The CEO and Her Daughter's Secret Father novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Mines Road
Two SUVs box in a new CEO's pickup at a night staging lot; a hauler pulls her through his cab door and drives through the fence, and she stitches his arm in a Cotulla motel and takes him to bed; at 4:50 his burner buzzes with a name, and she lets him go.
The first bullet went through my pickup's rear window at 11:22 at night.
I had been CEO of Arriaga Freight for five months.
My father had died in October, and I still signed his name on nothing.
That night I had driven alone to a staging lot on the Mines Road to sign off one cross-border load myself.
Two black SUVs came out of the dark and boxed me in at the fence.
I stood on the brake and gripped the wheel and could not think of one thing to do.
A tractor-trailer rolled up on my left, close enough to scrape my mirror.
The passenger door of its cab swung open.
"Get in," a man shouted over the engine.
A second shot split my windshield.
I crawled across my seat, took his offered hand, and he hauled me up into the cab.
He did not look at me once.
He dropped the gear, turned the wheel hard, and drove eighty thousand pounds straight through the chain-link fence.
Behind us, one of the SUVs tried to follow and went into the drainage ditch.
Three more shots rang out before the lot fell away in the mirror.
"You're bleeding," I said.
"It's nothing." He kept his eyes on the road.
His left sleeve was black and wet from shoulder to elbow.
"Is that the kind of nothing you can drive on?"
"I've done worse."
"I'll take that as a no."
We ran north on the interstate without lights for twenty minutes, and then he turned into a motel outside Cotulla with a buzzing neon sign.
The clerk gave me a key to room six without lifting his eyes from the television.
Inside, under the yellow lamp, I saw his face for the first time.
He was maybe thirty-three, with close black curls, a short beard, and eyes the color of tea held up to a window.
A split scar ran through his lower lip.
He peeled off his jacket and the shirt under it, and the graze across his arm was long and open.
"You need a hospital," I said.
"I need you not to call one."
I looked at him for a long moment.
Then I found the sewing kit in the nightstand drawer and threaded the needle with black thread.
"Sit down, Dell."
That was the name on the patch of his shirt, and it was the only one I had.
He sat on the edge of the bed, and I knelt between his knees and put careful stitches into his arm.
He did not make a sound.
My hands were shaking, and his free hand came up and closed over both of them until they stopped.
"You did good," he said.
"I haven't done anything."
"You got in the truck."
His thumb moved across my knuckles once.
I do not know who moved first.
I know my mouth was on his, and the cut on his lip tasted of salt and engine grease.
I pushed him back onto the bedspread and straddled his hips.
"Your arm," he said against my jaw.
"Then lie still."
I pulled my blouse over my head and watched his eyes go dark.
His good hand slid up my ribs and filled itself with my breast, and I heard the sound I made.
I opened his belt myself.
He was hard against my palm, hot and heavy, and I stroked him until his head fell back and his throat worked.
"Ximena," he said, because he had read it on my badge.
It was the first time anyone had said my name was an order.
I rose over him and took him inside me one slow inch at a time.
I was soaked for him, shaking, and he filled me so completely I had to stop and breathe.
"Look at me," he said.
I looked.
I rode him slowly at first, with my hands flat on his chest and his heartbeat slamming under my palms.
Then I stopped being slow.
He gripped my hip with his good hand and pulled me down to meet every stroke, and the cheap headboard knocked the wall in a rhythm I could not have stopped if I tried.
"Fuck, Ximena."
"Don't you stop."
I came first, hard and loud, with my forehead against his and his name that was not his name in my mouth.
He rolled us, bad arm and all, and pinned my wrists in one hand and drove into me until the bed shook.
He came with his face in my neck, groaning my name, and I held him through every shudder with my legs locked around his back.
We slept like that, tangled and sweating, with the neon sign turning the ceiling red.
At 4:40 the bed dipped.
I kept my eyes shut and listened to him dress as quietly as a man who had done it in many rooms.
The door clicked.
On the pillow beside me was a folded note in block letters.
LOCK THE DOOR. DON'T LOOK FOR ME. D.
At 4:50 his phone buzzed on the nightstand, charging where he had forgotten it.
It was a cheap black burner, and the message sat bright on the cracked screen.
"Serrano. The Cardinal has the ledger. Burn the girl's trail."
I read it three times.
I knew the Cardinal's name the way everyone on the border knew it, in a lowered voice.
I did not know a man named Serrano.
But I knew now whose hand had held mine until it stopped shaking.
I wiped the screen with my sleeve and drove back to Laredo with the phone in my glove box.
At the bridge, before the sun came up, I dropped it into the Rio Grande and told no one.
At nine I walked into the yard in yesterday's blouse.
My uncle Anselmo was waiting in my father's office with a manila folder and a paper cup of coffee.
"Mija, thank God." He pressed the cup into my hand.
Then he opened the folder on the desk.
"The driver who was at the lot last night. Dell Haverford. Hired nine days ago."
He looked up at me, very kindly.
"Do you know his face?"
"No," I said.
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