She Thinks Her Ex Is Sexy...

He bracketed her hips with his hands and hauled her out of the way so he could find her phone for her. She huffed and puffed about it, but he knew damn well she wouldn’t want to crawl around in an upside-down car to retrieve her things.

“Do you have some kind of bionic hearing or what?” He couldn’t imagine how she’d heard him talking to himself twenty yards away from her.

“Hardly. My hearing just seems good to you by comparison because you don’t like to listen and, as a result, hear very little.”

He picked her cell off the visor and removed her purse strap from a bar it was caught on under the passenger seat. Handing both items out to her, he then grabbed his wallet out of the glove box along with some tissues and a first-aid kit.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he removed the keys from the ignition and brought them around to the back of the car.

Finally, words from her mouth that were not arrows aimed at him.

“I’m going to get our suitcases out so we can streamline what we need.” He pried open the trunk with considerable effort, since that had bent, too, but the moment he released the latch, all the suitcases dropped out to the ground with a thud.

“What?” Shannon paced in a nervous circle, her shoes kicking up dirt as she walked, so a dust cloud formed around her ankles. “I haven’t even tried my phone yet. And we don’t know that the car won’t work at all, do we?”

He sent a meaningful look toward the upside-down, torn-up automobile.

“But if we could flip it—”

“It would still have a blown tire, a bent front axle and a slew of engine parts that broke during the fall. Trust me, the vehicle serves no purpose.” He took his keys out of the trunk and didn’t bother to shut it.

“Do we even know where we are?” She bit her lip as she stared down at her phone, and Romero knew she couldn’t get a signal.

“Shannon, there’s no phone service.” He tugged the cell away from her and dropped it in her jacket pocket. “Something like twenty percent of Mexico doesn’t even have electricity, so there are definitely large pockets without cell coverage. We need to figure out which way to walk that will yield some sign of life first. Any guesses?”

“Walk?” Her fingers crept back up to the chain she liked to wear, the one with the Celtic knot, and began to slide the pendant along the links.

It occurred to him that he knew she loved that necklace, but he didn’t have a clue why. For all he knew it could be a bauble from another boyfriend—he’d never thought to ask. The realization tweaked his conscience until he reminded himself he’d been on tour for something like a hundred and fifty days in the past year. Was it any wonder they hadn’t ever really known each other?

The sun cooked the countryside despite the fact that it was February, the heat reflected back by the pale sand beneath their feet. A lizard darted over his boot and he noticed the profound silence that came with being lost in the middle of nowhere.

“C’mon, Shan.” He burrowed in his overnight bag and found a bottle of water to hand to her. “I’ve seen you rock the treadmill for ninety minutes and knock off almost ten miles. I’m sure you can manage a walk to the next town.”

She took the water bottle from him and he noticed two of her nails were broken and the back of her hand was scraped up, no doubt from the accident. He cursed the driver of that van all over again.

Damn it, he would find a way to prosecute that bastard once they returned to the States, no matter what a pain in the butt it was to chase someone down for a crime committed in another country.

“I’m usually a little better equipped for running when I hit the treadmill.” She cracked the bottle top and took a sip. The movement of her lips on the container transported him to other times and places, romantic dates when he’d watched her sip vintage champagne from long-stemmed crystal or purse her mouth around a Jell-O shooter when they went out with friends. Something about the way she moved those full lips reduced him to seeing her through a slow-motion lens, and he had to blink his way out of the encroaching sex fog. He’d lost the right to fantasize about her lips when he’d peeled out of their driveway.

Funny about that—their driveway. No house he’d ever lived in felt as much like home as when they’d moved in together. The pricey piece of real estate had become a haven in no time. And although the house had been a joint investment, he was in no hurry to sell it or see her move out. He’d been staying in a hotel until he figured out where to go next, but he didn’t want to think about living in a house without her in it. Her fashion-conscious dogs. Her frequent ventures into ethnic cooking, from Norwegian to Thai. Her impromptu parties.

“Romero?” She waved a hand in front of his eyes and he remembered how much it drove her crazy when he zoned out.

She figured he wasn’t listening, and maybe she was right, since he didn’t have a clue what they’d been saying. He’d worked so damn hard to shut out his overbearing family from an early age that he’d carried the habit into all his other relationships, including a failed quickie marriage before Shannon. The complaints of his ex-wife hadn’t been all that much different from the frustrations Shannon had expressed.

He just didn’t know how to fix it. A damn shame, since losing Shannon had hurt even more than the breakup of the marriage he’d rushed into. He missed the spark she’d brought to his life with her nonstop energy and her insistence that he enter the world now and then. Before he’d met her, he liked to hole up between tours, working on his music in solitude. But he’d discovered a new way to relax with Shannon, a way to hang out with friends and experience a quiet life without going to ground.

“How do you expect me to walk through the Mexican desert dressed in jeans and three-and-a-half-inch heels?”

Romero peered around at the scrub and patches of grass scattered around the landscape. A thick stand of low trees loomed fifty yards away from where the Beemer had crashed down the embankment.

“Actually, the Sonoran Desert is one of the more kind terrains as far as deserts go because—”

“That’s not the point!” She screwed the cap back on the water and thrust it toward him, her silver bracelets jingling with a resonant hum like a cymbal. The dull thump of her foot on the ground broke the melody. “Don’t you see that I’ve got nothing to wear for hiking around Mexico?”

He scowled, acknowledging this was a cause for concern. He’d brought comfortable clothes for traveling, but Shannon didn’t ever seem to dress that way. Even her exercise outfits looked like something she could go clubbing in at a moment’s notice. Not once in all their time together had he known her to put on a pair of cutoff sweats and a tee for a workout, but then, she’d been hounded by the paparazzi all her life as the daughter of a megastar. She’d confided in him once that she didn’t dare have an “off” day or she’d be roasted in the tabloids for weeks afterward, and with the number her mother had done on her, Romero gathered that she didn’t deal well with too much public scrutiny.

“I’ve got a shirt you can wear.” He wouldn’t have made the offer unless they were in dire straits, since seeing her in his clothes made him seriously hot for her. And possessive as hell.

Then again, looking at a woman in your clothes was only one step away from seeing her with your rock on her hand, and Romero didn’t have any intention of taking that kind of step no matter how possessive he felt about someone. He’d witnessed firsthand how marriage could change a person, with that ill-advised union in his twenties. For that matter, he and Shannon had probably started growing apart the minute he’d made the big leap of faith and asked her to move in with him. He’d try like hell to remember the fact once his Ramones shirt was hugging Shannon’s breasts.

She moved closer to him, frowning down at the contents of his overnight bag as he retrieved the worn black cotton.

“I’m not worried about my clothes so much as my shoes. I only brought high heels for the wedding.” She tucked his shirt into her bag, as if to put it on at a later date, then dropped down onto a flat rock near his leather satchel and stretched her long legs out in front of her.

The same long legs she used to wrap around his waist. Or twine around his in bed when she wanted him to touch her. He could see the outline of her thighs in the taut fabric of her jeans, long slender muscle neatly defined from all those hours on the treadmill. All that time in his bed.

“I can’t help you with the shoes,” he admitted, determined to focus on the problem at hand and not give in to another slow-motion inventory of the ways Shannon Leigh was sexy.

“Yeah. I guess you can’t help me with the shoes.” Her voice went flat. Cold. “Pretty damned ironic that this would have been the perfect time for me to have a pair of freaking hiking boots.”

Okay, so he’d walked right into that one. But if she thought he was going to engage in her war of words when they had hours of walking ahead of them, she had another think coming. He wouldn’t do the argument thing on a good day. And frankly, today sucked monkey butt.

He just hoped they found civilization faster than he feared they would, because while Shannon might have reached her boiling point with him, she had yet to see his. But, sure enough, it was building.

And the fallout wasn’t going to be pretty.

3

UN-FREAKING-REAL.

Big, ugly birds screeched overhead, and Shannon wondered if they were vultures as she pounded out random combinations of numbers on her cell phone. Maybe she could somehow jar the unit into working before the scavengers started to close in. How could she be in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of noisy birds, no real walking shoes and a man who’d put her heart through the wringer? They had no phone, no map, no navigational system, no car. Thankfully, Romero had traveled with two cases of water in the trunk, since he refused to drink any liquid besides alcohol while south of the border.

He unpacked bottle after bottle from the shrink-wrapped carton now, loading up his overnight bag with Evian. His movements were sharp, quick. Angry. His obvious decision to take the higher ground and not engage in an argument with her about the hiking boots might be admirable if he hadn’t taken that route every single time she’d ever had a bone to pick with him. How could they ever solve their problems when he refused to acknowledge them, let alone discuss them?

Residual frustration simmered inside her, but what was the point of rehashing old terrain? He obviously hadn’t thought their relationship was worth fighting over three months ago, since he’d lit out of town on two wheels. She’d heard he’d gone to stay with friends out on Catalina for a few weeks, then he’d taken up residence at a posh Beverly Hills hotel. And in case she wanted to know how he was faring, the supermarket newspapers posted pictures of him tooling around town on his motorcycle or attending glitzy music awards shows. She had no reason to think he’d want to defend his decisions or talk through their issues now.

She’d be better off focusing on getting out of Mexico and back to civilization, away from scrubby bushes and carnivorous birds. She would put Romero behind her. And with any luck, she’d make him eat his heart out at his loss, to boot.

Not that it would be easy while trekking through the desert in jeans and a blazer, since she couldn’t wear his T-shirt without getting seriously turned on. The scent of him lingered in that cotton, as did memories of other times he’d worn it. Other times she’d taken it off him. Hence the need to stuff the thing directly into her bag. But she would find a way to make him regret that he’d left her. Wasn’t that a woman’s best revenge? To have her ex realize he’d made a colossal mistake?

Sauntering over to the spot where he worked to strip down the contents of his bag now overflowing with purified water, Shannon figured she’d better follow his example and sort through the stuff she had to bring with her.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asked, just because she hated pronounced silences.

Her mom had been either depressed or bored with her life for as long as Shannon could remember, and her silences had always meant trouble was brewing. Usually that she’d overstayed her welcome wherever her mom was filming and that Shannon would be on her way back home with a nanny before long. She’d worked damn hard to keep her mom too entertained to fall into the long silences and then send her away, but she’d had even less success as a daughter than as a serious actress.

“I tried to take a shortcut off Route 1 back in Insurgentes, where the interstate veers east before coming back west. But I stopped seeing signs a good five miles before we were run off the road.”