“Tell no one,” Vera said. “Our secret.” She left the room.

“Secrets,” Kelly mumbled. Maybe I should make a list of them so I can keep them straight. With a grimace, she picked up the magazine and began to turn the pages. If she did marry Pauly, what dress would he like the most?

She took a breath. This wasn’t going to be her wedding. She had been dumped. She tossed the magazine aside and picked up her textbook.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Is there anything else I can get for you?” Gabby asked. She was short, round and very curvy.

“No,” Miguel mumbled. Gabby was a good cook, a good housekeeper, good at everything a wife needed to do. He pushed away from the table.

“You should take Gabby to the dance,” Forey said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Very much,” Gabby answered. When she looked at Miguel, her eyes seemed to turn liquid.

“Can’t,” Miguel said. “I have to...work.”

“You can take the night off,” Rafe said. He was reading the newspaper. “Gabby would like to go. She never gets out of the house.”

Miguel looked at the three of them, with their identical expressions of pleading, and headed for the door. “Sorry. I have to go. I need... I need money for something.” He knew he’d regret it but he glanced at Gabby’s left hand. Let them think what they would.

He ran out the door, got into his pickup and raced out. He had no idea where he was going. Maybe he’d keep going until he reached his home in Taos. At the moment, his loud, overbearing brothers seemed easier than the soft, pleading eyes of Gabrielle.

Miguel was driving as though demons were chasing him, which, in his mind, they were. He took a farm road, where no one would think to look for him, but he kept glancing in his rearview mirror. He wouldn’t be surprised to see Rafe following him.

Because he was distracted, he didn’t see the old truck was sticking out in the road.

He went around the sharp curve too fast, saw the rusty bed with the stakes sticking out of the back, then cut hard right. Just before he went into a ditch, he cut left and stopped about twenty feet from the old truck. As he looked in his side-view mirror, he could feel his temper rising. Who the hell had left a truck there? Someone could have been killed. They could—He leaned forward toward the mirror. Stepping around the truck was a woman. She was tall and thin and had hair that he’d recognize anywhere. “Vera,” he whispered.

She was hurrying toward him, a worried look on her face. She’d grown up to be pretty, but then, he’d always known she would. He opened the door.