Tony and Paco, Anna and Margarita.
As she watched in horror, they all rose up to a sitting position, their movements jerky like marionettes attached to strings.
“Join us,” they chorused.
“No!” The protest tore from the depths of her soul. She wanted to back away, but she was frozen to the spot
They blinked their large eyes and looked down at the round red holes in their chests. Then, in unison, they jerked to their feet, wavering unsteadily as they started to move. One flailing arm knocked a vase of flowers off a table and it crashed to the floor with a shattering of glass.
The noise freed her. On a sob she turned and fled, hearing their footsteps tap, tap, tapping behind her as she ran down the path as fast as she could. But her enormous belly hampered her, and she couldn’t make much speed. The zombies behind her were catching up. She heard their feet, which were somehow making the flagstone path creak like old floorboards. A skeletal hand clasped her shoulder from behind, the force of it finally catapulting her out of the terrible dream.
Disoriented, drenched in freezing sweat, she lay in a tangle of sheets, her breath coming in little gasps. She was in her own bed, she told herself. She was safe. It was only a dream of San Marcos and Miguel’s clinic. She had made him relive the horror of it, forced him to share the pain; now she had been helpless to stop herself from visiting the place where he had almost been killed.
“Oh, Miguel,” she murmured. She wanted him with her now. She wanted to comfort him, and wanted him to tell her everything was all right. But she was alone, and she would have to deal with her worries on her own, the way she had dealt with so many other things over the past few months.
Pushing herself up, she wiped a sleeve of her nightgown across her clammy forehead and looked toward the hall, thinking that a glass of water might help. Then she thought she heard a sound somewhere at the other end of the house, and a new sensation of cold skittered across her skin.
A floorboard creaked, and she realized she must have heard it earlier and made it part of the dream. Like the sound of breaking glass, she thought with alarm, as the last of the fog cleared from her brain. She was wide-awake now, and she was sure someone else was in the house.
Her gaze shot to the phone on the bedside table. Calling the gas station was a waste of time. Even if Bernardo was there, he couldn’t get here in time. Neither could 911.
God, now what was she going to do? Her mind flashed back to the evening when Luis had been creeping toward her office at the Light Street Foundation. Only she was pretty sure the stalker wasn’t a little boy this time.
Clenching her fists, she willed herself to steadiness. Thankful that the darkness offered some protection, she pushed herself up and slipped as quietly as possible from the bed. Could she make it out the window before the intruder got to the bedroom? Probably not, in her condition. Wishing she had a weapon, she looked frantically around the room. Then she remembered the wooden baseball bat propped up in a corner of the closet. Someone had overlooked it at the Light Street picnic a couple of months ago, and she’d brought it home, intending to take it into the office so the owner could claim it. But she’d never managed to remember it.
Tiptoeing across the room, she slipped into the closet, leaving the door partly open. At first she couldn’t find the bat. Then her frantic hand knocked against it, and it started to fall. Grabbing for it, she repressed a little sob as her fearstiffened fingers slipped on the wood surface. Somehow she averted disaster.
With a silent prayer of thanks, she closed her fist around the wooden shaft, then carefully raised it above her head, bracing the top of the bat against a row of blouses as she waited with her heart pounding in her ears.
Almost as soon as she was in position, she heard stealthy footsteps right outside the bedroom door. In the next moment, a figure glided into the room. Straining her eyes in the darkness, she made out the form of a bulky man wearing dark slacks and a dark T-shirt. He looked strong and menacing, and she knew she was only going to have one chance to save herself from him. Silently she counted off the seconds, waiting for him to get close enough for her to land a solid blow on the back of his head.
As he crossed the room, she shrank against the clothes in the closet. Then a flashlight beam cut through the darkness, the light hitting the bed. When the intruder saw that it was empty, a low curse broke his lips. For a long moment he stood very still. Then he turned, swinging the beam in an arc that probed the far corners of the room. It glanced off the chair, the chest of drawers, the dressing table.
God, what should she do? Charge out and hit him? It was too risky. He’d hear her coming long before she reached him. But hiding in the closet was a risk, too. If he found her, she was trapped.
Clamping her teeth together to keep them from chattering, she waited, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t discover her hiding place.
In the next moment, the flashlight beam hit her feet.
“Ah. There you are.”
The light stopped, moved to waist level, spotlighting the rounded bulge of her belly.
He gave a satisfied chuckle. “What have we here? Come out of there, Señorita, so I can get a better look at you.”
Chapter Fifteen
“You’ll have to come and get me,” Jessie answered, projecting her fear into the quaver of her voice. It wasn’t difficult to appear terrified when the blood in her veins had turned to ice water.
“Do not be afraid. I am not going to hurt you. I only want some information.”
Yeah, sure, she thought. You’re here to recruit me for the neighborhood safety patrol.
His face was hard and confident as he stood facing her, blocking any chance of a pregnant woman’s escape. His hair was dark. So were his close-set eyes. She’d never seen him. But he looked too old to be one of Los Tigres. So that left Jurado. Miguel had warned her, and she hadn’t wanted to believe him. Now she knew that she’d been playing out of her league all the time. But at least she was up at bat.
Purposefully, the intruder began to saunter forward, sure that he had the situation under control. The breath frozen in her lungs, she held her ground as she tried to calculate precisely the right moment to strike.
Only one chance. She had only one chance, her mind chanted. If she fumbled it, she was dead.
As he reached to pull her from the closet, his expression changed from complacency to anger, and she knew that he must have finally noticed the baseball bat she was holding above her head. Even as he sprang toward her, she brought the club down with every bit of strength she possessed, changing the angle of her blow to compensate for the change in his position. She cracked him on the head, but not with the fat end of the bat where it would have done the most damage.
Strike one!
He staggered back, but the blow didn’t bring him down.
“i Pula!” he gasped in Spanish, reeling like a drunk in a bar brawl. Maddened, he sprang forward again, his big hands reaching for her.
Two chances, she amended, as she kicked upward, aiming for his crotch. She felt her foot impact against a man’s most vulnerable anatomy.
He yowled in pain, then cursed in gutter Spanish as he momentarily forgot about her and grabbed for his injury.
A home run! On a surge of adrenaline, she ducked around him and ran as fast as her pregnant body would allow toward the kitchen door. Still, she couldn’t make much speed. Terror racked her as she heard shuffling steps coming out of the bedroom. In her mind, she pictured a wounded bear bent on destruction.
When she reached the kitchen, she bolted through the swing door and resisting the urge to look behind her, flew across the tile floor to the back door. She fumbled with the lock until the key finally turned, and she threw herself outside, almost at the end of her strength. A stone stabbed the sole of her bare foot, and she gasped but kept moving.
Her nearest neighbor was some distance away, and with her lungs burning and her body feeling as if it were weighted down with rocks, she knew she couldn’t keep this pace up for long. If she could only get out of sight, she might have a chance. Along the side of her neighbor’s detached garage were evergreen bushes so thick that kids liked to disappear behind them. If they made a great hiding place during the day, they should be even better at night
Putting on a desperate burst of speed, she made it to the dense shrubs and plunged between the branches, scratching her face and arms as twigs and needles slapped her sharply.
She pressed back against the rough brick wall of the garage and tried not to gasp for breath. Screened by the bushes, she heard her attacker charge past.
How long before he came back? Should she stay here or try to make it to a house? Either course carried grave risks. But her pregnancy settled the question. She simply couldn’t run any farther.
She waited for aeons, her skin stinging from the thrash of the branches and her chest aching from the exertion. She was beginning to wonder if her attacker had given up, when she finally heard him coming back.
He was walking slowly now. She could hear him stopping to beat at the bushes along the way, and she saw the beam of the light winking at her through the branches. All she could do was wait and silently pray for invisibility.
Her heart stopped as he paused beside her hiding place, shining his flashlight back and forth into the greenery. But the thick branches kept their secret.
With a snarl, he kicked at the lower limbs, then moved on. Again she waited in the darkness, but this time he didn’t return.
Was it safe to come out, or was he trying to trick her—make her think he’d given up? Unwilling to take a chance, she stood there in her nightgown, pressing against the brick wall, locking her knees to keep from toppling over.
Her legs and back began to ache. She wanted to sink to the ground, but she forced herself to stay on her feet. Finally she saw the darkness around her begin to brighten and knew that dawn was breaking. Still, she remained where she was—half dozing in her exhaustion, rousing slightly when she heard a phone ringing somewhere nearby.
She was jerked awake again by a loud curse and the sound of running feet Not one man, but two—or maybe three. The runners dashed past her hiding place.
“Get him!” someone shouted in Spanish.
Her heart leaped when she realized the voice belonged to Miguel.
“Jessie. Jessie, where are you?”
“Here! I’m here.” Hoarsely calling his name, she gathered herself together and plunged through the bushes, falling into his embrace and clinging with what little strength she had left.
He grasped her and swung her up into his arms. “Jessie. Thank God.” His lips skimmed her face as he carried her toward the house. She hung on to him, hardly able to believe that she wasn’t dreaming of his arms around her.
Inside, he set her on a kitchen chair, then hunkered down beside her to examine her cuts and scrapes before washing them with warm water and soap.
“Did he hurt you?” he asked urgently, touching the skirt of her gown where she hadn’t even known it had torn. “Did he do anything to you?”
“No. No. I got away,” she answered, still in a kind of numb shock.
“Thank God,” he murmured again, then brought a bottle of antiseptic from his medical bag. “This may hurt a little.”
She winced as the cold liquid stung her skin, but it brought back reality. Miguel was here. He and another man had come back for her. And she was sitting in the kitchen wearing only a thin cotton nightgown that revealed quite a bit of her pregnant shape.
Miguel must have realized the same thing. When he was finished tending her scrapes, he strode down the hall and came back with her robe. “Bernardo will be coming inside,” he said.
She nodded, slipping her arms into the sleeves and pulling the robe closed as best she could. When she looked back at Miguel, his face was etched with agonized lines. “I am sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Of course it was! I never should have left you alone.”
“You didn’t know something like this would happen.”
“Stop making excuses for me.”
“How did you know I was in trouble?”
“Bernardo came back to the gas station, and Humberto finally remembered that some woman had called for me,” he said, his voice grating. “We called here. When nobody answered, we came to check on you.”
“I heard the phone!”
Before he could add anything else, Bernardo knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Miguel called.
“He got away,” Bernardo said in Spanish as he entered.
Miguel nodded tightly.
“He broke into the house,” Jessie told them. “I hit him with a baseball bat and kicked him where it would hurt. Then I ran and hid. I was afraid to come out. I was afraid he was still here, waiting for me.”
“He was,” Miguel said. He sucked in a sharp breath and let it out quickly. “I will help you pack your clothes.”
“Why?”
“You cannot stay here. Jurado must know that you and I are... together.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged in a low voice. She hadn’t understood the danger—not until she’d awakened to realize someone was in her house.
“Did you recognize him?” Miguel asked.
She shook her head.
“There will be others. We must leave quickly.” He led her into the bedroom and closed the door behind them, then whirled to catch her in his arms.
“Jessie.” He swept her close, held her to him, his hands moving over her in a kind of gentle frenzy. “If I had lost you, I would be wandering in hell,” he gasped out. ‘Forgive me, angel. Please forgive me.”
His pain was almost too much to bear. “For what?” she managed.
“For getting angry with you. For holding you to an impossible standard.”
“I should never have called Donna,” she admitted shakily. “It was a dumb thing to do. That’s probably how they found me.”
“You didn’t know. You have not been living like an animal in hiding for almost a year—calculating every move you make to keep yourself out of Jurado’s clutches.”
She closed her eyes and held him tight, thankful that he had learned to adapt, yet knowing that the way he lived had exacted a terrible price. She hadn’t comprehended his situation—not really. All along, she had expected him to act like a free man who could choose to stay with her or choose to leave. She finally understood that he was far from free. And she also understood that she had laid a terrible burden on him. He had been responsible for his own life. Now he felt responsible for hers and the baby’s, as well. Until this morning, she hadn’t really “gotten” it. She had been pressing him to work out their relationship, when her needs had only added to his agony.
“All those months ago, I should have let you go.” She uttered the words that filled her mind. “I should never have taken you to my bed. I’ve forced you into a terrible position.”
He shook his h
ead, clasping her closer. “No. Loving you kept me sane. Kept me human. When I wanted to give up, I remembered the sweetness of making love to you. I vowed to find a way to come back to you when I could.”
“But you weren’t counting on keeping a pregnant woman safe.”
She saw the anguish—and the naked longing—in his face. “A pregnant wife,” he said with such feeling that she felt her heart almost bursting inside her chest.
THEY WERE MARRIED a few days later in a small Methodist church in Princess Anne, a town on the eastern shore of Maryland that had been founded before the Revolutionary War. Now many of the Colonial and Victorian homes had been restored to their former elegance, giving the small community an ambience that charmed Jessie and made up for some of the other decisions they’d been forced to make—like choosing a place, time and church to minimize chances of detection.
The Methodist ceremony was a compromise, since Miguel was afraid that getting married by a priest could give them away. And the only friends in attendance were Cam and Jo and some of the men from Randolph Security, who functioned as bodyguards.
Cam and his men went in first to check the church for intruders. Jessie and Miguel waited in the parking lot in the Blazer that was one of the standard Randolph Security vehicles. When Hunter came out to tell them everything was ready, they entered the church together, holding hands tightly. Jessie carried no bouquet and she was wearing the one good maternity dress she’d bought. Miguel didn’t even have on a suit, because he didn’t own one. Still, he looked devastatingly handsome, Jessie thought, in a crisp blue shirt and dark slacks.
The tall, thin Reverend Carter had never met the happy couple before, but the Light Street Foundation had made a sizable contribution to his youth fund, so he only glanced once at the bride’s rounded middle before casting his eyes upward. Probably he assumed that this was some kind of shotgun wedding, Jessie surmised.
She stopped worrying about what he thought when he began to lead them through the words of the marriage ritual.
“Do you, Miguel, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?” Reverend Carter asked the age-old words.