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She looked again at the envelope. She knew it didn’t contain the missing money. It was too lightweight, too thin, to hold the amount of money she feared Julio had stolen. But maybe it had information about where he’d hidden the drug money. Why else would he try to burn it just before he’d been killed, if not to protect his ill-gotten gains?
She grasped the hope. If she had the location of the stolen money, then maybe she could buy her freedom and her daughter’s from Calderone.
As she lifted the parcel to look inside, something fell out and tinkled to the tiles. The tiny object rolled to a stop and as she stopped to pick it up, she saw that it was a silver heart-shaped locket. It had no chain and the silver was tarnished and scratched, making it hard at first to read the name engraved on it.
Abby.
She stared at the locket. Should that name mean something to her? Was it one of her husband’s mistresses? One of her lost relatives?
She pried the two halves open and stared down at a man’s photo inside, her fingers trembling. Not Julio. Not any man she’d ever seen before. She felt Elena beside her and tried to shield her from the body on the floor, but saw that her daughter was more interested in the locket—and the photo inside.
“Papacito,” Elena whispered, eyes wide as she stared down at the photo of the stranger.
“No, my little bright 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, she told herself now as she sat up, careful not to wake her daughter. Everything she’d done, she’d done for Elena.
Only now they were running for their lives. Scared, with no one to turn to and nowhere to go. Her sleepless hours filled her with nightmares. Not of the men chasing her and her daughter, but of the memory of the emotionless woman who’d pulled the knife from her husband’s chest, then calmly picked up her daughter’s doll and left without looking back.
What had she planned to do with the knife? Surely not use it as a weapon. What had she been thinking? And where did she think the two of them would go? What would they do?
She glanced at the envelope beside her on the nightstand, still upset and confused by what she’d found inside it. Nothing about the drug money Julio had stolen from Calderone. Nothing to help her.
She picked up the envelope. It still had some of Julio’s blood dried into one corner. She felt nothing. Not a twinge at the sight of the blood, nor anything for the cold distant man who’d been her husband. What kind of woman was she? she wondered again. How could she feel nothing for the man who’d given her Elena?
She opened the envelope as if the contents might explode, slipping the papers out onto her lap, quietly, cautiously, not wanting to wake Elena, still stunned by what she’d found.
A passport and Texas driver’s license tumbled out, the accusing eyes staring up at her from the photo on the license. The woman’s name, it read, was Abby Diaz. Abby, like the name engraved on the silver heart-shaped locket. Abby Diaz, an FBI agent.
But what made Isabella’s fingers tremble and her heart pound was that the woman looked like her.
She reached up to touch her face, running her fingers along the tiny scars left from her surgery. What had she looked like before the fire? She couldn’t remember. Worse, why did she suspect she’d been made to look like this Abby Diaz?
She didn’t want to think about that. Nor about the other papers she’d found in the envelope. She looked down at her daughter. Elena still had the locket clutched in her fist.
The sight tugged at Isabella’s heart and concerned her more than she wanted to admit. Her daughter had cried until she’d been given the locket to hold. The battered heart-shaped silver locket with a stranger’s face inside it.
Then Isabella had awakened to find Elena on the phone and the envelope’s contents on the floor beside her, the silver locket open and empty, the photo in Elena’s small hand.
“Why did you call the number inside the envelope?” Isabella had demanded after she’d hurriedly hung up.
She didn’t ask how the little girl had realized it was a phone number or how she’d known to make a call. Elena had taught herself to read at three. She was smart. Too smart, Julio used to say. Gifted. Precocious. Frightening even to Isabella sometimes. Her grandmother would have called Elena an Old Soul.
Elena had shown her the phone number and explained it was like ones Julio had called in the States. Isabella wondered who Julio had called.
“But why would you call this number?” she’d asked, growing more afraid for her daughter.
Elena had handed her the tiny photograph of the stranger from the locket. On the back was printed: “Love, Jake.” When Elena had found the name Jake Cantrell in the envelope with a telephone number, she’d called it.
“Daddy will help us,” Elena had declared stubbornly.
“Julio was your father,” she’d said, “And he cannot help us.”
Elena’s lower lip had begun to tremble. Tears welled in the child’s eyes. “Daddy Jake will help us, though.” She’d cried inconsolably until Isabella had put the picture back into the locket and given it to the child to hold again.
What disturbed her most was that Elena was convinced Jake Cantrell was her father. Why was that? Had Julio planted this seed? The same way the hospital surgeons might have been told to make Isabella look like another woman? A former FBI agent named Abby Diaz?
She felt sick now as she watched her daughter sleep. Elena expected some stranger to come and save them from Calderone’s men.
But what the child didn’t know was that if Jake Cantrell found them, it wouldn’t be to save them. In the envelope, Isabella had found evidence that former FBI agent Jake Cantrell had set up his partner Abby Diaz to die in a drug raid six years ago. What scared her was that she looked enough like this woman that he might think she was Abby Diaz.
Isabella now feared that Elena’s call for help had only given away their location and set an even more dangerous man after them.
Chapter Two
Everything from the wedding reception had been cleared away by the time Jake returned. The ranch house felt cool and dark and blessedly normal again. He regretted that he hadn’t got to tell Brady goodbye before he took off on his honeymoon, but he knew Brady would understand.
He could hear Rosa and Slim in the kitchen, Slim trying to flatter the short, round, good-natured cook, but Rosa resisting the crusty old ranch hand’s charm to the clatter of dishes and Mexican music on the radio.
He breathed it in, wishing he could get back some of the tranquillity he’d found over the last five years here at the Smoking Barrel. Usually riding his horse Majesty under the vast Texas sky brought him some peace. But not tonight.
He couldn’t get the call off his mind. Still, he felt a little better after his long ride and regretted snapping at Penny earlier when she’d followed him down to the stables. She’d only been concerned, but he’d wanted to be alone. He’d felt like a powder keg ready to blow and needed to feel the wind in his face and a good fast horse beneath him.
Hat in hand, he now tapped lightly at Penny’s door, hoping to catch her before she went down to the meeting.
She opened her door and looked surprised, the air around her sweet with the scent of perfume, her hair pulled up into a style he’d never seen on her before and a hairbrush in her hand. No, not surprised. Embarrassed to be caught primping. He wondered if the carefully applied makeup and new hairdo had something to do with the date he’d heard discussed over coffee this morning in the kitchen.
“These are for you,” he said, drawing the fistful of wildflowers he’d picked from behind his back. They seemed too small a gesture, but her eyes lit at the sight of them and her face softened as she gazed up at him.
“You didn’t have to do this,” she said, too much understanding in her voice.
The last thing he wanted was sympathy right now. He wanted even less to discuss the call.
“I’m just sorry I barked at you in the stables before,” he said, turning away quickly.
Before she could reply, he walked away. Downstairs, he took the hidden elevator to the basement, to find the three men already waiting for him. He realized Penny wouldn’t be joining them. Cody and Rafe were discussing the recent cattle-rustling and new evidence that someone had been camping on the ranch. For once, the young and cocky Rafael Alvarez wasn’t clowning around, but then Penny wasn’t here. Half Spanish, half Irish, Rafe had a way with women and he loved to tease Penny mercilessly.
Cody Gannon, a former rodeo bronc rider and the youngest of the bunch, was insisting what should be done about the rustling. Mitchell Forbes seemed only to listen at the head of the table.
Wondering why a meeting had been called, especially without Penny present, Jake took his place, his gaze on Mitchell. The older man didn’t look sixty-five, not even with his head of white hair. The ex-Texas Ranger and Vietnam vet owned the Smoking Barrel, a pretty impressive spread, even by Texas standards. On the surface, the widower seemed exactly what he was, a wealthy rancher.
Few people knew that the ranch was headquarters for Mitchell’s ragtag group of misfits known as the Texas Confidentials—an offshoot of the Federal Department of Public Safety. The confidentials were secret agents who handled cases that required a bit more sensitivity and stealth. When they weren’t on assignment, they worked the huge ranch just like the cowboys they were.
Jake knew he’d been handpicked for the job by Mitchell. He’d just never understood why. But he was grateful. Not only had Mitchell given him something to do that mattered, he’d given him a home and a family.
“I think that covers it.” Mitchell’s deep voice pulled Jake back from his thoughts. “We’ll step up security and see what happens.”
Jake realized he hadn’t been paying attention. Cody and Rafe got to their feet to leave, arguing over whose turn it was to ride lookout tonight. Jake started to rise, but Mitchell motioned for him to wait.
Once they were alone, Mitchell studied the tip of his cigar, taking his time to light it with an elaborate silver lighter, then he turned the lighter in his hand. Over and over, as if he didn’t know quite how to begin. That wasn’t like Mitchell.
Nor was he supposed to be smoking. Maddie would throw a fit if she knew. Maddie Wells, a neighboring rancher, was in love with Mitchell. His health was one of the things they squabbled about. That, and why Mitchell hadn’t gotten around to popping the question.
For Mitchell to be smoking again— Jake watched him through a haze of cigar smoke, his earlier anxiety growing with each passing moment.
“Penny told me about the call from the little girl,” Mitchell said at last.
Jake felt a wave of annoyance. Nothing that happened on the ranch escaped Mitchell’s attention. Penny saw to that. “It was just a prank call. Penny shouldn’t have worried you with it.”
Mitchell studied him, the lighter suddenly motionless. “Jake, I got a call from Frank Jordan, over at the FBI. I believe you worked for him when you were with the Bureau.”
Jake nodded warily.
“Julio Montenegro, a high-ranking distributor for Tomaso Calderone, has been killed. His wife and child are missing, along with a very large amount of Calderone’s drug money. The FBI wants us to find the woman and child before Calderone’s men do. Frank asked for you.”
Jake stared at his boss in disbelief. For the last six years he’d wanted nothing more than to nail Calderone, but it had been Mitchell who refused to give him any assignment that had anything to do with the drug lord.
“Excuse me?” he said now, getting to his feet. “You’re giving me this assignment? After all the years of telling me to forget what happened, to forget Calderone?”
Mitchell started to speak but Jake cut him off.
“Now, just because Frank asks, you’re going to let me go after the wife and child of Calderone’s top Mexican distributor? Would you like to tell me just what the hell is really going on?” he demanded, angry and not sure exactly why. Maybe because he didn’t want to dig up the past again. Not now. Not when he’d finally accepted what Mitchell had for years been trying to convince him of. Getting Calderone wouldn’t bring Abby back.
“Sit down, Jake,” Mitchell said quietly. He puffed on his cigar for a moment. Tension stretched as taut as a hangman’s noose between them.
Slowly, Jake sat back down. “Dammit, Mitchell, why now?”
“Jake, I’ve always told you that personal vendettas have no place in this business. That hasn’t changed.”
