“You do that, and make it good.” The phone clicked as he hung up, and Susanna turned off her phone.
She took a deep breath. Well, the plan was simple: seduce her husband. Executing the plan, though, was going to be a bitch.
12
A week went by in which Milla didn’t hear anything from either True or Diaz; she didn’t expect to learn anything from True, now that she knew she’d been on the wrong track thinking Diaz had been involved in Justin’s kidnapping, but she did expect True to at least call and tell her he didn’t have any new information.
She felt constantly on edge, expecting to see Diaz every time she turned a corner or opened a door. Sometimes she had the sensation of being watched and she would look around, but if he was there, she never spotted him. Why would he be trailing her anyway? He was probably somewhere in Mexico, doing whatever it was he did, legal or otherwise.
She should feel more relaxed, with him gone. Whenever he was anywhere near, all her senses were on high alert, as if she were in the presence of a half-tamed animal that she couldn’t fully trust. But when he wasn’t there and her sense of danger faded, then her guard dropped and she would sometimes be blindsided by an insidious pang of desire.
It was insane. She’d been attracted to other men since David, had tried to have other relationships. She was aware that there was some chemistry between her and True Gallagher, though her reasons for not responding to it were valid and she didn’t have even the smallest temptation to change her mind. Being physically attracted to Diaz, however, was alarming. He was the most unsafe man she’d ever met, and she didn’t mean in terms of sexually transmitted diseases. He could be devastatingly violent. She hadn’t seen it, had tasted only a small fraction of his potential the night he’d jumped her in Guadalupe, but she could read it in his eyes, in the reactions of people who had heard of him or had anything to do with him.
She would have to be a fool to consider anything other than a working relationship with him—and that was assuming he was capable of having a relationship. Sex, yes—relationship, no. That would require an emotional bond she didn’t think he wanted to make, or was even capable of making. Besides, did she really want to crawl into bed with a man she was half afraid of?
Maybe just once, her libido whispered, which told her how tempted she truly was, because she’d never before had a problem refusing personal gratification if it interfered with her relentless search for Justin. Diaz was the best shot she’d ever had at finding out what had happened to her son, and she didn’t dare do anything to upset the status quo.
Once she acknowledged the dangerous attraction she felt for him, she became even more nervous as she waited for him to turn up in that unexpected way he had. Part of her, the deeply feminine part that yearned for the touch of a strong male, wanted to see if the tug of desire was there in person, or if she had just imagined it in the safety of his absence. Logically, however, she knew she should never give him the slightest indication that she saw him as a sexual being, and the best way to do that was to stay away from him. Since that wasn’t possible, the big question was could she clamp down on her response and keep him from seeing the slightest glimmer of interest? In view of his acute awareness of his surroundings and the intense way he watched people, she would have to be doubly careful.
After he located Pavón for her, perhaps—
No. She couldn’t let herself even think that. She couldn’t hang the possibility out there like a constant temptation, a reward at the end of the trail. She had to put her physical responses in deep freeze and concentrate on only one thing: Justin. That had worked for ten years, and it would work again. The only relationships she had allowed herself to have were with men who didn’t elicit a strong enough attraction that she wasn’t always in complete control. She could and had put them in second place without a moment’s thought. With Diaz she was afraid she wouldn’t have that control, and now of all times, when she finally had a concrete lead to Justin, she couldn’t afford to give that control up.
Because she was so nervous, when Susanna happened to catch her on a night when she didn’t have anything to do and asked her out to dinner with them, she gladly seized the chance to get away from her own thoughts for a while. Normally she preferred to enjoy her rare free evenings at home, but she felt as if the other shoe was waiting to drop and the mental tension was driving her crazy.
Determined to enjoy the evening, she put on one of her favorite dresses, a pale, creamy yellow sleeveless silk, with a swingy skirt that flirted with her knees when she walked. Though rain had indeed broken the heat wave and eased temperatures back down to normal, normal in El Paso in August was still hot, and the dress was wonderfully cool. Back when she and David were dating, they had often gone dancing, and this dress reminded her of the dresses she had worn then. Now that she was older, she realized what an effort David had made in his courtship of her, because he’d been in his residency program then and perpetually short of sleep. She loved to dance, though, so he had used his precious off-time to take her dancing.
The memory had her smiling as she opened the door to Rip when he and Susanna came to collect her. She had offered to drive herself and meet them at the restaurant, but Rip was protective of her, had been since the day Justin was stolen and she herself had nearly died from her wounds. He nearly always insisted on picking her up and making certain she was safely home whenever she had dinner with them.
“Hi there,” he said, smiling at her. “Spiffy dress.”