by Bethany-Kris
“And now,” Jorge said, taking the stairs leading into the basement slowly as they sloped sharply, “the tunnel.”
The keys in Jorge’s hand jangled with every step he took. Valeria had to walk carefully in her heels, more so than the man in front of her. Jorge didn’t notice, or if he did, then he didn’t care. A hand came to rest on Valeria’s back, and while it shocked her, her body only relaxed from the soft touch.
Chris.
His hand on her back let her know she was safe, and if she missed a step, then he would be right there to catch her. For whatever reason, and she blamed poor planning, they situated the light switch at the bottom of the stairs. She had seen the tunnel before, so there wasn’t very much about this tour that was new or amazing to her.
Jorge flicked the light on, illuminating a stark, white hallway that led to a set of double steel doors at the end, a good twenty feet away.
“There’s nothing else down here?” Chris asked.
Jorge waved a hand for them to stay where they were at the bottom of the stairs as he headed for the doors at the end. “Cement in this section. We filled the rest of the space in because we didn’t need it. The basement is finished and furnished in other areas—bedrooms, and whatever else. Some storage, too.”
Chris shot Valeria a look, but for what, she didn’t know. So, she shrugged as a non-response. He didn’t seem to mind.
Using the keys he’d brought along, Jorge unlocked the metal doors at the end of the corridor. It took an effort for him to pull the doors open to showcase what rested behind. Once he did, Jorge stepped back with a smile and a nod at the dank-smelling, dark tunnel the metal doors kept hidden.
Chris made a noise under his breath. “How is it ventilated?”
“A couple of different ways.” Jorge shrugged. “A few pipes here and there that come out of the ground, and when someone is working in the tunnels, we force air through them.”
“And this is the closest one to the American border?”
“We’re still quite a ways away, but sí.” Jorge gestured at the dark hole, asking, “Care to inspect?”
“Not particularly.”
That earned a chuckle out of Jorge.
“Don’t blame you, amigo. I won’t go inside them, either.”
“I take it this isn’t where I will sleep for the weekend,” Chris said, his attempt at a joke flying way over Jorge’s head when the man gave him a pensive look at the other end of the hall. “I’d like to relax. It was a long drive.”
Jorge nodded. “One of my men will show you which rooms you can use for the weekend. Find one and ask.”
“Thank you.”
Chris gave Valeria a quick smile, but didn’t linger. If Jorge witnessed the exchange between the two, he didn’t say. The receding footsteps echoed up the stairwell until a door opened and clicked shut. By the time she turned around to wait for Jorge to lock the doors back up, he was already down the hall and coming her way.
The doors at the end?
Closed.
That was how distracted Valeria became whenever Chris was in the picture. She knew, without a doubt, that wasn’t a good thing for either of them. It would likely get them both in a world of trouble.
It scared her to death.
Jorge, though?
He terrified her more.
“I would like to call Maria,” she told him, “once we’re settled in.”
Her husband chuckled, his arm coming to snake around her waist. To someone else, that hold might seem affectionate, but to her ... it felt like another kind of prison. One she would never escape.
“No,” he said.
“But—”
“Maria is fine where she is for the weekend, Val.”
“I want to tell her goodnight, and to be a good girl while we’re away.”
When she couldn’t get what she wanted from being honest, then she had to try another route. What she really wanted to do was make sure her daughter was being treated fairly by that bitch he forced her to leave Maria with.
“Come on,” Jorge said, his arm tugging her up the stairs with him, “let’s get settled in, and have something made to eat. I am starved.”
“And then I can call Maria?”
“No.”
“Jorge—”
In the stairwell, Valeria found herself slammed into the wall. Her spine ached from the force of her husband shoving her before he was quick to crowd her with his presence. She stared into his cold, dark eyes as his lips pulled down into a scowl that would rival the devil’s. It frightened her, sure, but she refused to show it.
“You’re too close to her, I think.”
Valeria sucked in a sharp breath. “She’s my child. I raised her.”
“Yes, without me. Because what did you do, hmm?”
She refused to entertain that conversation. It always ended the same way, and that wasn’t a game she wanted to play with this man today. One person lost every single time—her. That loss came in the form of a sore body, and bruises she needed to be creative to hide. She wasn’t in the mood for it.
Her silence was not what he wanted though.
Jorge leaned in close, baring his teeth as he spoke in a hissed tone. “You spend far too much time filling that girl’s head full of shit about me, Valeria.”
“I do not.”
On that, she wouldn’t budge.
Valeria never told Maria anything bad about her father. Why would she when she didn’t need to? Jorge poisoned his daughter against him all on his own, and with little to no effort on her part. If he couldn’t see that, then how was that her problem?
“I think it would do her—and you—good to spend time apart.”
“What does that mean?”
Jorge smiled. “Behave this weekend, Val, or she won’t be there when you get home. The tutoring works well enough for her, doesn’t it? I can’t say how long that’ll last, and there are quite a few private schools she can attend instead. Ones that will keep her away for weeks at a time. Do you hear me?”
Valeria swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. “I hear you.”
“Make sure.”
• • •
The crack of a gunshot slicing through the air had Valeria jerking on the spot. She glanced upward in just enough time to see a skeet fly into the air by a mechanical arm before it exploded into shards of ruined ceramic. This little game of Jorge’s and his men was now getting tiring, but she knew better than to go out there and tell him to knock it off.
Not that it mattered.
The sky was darkening as Valeria could see from her position on the bench seat at the large bay window in the sitting room. Soon, they would drink—let’s be honest, they already had—and that would take importance over playing stupid shooting games with their rifles.
“You seem annoyed.”
Valeria gave a look over her shoulder, and a small smile when her sister-in-law joined her at the window. “Decided to come along, did you?”
Abril waved a dainty hand. “Someone needs to keep you company, no?”
“Oh, was that it?”
“I had nothing better to do back at the ranch.”
“Did you see Maria with—”
Abril’s smile grew cold in an instant. “Carla knows what will happen to her should she step out of line with my niece.”
Of course.
No question, Abril was just like her brothers. They didn’t realize it, which was their mistake, Valeria supposed.
The raucous laughter from outside drew their attention to the window again. Valeria didn’t wonder for long what had caused the men’s uproar when she found her husband pawing at a woman while he stuck his tongue down her throat.
Valeria blinked.
The woman, wearing a gray dress with white buttons down the front, was a servant at the house. She couldn’t be any older than twenty, if that, but she didn’t seem to have a problem with the way Jorge groped her in front of a crowd of men while he licked the goddamn taste right
out of her mouth.
She made a noise in the back of her throat, unsure of how she felt about the entire scene happening outside. Annoyed, maybe, but only because if the woman was bothered by the attention, she was far better at hiding it than Valeria.
“Better her than you tonight,” Abril murmured beside her.
“That’s cold, don’t you think?”
Abril sighed. “I have learned that we all have to sacrifice to survive in this world, Val. And that means sometimes, thinking about yourself and what is best for you, even if that means someone else must hurt for it. You have too caring of a heart—you worry too much about people who wouldn’t give a damn about you, and that’s why you’re an easy target for him, and whoever else wants to break your back on the way to the top.”
Ouch.
That stung.
Abril wasn’t wrong though.
“It’s bad I care?” she asked quietly.
“It’s bad you care so much, you would sacrifice yourself for someone else, yes. Women like us that’s not how we make it in our life.”
“Abril?”
“Hmm?”
Valeria glanced at her sister-in-law from the side, weighing her next words because she didn’t want to offend the one person from her husband’s family who gave a shit, and looked out for her. Then again, Abril had always appreciated Valeria’s honesty, so she chose to say was on her mind.
“I don’t want to be like you,” Valeria whispered, “I’m not like you, or them. I never was.”
Abril cleared her throat, her gaze drawing down to the ledge of the bench seat where Valeria sat, and she stood next to her. “I know, which is why I never understood his obsession with keeping you when you didn’t fit him.”
“I’m a trophy. Something he won. Nothing else.”
“Shame, that.”
Valeria let out a hard exhale and put her attention on the scene outside. “He told me earlier that if I didn’t behave, Maria wouldn’t be there when I returned home.”
Abril made a dismissive noise. “He wouldn’t bother. That’s too much energy to spend for a girl, Val. And that’s all she is to him, a girl. What he wants more is a boy, and so if he can keep you in your place long enough to get what he wants from you, then that’s what he’ll do. Even if it means using her, and your fears about her, to get it.”
She swallowed hard.
Abril didn’t miss it.
“What?”
“He will not get that boy,” Valeria muttered.
“That’s not how sex works, is it?”
“IUD, two years ago. A just in case. I have another four years before it must be replaced.”
Abril whistled low. “Do not let him find out about that.”
Yeah.
Valeria got it.
“But for her—Maria—he doesn’t care,” Abril said, “and if you were a smart woman, you would use that to your advantage more than you do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re not like me, right?”
Valeria gave her a glance.
Abril cocked her brow. “Not a lie.”
“Not a lie,” she echoed. “What do you mean, though?”
“If he’s willing to use her to manipulate you into behaving, then use her as a way to make him believe you’re willing to behave.”
Valeria blinked. “Do you mean—”
“He’s a man, Val, and not a complex one to begin with. Should he think letting you have her and do what you want with her will make you react and behave better than his way, which do you think he’ll use?”
Huh.
At the dawning realization in Valeria’s eyes, Abril smirked.
“Keep it in mind.” With that said, Abril turned to leave, but not before saying, “It’s rude to spy. Or hasn’t anyone told you that, yet?”
Valeria’s head snapped sideways at Abril’s chiding only to find the reason for it leaning in the sitting room’s doorway room like he didn’t have a care in the world. Chris shrugged when Abril strolled on past him, but his attention turned on her once Abril left.
Sadness.
That’s what she found in his gaze.
How long had he been listening?
What did it matter?
• • •
Valeria avoided going to bed, but as the house grew quiet and the sky blackened but for the moon and stars, she no longer had a choice except to go to her room. It was always easier when she went willingly rather than Jorge needing to come and find her to drag her to bed.
The bedroom was empty and dark when she made her way upstairs, but she wasn’t mad about it. At least, it gave her a few more minutes to be alone with her thoughts, and without her husband.
Everything was always easier without him.
Valeria also learned what she had to do to make her experience in bed with Jorge less traumatic and painful. As long as she seemed submissive, and unwilling to fight, even if every piece of her wished she didn’t have to be there, doing what he forced her to do, then she walked away from nights with her husband in the morning less sore, and with fewer bruises.
Sad as that was.
So, Valeria readied for her night, sick to her stomach the entire time. Undressing from her day clothes, and slipping into something more appropriate for nighttime, and moved on to set out her clothes for the next day, the minutes ticked by.
Jorge still didn’t come upstairs.
The longer she waited, the more nervous Valeria became sitting on the edge of the bed. There, she had a full view of the door, and what kind of monster might come through it.
Jorge had been in a mood all day, and that was going to translate into the man who entered the bedroom. She much preferred to be ready to deal with it right away instead of being surprised by it.
Valeria had time to consider her life during moments like these, and everything that happened until this point. All the choices she made, and the things she might have done differently so that this wasn’t where she ended up night after night.
She didn’t want to blame herself.
Easier said than done.
Sighing at the sounds of footsteps in the hallway, approaching the bedroom, Valeria glanced down at the clenched hands in her lap. Her fingernails manicured to perfection because that’s what her husband liked, but she was more concerned with the stiffness in her hands that reflected in the rest of her body.
She willed it to calm.
To relax.
It didn’t work—it never did.
The doorknob jiggled, before it turned, and the door pushed open. For the split second she took to peek up, ready to deal with yet another nightmare in her daily life ... only for her to freeze on the bed at the man who slipped into the room.
It wasn’t Jorge at all.
“Chris.”
12.
Valeria’s shock at seeing Chris slip into her room only lasted long enough for him to close the door before she shot up off the bed like a bullet coming out of a gun. Her hands were already up, palms facing him as she came toward him, reading to push him back.
“You can’t be in here,” she hissed, “you can’t—he’ll be up any minute. You have to go!”
“Val—”
“Get out. This isn’t funny anymore, Chris!”
“Valeria.”
She wasn’t hearing him at all. Her hands hit his chest, and with all her might, she pushed him back toward the door. Or rather, she tried. Chris was a wall, tough as fucking brick, and unmovable. That didn’t mean she wasn’t willing to give her all, which he had to appreciate either way, as cute as it was.
Cute.
Yeah, that wasn’t the right word.
Chris had seen Valeria go through a gamut of emotions and situations since his arrival in Mexico. He’d seen her sweet and loving with her child. Sad and scared with her husband. Indifferent when no one thought she was looking, and she was alone with her thoughts. The woman was a spectrum of feelings—never settling on one thing for too lon
g before she had to put on yet another mask to satisfy her husband, and whatever he was demanding of her for the moment.
But anger?
He’d never seen her with that.
Until now.
Chris had to admit, she looked damn good angry. A red flush colored her golden-brown skin and brightened her eyes more than they already were. Sure, that beautiful smile he loved faded, but that didn’t change his desire to kiss those full, sexy lips of hers at all.
Not in the slightest.
“Do you know what he’ll do to me?” Valeria demanded.
Her hands came up to shove against him again, but Chris was quick to grab her wrists that time. Locking her in place with his fingers like bars around her wrists, he dragged her into his chest without warning, and tipped his head down to press a fast kiss to her lips.
He had control.
Always.
Chris was the one who, in the middle of chaos, would be as calm as the eye of a storm. No matter what, he took great pains to ensure that was the case.
Except with her, it seemed.
There was something about Valeria, something in her soul, he thought, that called out to him, and shredded any sense of self-preservation or restraint he had left. He swore that he could sense her sadness and loneliness from across a crowded room, and he hated that. This woman should never feel those things—ever.
The second his mouth touched to hers, Valeria answered him back. She kissed him hard, her lips moving against his in a way that seemed familiar although it couldn’t be—he had barely touched this woman, and yet, a part of him felt like he had known her for his entire life.
How was that possible?
It was crazy.
Chris let Valeria’s wrists go just so he could cup her jaw and draw her even closer to him as his tongue teased the seam of her lips. He wanted in—wanted to taste her, and if that meant handing over his soul to this woman to get what he wanted, then fine.
So fucking be it.
Their tongues clashed, a war in a kiss, if that were possible. Her fingers found the neckline of his shirt, curling tight, and holding close. She seemed determined to lick the taste of him right from his mouth with her kiss, and as much as he liked that, he still needed to talk to her.
