gonna like it.”
She trusted him. As they wound into the canyons, she let the rugged beauty of the Texas landscape wash over her. It was rough country. But tough. Like her and Gabe. They’d survived an ordeal that would have broken someone with less courage. With less to live for.
She smiled as Gabe turned the Escalade into the scenic overlook the local kids called Lover’s Point.
“I thought for once you might like to come up here for more than the view. Wanna make out?” he asked gruffly.
“With you? Always.”
“About Melinda. I was talking about you with the doctors when I said I loved you. She misunderstood and barged out to spout all that crap about marrying me. I’m totally over her,” he finished adamantly. “You’ve got to believe me.”
“What about that other part you told the doctors. That you were planning to propose?”
“Well. About that.” He got out of the car and came around to open her door for her. He escorted her to the front of the car where a towering thunderhead blocked the sun. It was backlit in shades of lavender and gray, with a corona of sunbeams bursting outward in all directions like the promise of a new day.
“Are you sure I’m not too old for you, Willa?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like you’re a hundred years old, Gabe.”
He laughed and knelt on one knee in front of her. “Then, if you will have this old wreck, would you make me the happiest man on earth and do me the honor of becoming my wife?”
Her heart expanded as big as the Texas sky and filled with as many colors of joy. “Oh, yes, Gabe. I will. I definitely will.”
* * * * *
Don’t miss the next romance in the
VENGEANCE IN TEXAS series: Carla Cassidy’s
A PROFILER’S CASE FOR SEDUCTION,
available next month.
Keep reading for an excerpt from Colton Showdown by Marie Ferrarella.
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Chapter 1
He wasn’t one of those people who had an obsession about cleanliness. Tate Colton had never had a problem with getting his hands—or any other part of him, for that matter—dirty, if the job required it. That kind of dirt he could put up with and ignore.
But dealing with these subhuman creatures who made their living trafficking in human flesh, in destroying young lives and thinking absolutely nothing of it, was an entirely different matter. It made him want to go back to the hotel room where he was registered under his assumed name and take a shower. A long, scalding-hot shower to wash away their stink.
Once he received the assignment from his supervisor, Hugo Villanueva, he knew that going undercover in order to find and save the Amish young women who had been kidnapped would require him to associate with, in his opinion, the absolute dregs of the earth.
Dregs in expensive suits.
You could dress a monkey up in fine clothes, but he was still a monkey, Tate thought. No amount of expensive clothing could change that, or change the fact that the people he was forced to interact with were lower than scum.
He’d think more about stepping on a beetle than he would about terminating the existence of one of these cockroaches.
To look at the man who had brought him up to this particular hotel suite—his current tour guide to this underworld—someone might have thought the man was a successful businessman or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company instead of the utterly soulless lowlife that he actually was.
Impeccably dressed in what was easily a thousand-dollar suit, his guide to this lurid world of virgins-for-sale smirked at him confidently as he opened the door leading into the suite’s bedroom.
“I’m sure we can find something to pique your appetite, Mr. Conrad,” he said.
Tate scowled at the shorter man. “I said no names,” he snapped, mindful of the part he was playing in this surreal drama.
The other man laughed, enjoying what he considered to be the display of ignorance on the part of this new client.
“Nothing to be worried about. What are they going to do?” he asked, gesturing