The CEO and Her Daughter's Secret Father novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Driveway

By the time I turned onto Zaragoza Street that evening, I had been watching the same pair of headlights for six miles.

They were high and wide-set and belonged to a tractor, not a car.

I pulled into my mother's driveway, took the tire iron from under my seat, and got out.

The tractor stopped at the curb with its engine idling.

The driver's door opened, and Dell Haverford climbed down with both hands up and open.

"Ms. Arriaga."

"You're off shift."

"I'm off shift."

"Then why are you in my street with a forty-ton truck?"

"It's a yard tractor. It's not even street legal." He looked at it fondly. "I borrowed it."

"You stole it."

"I borrowed it from a man who owes me a favor."

"Dell."

"There was a silver sedan behind you on Mines Road last night," he said, and the humor went out of his voice. "And the night before. Two men. It sat outside the yard fence until you drove home and then it followed."

I lowered the tire iron an inch.

"You were on the shuttle."

"The shuttle has mirrors."

I had not seen any sedan.

I looked up and down the street, at the porch lights and the sprinklers and the neighbor's inflatable pumpkin.

"Nobody follows me," I said. "I'm a freight company."

"Everybody follows a freight company."

"Is that what the other drivers tell you?"

"That's what I tell me."

He took one step closer.

I could smell the diesel and the cheap soap again, and my pulse did something stupid in my wrists.

"Put the iron down, Ximena," he said quietly. "If I wanted to hurt you, I had four years."

It was the first time he had used my name since that room in Cotulla.

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