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  Love’s Second Chance

  M. L. Buchman

  Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

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  About the Author

  Also by M. L. Buchman

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  Chapter One

  “You really stepped in some shit this time, Alejandra Martinez.” She didn’t even know where to direct her fire. Or if she should fire at all.

  Lying prone on the roof of the highest building in the area, a whole two stories, gave her the best vantage of the cesspool that had been her hometown for over twenty-five years. US-Mexican border towns sucked, especially when they were on the Mexican side. But she’d never found a way to leave it.

  If she started shooting over the low parapet of aged adobe, they’d know she was up here and that could start to suck really fast. Of course another couple of hours up here in the midday sun baking her butt on an adobe grill and maybe she would be ready to shoot all of the assholes who had conspired to trap her up here. They’d gotten blood on her new jeans and sneakers, which was really pissing her off. At least it wasn’t hers.

  “Next time you’re stuck in a street war and trying to survive, remember to bring milk and cookies. Or at least some water.” Good reminder, if she ever got out of this one. A six of cold beer sounded good too.

  Life had been so much simpler twenty-four hours ago. She’d had a lover, a lousy-as-shit job—making it only a little better than her lover—and something that sort of resembled a place to be.

  Now she had a cartel war surrounding the building she lay on top of, and her job was dead—her former employer had owned most of the blood she was wearing. Too bad her job had been to protect his stupid ass. He’d not only been stupid enough to piss off the Alvarado cartel that controlled all the contraband traffic through this town, he’d neglected to tell her he was also setting up the street gangs for a hard fall. They’d found out. Everyone wanted him dead and it was hard to blame them.

  The steady crack of automatic gunfire and the hard thwaps of bullets impacting on stone and metal echoed up and down the streets below. These guys were using ammo like it was free. As far as she could tell they were either fighting over who got to claim taking the idiot down, or they were having a gunfight just for the hell of it.

  “This town is really going down the toilet.”

  “Wasn’t all that impressive to begin with,” a deep voice resonated from close behind her.

  As she swung around, a big hand grabbed the barrel of her rifle, stopping it halfway to its new target.

  There’d been no sound.

  No warning. Not a creak or shift of the rotten roof timbers.

  A big muchacho knelt close behind her on the roof. He was loaded for action. He held a combat rifle in one hand and her rifle barrel in the other as calmly as if it was the other end of an umbrella or something. Despite his light jacket she could see a pair of Glock 19s in twin shoulder holsters and would wager he had more ammo and another hidden carry or two on him.

  A glance past him—the roof access hatch was still closed and latched.

  “How the hell did you—” But then she recognized him and knew. “Hector Garcia? Haven’t seen your pretty face since Marina was still a virgin.” Which was close enough to never. Her little sister had probably seduced her first boy from side-by-side bassinets at the hospital and hadn’t slowed down since. At times it was hard to tell if she was a whore or just a slut.

  Actually, Hector’s wasn’t a pretty face, not even the part that wasn’t covered by his wrap-around shades and a scruff of three-day beard that looked good on him. He’d broken his nose twice that she knew of, and now maybe a third time by the look of it. She still remembered the knife fight that had earned him the wavering scar from jawline to temple. His dark hair was long, the way he’d worn it ever since he’d lost an ear during a street brawl. He might be a mess, but Hector also looked really good. He used to be one of those slender and dangerous types. Now he was a powerfully wide and dangerous type.

  And at the moment…she must look like shit. Just perfect.

  She’d been riding guarda on a candidate for congress presently bleeding out in the middle of the plaza. What idiota campaigned in favor of building a wall on the Mexican side of the border to stop drugs and illegal emigration? That was American-style craziness. But he’d paid her more than she could make anywhere else even marginally legal—which meant he was also on the take in a dozen different ways and worried about it. She could have defended him against one or two shooters. But the two gangs duking it out on the streets below had brought them to his speech by the truckload. She’d dropped four before her sense of self-preservation kicked in.

  Now Alejandra was really pissed about the blood on her. She’d also crawled through a shattered luncheon buffet on her way up to the roof. Total mess.

  Not usual at all for her to think about how she looked in the middle of a gunfight, but she and Hector had a past—even if it was a long-ago past—and her last shred of vanity had been drowned in reeking mole sauce and blood.

  He let go of the barrel and she sat up to get a better look at him.

  “Shit, woman!” He placed a big hand on top of her head and shoved her back down onto the roof.

  Moments later a single bullet cracked by overhead. She’d drawn exactly the kind of attention she hadn’t wanted.

  Hector rose quickly onto one knee, then swung his rifle up so fast she could barely follow it. No time to aim. No time for anything. He just fired: two shots, a hesitation with a slight shift upward, then a third. He dropped back down. “That should take care of that.”

  She’d been a shooter of one form or another ever since she was little: possum as a kid, armadillos to put meat on the table after Dad had bugged out, and bad guys as a policewoman—until the drug lords made that too dangerous a beat. But she’d never seen anything even close to what Hector had just done. He’d barely even looked for the target. Maybe the sound of the bullet had been enough. Maybe for him. And she knew if she tracked down the corpse—for she had no doubt that’s all it was now—it would have two holes close together in the chest and one more in the head.

  There was certainly no return shot whistling aloft from below.

  “Sorry,” she should have stayed down.

  “De nada! So,” Hector lay on the roof beside her. “You busy much?”

  “You saw the body in the plaza?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was my meal ticket. No major loss—wasn’t much of a lover either.”

  Hector’s face darkened at her second statement.

  She swung the butt of her rifle into his gut, aiming between a pouch of ammo and a Glock 19. She caught him hard enough to earn her an angry grunt.

  “You been gone, hombre. You don’t get to judge shit.”

  He shrugged one shoulder in agreement, but didn’t look much happier about it.

  Well, neither was she. Especially not with Hector Garcia lying just inches away to remind her of how good her best lover ever had been.

  The gunfire down on the plaza was dying down. Probably running out of ammo at the rate they were using it.

  “Why? You got any bright ideas on how to keep me busy?�
�

  “More than few,” his easy leer said plenty. But she still knew him well enough to know that sex wasn’t the only thing he had on his mind.

  Chapter Two

  Hector had remembered Alejandra Rosa Martinez as a total knock-out, but that was nothing compared to what he’d found up on the roof.

  He’d come back to his shithole of a hometown for a mission, not looking for her. Not really. In five years his life had totally changed—no reason to assume that hers had stayed the same. Or that she’d be real interested in seeing him. But a few questions about her had led him to the plaza, just as all hell had broken loose.

  He hadn’t expected to walk into a gunfight, though four years in the US Rangers and another year as a Delta Force operator had let him see the patterns quickly. There was an obvious hole in the battle running from door to door.

  The policia were wisely hanging back a couple blocks and waiting it out—though they needed a real lesson about how bullets skipped along concrete walls and he hoped they didn’t catch one. It was the reason that war zone photos always showed the US military walking up the center of a street rather than hugging the buildings.

  But whatever sides were fighting around the plaza and up on the low roofs, the lack of action from the best vantage point spoke volumes. Somebody held the high ground, which meant they were defending it, but there was no sign they were using it. Someone smart—maybe like Alejandra. He got up to the second story inside the building, leaving only a few broken bones behind him. Not a one of them understood that it would hurt less if they’d just let go of their gun when he was ripping it out of their hands.

  At a rear, second-story window, he’d managed to reach up high enough to loop his rifle’s sling over a protruding outside timber and used his rifle as a ladder to haul himself onto the roof. There he’d been confronted by one of the finest asses he’d ever seen.

  How Alejandra had gotten even better looking in the years he’d been gone, he’d never know. It shouldn’t be possible, but it was true.

  “You done here?” he nodded toward the plaza.

  “Shit, you think?” her sarcastic tongue hadn’t changed one bit.

  “Good. Got a job I could use some help on.”

  “You show up out of the blue after five years and you suddenly need help from me? Hector, you’re an asshole. You know that, right?”

  “Sure.”

  She snarled at him.

  “Never argue with a lady when she’s right,” he threw one of her favorite sayings back in her face.

  Her growl went deep and feline, but when he belly-crawled to the roof access, she followed.

  He unsnapped the latch without making a sound. She had her rifle ready to aim down when he opened the hatch. With a shake of his head, he warned her off.

  He flipped the release and threw the hatch wide.

  They both rolled away from it. Moments later, a half dozen wild shots cut upward through the hatch. One shooter. Off center to the right.

  He aimed through the roof itself and laid down a short line of fire. Crawling across it earlier, it was clear that it wasn’t much of a roof. The rounds punched through easily.

  Alejandra did the same from the other side and her angle looked good.

  Hector rolled back and dove through.

  The shooter was down.

  Alejandra dropped in beside him, so close it was hard not to just grab her. With a toe of her boot, she kicked the shooter over. He’d been hit both front and back. She’d always been good, but somewhere along the way, she’d gotten even better.

  “Alvarado’s eldest. They were both really pissed when I wouldn’t marry him. His dad, Miguel, is not going to be happy about this.” She nudged a boot against him again, hard to believe he was finally dead.

  “Good,” Hector offered her a smile. “You can tell Miguel yourself when he finds you in his bed tonight.”

  “That’s part of your plan for…whatever?”

  It wasn’t, but he’d forgotten how much fun it was to tease her. For a second he thought she might try aiming her rifle at him again and he was ready for that.

  Instead she kicked him in the shins. Hard.

  Chapter Three

  Whatever Hector was into, Alejandra wasn’t interested.

  But she was.

  They scrounged lunch in the deserted first floor café while the gun battle finished dying off around them. They sat side by side in the cool darkness of the kitchen, their backs against the steel door of the walk-in refrigerator and good visibility of both approaches—each with their rifle across their lap. They’d found cold beer, but Hector had opted for water so she’d done the same.

  “Where the hell did you go, Hector?”

  “North.” The only thing north was the US.

  “Why?”

  His frown said he didn’t like that question. Not a bit.

  She finished her empanada then nudged his ribs with the butt of her rifle.

  “You told me to go. Said you’d kill me if you ever saw me again,” his face said that his second empanada tasted like bitter sand. He chucked it under the sink.

  Alejandra thought back to the day he’d gone. She’d been furious with him for something, then he’d bugged out and she never had a chance to take it back. What was…

  Marina! Her slut of a sister had bragged about taking down Hector.

  “You weren’t supposed fuck my sister while you were with me.”

  “Didn’t.”

  She opened her mouth, then shut it again. One thing about Hector, he never lied. He might keep his trap shut, but he never lied.

  “Pissed her off some that I wouldn’t.”

  Whereas her little sister lied about everything—and Alejandra always fell for it. Big sisters were supposed to trust their little sisters. But she’d described certain things about Hector that only a lover would know…or someone who’d spied on him making love. “Shit! I’m gonna strangle the little bitch.”

  Again Hector’s indifferent shrug.

  “So I tell you to go and you just do? No argument?”

  “You had a .357 revolver aimed at my crotch. I’m not gonna argue with that. I know how good a shot you are.”

  “And you don’t even try to come back?”

  Hector looked over at her with those sad, puppy-dog eyes of his. She’d never been able to resist those. Six foot of tough hombre was not supposed to have window-to-his-soul kind of eyes, but he always had. “Without you, I had nothing here.”

  And he hadn’t. His family made hers look like all the good bits of a Thalía telenovela.

  “Five years.” Somehow they’d lost five years. “Five goddamn years.”

  Chapter Four

  Hector leaned his head back against the refrigerator door and closed his eyes. Yeah, he’d abandoned her to this hell for five years. If she’d done it to him, he’d never forgive her. Shit.

  Closing his eyes didn’t help.

  Now he wasn’t seeing her long flow of softly curling black hair with just a hint of her grandmother’s dark gold, framing that perfect face. He couldn’t see the proud curves above her slender waist that he had so loved to bury his face in. But he could smell her: rich, dark, spicy—overlaid with drying mole sauce on her tight jeans. Like a mix of the lush bounty of the goddess Mayahuel and the fierce and deadly earth goddess Tlaltecuhtli. She had seemed that way ever since they’d sat side by side in primaria school desks and learned about the ancient Aztecs.

  And she was still that even now, squatting in a darkened kitchen waiting out the stupid shit going on outside: lush, dangerous, and so goddamn good to look at.

  He’d landed his fair share of bar babes over the years. His ugly excuse for a face drew in as many as it put off. Not a one had been worth even half of Alejandra Rosa Martinez.

  He shouldn’t have tracked her down; it was just messing with his head. She wasn’t essential to the mission—though it was a better angle than the one he’d thought up while planning back at Fort Bragg. His assi
gnment was to investigate and assess, then call for what assets he needed. If he shifted his plan to include Alejandra, he had all he needed right here.

  Reading the profile on cartel boss Miguel Alvarado had brought up too many memories, too much anger. He shouldn’t have taken the assignment.

  Missions can never be personal. The commanders of Delta Force had beat that into his head again and again. Yet this time it was. His hometown. His family that had been destroyed. And now, in a file handed to him like a random draw, he knew why.

  But he had tracked her down.

  He thumped his head back against the refrigerator door.

  Just walk away, Hector. You did it to her before, you can do it again. It’s safer that way. Better for her. Sucks totally for you. But since when was that anything new?

  Even knowing the right course of action, Hector knew he didn’t have the strength to do it again. She was all the past he had. There was no way she could fit into his current life—she wasn’t exactly the patient housewife sort—but there was no way he could stand to pry her back out of his heart now that he’d found her. Not that he’d ever been able to.

  “So, what’s Alvarado up to this time—other than gunning down my meal ticket? And why you?” Even her voice—he’d even missed the sound of her voice. He remembered it like yesterday.

  Hector sighed. There was no way to resist having her by his side, so he should just give in. Even if it would only be on a mission.

  “Miguel Alvarado is known for moving drugs and immigrants across the border. Pain in the ass, but the US has had plenty of bigger fish to fry.”

  He could feel her shrug as a movement through the cool metal against his back.

  “He’s gone a whole lot lower—human trafficking for the sex trade—and it’s time to shut his ass down.”

  “Shit!” Her sound of utter disgust said that was news to her. “Why you?”