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Turning her back on him, she walked stiffly toward the sink, her knees shaking with anger.
    He uncoiled his legs and blocked her movement, his hand snaking out to her shoulder. The kitchen suddenly felt smaller. His body took up a lot of space, but their past took up more.
    “Who do you think sent those men who came after you tonight? You and I both know that wasn’t a random crime. Ortega has to be involved. Everything points to him. He’s moving into Rio County, and he won’t stop until I make him stop.”
    “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Santos. I told you about this guy named Enrique—”
    “Sometimes Ortega uses the local talent.” His eyes turned stony and dark. She shivered because she’d seen this kind of determination in his gaze before, and it didn’t bode well for whomever he was hunting. “I’ve got to find this woman. She was taken on my watch. I’m responsible for what happened, and I can’t rest until I fix this and the bastard is behind bars where he belongs.”
    She locked her eyes on his and shook her head. “If I thought you were right about my mother, I’d help you. But I don’t, so we’re finished. You need to leave.”
    …
    Rose was incredibly busy the following day, but her brain still had time to churn away at Santos’s appearance, his pleas, and the way his touch had felt. In between those troubling considerations, she dealt with a teenager’s joyride, an escaped cow, and a ten a.m. drunk at Ms. Mae’s, the only halfway decent bar in town. On the back burner, King was working to find Rose’s attackers, and she’d checked in with him almost hourly. He’d found nothing so far, and John Ramos had insisted he didn’t even know anyone named Juan Enrique, much less asked the man to instigate a jail breakout for him. He was lying, of course, but Santos had barely listened when she’d told him before he’d left last night that only Enrique sold the kind of meth King had found in his arroyo the night he’d arrested Ramos.
    In the silence of the newly repaired SUV, she headed home that evening with a purple dusk falling, her thoughts returning to Santos and what he’d said.
    The idea of her mother being involved with a criminal like Ortega was disturbing, but what had surprised Rose more was how she’d responded to Santos. Even though he looked completely different, he still had the same smoldering way about him. His voice deep, his face lean, his stare even more intense than it had been before—she hadn’t been able to stop her automatic deep-down-in-her-gut reaction when he’d grabbed her wrist, her body’s betrayal bitter. Maybe she had more of her mother in her than she’d known. His reckless appearance had ratcheted his already sexy appeal even higher.
    She was almost to the front door when a quick motion down the street caught her eye. Her pulse taking a leap, her fingers closed over her pistol’s grip. Then a coyote trotted out from under her neighbor’s Mexican Poinciana bush. Three pups followed. Releasing her breath, she sent a quick look in either direction and continued up the steps, feeling foolish.
    Once inside, she pulled her drapes then switched on the lamp, collapsing on her sofa to lift her eyes to a framed photo on the opposite wall. A neighbor had taken the picture on her first day of school. Her mother was standing beside her, clutching her hand, a proud smile on her face. At the time, she had known nothing about it, but Gloria had taken care of her daughter by whatever means she could, her crimes petty ones that Rose’s father had taught her when the two of them had still been teenagers—before either had finished high school, before Gloria had gotten pregnant, before he had fled town.
    She would attempt to do better with some dead-end job, and then something would happen. Rose would get sick, or the car would break down. An unexpected bill might come in. One time her mother had just flat run out of money and food at the very same time, and