“Mija!” Then she frowned. “You need a shower. And some way to cover the love bite on your neck.”

Instinctively, Kata raised her hands to cover herself. Hell, Hunter had a propensity to leave behind his mark when he made love to her.

And she’d never have another mark of his possession. More misery pressed down on her, and she choked back fresh tears. This was about her mother now. Her own heartbreak could wait. God knew, she’d have a lifetime of it to deal with it.

She pasted on a plastic smile. “How are you feeling today? You look better.”

“I feel better. I am at peace for the first time in years. You can thank Hunter for that.”

Kata sent her mother a puzzled stare. “Because he took you away from Gordon?”

“And he urged me to talk to his father. Caleb and I are fine now. We will be good friends, I think. He is a good man. They both are.”

Good friends? “Yesterday, you couldn’t stand the overbearing man.”

“Hunter pointed that out to him. They had something of an argument . . . which I overheard. Do not worry about me, Mija.” Her mother grabbed her hand and squeezed. “I will recover here with Caleb. I am going to divorce Gordon and go back into nursing.”

“Really?” She’d decided all of that in one night?

At Mamá’s broad smile and nod, joy infused Kata, sugary . . . but bittersweet. She had tried for years to help her mother see another future but had encountered one barrier after another. Enter Hunter. He’d gently taken charge of Mamá. In doing so, he’d given Kata another precious gift. She’d be eternally grateful to him. Even if her life was falling apart, Mamá was getting hers together. That meant so, so much to Kata.

“That’s great!” She hugged her mother. “This will be good for you. Mari will be completely over the moon.”

“She seemed so when I called her this morning, yes.” Then something sad flitted across her face. “My sweet girl, why did you not talk to me? I cannot tell you how sorry I am that I set a poor example for you. I made you doubt yourself and cost you a marriage.”

“No,” She wanted to reassure her mother. "I . . .” What? She couldn’t reassure her mother that she’d played no role in it. “The decision not to stay in the marriage was mine.”

Mamá’s expression chided her. “Sí, because of me. I heard Hunter and Caleb arguing. It never occurred to me that you would be afraid to become like me. You?” She shook her head. “It is impossible. You are so strong.”

“Maybe today, but look what the years with Gordon have done to you.”

“Because I let them. It was not that I lacked strength to stand up to him; I lacked will.” Her mom squeezed her hand. “When your father died, I was barely thirty-three. With three growing children, no money, and a broken heart, what was I to do? When I met Gordon, he seemed like the answer to my problems. Believe me, I knew not long after the wedding that the solution was not perfect. Joaquin hated him after he overheard Gordon talk down to me. But you kids had a roof, food, good schools. Me, I did not matter so much.”

“Mamá, you married him for money? For us kids?” Until now, she’d never hinted that the union had been anything but a love match.

“It is not the first time a woman has put her children before herself. Gordon knew I did not love him, and this made him feel small, I think. So he made me feel small in return. After Joaquin moved out, and the doctors and I lost that little boy during surgery . . .” she shrugged. “Well, every day I felt my love of life dimming. I no longer cared that Gordon treated me badly. The routine of seeing to him and the house was numbing, especially after the car accident. For that, I was grateful.”

Kata shook her head slowly, shock racing through her brain. “All this time you acted as if Gordon was the man for you, but you knew . . .”

She nodded. “I did not want you kids to feel any guilt for my choices. After I turned forty and shattered my foot ... I resigned myself to life with Gordon. I was no longer young or had most of my life ahead of me.”

“You’re wrong!” Kata insisted. “You’re wonderful and deserve every happiness. Sometimes you have to fight for it and go after what you want, but—”

“Is that right, Kata?” Mamá sent her one of those cat-that-ate-the-canary smiles. “Have you fought for Hunter? He may be demanding and, at times, difficult. He is, after all, a man. But it’s unlike you not to chase what you want. Your zest for life reminds me of your father. He never let anything stand in his way.” She frowned. “All this time, I never imagined that you were keeping men at a distance for fear of becoming like me.”

When Mamá put it like that, her behavior sounded cowardly. “I’d watched Gordon browbeat you. I knew that you had to be unhappy, but you didn’t say so, didn’t change the situation.”

Her dark eyes softened with love. “Kata, you have always had far more courage and strength than I, at least until Hunter. I let your father’s death and Gordon’s behavior take mine from me, but you . . . I am proud of you, Mija. Do not make the wrong choices simply because I did. If Hunter is the other half of your heart, you should not let him get away.”

That’s exactly what she’d done, let fears and dark possibilities ruin her chance to be happy.

“Hunter overwhelms me sometimes, and I thought . . .”

“That if you stayed long enough you would become me? He knows that. Today he returns to active duty and will not be home until Christmas. You have time to sort this out. He will need the time to think, to heal. Never fear, Mija. I believe he will come back still as in love with you as ever.”

For the first time since Hunter had promised to sign their divorce papers, she genuinely smiled.

ACROSS the street from Kata’s apartment, Hunter sat in the Colonel’s Jeep. He’d driven to Lafayette this morning to talk to Jack and Deke, see Villarreal’s body for himself. That grim task behind him, he had a few hours to kill until he had to jump on a plane and head back to Venezuela.

Barnes was smoking crack if he thought all the men he sent on this mission were going to make it back alive. So he’d spent a little time this morning making sure the navy was informed of his change in marital status. If he died before the divorce was final, no reason Kata shouldn’t have everything she was entitled to as a SEAL’s widow.

He also visited Kata’s sister. As an attorney, he figured she didn’t see many clients on Saturday. As he’d predicted though, she’d made an exception for him, and agreed to meet with him, in fact was beyond eager to see him. And unload on him. After a little heart-to-heart, Mari still didn’t love him . . . but she knew the score, knew that he would always love her sister. He had the skeleton of a nice, new will, leaving everything to Kata, as a result of the meeting.

Shifting in the leather seat as the early June afternoon heated up, Hunter stared out the tinted windshield. The only thing that was missing now was for Tyler to drop Kata off safely on his way home. He’d fight down the urge to go to her and persuade her that last night wasn’t a fluke, that she could be both a strong woman and his sweet submissive and still respect herself tomorrow.

If she hadn’t figured it out yet . . . chances were that she wasn’t going to. For her sake, he had to let it go.

On the seat beside him, his cell phone vibrated. Jack’s name popped up. Hadn’t they already hashed most of the crap about Villarreal?

“What’s wrong?” he barked into the phone.

“Plenty. You’ve got good instincts. Sure you don’t want a job with Deke and me?”

Maybe if he and Kata had a future and—He cut the thought off. Pointless. “Tell me.”

Jack sighed. “I scanned Villarreal’s phone. Deke scrubbed his computer. It’s all the normal criminal shit, calls to local thugs and drug dealers. There’s just one thing missing . . . No sign of communication between your boy and the assassin. He hasn’t talked to anyone out of the 337 area code in the last month. Unless someone was hiring a hit man on his behalf, Villarreal didn’t hire Manuel Silva.”

Hunter’s blood ran cold. His first instinct had been that Villarreal was too small-time for a hit like that. In the absence of any other evidence or suspect, he’d let himself be swayed by circumstantial shit.

He pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “Goddamn it to hell! I’ve got to get on a plane in two fucking hours, and I have no idea who’s trying to kill my wife. Or why.”

“There’s no one else in her life who would want her dead?”

“No. Her mother thinks she’s a saint. Her sister adores her. Brother is all but MIA with work undercover somewhere.”

“The buddy who set you two up in the first place? Could he be the jealous type?”

“Ben? Hell no. If he wanted to kill anyone, it would be me. But he won’t fuck with me. I’ll wipe the floor with him. I’ve done it before and have no problem doing it again. “

“I’m not even sure I’d want to cross you.”

Hunter snorted. “That would be an ugly fucking fight. Man, I’ve got to solve this.”

“So no one in her life who would want her dead,” Jack mulled. “How about someone in yours?”

Hunter paused. That didn’t seem possible . . . but he couldn’t afford to rule anything out now without examining the possibility thoroughly.

“Jealous ex-girlfriend?”

“No.” He hadn’t done much more than one-night stands in years. Once he’d joined a team, his love life had been one of the first casualties.

“Anyone who would want to hurt you by hitting where it counted?”

The list of assholes who wanted to hurt him was probably long and would take too long to cull. Better to just take the logical approach.

Pushing down the panic threatening to eat away at his composure, he walked through the sequence of events. “If someone I knew wanted to hurt me by killing Kata . . . who even knew last Sunday when Silva attacked her that we’d married the night before? The people we partied with that night, whom we’ve never seen again. Ben, who wouldn’t do this.” Hunter kept moving forward chronologically. He’d only told one other person before that attack on Kata.

He froze.

“Andy Barnes.” He gripped the steering wheel, suspicion and fury poisoning his veins. “My CO.”

If he was truly guilty, Hunter vowed to rip the fucker apart limb from limb.

“Why would he want your wife dead?”

Motive was the big question mark. “We used to be buddies. His last promotion was one I turned down first. We’ve come up the ranks together. I always thought it was a friendly rivalry, but since this last promotion, he’s turned into a prick.”

Jack started tapping on a keyboard, the clacking sounds audible through the phone. “Give me all the info you’ve got on him. Full name, DOB, anything.”

Hunter had always had a head for numbers, and he thanked God now that it hadn’t deserted him. In minutes he spit out Barnes’ DOB, phone number, address, and a few other miscellaneous facts.

Less than a minute later, Jack whistled long and low. “I just tapped into your CO’s phone records. He makes a lot of calls to South America.”

“That’s not a surprise.” They had contacts down in Venezuela, informants and former government officials who didn’t like the way their country was headed now. “But he did ask quite a few questions about Kata.”

“On Saturday, he made a flurry of phone calls to a mobile phone in New Orleans. They stopped abruptly on Sunday. And based on his financials, he wasn’t in particularly good shape until he received a small wire transfer Sunday morning. It’s the kind of amount that makes me think it’s a down payment on a bigger job, you know. But the payoff hasn’t come.”

Because Kata was still alive.

“I don’t know who Barnes would be taking from . . .” Hunter skimmed his interactions with his CO. It had to be work related, and in the last two years, he’d devoted most of his missions to stopping Sotillo and his thugs. “Shit, Barnes cut my leave short to send me back to Venezuela tonight, to intercept a meeting between a drug lord and an arms dealer. The last mission with that objective was a waste. This one is suicide.”

“Maybe he wants you out of the way. Oh, your CO just received a text from someone with a Venezuelan mobile phone. It says, ‘Reaching target’s apartment in three minutes.’”

Venezuelan? Someone from Sotillo’s gang?

Hunter’s heart nearly fucking stopped in his chest. Maybe Andy had hired a new assassin to kill Kata. “Can you trace the number?”

A long pause and a few clicks later, Jack sighed. “Disposable phone.”

Shit, no tracking the possible assassin that way.