Texas
April, 2001
The Harley roared and bucked and writhed under his muscular thighs as wildly as a fresh border whore. And since he was half-Mexican and half-Anglo, and oversexed to boot, Roque Moya was just the man to know.
Not that anyone in Texas called him Moya. Here he was Blackstone, a name he hated, a name most people hated. But not nearly as much as they feared it. His father had seen to that.
The stripes that divided the interstate lanes blurred into a fluid white line flying beneath his wheels. His thickly lashed eyes flashed on the speedometer. One hundred and ten.
He was in too big of a hurry to slow down.
Only when he passed the world famous R.D. Meyer Heart Institute on the outskirts of Houston a few miles later, and the traffic began to thicken, did he use his left foot to gear down.
Fury knotted his gut.
Don’t think about her!
Cities. It was cities he hated. They always seemed like filthy jails. Even up here in el norte, on this side of the border where they were supposed to be safer, cleaner, and more respectable, they were still prisons.
Especially this city which happened to be where his once rich daddy had made himself so notorious by manipulating juries he despised with his well-told lies.
She lived here. She’d married another man and hidden from him here.
His black leather glove gripped the throttle with a vengeance. Thoughts of her up ahead in addition to the soaring speed of his bike gave him an adrenaline rush.
He had a funeral to get to. And he was late. A funeral he was very much looking forward to.
Her husband’s.
Ritz.
He thought of Ritz at the damnedest times. Thought of what she’d done…and what she hadn’t. Thought of her glorious yellow hair blowing in the wind, thought of her blue eyes, how they could change from blue to violet when she got hot for him. She didn’t think she was sexy, but she was.
He had to know why she’d crawled into his bed two months ago, why she’d been so eager to sleep with him, her warm, silky body aquiver. She’d been a perfect fit, better than before.
And yet…she’d kept secrets that night.
If it had been half as good for her as it had for him, why had she gone home to her husband?
Since that night, he’d done some research.
Were all the sordid stories Josh had spread about her true?
Border saint? Or border tramp? Or something in between? Someone far more complex? She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a woman.
And a widow now.
Time to find out who she really was.
He’d waited a hell of a long time for his turn.
Thumpty-thump. His big wheels hit cracked pavement. Big piles of dirt, earth-moving equipment, and cranes littered either side of the interstate. Houston seemed to be falling apart. In the shimmering heat beneath a white soupy sky, the downtown skyscrapers undulated like strippers to the frenzied tempo of his bike. On either side of the freeway, office buildings, signs, restaurants, strip shopping centers, malls and huge parking lots whipped by.
Progress? Were they going to pave the whole damn world? For a second or two he felt like Mad Max roaring to his doom on a crotch-rocket across some crazed, futuristic landscape.
He should have noticed the lanes narrowing, the traffic beginning to hem him in. But he was flying past the blinking yellow lights on the orange barrels and all those little white signs that warned the freeway was under construction before he really saw them.
His mind was on Ritz and the telephone call he had received six hours ago on the ranch.
“…dead!”
“But I thought….”
“Caught us by surprise, too, Roque. Nobody thought he’d go this fast!”
“How?”
“In his sleep…painlessly.”
“How’s she…taking….”
“…too devastated…to even call me! Frankly I’m worried…. And she’s sick. A stomach virus or something.”
For no reason at all that news had gotten him edgy. “How sick?”
“Threw up everywhere. Been at it a week.”
After all she’d been through, nursing a dying man, her formerly rich, famous husband…. His old nemesis, Josh.
So…she’d loved Josh after all. The realization hit him hard.
Ten thousand taillights blazed blood-red. As if on cue, six lanes of vehicles slammed on their brakes all at once.
An eighteen wheeler’s trailer loomed ahead like a solid wall of silver.
“Híjole,” he whispered, easing off the gas, gearing down, braking so fast, his bike went into a skid.
G-forces hurled his powerful, leather-clad body straight at the mirrored trailer. To avoid slamming into it, he put his bike on its side. Sparks flew off his crash bar across asphalt.
Hanging on and hunkering low, a jagged rock sliced his cheek as he hurtled under the eighteen-wheeler. A second later he shot out the other side across two congested lanes of stalled traffic.
An exhaust pipe blistered his stubbly jaw with a wave of hot fumes. A strip of black leather flapped loose from his shoulder.
But he was alive.
“You, son of a bitch!” a man yelled at him.
Gears ground. Brakes slammed again as Roque skidded to a halt just short of the guardrail.
Only when he was stopped did Roque notice the hole in his black jacket and see the blood oozing from his chest.
He was alive. And so was she. All of a sudden he felt a hell of a lot better.
Sudden longing wrenched his being. He saw violet eyes and golden hair spread all over his pillow.
She was free again and so was he.
He lifted the silver St. Jude medal he’d worn around his neck for good luck and kissed it.
Then he began to shake.
“Shit.”
He rolled the throttle and made his rice burner roar.
Where the hell was her house in River Oaks?
Ritz Keller Evans was to the manor born. She
