Maximum Security by Tracy Montoya

Author:Tracy Montoya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2004-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The afternoon before Gina Markson’s memorial service, Maggie sat in her office window seat, wrapped in a worn quilt her grandmother had made her, and stared at the sea. A sharp, cool wind blowing in from the west rippled across the Pacific, stirring up white-caps and making the water spray high into the air when it hit the jagged rocks along the shoreline. Not that the water was calm even when there was no wind. The ocean near most of Monterey Peninsula was always foaming, moving, crashing. Almost monthly, you heard news reports of someone falling into the deep pools near some areas of the shoreline, never to be seen again. And though some intrepid swimmers took their surfboards out at times, surfing even the calmest stretches of water was dangerous, due to the many riptides and undertows.

It had been fun, though.

Maggie pulled the quilt tighter around herself. Fun. It wasn’t fun being locked inside your house for eighteen months, fearing a horrible death at the hands of a maniac. But in her house she remained, scared out of her mind. Literally.

Her heart thundered in her chest at the sound of a key scraping in the front door lock. Billy. It’s just Billy, she told herself, back from running some errands right when he said he’d be. She forced herself to remain seated like a normal person, instead of lunging for the nearest weapon the way she wanted to.

As soon as he stepped in the door, he called out his presence, and her pulse returned to normal. They hadn’t done much more than work and continue the longest game of chess she’d ever played, but she felt comfortable with him in her house. Sometimes, on the rarest and quietest of moments, she even felt relaxed.

Weird.

Shrugging the quilt off her shoulders, she spun around to face the door, just as Billy walked into the room. The gold hoop in his left ear glinted in the fading sunlight, and the black Lakers sweatshirt he wore with his jeans brought out the ever-present five o’clock shadow on his face. When she’d first met him, she’d thought he had to work to get his stubble that perfect, but it turned out he just hated shaving.

She smiled hello at him, and then an incredible aroma coming from the bags he carried hit her square in the hunger pangs. “Oh. My. God. Don’t tell me you went to Mariposa.”

Raising one dark eyebrow at her—a trick she couldn’t mimic even if she practiced in the mirror—he set the white plastic bags on her desk and flipped them around so the logo on them faced her. An orange butterfly fluttered in between script letters that did indeed spell out Mariposa, the name of the excellent and relatively undiscovered Cuban restaurant half a mile from her house.

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, reveling in the smells of lime-marinated chicken, arroz con frijoles negros, and maybe, if her nose wasn’t playing tricks on her, fried platanos. “Wow. I haven’t had Mariposa in months.

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