when the going gets tough.” She shot the accusation over her shoulder. “But I think you’d agree we’ll both be better off when this trip is over and we can go our separate ways.”
SHE HADN’T TOLD HIM anything he didn’t already know.
Romero was well aware that she’d had enough of him. That had been abundantly clear during the daylong rampage when she called his bluff on the trial separation idea and moved straight ahead to removing him from her life completely. She’d still been spoiling for a fight when he’d pulled out of the driveway with a bag in hand. But he couldn’t help a twinge of regret that she still harbored some resentment toward him even now, when they’d nearly died. Would she have shown up in front of St. Peter’s gate with her score sheet in hand of all the times Romero had ticked her off?
“You’re a hard woman to please,” he muttered, and got up, unwilling to let her be blown up in the hunt for a cell phone that wasn’t going to work anyhow.
“I disagree,” she replied as she hunkered down near the open window of the Beemer and peered inside. “I’m an easy woman to please for people who are willing to engage in the occasional disagreement to work through problems in a relationship.”
Romero’s head pounded with frustration about the car, the accident and the long walk he feared was ahead of them, so Shannon’s latest slam seemed poorly timed.
He bracketed her hips with his hands and hauled her out of the way so he could find her phone for her. She huffed and puffed about it, but he knew damn well she wouldn’t want to crawl around in an upside-down car to retrieve her things.
“Do you have some kind of bionic hearing or what?” He couldn’t imagine how she’d heard him talking to himself twenty yards away from her.
“Hardly. My hearing just seems good to you by comparison because you don’t like to listen and, as a result, hear very little.”
He picked her cell off the visor and removed her purse strap from a bar it was caught on under the passenger seat. Handing both items out to her, he then grabbed his wallet out of the glove box along with some tissues and a first-aid kit.
“What are you doing?” she asked as he removed the keys from the ignition and brought them around to the back of the car.
Finally, words from her mouth that were not arrows aimed at him.
“I’m going to get our suitcases out so we can streamline what we need.” He pried open the trunk with considerable effort, since that had bent, too, but the moment he released the latch, all the suitcases dropped out to the ground with a thud.
“What?” Shannon paced in a nervous circle, her shoes kicking up dirt as she walked, so a dust cloud formed around her ankles. “I haven’t even tried my phone yet. And we don’t know that the car won’t work at all, do we?”
He sent a meaningful look toward the upside-down, torn-up automobile.
“But if we could flip it—”
“It would still have a blown tire, a bent front axle and a slew of engine parts that broke during the fall. Trust me, the vehicle serves no purpose.” He took his keys out of the trunk and didn’t bother to shut it.
“Do we even know where we are?” She bit her lip as she stared down at her phone, and Romero knew she couldn’t get a signal.
“Shannon, there’s no phone service.” He tugged the cell away from her and dropped it in her jacket pocket. “Something like twenty percent of Mexico doesn’t even have electricity, so there are definitely large pockets without cell coverage. We need to figure out which way to walk that will yield some sign of life first. Any guesses?”
“Walk?” Her fingers crept back up to the chain she liked to wear, the one with the Celtic knot, and began to slide the pendant along the links.
It occurred to him that he knew she loved that necklace, but he didn’t have a clue why. For all he knew it could be a bauble from another boyfriend—he’d never thought to ask. The realization tweaked his conscience until he reminded himself he’d been on tour for something like a hundred and fifty days in the past year. Was it any wonder they hadn’t ever really known each other?
The sun cooked the countryside despite the fact that it was February, the heat reflected back by the pale sand beneath their feet. A lizard darted over his boot and he noticed the profound silence that came with being lost in the middle of nowhere.
“C’mon, Shan.” He burrowed in his overnight bag and found a bottle of water to hand to her. “I’ve seen you rock the treadmill for ninety minutes and knock off almost ten miles. I’m sure you can manage a walk to the next town.”
She took the water bottle from him and he noticed two of her nails were broken and the back of her hand was scraped up, no doubt from the accident. He cursed the driver of that van all over again.
Damn it, he would find a way to prosecute that bastard once they returned to the States, no matter what a pain in the butt it was to chase someone down for a crime committed in another country.
“I’m usually a little better equipped for running when I hit the treadmill.” She cracked the bottle top and took a sip. The movement of her lips on the container transported him to other times and places, romantic dates when he’d watched her sip vintage champagne from long-stemmed crystal or purse her mouth around a Jell-O shooter when they went out with friends. Something about the way she moved those full lips reduced him to seeing her through a slow-motion lens, and he had to blink his way out of the encroaching sex fog. He’d lost the right to fantasize about her lips when he’d peeled out of their driveway.
Funny about that—their driveway. No house he’d ever lived in felt as much like home as when they’d moved in together. The pricey piece of real estate had become a haven in no time. And although the house had been a joint investment, he was in no hurry to sell it or see her move out. He’d been staying in a hotel until he figured out where to go next, but he didn’t want to think about living in a house without her in it. Her fashion-conscious dogs. Her frequent ventures into ethnic cooking, from Norwegian to Thai. Her impromptu parties.
“Romero?” She waved a hand in front of his eyes and he remembered how much it drove her crazy when he zoned out.
She figured he wasn’t listening, and maybe she was right, since he didn’t have a clue what they’d been saying. He’d worked so damn hard to shut out his overbearing family from an early age that he’d carried the habit into all his other relationships, including a failed quickie marriage before Shannon. The complaints of his ex-wife hadn’t been all that much different from the frustrations Shannon had expressed.
He just didn’t know how to fix it. A damn shame, since losing Shannon had hurt even more than the breakup of the marriage he’d rushed into. He missed the spark she’d brought to his life with her nonstop energy and her insistence that he enter the world now and then. Before he’d met her, he liked to hole up between tours, working on his music in solitude. But he’d discovered a new way to relax with Shannon, a way to hang out with friends and experience a quiet life without going to ground.
“How do you expect me to walk through the Mexican desert dressed in jeans and three-and-a-half-inch heels?”
Romero peered around at the scrub and patches of grass scattered around the landscape. A thick stand of low trees loomed fifty yards away from where the Beemer had crashed
