Running Wild. Susan Andersen

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      Or if he had simply been brainwashed by all the happy-happy shit that seemed to surround him these days.

      His gut told him it was the latter, but with these chick-type thoughts popping into his head lately, who was to say his gut wasn’t overcompensating?

      In any event, he didn’t have to figure out everything right this minute. All he really needed to do this evening was drink his beer, check out the pretty girl and contemplate which route in this part of the Andes he most wanted to hike. And relax. Yeah, especially that.

      Above all else he’d come here to relax.

      * * *

      THIS WAS THE WORST damn birthday Magdalene Deluca could ever remember. God knew, a few back in her early teens had been pretty crappy, but that happened when a girl’s parents shipped her off to boarding school in order to free up more time to pour their missionary fervor into other people’s kids. Gazing at the shot of tequila the bartender had just given her, she was sorely tempted to toss it back where she stood and hold out the empty for a refill. Hey, she liked to party as much as the next woman and if she got a little buzzed...well, there was no one here she had to be accountable to for her behavior.

      A bitter laugh escaped her. No shit.

      All the same, she walked away from the bar, took a seat at a nearby table and simply stared for a moment into the pale amber liquor. Then she picked up a wedge of lime, bit into it and tossed back the shot of tequila. She shuddered as warmth flowed down her throat and spread through her veins. Yet it didn’t touch the coldness in the pit of her stomach. But that was her own fault. Because, dammit, would she never learn?

      She’d taken a leave of absence from her life in California to come running down here. The last two letters from her mother had detailed Nancy Deluca’s distress with the way the Munoz cartel, over her frequent, clearly stated objections, kept trying to recruit some of the barely teenaged boys and girls the Delucas mentored. It wasn’t the letters alone that had brought Mags to El Tigre, however, although those had certainly set up a niggling in the pit of her stomach. It was the way all communication from her mom suddenly ceased after she’d received them. That had really made her get her butt in gear.

      The abrupt lack of communication had given her a very bad feeling. Because while both the United States and the relatively newer, kinder El Tigre regime had worked to clean up the proliferation of drug cartels down here, plenty of crime syndicates still existed. So did the violence that accompanied them. And despite a bombardment of government-sponsored aerial herbicide spraying, illegal coca crops hadn’t been wiped out. Some of the minor grow farms had disappeared, but the larger cartels had merely scaled down their operations and redistributed them to a few smaller, harder-to-reach plots.

      Mags hadn’t seen her parents in years. But she didn’t think for a minute that her very vocal mother had changed during their time apart. Nancy had never been shy about stating her disapproval over anything she considered wrong.

      Mags worried that very fact might have put her parents in danger.

      Well, fool me once, right? Because, it turned out she was a chump. No, hell, why be so modest?

      She was the freakin’ queen of chumps.

      She had dropped everything and wiped out her meager savings. Worse, she’d given up a prime makeup-artist position on a space epic that would have rocked and for which she had campaigned for over a year. All in order to run to the rescue.

      God, wasn’t that rich? Considering she’d been informed by her parents’ landlord when she arrived at their place that the missionaries had gone back to the States on a sabbatical.

      They’d just up and left. Without mentioning a word to her about it.

      She knew it shouldn’t come as a shock, or feel like such a betrayal. Heck, she’d learned five months, two weeks and three days after her thirteenth birthday that not only wasn’t she a priority in her parents’ lives, but she was an obstruction to their accomplishing everything they’d come to El Tigre to get done. So if they didn’t feel the need to let her know that they’d be in the States for a while, well...fine, then. It was nothing new. And she frankly didn’t give a rat’s ass.

      Or not much of one, anyhow.

      Mags straightened in her seat. Why was she even thinking about this anyway? Families were what they were; whining about it was pointless. Looking around for something to distract her from her thoughts, she caught a guy checking her out.

      Great. That was what she needed—some local lounge lizard looking to score. And yet...

      Locking eyes when his lazy gaze reached her face, she found herself unable to look away. For one thing, she was wrong. His coloring might fit with the locals, but he was definitely American. It was clear in the clothing and excellent dentistry.

      Brown hair flopped in deep-set bittersweet chocolate-colored eyes and it took some effort to tear her gaze away. But given the way the rest of her day had gone, gawking instead at the wide shoulders that topped what she could see of a lean, muscular frame probably wasn’t an improvement, so she went back to admiring that face.

      Its flesh was close to the bone and, coupled with his long bony nose, gave him the austere look of a Trappist monk. Yet when she met his dark-eyed gaze again, she encountered a world of heat.

      And for a single tempting instant she considered going over to his table and starting something up. She had a boatload of aggression she’d just love to work off.

      But...no. She was going to collect the beater car she’d left down in the valley, where the economically depressed barrio that had been her folks’ most recent stomping grounds gave way to a neighborhood a bit more affluent. Or where she’d at least had less fear that she’d come back to find the car sitting on its axles, stripped of its few amenities. With a final regretful look at the hot monk guy, she picked up her huge purse and headed for the door, pulling the tote’s long strap over her head and settling the bag cross body as she walked.

      The cantina had hardly been what anyone would call a bastion of silence, but the wall of sound that came off the streets the moment Mags pushed through the doors rocked her back on her heels. The engine of a high-end SUV roared as it started up and equally noisy motorcycles wove in and out of the ubiquitous old Volkswagens clogging the narrow avenue. Young men and women laughed and talked and called to each other as they made their way between bars and restaurants. A little girl on a big bicycle pedaled within an inch of Mags’s toes.

      After dancing out of the kid’s way, she stopped at a donkey-drawn cart full of mangoes to escape the crush long enough to reset her mental compass. She bought two of the green-and-blush-colored fruits and dropped them into her purse, then made a beeline toward the street that would take her back to the route she’d used earlier to come up from the valley.

      After learning her folks had bailed without so much as a forwarding address, she’d had a potent urge to burn off the overload of furious energy that made her nerves jump and her heart pound so furiously. But had she collected her rental car like a smart person would have and gotten her butt to the airport to catch the first plane out of here? Oh, no. She’d thought climbing the steep hills to this neighborhood was a good idea.

      It didn’t make sense to her right now, but at the time it had struck her as a good way to work off her agitation.

      And to some extent it had been.

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