Twilight

She scowled at that. “Oh?” she said, her voice a lethal warning against assuming any kind of intimacy was possible between them.

His perfectly sculpted lips curved ever so slightly. “That was not what I meant, Dana.”

Despite the denial, her name on his tongue was like a caress. Heat crept up her neck and inflamed her cheeks again. “Of course not,” she said stiffly. “But I think you’d better explain exactly what you did mean.”

Without answering, Rick pushed himself away from the table and stood. Half of the coffee cake remained. Obviously, his appetite had fled, too.

Still silent, letting her demand for answers hang in the air, he moved toward the window, as if he couldn’t stay away. She knew precisely what he was seeing—the cold, barren earth, the simple marker, the place where Ken would rest for all eternity.

“He deserves to rest in peace,” he said so quietly that she had to strain to hear him.

When the words registered, she realized it was as if he had read her mind. For a brief second, there was a connection between them, a fragile thread of understanding that she hadn’t expected. It shook her to discover that she could feel that, despite the overwhelming hatred she felt toward him.

When he finally turned back, his eyes glistened with unshed tears. As Kate had warned her, it was a devastating sight in one so strong. Dana had to steel herself against that image, as she had against so many others lately. She couldn’t afford to feel any compassion for this man. None. Ken had been nothing to him, nothing more than someone to be used for the good of his cause. She believed that of Rick Sanchez, because she had to. The hatred, the need for revenge, was all that anchored her these days.

Rick leaned against the counter, propped one sneaker-clad foot on the rung of a chair and cradled his coffee mug in hands that, despite their nicks and scars, looked somehow graceful. Sure and competent hands. Hands that could caress a woman’s body and bring it alive.

Dear heaven, where had that last come from? She glanced at Kate and saw that she, too, was fascinated with Rick Sanchez, fascinated the way a woman would be with a devastatingly attractive man who radiated sexuality from every pore.

That, of course, was his single most potent weapon, Dana realized. If she weren’t careful, if she weren’t strong, he would weave that easy magic over her, as well. She was lonely now and, like too many lonely women, she was vulnerable. She could not, she would not, allow anything to happen between her and this man. She would keep the hostility alive as protection, as a duty.

“I’m waiting,” she said, keeping her voice icy, her expression remote. “Unless you have something specific to discuss, I’d like you to go.”

His lips curved again. “Patience, Dana.”

“I don’t have time to be patient. I have things to do.”

“Planning more break-ins?”

She scowled at him. “Possibly.”

“Not at Yo, Amigo, I hope.”

“If that’s where the answers are, then I’ll be back.”

“I’ve already told you that the program and its boys are not the key to Ken’s death.”

“How can you possibly be so confident of that?”

“Because everyone at Yo, Amigo loved Ken,” he said.

The simple declaration shook her as more vehement statements might not have done so. For just a moment, she wished she hadn’t remained so adamantly opposed to what Ken had been doing. She wished that she had accepted one of his repeated offers to take her with him, to let her see for herself why these lost kids mattered so much to him.

Instead, she had clung to the long-ago betrayal of a boy very much like those in Rick’s program. She had been trying to help him and his lawyer fight armed robbery charges he claimed had been unfairly brought. She had believed in him. Only after they had successfully fought off a conviction had she discovered he was guilty, that he had played on her sympathy and used her clever investigative skills to win his case.

Weeks later, released from jail, he had shot and killed another storekeeper in yet another robbery attempt. A scared sixteen-year-old boy had been his accomplice. He had been shot by police arriving at the scene. She had vowed right then never to trust her instincts again, never to trust vows of innocence and remorse from the very kind of boys Ken and Rick believed capable of change.

Had she put aside that vow and gone with Ken, would she have shared Rick’s belief that his teens were incapable of harming Ken? She doubted it. Her own experience would have warned against it.

In fact, she would have grabbed on to any possible motive, any possible suspect, just as she was doing now. She was too desperate for answers to exclude anyone on blind faith alone.

“What do these kids know about love?” she countered.

“Precious little,” Rick agreed. “But they experienced it with your husband. Ken showed them what it meant to be accepted unconditionally, to be forgiven. He taught them they were worthy of God’s love. Every one of them was blessed to have known him.” His gaze locked on hers. “And they knew that.”

Dana shuddered under that unwavering gaze. In his own way, Rick Sanchez was as fervent in his beliefs as Ken had been in his. She, to the contrary, believed in nothing anymore, not even in the generous, compassionate, forgiving God who had guided her husband.

Despite their opposing views of his boys, she couldn’t help being swayed just a little by Rick’s faith in them. “Okay, Mr. Sanchez. Say I were to take your word for the moment that no one connected to the program had anything to do with Ken’s death. Where would you start to look for answers?”

“Closer to home,” he said at once.

He said it with such quick certainty that she was startled. “What on earth does that mean? Surely you don’t think that I...?”

“Of course not. I was talking about the people Ken dealt with right here, in his own congregation, in his own community. He told me there was a faction who wanted him removed.”

Dana stared. “If there was, this is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“It had just come up. He didn’t want to worry you. He told me it was the sort of nuisance thing that arises every now and then. A few people don’t like the way their minister thinks, or they respond to some imagined slight. In Ken’s case, he suspected there were some who disapproved of his work with Yo, Amigo. They feared he was already dragging the gang problem into their backyard.”

It was easy enough to make the connection, then. “This came up after he brought Juan Jesus here to live with the Wilsons, didn’t it?” she asked.

Rick nodded. “That would be my guess.”

“But he is such a sweet young man. How could anybody fear him?” Kate demanded.

It was the first time she had said a word in so long that both Dana and Rick turned to stare at her. Rick smiled at the fiercely protective tone of voice. Obviously, all of her motherly instincts had been aroused. And unlike Dana, she hadn’t been a holdout, fighting Ken’s commitment to the kids in the barrio. She had gotten to know Juan Jesus and any of the others he had brought around from time to time. Kate’s soft heart hadn’t been touched by the kind of tragedy that had made Dana so terribly wary.

“Taken individually, most of our boys are just like Juan Jesus,” Rick responded. “They’re tough on the outside, but if you look beyond that, you find a scared, vulnerable kid. Put him in the right environment and he will flourish.”

“Put him in a gang, he becomes dangerous,” Dana pointed out.

“Yes,” he said. “Some do.”

“Most,” she countered.

He studied her intently, assessing her. “Would you have joined with the faction who felt threatened by Juan Jesus’s presence in the community?” Rick asked.

Dana didn’t like the immediate response that formed. She bit back the instinctive yes that formed in her gut. She and Ken had argued over that very subject more than once. They had argued about it again on the day he had died. She had wanted their boys to live in a safe environment. She hadn’t wanted outside influences to change their protected world. It was petty and selfish of her, but there it was. She was a mother first and she’d seen firsthand the very real danger that came with trusting a kid with a record.

Intellectually, she had understood that boys like Juan Jesus deserved a chance. Give them their chance, she had argued—just not here. Not here, where a failed experiment could be so terribly costly to their own children. She hadn’t realized there were others in the church who’d said the same thing.

Nor had she considered that such feelings might run hot enough to do harm. For a brief moment, with Rick’s knowing gaze studying her, she allowed herself to feel ashamed at her unwitting complicity with narrow-minded, hurtful people, who would have ruined her husband’s career out of fear.

“Would you?” Rick asked again.

“I would like to think I’m better than they are, more open-minded, fairer, but the truth is I had said many of the same things to Ken myself,” she confessed reluctantly.

“Dana, you hadn’t!” Kate protested.