That brought her terrified gaze to his. “Your brother?”
“He told me he didn’t know if it was true or not, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it. The local P.D. stays out of immigration issues. People have to trust them, be willing to talk to them when a crime has been committed. If they’re afraid of being asked to prove their citizenship, they won’t talk to cops.”
“But there’s been talk.” This was said so softly, he had to tilt his head to hear her.
“Maybe not that much.” Watching her, he said, “Do you want me to ask him?”
“I…don’t know.” Lia turned blindly back to the animals, leaning her face against the horse’s neck.
“The kids are gone. You have nothing to fear right now.”
She laughed, but not happily. “Right now.”
“You could quit.”
“It’s…important to me.”
“Make me understand,” he said again.
Her eyes lifted to his, and he couldn’t have looked away to save his life. “Do I have a choice?”
He felt again as if the horse had somehow planted one of those hooves smack in the middle of his chest, maybe denting a few ribs. Conall hadn’t felt anything like this since he was a kid.
Back off, he told himself. I don’t need to understand. I don’t need anything from her.
But now he was lying to himself.
He swallowed. “Yes.” His voice roughened. “I meant it when I said I won’t tell anyone. Talking to me is optional.”
Still she looked at him, her eyes searching, intense. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a breath.
Abruptly he was freed; she was stroking the horse, gazing out across the pasture. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. You’re right. Julia and Arturo are gone. If you really want to know…”
“I want.” Hell, now he sounded hoarse. He wanted her in a hundred ways.
Foolish, and dangerous.
Lia only nodded. “Okay.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIA CLIMBED THROUGH the fence rails, wanting a barrier of some kind between her and Conall. As if it would do her any good at all.
After hopeful and unfruitful nudges at her empty jeans pockets, horse and pony wandered a few feet away and began to graze. She crossed her forearms on the fence.
“My mother was here illegally.” She grimaced. “I told you that, didn’t I?”
He rested one booted foot on the lowest rail and nodded.
“Mom came here with two of her brothers. I guess they stayed in the L.A. area for a bit, then gradually headed north. None of them wanted to work in agriculture. My uncle Guillermo is a mechanic and Uncle Jorge mostly did construction, I think. Mom found jobs as a maid.” This wasn’t the painful part of the story for her. Very aware of Conall’s keen gray eyes, she continued.
“Mom met my dad when she was cleaning offices. Dad is an electrical contractor. They had a thing, she got pregnant, but they didn’t get married at first. Maybe he was embarrassed by her, I don’t know.”
“Why would he be embarrassed?”
“She was uneducated, a maid. I doubt she’d picked up more than broken English by then. She still has a really strong accent.”
“Is she as beautiful as you are?”
That made her cheeks heat. “I— Mom is pretty. But she’s darker-skinned, of course.” Dad and Mom hadn’t done much socializing, and by her teenage years Lia had suspected he was still embarrassed by his obviously Hispanic wife. Lia had never been sure; her father wasn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy kind, so maybe he simply hadn’t made friends.
“But he did marry her.”
“Not at first. We lived with him, but…it was more like she was his housekeeper. Mostly I remember Mom yelling a lot and him getting stony-faced and slamming his study door.” She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “When I was five, Mom and I were deported.”
Shock showed on Conall’s face. “What?”
“She was cleaning rooms at a hotel and she’d taken me to work with her that day. There was a raid, and we were rounded up with a bunch of other maids and, I don’t know, I think a gardener and a maintenance guy—all illegal. Of course Mom didn’t have my birth certificate with her, and I doubt it would have made any difference if she had had it.” Lia toed a rough clump of grass, focusing on it. “I remember being scared. They weren’t very nice to us. It was like we were cattle. We got taken to some kind of processing place where there were a couple hundred other people they’d rounded up. We slept on pallets and then they flew us to Mexico.”