Page 37 of Vicious Temptation

“Misfire?”

“Yeah.”

“Coils?”

“I swapped them.”

“Plugs?”

“Checked.”

A beat passes between us, and I can almost hear the words sitting on his tongue before he finally says them.

“Then maybe it’s not the car.”

My fingers tighten on the throttle. “It’s the car. It’s always the car.”

He doesn’t argue, but watches me for a long moment, then eases ahead again.

There isn’t much he doesn’t know about me, and we’ve never been the kind of family that keeps things from one another. I’m not trying to start now. I just don’t see the point in telling him I let someone get close without knowing something as basic as what he did for a living.

After everything that happened, we all know better than to forget there are still people out there who could come for us. Thiago turned out to be a cop, but he could have been someone far worse, and I let him get close enough that Zara was standing only a few feet away from him.

“You’re riding tense,” he calls back after a while.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

I hate that he can tell, but I force my shoulders to loosen and my breathing to even out. We ride like that for a few more miles until he hangs back again, pacing me.

“You gonna talk to me, princesa, or how long are we gonna play this game?”

I hesitate, keeping my eyes on the road as the yellow lines blur beneath me. “Met someone,” I finally say.

He keeps riding, waiting for me to continue, but when I don’t, he presses.

“Yeah? And?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking. Not even close. But I let him in, and he turned out to be something I wasn’t expecting.”

Another stretch of road passes beneath us before he speaks again. “Turned out to be what, exactly?”

There’s enough warning in his voice to make me smile despite everything.

“He lied about what he does. Tried to hide the fact that he’s a cop.”

“Oh.”

A hollow chuckle crackles through my speaker.

“Yeah. A cop is the last thing I need in my life. The last thing any of us needs is someone poking around, digging into things that will only end badly for them.”

“But it’s not what you wanted?”

“No one wants to be lied to, Papi. But if you’re asking if I’m torn up or missing him, I’m not. I barely know the guy. I just…” I exhale. “I wanted to know him.”

Maybe that’s the part bothering me, that I wanted to see where something went instead of finding a reason to walk away from it.