Texas…Now and Forever by Merline Lovelace Page B

glance.
    â€œYou okay, Miss Mercado?”
    The man beside her went still. Absolutely still.
    â€œMercado?” he echoed softly. Dangerously. “Did he just call you Miss Mercado?”

Nine
    H aley swallowed a curse. She’d imagined a hundred different scenarios in which she finally revealed her real identity to Luke. None of those scenarios had been played out in a parking lot, with guns drawn.
    Nor had she expected this sudden, Arctic silence. Disbelief, yes. Anger, of course. The kind of deep, visceral anger a man once accused of causing Haley Mercado’s death was entitled to feel. She suspected that would come, though, and soon.
    Delaying the inevitable, she answered the agent’s question first. “Mr. Callaghan wasn’t threatening me. We were just talking.”
    â€œDidn’t look much like talking from where we sat,” he returned. “You sure you’re okay?”
    â€œYes.”
    He eyed Luke speculatively. “Want us to hang loose while you finish your chat, Miss Mercado?”
    â€œNo. Please, just leave us alone.”
    â€œAll right. If you say so. But we’re close if you need us.”
    They retreated to the van, shutting the doors behind them. Stillness settled over the parking lot once more. The hot, dusty quiet plucked at Haley’s raw nerves like a hag with boney fingers. Bracing her shoulders, she turned to Luke.
    He might have been carved from the granite dug out of the hills of north Texas. He stood rigid, unmoving, his eyes narrowed to slits. As if he could actually see her. As if he was trying to strip away the layers of lies and deceit with which she’d cloaked herself.
    â€œI wanted to tell you the truth, Luke. You and the others. I couldn’t.”
    He didn’t answer. The silence stretched tight and thin. He broke it with a savage command.
    â€œGet in the car.”
    â€œWhat?”
    His jaw worked. “Get in the car. You’ve got some serious explaining to do, Miss Mercado. I’ve got a few things to say to you, too, but I’ll be damned if I’ll say them in a parking lot with the FBI and God knows who else listening in.”
    Â 
    The white van followed them all the way to Luke’s sprawling estate on Lake Maria.
    Since the Callaghans had made their millions in oil and the stock market, the property Luke had inherited didn’t run to thousands of acres like thecattle ranches owned by the Carsons and Wainwrights, Mission Creek’s two most prominent families. The house sat on five hundred acres of prime real estate, though, bounded by the lake to the east and low, rolling hills to the west.
    Haley pulled up at massive wrought-iron gates, which slid open at a click of the thin, quarter-size remote dangling from the key ring Luke dug out of his pocket. When she drove through, the gates slid shut again.
    â€œStop here for a moment,” Luke snapped.
    Aiming the remote at some invisible target, he clicked out a code. Haley neither saw nor heard any evidence of the security system he was obviously reactivating, but she guessed it would be elaborate given his long and frequent absences from Mission Creek.
    While her rust-spotted sedan idled just inside the gates, the FBI van rolled to a halt outside. Its headlights blazed in her rearview mirror. She half expected the driver to lean on the horn and demand entrance, but he must have radioed the FBI command center for instructions. A moment later the van backed up and parked beside the stone gate-post.
    Seeing the FBI settling in on the other side of the gate raised an odd, prickly sensation on Haley’s skin. She’d worked with them for more than a year,passing information, receiving coded instructions. Now Sean Collins’s team was on the other side of the fence, literally, and she was on her own.
    No, not on her own. She was with Luke.
    The prickly sensation intensified, raising goose bumps all up and down her arms.
    â€œIt’s