Twilight

She was going to be trouble. He knew that, too. She had the same sort of passion for her particular cause that he had for his, which put them at cross-purposes, for the moment. Oddly enough, they both wanted to find Ken’s murderer. She would destroy Yo, Amigo in the process, if she had to. He was convinced that no one connected to the program had had anything to do with the shooting.

The kids he worked with weren’t saints. Far from it. They’d been handling knives and guns and wearing gang colors starting at a frighteningly early age. Most of them had been touched by tragedy and violence more often than white, middle-class America could imagine. They’d responded the only way that made sense to them, by seeking protection in numbers, by arming themselves. Only a few had learned the lesson that violence only spawned more violence. It solved nothing. As injustices mounted and anger deepened, the violence only escalated, unless they learned another way. He’d tried to teach them that.

Even so, even knowing that his message had convinced only a handful of the teens he worked with, Rick knew in his gut that not one of them would have harmed Ken Miller. They had respected the padre, as they called him. The youngest ones had clustered around him, desperately seeking the warmth and love he radiated, the father figure he represented. The older boys grudgingly admired his straight talk and his jump shots. Ken had run circles around them on a basketball court, playing with a ferocity that had been startling in a man normally so placid.

Rick hadn’t relied solely on his gut in reaching the conclusion that no one he knew would have harmed Ken. He was a little too cynical for that. He’d asked questions, gently most of the time, forcefully when necessary. He’d laid it all out for these tough kids who were trying to find their way. One of their own was down, and he wanted to know the names of the people responsible. The future of Yo, Amigo, their future, was on the line. He believed so strongly that any one of them would have ratted out his best friend for Ken’s sake, that he would have staked his reputation and his life on it.

When no one had stepped forward with so much as a whiff of innuendo—much less a solid clue—it convinced him that his kids were innocent. That left a whole lot of unanswered questions. He was as frustrated as Dana Miller had to be. He was also convinced that the answers had to lie outside the hood.

The difference was, she was going to tear his fragile grasp on the souls of these boys to shreds trying to find those answers. She was going to put herself at risk by poking and prodding and turning up in every dangerous nook and cranny until she found something. For every boy in the program who’d respect her for trying, there were a dozen on the streets who would take advantage of her. Some would only take her money for leads that would merely take her down blind alleys. Some were capable of doing far worse.

Rick figured either he was going to have to trail along behind, protecting her, or he was going to have to find some way to join forces with her—for the program’s sake and for hers.

Of course, that meant seeing her again, trying to cut through the pain and the hatred and the anger to convince her that they were on the same side. His pulse raced predictably at the prospect. His quick rise to any challenge was both a blessing and a curse. After the way he’d responded to the woman struggling in his arms the night before, he figured this time it was downright suicidal. His body apparently didn’t have the same high moral standards his head did, standards that said a man shouldn’t be intrigued by his best friend’s wife. Ken’s death hadn’t changed that. In his eyes, Dana Miller still belonged to her late husband.

“Que pasa, Señor Rick?”

At the sound of the softly spoken question, Rick’s gaze shot up. “Maria, you have to stop sneaking up on me,” he told the teenager with the huge brown eyes and shy, dimpled smile. “My heart can’t take it.”

The shyness faded, replaced by a knowing twinkle. “Oh, I think your heart can take quite a lot, Señor Rick.”

“And how would an innocent girl like you know a thing like that?”

“The others talk,” she said, then shook her head. “As if you didn’t know that already. They think you are muy sexy, a how-do-you-say-it, a chunk?”

Rick laughed. “That’s hunk, as if you didn’t know that already. Your English only fails you when it suits your purposes.”

“No, no,” she protested. “Para me, anglais es muy difficile.”

“Maria, you were born right here in Chicago.”

Her chin rose a defiant notch. “But my parents, they speak only Spanish at home,” she protested, her expression all innocence. “I heard no English until I went to school.”

It was a common enough story in certain immigrant neighborhoods, including this one. Rick happened to know, however, that Maria could speak and understand English like a native, unless it seemed inconvenient to do so.

“The way I hear it, you were a quick study. I’ve seen all your transcripts. Straight As. That’s why the padre was trying to help you get a scholarship to college.”

At the mention of Ken, she immediately sketched a cross across her chest and her eyes turned sad. “I miss him every day,” she said softly. “He was very good to me and the others, especially my brothers.”

“He loved you all. He wanted you to succeed.”

Maria perched uneasily on the edge of the chair opposite Rick’s desk. She folded her hands in her lap in the pose of a proper young lady, but it was only seconds before she began to fidget nervously. “What do you think will happen now? Will they find the person who killed him? They don’t seem to try very hard anymore.”

Rick couldn’t deny that. It was one reason he could understand Dana Miller’s determination to take matters into her own hands. “I don’t know whether the police have given up,” he told Maria honestly. “But I haven’t.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“No, but I think someone knew exactly what he was doing that night.” It was the first time he had voiced that particular opinion, but he was forced to temper it by acknowledging the other possibility, the one Dana Miller and the police shared. “On the other hand, if the killer is from the hood, I’ll find him.”

Maria looked shocked. “You think one of us could have harmed him?”

“No one in the program,” he said firmly. “But others, who knows? Others believe anything is possible here. The only way to prove them wrong is to find the person responsible. Have you heard anything, Maria? Anything at all? Is anyone bragging a little.”

“Who would brag about such a thing?” she demanded indignantly.

“We both know there are people who would like to see the program fail, who would gloat if we lost our funding. They might even commit murder to bring us down.”

“But why? What you do here is good.”

“Not for those who want to recruit every young child into a gang. They’re afraid we might cut into their power.”

“They are fools!” she declared dismissively. “And I have too much work to do to waste time on them.”

As she left his office, Rick smiled at her vehemence. There was no chance that Maria would become one of the lost souls. Raised by two strict, doting, Catholic parents, she and her brothers had been taught right and wrong. Unlike so many others, they had been surrounded by love. They had been taught the value of hard work, grit and determination. There would be no shortcuts, no straying from the straight and narrow.

When Juan Jesus, the youngest, had gotten too friendly with members of the toughest gang in the area, the entire family had come to Rick for guidance. Dollars had been scraped together for the tuition to a private school in Ken’s suburb. A family in Ken’s congregation had taken Juan Jesus in as one of their own on weekdays. Ken had brought him back to his family on Friday afternoons and picked him up again at dawn on Monday mornings for the trip north of town. Those days away from the hood had been the boy’s salvation.

Only Maria knew that the small pittance the family had raised was a fraction of the actual tuition. Had the others known, they would have been too proud to accept the arrangements.

Ever since discovering that Rick and Ken had chipped in to pay the rest, Maria had been coming to the program headquarters every morning to do whatever jobs needed doing. She typed. She answered phones. She cleaned. She bullied Rick into eating, when he would have forgotten. She stayed as long as he did, sometimes longer.

Unofficially, she counseled the teenage girls who trusted her with secrets they might never have shared with Rick. All in all, Rick knew he’d gotten the better end of the deal when he’d made the contribution to Juan Jesus’s education. And when Maria had her college scholarship, he guessed she would study psychology or social work and make an even greater contribution to his program, or another like it.

Now and again, when he saw the flash of passion in her eyes for Yo, Amigo’s goals, when he heard her sweet voice of reason working its magic on a potential backer, he could envision her in the state capital or in Washington, making a difference for all of the teens who seemed intent on sacrificing their youth, or their lives, to gangs. For now, he might be the brains and the drive behind Yo, Amigo, but Maria and a few others like her were its heart. Ken Miller had been its soul.

Not a day passed that Rick didn’t miss him. Not an hour passed that he didn’t contemplate his own inadvertent complicity in bringing Ken into the barrio, where he died. Not a minute passed that he didn’t want to avenge his friend’s death.

Thinking of that brought him full circle, back to the fury he’d read in Dana Miller’s eyes the night before. She was trouble, all right, and it was way past time he faced it. His warnings last night weren’t nearly enough to make her back down.

“Maria, I’ve got to go out for a while,” he said as he passed the desk where she was trying to make sense of the piles of paperwork that accumulated on a daily basis, paperwork that Rick had no patience for, even when he understood the necessity for it.

“I’ll be here,” she told him with a wry expression. “You haven’t touched this in a week. It will take me most of the day to see which is important and which could have been tossed into the trash, if only you’d bothered to read it.”

“Gracias. What would I do without you?”

She shook her head. “I cannot imagine.”

“Neither can I, nina. Neither can I.”

“Then it is good you won’t have to find out.”

“Until next fall,” he reminded her. That was when he was convinced she would have the full scholarship to Northwestern that she deserved.

“Even then, I will be here to worry you every day,” she insisted.

It was an old argument and one they wouldn’t resolve today or even tomorrow. Maria Consuela Villanueva was a woman who knew her own mind, probably had from the time she was two, Rick guessed. There had been times he regretted the age difference between them. She was barely eighteen to his thirty-four. Had she been a few years older, she might have been a good match for him. As it was, he thought of her only as the kid sister he’d never had. Even when she was at her nagging, pestering worst, he would have protected her with his life.

“When will you be back?” she asked.

He thought of the likely battle that lay ahead. Either Dana would slam the door in his face and he’d be back in no time, or she’d listen. He was counting on the latter. He held no illusions, though, that he could persuade her easily to accept his help.

“I’m out for the day,” he said, “unless there’s an emergency.”

“What constitutes an emergency this time? Fire? The arrival of the mayor? A delegation from the capital?”

“Those would do,” he agreed.

“Where will you be?”

“With Ken’s widow.” He shrugged, then added realistically, “Or nursing my wounds beside Lake Michigan with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other.”

“Better you should take bandages,” she retorted.

Rick stared at her suspiciously. Something in her tone alerted him that she knew something about what had gone on here the night before. “Why would you say that?”

“People talk,” she said enigmatically.

“Maria! Spit it out. What are people saying?”

“They say that bruise on your cheek is the work of Mrs. Miller. Since it was not there when I left last night, I assume you’ve seen her since then.” She tilted her head and studied his face. “She must not have been glad to see you.”

“I’m sure she wasn’t,” Rick agreed.

“And you think today will go better?”

“Probably not.”

Maria opened a cabinet behind the desk and plucked out a handful of Band-Aids and a bottle of peroxide from the stock kept on hand for the multitude of kids with minor wounds who turned up on their doorstep nearly every day. They were all too practiced at coping with major wounds as well, at least as long as it took to send for an ambulance.

“Then these may come in handy,” she said. “Of course, people say she is also a trained private eye, like Magnum.” Maria was a very big Tom Selleck fan. She thought he was even “chunkier” than Rick.

“She was a private detective,” Rick corrected. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“She knows how to use a gun, yes?”

“Very amusing, Maria. You seem to forget that I have at least a vague familiarity with guns myself.”

“The difference is that you have vowed never to touch another one. Can you say the same for Mrs. Miller?”

Rick could only say that he knew, with relative certainty, that she hadn’t had one with her the night before. She would have found some way to use it on him.

Of course, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t grab a gun the second she realized who was on her doorstep. Another adrenaline rush raced through him at the prospect. Disarming her could prove to be absolutely fascinating.

4

The screeching of that damnable doorbell brought Dana to her feet at once. It had to be a stranger. No one she knew liked the sound of it any better than Kate.

“Want me to get it?” Kate offered.

“I’m still capable of answering the door,” Dana said dryly, pushing aside the virtually untouched slice of the pecan coffee cake that she had made when she could no longer sit still. “I haven’t lost all my wits yet.”

She stepped into the foyer and paused. She could see the large shape of a man through the glass panels on either side of the door. Tall, broad-shouldered and wearing an ancient football jacket from one of the Catholic high schools in Chicago, Rick Sanchez was unmistakable.

“Oh, boy,” she muttered under her breath.

“Dana, who is it?” Kate whispered, slipping up behind her.

“Rick Sanchez.”

“Oh, boy, is right. Has he brought the police with him?”

“I doubt that Mr. Sanchez is any fonder of the police than I am at the moment.”

“Were you counting on that when you broke into the Yo, Amigo headquarters last night?”

“No, I was counting on not getting caught,” Dana said, keeping a wary eye on the man outside.

He seemed to be growing more agitated by the minute. When he turned and leaned on the doorbell, filling the house with the squealing sound, she decided there was no point in postponing the inevitable. He was here to see her and he’d probably break down the door, if he had to. She was in no position, at the moment, to complain about a little breaking and entering on his part.

“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” she shouted as she unlocked the door. When it was open, she glared at him and said, “Mr. Sanchez, you really need to work on your patience.”

A twinkle lit his brown eyes, softening his hard, unyielding expression. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”

Standing squarely in the doorway, Dana refused to concede the point. “Why are you here?”

“To talk.”

“I’d say we both made our positions completely clear last night. Anything we said today would be a waste of breath.”

“Then I guess you haven’t seen the error of your ways,” he said with exaggerated regret. “Too bad. I was hoping this was going to be easy.” He glanced over her shoulder. “Hello again, Mrs. Jefferson. Good to see you.”

Dana shot a warning look at Kate, whose love life was such that a potent man like Rick Sanchez might be able to charm her with little more than a smile. “Don’t think you can use my friend to get to me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m an up-front kind of guy. My friends say I’m direct.”

“And your enemies?”

“They say quite a lot of things about me,” he conceded.

With his hands shoved in his pockets and his hair tousled by the wind, he had a look of pure innocence about him. Clearly it was deceptive. “I can imagine,” she said.

“I’m hoping you and I will become friends.”

“Not in this lifetime,” she said fiercely.

“That’s what Ken would have wanted,” he added with quiet conviction.

Dana wanted to hit him for dragging Ken into the conversation, even though he was obviously the reason Rick Sanchez was here. “Do your friends know that you hit below the belt, Mr. Sanchez?”

He didn’t look half as insulted as Dana might have liked. In fact, he looked her squarely in the eye.

“I’m a product of the streets,” he reminded her. “I fight any way I have to for what I believe in.”

The penetrating, brown-eyed gaze, the softly spoken words sent a chill washing through her. For the first time, she fully accepted just how dangerous an adversary Rick Sanchez could be. Knowing the enemy could sometimes be as important as arming against him. With that in mind, she stepped aside and gestured toward the kitchen.

“Kate and I were just having coffee, if you’d care to join us.”

There was nothing gloating in his expression, no hint of smug arrogance. In fact, if she’d had to describe what was going on inside him, she would have had to say he looked relieved. Obviously, he hadn’t expected her to capitulate so easily. Good. That meant she’d thrown him off guard.

In the kitchen, she poured him a cup of coffee, then refilled her own and Kate’s. She deliberately didn’t offer him any of the coffee cake. It didn’t matter. His gaze landed on her slice, then lifted hopefully. “Aren’t you planning to eat that?”

“No,” she said resignedly and pushed it toward him. “There’s more on the counter.”

“I can smell the cinnamon and nuts. Just baked, isn’t it?” he asked, sounding as eager as a kid.

“Yes.”

“Why’d you bother if you didn’t intend to eat it?”

“For something to do. What difference does it make?”

He shrugged. “None, I guess. Just making small talk.”

“Don’t waste your time.”

He accepted the advice without comment and pulled out a chair. When he was seated at the round oak table, Dana suddenly wished that she’d suggested the living room instead.

This table, bought at an auction the first year of her marriage, had been at the heart of her family’s life. Every breakfast and every dinner, they had gathered here, no matter the other demands on their time. This was also where she and Ken had discussed the future, made plans for vacations, argued over finances. It was at this table, lit by the soft glow of candles, that she had first told him she was pregnant on three different occasions.

It was also where they had lingered over coffee, gazing into each other’s eyes with yearning, both of them regretting for just a moment that there were boys underfoot to keep them from acting on the desire that always simmered just beneath the surface of their relationship.

Seating Rick Sanchez here, of all places, seemed to defile the memories. She had never wanted this man to touch the intimate portions of her life with Ken. That was why she had stubbornly refused for so long to include him in family dinners, in holiday celebrations. Ken had accepted her decision, had even understood its roots, but it had been clear that he thought less of her for her inflexibility.

Even then, she realized, Rick Sanchez had found a way to come between them. Now he was doing so by replacing her memories of Ken sitting across from her with his own powerful and very masculine presence. She added that to the list of things to hold against him—the fact that he was so virile, so alive, while just outside her husband was cold in his grave.

She could feel the patches of angry color burning in her cheeks as she scowled at him. “Why are you here?” she asked for the second time that morning. There was nothing gracious or even polite in her tone. Kate glanced at her sharply, subtly warning her to back off. Dana sighed and forced a smile. “That is, what did you want to talk about?”

“You and me,” he said.

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.