Free Fearless by Diana Palmer Page A

found Consuelo sitting at the table crying.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked gently.
    Consuelo dried her face on her apron. “Nothing,” she choked. “It’s okay.”
    “I heard someone, a man, shouting.”
    The older woman looked up at her with red, swollen eyes. She looked miserable. “Marco was furious because I wouldn’t loan him some money. He thinks I was lying when I said I didn’t have it, but I wasn’t.”
    Glory laid a gentle hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “He’ll get over it. Families argue. Then they make up.”
    A watery smile was her reward for all that optimism. “You think he’ll come back?”
    “Of course,” Glory assured her. She grinned. “How can he stay away from all this wonderful fruit?”
    Consuelo burst out laughing. “Oh, you’re good for me,” she said. “What a lucky day I had when Señor Ramirez hired you!”
    Glory smiled. “I like you, too. Now could we have coffee? Coffee and toast would be better, but especially coffee. I have to have my morning jolt of caffeine or I can’t get both eyes to work at the same time, to say nothing of my brain.”
    “I was just about to make coffee,” Consuelo said, jumping up. “I was waiting for the cinnamon rolls to bake.”
    Glory’s eyes lit up. “Cinnamon rolls? Real ones? Homemade ones?”
    Consuelo laughed. “Yes.”
    Glory slid into a chair. “What a lucky day for me, when Señor Ramirez hired you!” she said. “The closest I can come to cinnamon rolls is to buy frozen ones at the store and heat them up. You’ll spoil me.”
    The older woman wiped her eyes and smiled. She got busy with the coffee.
     
    L ATER, IT OCCURRED TO Glory that there might have been a dark motive for Marco’s need of immediate cash. She noticed that both he and Castillo spent a lot of their free time talking to each other. She wished she had some decent way to find out what they were saying. But what really bothered her was that Rodrigo was frequently involved in those conversations.
    She wished she could call Marquez and talk to him confidentially about what she was learning, but she was wary of using any sort of communication around the house. Consuelo had said weeks ago that Rodrigo kept an arsenal of electronic devices in his room. He might have the ability to monitor conversations. It wouldn’t do for him to get too curious about why a wage earner in his employ was having clandestine conversations with a San Antonio police detective.
     
    M OST OF THE WORKERS spent their weekends at their own homes in a local trailer park. But on Saturday afternoon she and Consuelo were pressed into labor helping put up lanterns and streamers for a small fiesta on the farm. A mariachi band had been hired and the men had thrown together a large wooden platform for dancing.
    It had been years since Glory had been to any sort of party. She got caught up in the excitement. She remembered how desperately she’d wanted to go to her junior and senior prom, but by then she was too shy and nervous around boys to feel comfortable with one. Which was just as well, because not one boy asked her out during the whole time she was in high school, thanks to the malicious Internet gossip about her.
    In college, things had been a little bit different. She tried, she really tried, to make friends and be outgoing. But she learned on her first date that the world outside Jacobsville, Texas, was very different. Her date took her to have a meal in a nice restaurant, and then he tried to take her into a motel room. When persuasion and ridicule didn’t work, he tried force. By then, she was living with the Pendletons. She fought her way out of the car, pulled out her cell phone and dialed Jason Pendleton’s number. By the time she hung up, her erstwhile date had escaped in a spray of gravel. Shortly thereafter he transferred to another school. Jason never told Glory what he’d done to the boy. She never asked, either.
    Rodrigo came out of the house just as it started