Free Untamed Hearts 1: The Viper by Kele Moon Page B

booth today. She just couldn’t believe the picture these articles were painting of him. She couldn’t even put Chuito in that role, and she and Chuito weren’t exactly the best of friends.
    It made her realize, as a history teacher, how very different the reality was from the facts on paper, but she couldn’t stop reading, searching through the different resources, though most were police related.
    One article was a study on Los Corredores’s success as an exclusively Puerto Rican gang, when Miami had a much larger Cuban population. Most of Los Corredores’s rivalry was with Cuban gangs. According to the article, they’d managed to establish a strong foothold over the past decade in Dade County through swift, deadly action whenever their territory was threatened.
    Katie wondered if by threatened , the article meant shooting up a house with women and children in it. None of these articles and posts had the whole stories in them. Not even close.
    She was certain of it.
    And she was regretting letting Marcos go so easily, which she knew made her absolutely insane. He’d all but admitted to murder, but going after his mother’s murderers was sort of like self-defense, wasn’t it?
    Katie wanted it to be. Desperately. She needed another excuse to see him and touch the magic that she felt in his presence before he left.
    She closed her eyes and dropped her phone to the mat by the tub and sucked in a shaky breath, because there was no amount of denial that was going to let her believe the lie for long.
    The murders he’d confessed to weren’t self-defense at all.
    They were revenge.
    Which led her to wonder why, of all the people in the world, did Marcos admit it to her. She got the impression he didn’t trust easily. If he was anything like his cousin Chuito, he likely didn’t trust at all, but he had just spilled his guts out to her at Hal’s Diner today like they were the oldest of confidants.
    Which meant she wasn’t the only one who felt this connection. With her eyes still closed, she remembered the way Marcos had looked at her, like she was the most beautiful, tantalizing woman in the world. It was so bizarre for Katie, who never considered herself anything more than plain at best.
    She’d gone through high school with her nose in a book.
    Grayson was the first man she had ever kissed, and that wasn’t until her junior year of high school. He’d always made it very clear that her mind was what appealed to him, and sex with him had been like everything else in their relationship. Neat, scheduled, and to the point. Tuesday and Saturday nights were usually slotted for evening intimacy, well spaced during the week and usually finished before the local news at ten.
    For some reason, Katie didn’t think sex with Marcos would be on a towel spread out under her to protect the Egyptian cotton sheets, quick and efficient to ensure they heard the full weather report before bed.
    For just a moment, she allowed herself the luxury of fantasizing about something other than ordinary and boring. As sad as it was, for years even her fantasies had been bland because she had no point of reference to extend them. The romance novels, even the really steamy ones, were so far outside her reality, she could never put herself in the spot of those beautiful heroines, with their gravity-defying tits and tiny waists.
    Now, for just a moment, fueled by those hot looks from Marcos before he had left, she was able to believe that one man in this world actually thought she was valuable for something beyond her mind. As she sat there, she realized that though she knew Marcos was probably as dangerous for Katie’s nice, neat little world as he claimed, she also knew she was utterly sick of nice and neat.
    She wanted something a little edgier. A little risky. She wanted tattoos instead of a briefcase. She wanted someone to like her tits instead of her degree.
    She got out of the tub and craned her head to look in the mirror as she stood