Running Wild

“What? No.” She managed not to sigh, but she’d forgotten about the Latino machismo. “It’s just that, other than you, no one of interest has stopped in this town for a very long time.” She waved a hand, staggered as if the action had thrown her off balance, then slapped her hand down on the trunk to catch herself. “Well, I did hear in the cantina that a couple of americanos are spending the night here, but I didn’t actually meet them.” She shrugged. “Not that I would’ve been able to talk to them anyway—americanos never bother to learn our language, you know?”

His expression said he agreed wholeheartedly, but he merely nodded.

She licked her lips. “You’re very handsome. Where are you from?”

He left his post next to the passenger door and swaggered down to her end. “Santa Rosa.”

“Ay! You are so lucky! I would love to see Santa Rosa someday!”

“You have never been?”

“No. It is far away and I have no car.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Finn slide out of the shadows. “But hopefully someday.” She turned to lean her rear against the back of the vehicle and patted the fender next to her hip.

“Still,” she said, tilting her head to look up as if she didn’t care one way or the other if he joined her, “I bet you don’t have a view in the city that can rival our sky.”

It was certainly like nothing she had seen for far too many years. Yet as if her first thirteen years in El Tigre had imprinted it in her DNA, it was a sight she’d carried with her wherever she went. Even in the dead of night—or in this case, earliest morning—the sky was a deep midnight blue strewn with a million stars. Many shimmered dimly and looked every bit the hundreds of light-years away that they were. Others burned brightly and seemed close enough to reach up and gather by the fistful.

Frederico merely shrugged, however, unimpressed. “Give me the bright lights of the city any day,” he said, leaning against the trunk next to her. He turned to give her a smoldering once-over. “I like looking at you, though.”

She brought a hand up to brush back her hair and maybe buy herself a few moments’ reprieve from the intent she saw building in his expression. Just in time she remembered the elaborate head wrap she’d created to disguise the fact she was a blonde. But the action brought her hand into her line of sight and even in the dim light she was sidetracked by how dirty her index finger had gotten from writing on the trunk. Without thought, she popped it in her mouth and sucked.

An unfortunate impulse, as it turned out, and one she regretted immediately. But before she could even grimace at the taste, Frederico whipped an arm around her and yanked her first to her feet, then into his arms. Her mouth went slack in surprise and the finger she’d been about to spit out slid free. Then faster than she could catch her breath he slammed his mouth over hers.

Her hands automatically flew up to shove him away and as they met the cloth over his chest it was all she could do to suppress the instinctive urge to push, and push hard. She curled her fingers into the fabric to keep herself from doing so and managed to stand docilely. But this venture had failure written all over it because docile was all she could pull off. She simply wasn’t a good enough actress to pretend she enjoyed this slob’s attentions.

Her brain was still rapidly looking for a way out that didn’t include her and Finn being gunned down or captured, when Frederico wrapped his hands around her hips and lifted her onto the trunk of the car. Then he slid his meaty paws up her waist, her diaphragm, clearly aiming for her breasts.

Oh, no. That is so not gonna happen!

Luckily, before she could blow everything, Finn materialized behind the cartel thug. She watched as he raised the gun he held by its barrel and brought the pistol grip down hard against Frederico’s head. The crack as it made contact sounded like thunder to her overstimulated senses.

Then Frederico’s dead weight came down on her like a felled tree. It was far too late to dodge out of his way and feeling his slack heaviness picking up velocity as it tipped her upper body backward, she feared his overmuscled mass would slam her head right through the rear window.

But Finn caught the cartel enforcer by the back of his collar and belt and hauled him upright, holding him in place long enough to move between her and Frederico and shove a shoulder into the thug’s gut to carry him in a firemen’s lift.

“Move,” he said in a low rough voice and stepped out of her way.

She moved, sliding off the trunk with alacrity to follow him.

In a few long-legged strides he was at the back of the SUV, reaching for its cargo release with his free hand. It clicked open and he took a large step back to allow the hatch to rise. He looked over at her.

For a second she could have sworn she saw fury etched on his face. But that didn’t make sense. And since he merely said in a neutral voice, “See if you can find the latch to pop the hood,” she decided she must have misunderstood. He bundled Frederico handily into the cargo space.

She picked up her tote, then hurried to open the driver’s door on the SUV. It took her what felt like forever to locate the hood latch, but finally she released it, then quickly eased the door closed to kill the light. She turned...and literally bounced off Finn’s chest as he strode toward the hood.

He caught her by the upper arms and steadied her, then set her aside. “We have to get the hell out of here,” he said. “Joaquin’s gonna be out any minute.”

“Did you disable the car?”

“I slashed a couple tires, but I’m going to grab the distributor cap and cut the radiator hose as well.”

“I thought having possession of these babies might help slow him down, too.” She dangled the keys she’d found in a section of the console between the front seats.

For just a second he stared at them as if hypnotized. “Damn. If I knew the keys were in the car, we’d have taken this rig instead of the rental.” But he apparently shook off the regret that sounded in his voice with a brisk roll of his shoulders and leaned into the engine compartment.

In practically the same movement he straightened back up, a car part hanging from his fist. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They dived into the car and Finn had just fired it up and put it in gear when Senora Guerrero’s front door opened with a crash. Joaquin stormed out, his gun swinging around to take aim at them.

“Duck!” Finn snapped, then leaned over the steering wheel himself to provide a smaller target.

She bent below the window just as he stomped on the gas. She heard the report of a gun, but not the sound of the bullet hitting anything. A nervous laugh escaped her and she slowly sat up as Finn shot out of range between the few buildings that constituted the village center. “He missed. Oh, thank God. He missed, Finn!”

“What the hell did you think you were doing?” Darkness, not lightened appreciably by the thick blanket of stars, enclosed the countryside as they left the meager lights of the township in their rearview mirror.

She blinked...and realized her mouth was opening and closing like a trout’s. She snapped it shut, only to open it again and croak in genuine bewilderment, “What?”

“With Mister Handsy—what the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Excuse me?” She hauled herself upright in her seat and swung to face him, outrage muscling aside the icy terror that the past several minutes had wrapped around the scant dregs of her courage. “You asked me to distract him, to put myself in danger—then believe you have the right to critique the way I handled it?” She glared at him. “What did you think was going to happen? That I’d pull out a deck of cards and challenge him to a game of Go Fish?”

He took his attention off the road to pin her with cold eyes. “I didn’t think you’d invite him to stargaze, then suck off your finger like it was his di—”

Rage such as she hadn’t felt since she was thirteen going on fourteen exploded in her brain, red-hot and out of control. Her usual fail-safes—not engaging, taking deep breaths, hell, taking a moment to prevent herself from acting before thinking—went up in smoke and she launched herself at him, fists swinging.

“What the fu—?” He fought the car as it swerved across the dirt road.

The vehicle’s wild rocking barely even registered as Mags landed blows in any undefended spot she could find. “You dare say that to me, you pimping son of a shit?” she demanded, further enraged when she became conscious of the tears welling in her eyes. With sheer determination she willed them away. Damned if she would let him see he’d made her cry. “That man had his filthy hands, his mouth on me and you dare accuse me of tacitly offering him a blow job?”

She didn’t realize the car had rolled to a stop at the side of the road until Finn’s strong arms wrapped around her, pinning hers to her side.

“Stop that,” he said in a rough, authoritative voice. “We don’t have time for this.” But his arms tightened even more and one big hand roughly stroked her head, dislodging her head wrap. “I apologize, Magdalene. That was a crappy thing to say.”

“It was an asshole thing to say. And my name is Mags.” Her nose was squashed against the hard plane of his chest, her back arched at an awkward angle and, all told...? “This has gotta be the worst stinking birthday of my life.” And just as she’d thought in the Santa Rosa cantina what felt like aeons rather than half a day ago, that was saying something.

He jerked against her, further torturing her nose, and she could feel him tucking in his chin to look down at her.

She wasn’t about to return his regard.

“It’s your birthday?”

Okay, maybe not technically, since it was after midnight. “Well, it was when I fell asleep,” she muttered sulkily. So, close enough.

* * *

“CLOSE ENOUGH,” Finn unknowingly echoed Mags’s thought as guilt piled upon guilt. God, hadn’t he just been a prince among men with her today? His mom would be so proud.

But they needed to focus on the here and now, and he gently moved her back to her side of the front seat.