So, he told her about life in the desert. Harvesting saguaro fruit and cooking them down to syrup. Going on Salt Pilgrimage with other young O’odham men. Playing basketball with boys from the local youth club every Friday night. Growing tepary beans and corn with his grandfather. Watching his grandmother weave baskets. Learning the hard way not to get stuck by the spines of a cholla cactus.
“Those are painful—let me tell you. They’ll make you bleed.”
“Ouch.” Winona scooted back until she was sitting with her back against the headboard. She seemed more relaxed and less afraid now. “I bet that’s a mistake you don’t make twice.”
“Truth.” He sat beside her. “The fruit is tasty, but you have to get the spines off first. My grandmother made it look easy, but it isn’t.”
“Why did it end—your relationship with your fiancée?”
The question took Jason by surprise. So, too, did the realization that he didn’t mind talking about it with Winona.
She mistook his silence for something else. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“No, it’s okay. I was just surprised.” Jason took a breath, wondering where to start. “Elena is O’odham, too. We met in high school.”
Jason told her how he’d lost track of Elena while he was away at college and then the training academy and how they’d gotten reacquainted one night at a party that his friends had hosted to welcome him back to Sells.
“We started dating. She had a hair salon and wanted to make life better for our people—or so I thought.” Jason saw it all differently now—her love of nice things, her constant talk about money, her focus on appearances. She’d only wanted to make life better for herself. “Every weekend when I was working, she went to visit her auntie in Tucson, taking her food, picking up her medicine for her, doing her hair and nails.”
“That was kind of her.”
Jason had to laugh. “That’s what I thought.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A little more than six months ago, I was working, cutting sign along the border. I got a text from my boss to come to his office. A DEA officer was waiting for me there. He told me that they had just arrested Elena for trafficking cocaine—part of a long investigation. They recorded her bragging about how she was engaged to a Shadow Wolf and how she’d learned by listening to him how to avoid feds.”
It had felt like a physical blow—a bullet through his chest.
“Oh, Jason!”
“When prosecutors questioned her, she told them how drug runners dropped off cocaine at her salon in shampoo boxes and how she transported it to a house in Tucson for five grand per trip every time she visited her auntie. She’d gotten away with it for years, right under my nose. She just didn’t want to live on my salary.”
Winona shifted so that she faced him. “I’m so sorry. That must have hurt. You trusted her. Youlovedher.”
“I’m grateful I found out when I did and not a few months later when we would have been married.” He’d have had a divorce to contend with then. “But, yes, it hurt.”
“You broke up with her?”
“The same day.” Elena’s tear-stained face flashed through Jason’s mind. “I went to the jail. I needed to hear from her why she’d done it. She expected me to bail her out and help her pay for an attorney. Instead, I ended things. She knew drug runners hadmurderedmy parents. She knew I’d spent my entire adult life busting people who did what she’d done, that I’d lost fellow Wolves, that I’d been shot. Still, she’d gone to work for the enemy. That’s what hurt the most. It felt like a betrayal of everything I am.”
Winona laced her fingers through his. “Itwasa betrayal.”
Jason looked into Winona’s guileless eyes, saw nothing there but compassion. He tried to hold back, but he couldn’t. He leaned forward—and kissed her.
* * *
The sweet shockof Jason’s lips against hers made Winona’s breath catch. Heart skipping, she leaned into the kiss, resting her palms against his bare chest. All else faded from her mind, the world around her melting away until there was nothing left but the two of them.
The searing press of his lips. The silken caress of his tongue. The spicy scent of his skin. The rapid beating of his heart beneath her palms. The hard feel of his body.
Oh, yes.
He sat fully upright, slid one big hand into her hair, and turned the two of them, bearing her back onto the mattress, his lips never leaving hers.
Anticipation shivered through her, just the weight of him arousing. It had been so long since she’d been with a man. But Jason wasn’t just any man. He kissed her like he meant it, paying attention to the tiniest details—the dip at the center of her upper lip, the outline of her lower lip, the corners of her mouth.
At last, he broke the kiss, the intensity of his gaze making her pulse skip. “Are you sure you want this?”