.
his composure. “I’ll handle it.” Yanking open the door, he found a middle-aged woman who, from every indication, was an out-of-work schoolteacher. “¡Hola, señora!” he said in the worst Texas accent he could muster. “Gracias por letting us usar el baño. Yo estoy embarasado—” He stopped when the woman’s eyes widened and Benny gasped. “What? What did I say?”
“You know you just told her you were pregnant, you dork!” She looked as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or faint.
“Oops.” Pleased that his diversion had worked, he turned back to the woman still blocking the doorway. Her florid face was convulsing in laughter. “Lo siento, señora. Yo no embarasado. Yo—Yo—”
“Yo-yo about covers it.” Benny ducked under his arm to smile up at the señora. “We are sorry if we weren’t supposed to be here,” she said in her flawless Spanish. She had an ear for colloquialisms and she’d already picked up the penchant for extra x’s and z’s characteristic of the dialect in this part of Mexico. “We’re having a very bad hair day.”
Owen clutched his dyed locks. That was the understatement of the year.
“We were just leaving,” Benny continued. “Do you know where we can find the car lot of Jorge de Oca?”
The woman wiped her streaming eyes. “The other side of town on Highway 130 near the Poza Rica Inn. Jorge has fine cars, but I hope you have plenty of money. He does not sell cheap.” She moved aside, glancing at Owen with mild disapproval. “You should let your wife do the talking if you expect to make a bargain.”
“I’m not his—”
Owen bent down to lay a quick kiss on Benny’s mouth. “Sí, señora,” he said with a wink at the schoolteacher. “Hasta luego.” He hustled Benny toward the gate, where they’d left Sunflower. “Ha. That went pretty well.” He untied the mule and mounted, then reached a hand down for Benny.
“Depends on your definition of well.” She grabbed his wrist and let him boost her up. “If you wanted to make sure she remembers us, I’d say you accomplished your mission.” She sighed as Owen nudged the mule’s ribs. Sunflower brayed and reluctantly abandoned the weeds along the fence. “Doesn’t Border Patrol ever do undercover work?”
“Benny, I’m a pilot. I generally wear a uniform.” He patted her hand, lightly splayed across his middle. “This is a big city. The chances of anybody finding us here are next to nil.”
“It’s that little possibility that worries me.”
Silence fell as Sunflower plodded along the street. It had been recently paved and the smell of sticky tar rose from the sunbaked road. Owen longed for a cold shower. Well, truthfully, he needed a cold shower for a lot of reasons. He and Benny were going to be together for a while, whether she liked it or not.
The problem would disappear if they were to get married. A thought that proved the sun had roasted his brain, too. He might be halfway in love with Benny, but he wasn’t ready to marry a woman who had people shooting at her.
Yesterday. Had it been less than thirty-six hours ago that they’d taken off from the beach with bullets flying after them?
Owen pulled the mule to a halt in the shadow of a little adobe church whose steep roof was topped by a small bell tower. The bells began to chime for afternoon mass. “Bernadette, we’ve got to talk about this. Who’s after you?”
She sat silent for a moment. “There are several possibilities.”
The mule sidled. Owen settled him, tamping down irritation. “I can’t help you if you won’t give me a clue who they are.”
He felt a gusty sigh against his back. “I know. I just…Owen, I’m not putting my life in somebody else’s hands again—” She paused. “Nobody’s but the Lord’s.”
“Yeah, that sounds really noble and spiritual, except for the fact that it’s downright unbiblical.” He felt her stiffen. Right about now his big brother would have told him to keep his mouth shut and wait for a better time to talk. But Owen had never been a big fan of waiting. Or keeping his mouth shut, for that matter. “What about the whole ‘two are better than one’ thing? And ‘pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up’?” He prepared to defend himself. After all, who was he to correct somebody with a seminary Ph.D.?
“Okay, I give. You’re right.”
“I’m—what?” He looked over his shoulder and found her eyes closed, brows pulled together.
“I had no idea you knew so much Scripture. But you’re right. It’s not fair to expect you to hang with me and not tell you what’s going on.”
“So—” he struggled to regain his footing “—so you’re going to fill me in?”
“No. We’re splitting up as soon as we get to the car lot.”
“Benny, we are not going through that rigmarole again. If you try to leave me, I’ll find you. And you should know, I’ve got a wall full of tracking awards. Besides, you have no money and no ID. How do you think you’d get to Texas by yourself?”
“I can walk and I can hitchhike.”
“You can hitchhike.” He felt like howling.
“I don’t want to, but I can. Owen, please.” Her voice wobbled a little, the first crack in her pigheaded confidence he’d heard. “Please don’t push me. There are things I can’t say without putting other people in danger. I—I really feel safer when you’re with me but not if you’re going to keep on at me.”
With a frustrated grunt, he kicked the mule into motion again and they continued to plod down the road. That little waver in her voice got to him, whether he liked it or not.
His thoughts rotated like a propeller. What could Benny have done to make someone want to kill her? What was so bad, so scary that she refused to let him get involved?
As they rounded a bend in the road, a huge white sign painted with red letters appeared: Carros de Segunda Mano de Jorge. Jorge’s Secondhand Cars.
They had other things to think about now, but he wasn’t giving up on digging the information out of her. Nope, he didn’t like to wait, but he could do it when he had to.
“I still think we should take a bus.” Benny tugged on Sunflower’s reins. Multicolored plastic flags flapped overhead as she peered through a chain-link fence at rows and rows of cars. Just inside the gate squatted the small prefab office building.
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