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 dwelling on the past.
He felt eyes on him. Not just watching him. But staring at him. He shifted his gaze and saw Penny Archer across the room, standing with her back to the library door she’d just closed behind her. Earlier he’d noticed when she’d gotten a beep on the priority line. Noticing was something he was good at. That and finding people who didn’t want to be found.
It had to have been a business call. That was the only kind that would make the administrative assistant leave the wedding reception and the boisterous crowd, and disappear into the library. From there the hidden elevator would take her to the basement and the secret office of Texas Confidential. The true heart of the ranch. Its aberrant split personality.
Now he met Penny’s intent gaze and felt a jolt. She was as tough as they came. It took a lot to upset her. And right now, she was visibly upset.
He made his way across the room, knowing it had been the priority call that had upset her. Just as he knew the call had to do with him.
“What?” he asked, never one to mince words.
She motioned for him to follow and led him away from the crowd and the noise of the party, outside to a corner of the porch. In the distance, mesquite stood dark-limbed against the horizon, shadows piled cool and deep beneath them. The land beyond was as vast and open as the night sky.
“I just got the strangest call,” she said the moment they were alone and out of earshot of the others. Her gaze came up to his. “It was from a little girl. A child. No more than three or four. She spoke Spanish and—” Penny’s voice broke. “She was crying. She sounded really scared, Jake.”
“What did she want?” he asked, wondering what this could possibly have to do with him.
“She said her mommy was in trouble and needed help. She asked for her daddy.” Penny seemed to hesitate. “Her daddy Jake.”
He felt a chill even as a warm Texas wind whispered through the May night. He shook his head. A mistake. A wrong number. An odd coincidence.
“Jake, she called through your old FBI contact number.”
He stared, his heart now a sledgehammer. Only three people in the world had ever known that number and two of them were dead. “What did she say? Exactly.” Not that he had to add that. Penny could remember conversations verbatim. That was part of her charm—and the reason the thirty-four-year-old was Mitchell Forbes’s right-hand woman.
She repeated the Spanish words. “Then I heard a woman’s voice in the background. The woman cried, ‘No, chica suena.’ Then the line went dead. Of course, I put a trace on the call immediately. It came from a small motel on the other side of the Mexican border.”
Chica suena. The light in the trees seemed to shift. Lighter to darker. The porch under him no longer felt solid, became a swampland of deadly potholes. His world, the fragile one he’d made for himself here, spun on the edge of out of control. Just as it had six years ago. Before Mitchell had saved him.
From far off, he heard Penny ask, “Jake, are you all right? Jake?”
Chica suena. He hadn’t heard the unusual Spanish endearment in years. Six long years. Nor was it one he’d ever heard before he’d met Abby Diaz. It was something her grandmother had called her. It meant “my little dream girl.” And it suited Abby.
Abby Diaz had been everything to him. The woman he was to marry. His FBI partner. His most trusted friend.
His chica suena.
He bounded off the porch, his long legs carrying him away from the party and the faint sound of music and laughter. Away from the pain and anger and memory of the death of his dreams of love ever after. Away. But he knew, gut-deep, that running wouldn’t help. It never had.
Someone had found out about him and Abby. Had found out their most intimate secret. Daddy Jake. Chica suena. Someone wanted him running scared again. And they’d succeeded.
Chapter One
Isabella Montenegro lay on the bed, her body drenched in sweat, fear choking off her breath. Dark shadows shifted in the shabby motel room, one image refusing to fade—the image of her husband Julio sprawled in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. But it was the knife sticking out of his chest, rather than his blank eyes, that she saw so clearly.
She shuddered, watching herself pull the knife from his chest. She watched it in her mind’s eye, watched the unfeeling woman wipe the blade clean on his shirt, then slip the weapon into her bag.
She closed her eyes. Who was that unfeeling woman? Or had she always been this cold, this uncaring?
Yes, she thought, unable to recall the other feeling, the only other strong, sure, knowing one she’d ever had, one she hadn’t trusted. A feeling that she’d known earth-shaking passion.
A lie, she thought. She’d never known passion. Not with Julio, who’d never been a husband to her. Not with anyone. She couldn’t even call up the feeling.
She closed her eyes to the horrible image of her moving his body to retrieve the envelope. But the image danced in the darkness behind her eyelids, taunting her. What kind of woman was she?
She opened her eyes and snapped on the lamp beside her bed, chasing the shadows from the cramped room and illuminating the tiny body sleeping next to her.
Elena was curled in a fetal position, her small, warm back against her mother’s side, her dark hair hiding her face.
She had done it for Elena,
