Buried Secrets

In her dream, she saw Diego and jerked awake with a sharp, real breath. Too real. She preferred the half life she’d been living since she moved here; it hurt less. She preferred the Novocain.

But another attempt at sleep—another gasped return to consciousness—confirmed that the numbness had worn off at just about the same time Zack Lorenzo opened his big mouth.

“Damn it,” Jo whispered brokenly, sitting up in bed so that her Navajo blankets slid to her waist, dragging her hands through her short hair. She wouldn’t dream of him again. Not tonight. Not now. Not Diego.

It hadn’t even been real. Except for him being dead.

But the next morning’s rising sun found Jo sitting at her kitchen table, dizzy from hours of fighting the dreams that haunted her each time she closed her eyes. Both Butch and Sundance lay at her feet, eyeing her with mutual doggy concern.

She glared blearily at Zack Lorenzo’s business card, on the table in front of her. He’d somehow robbed her of her sense of safety. Business hours or not, Jo meant to take it back.

She picked up the phone.

Chapter 2

Zack was in Hell—Hell with Formica countertops, contoured bedspreads and a window air conditioner that made the carpet smell like wet socks. Almanuevo didn’t rate a Holiday Inn, much less a Hilton. Unless he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast or tourist resort, he was left with the Alpha Inn, a “motor hotel” of unparalleled luxury—if you lived in the freaking 1950s.

He still stayed awake most of the night, for his own reasons. But even though he was awake ungodly early, taking notes at the pink “kitchenette” table, Zack swore when his mobile phone rang out its programmed Journey riff. It didn’t matter if he was awake or not. Who the hell called at dawn?

He snatched up his phone. “Whaddaya want?”

“Mr. Lorenzo?”

A woman? “Yeah, this is Lorenzo.” So whaddaya want?

“This is Sheriff James, from Spur.”

He guessed the sheriff counted as a woman. Cocky, yeah. Butch even. But Josephine James couldn’t hide being female, even from a man who wasn’t particularly interested. Jeans and short-sleeved cotton tops just fit differently over feminine curves. Her shiny brown hair, shorter than some men’s, had bared the nape of her neck. Zack never really thought before then about how soft and vulnerable napes looked. And her pixie nose had undermined her no-nonsense, I’m the sheriff attitude.

So, now, did the caffeinated strain in her voice. He felt a twinge of guilt for maybe giving the lady a fairly sleepless night, but he fought it. Gotta break a few eggs, yada yada. This was his job. Worrying about other people wasn’t, not anymore.

He wasn’t any damned good at it, anyway. “What can I do for you this morning? It is morning, right?”

“Look, Mr. Lorenzo, I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to talk to you. If you’re still in the area, I mean.”

The area. Yeah. Right. “I’m still in the state, anyhow. You want I should drive back down there?”

“No,” she said quickly, then paused. “It’s a small town, and I don’t want questions. I’ll drive up and meet you.”

“You know,” he pointed out, “as many car accidents are caused by exhausted drivers as by drunks.”

“I’m a good judge of my own limits.” He’d heard that before. It was usually a lie.

“I’d make better time,” he insisted.

“I’m sure you would. Where are you staying?”

Stubborn, wasn’t she? “The Alpha Inn. Room 7.”

“I’ll be there by lunch.” And she hung up, which Zack found annoying, even though he generally did the same thing.

“I could be there by breakfast,” he muttered, and went back to his note-taking so he could maybe catch a nap before Little Jo moseyed on into town.

A nervous woman. Great. Even the well-rested ones were trouble.

He hoped she had something worthwhile to tell him.

Relieved to have that decision made, Jo managed a quick nap on the cot in the jail’s cell before she left Fred in charge for the day. She couldn’t help remembering that the last person to stretch out on that cot was one rangy, thirty-something Chicago P.I. Despite having changed the sheets, she imagined that she could smell the faint scent of aftershave. Or was that just the whole “breathing again” business?

Either way, she slept better.

She drove her old Bronco into Almanuevo a little after 11:30 a.m., marveling at how quickly the once-deserted little town had risen from the dead. Was it even five years since some real-estate developers started marketing the area as an Eden for psychic enlightenment? Not that it wasn’t pretty in its red-rocked, desert-y way—Big Bend National Park lay several hours south of them and the Guadalupe Mountains almost as far to the north. But when the closest metropolitan area was El Paso, how could Jo not be surprised by Almanuevo’s success?

And it was, against all probability, succeeding. Billboards advertised vortex tours, psychic readings and even a dude ranch that offered everything from chakra alignments to rattlesnake roundups. The signs were set too far back to shade the two-lane highway as she drove into town, her windows open to the unseasonably warm March sunshine. But they were entertaining.

She knew the Alpha Inn, with its pitted parking lot and faux-adobe bungalows. It was one of the oldest businesses in town. Its first incarnation had been as the Tumbleweed Motel, before interstates had put the original town out of business. Jo spotted Lorenzo’s black Ferrari, a rental with New Mexico plates, and she parked her battered blue Ford beside it.

God, she was tired.

For a moment, right after she killed the engine, she let her head fall back and wondered what the hell she was doing here. The sensation felt very much like panic, but at what? The story she finally was going to tell?

Or the man she meant to tell it to?

Since she never allowed herself to panic, Jo grimly shook it off and got out of the truck, sand crunching between her boots and the warm, worn asphalt. At least her cowboy hat—stained white straw, for summer wear—kept the worst of the sun off.

She knocked on door #7. Then she waited, squinting even through the shade of her hat brim and sunglasses. She noticed the drapes were closed.

She knocked again, harder. Nearby a snake of some kind flowed off a flat rock and into the desert. Jo thought she might just fall asleep on her feet out here.

Then the door swung open, and she found herself surrounded by a burst of air-conditioned coolness and nose-to-hairy-chest with the P.I.

Lorenzo had obviously just woken. His thick, dark hair was messy, his shirt was halfway open, his jeans partly unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. For a long moment, Jo just stared—breathing again. She forced her gaze slowly upward. From the small, gold medal nestled in his chest hair to his throat, his shadowed jaw, finally his intense eyes squinting down at her against the glare of Texas sunlight. The awareness that whispered through her from his proximity surprised her. It was another sensation she didn’t generally allow herself to feel.

When Lorenzo covered a wide yawn and waved her in—“Nice hat”—Jo entered his cool, dark cave. She didn’t like caves.

Yet it was so unlike anyplace she expected a man who drove a Ferrari to stay that she found herself grinning. “Pink Formica?”

He snorted. “You got something against Formica?”

But her attention had moved on to the rumpled, king-size bed. It looked particularly inviting, more than this morning’s cot had, and Jo hid her own yawn as she took off the hat and sunglasses. “It’s kind of dark in here,” she hinted.

“Oh yeah. Sorry.” Lorenzo flipped on the lights.

Accepting that as the best she’d get, Jo sank into one of the hard plastic chairs by the paper-strewn table. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“No problem.” Belatedly, Lorenzo buttoned his jeans, then sprawled with his odd, lumbering grace into the other chair. He dwarfed it. “I’m gonna send out for lunch—you want anything?”

She tried not to look at the bed, wishing she didn’t feel so…so alert, around this man. “Almanuevo has delivery now?”