Free Between Love and Duty by Janice Kay Johnson Page A

puta. This isn’t right! I would never hurt one of my children. I’ve done nothing to deserve to be treated like some kind of monster!”
     
    “Please don’t swear at me.” Doing her best not to let him see that she was beginning to be frightened, Jane said, “If you love your son, you’ll cooperate for one month. That’s little enough to ask. If you can’t do that, tell me now.”
     
    They stared at each other, his eyes dilated and red suffusing his face. His lips were drawn away from his teeth and he was breathing hard.
     
    Jane held herself still, refusing to let him see that she was quaking inside.
     
    He said finally, “I have no choice, do I? But I see now that you want to take my son away from me. Perhaps you want to give him to that policeman who was spending so much time with Tito. These visits—” he spat to one side “—they’re nothing but a front, are they? So if I say later, I wasn’t treated fairly, you can say, see? He had his chance. But it’s a lie. Now I know.”
     
    “No,” she said. “I promise you, Hector. Your future with your son is in your hands. If Tito doesn’t come to live with you it will be your fault, because you didn’t follow through with the judge’s requirements. You can make this hard or you can make it easy. You can be smart. Why not be smart, Hector?”
     
    He rocked on his heels. “Am I permitted to go upstairs and tell my family why I can’t eat dinner at their table?”
     
    She didn’t dare back down at all. “I’ll tell them.”
     
    With a vicious curse—in Spanish, thank God—he punched the wall again and swung away. A minute later, Jane heard the cough and uneven roar from Hector’s pickup, and then it accelerated past on the street.
     
    She leaned against the wall for a minute and let herself shake.
     
    “Well, that was fun,” she said out loud. “To answer your question, Captain MacLachlan, this is what I do for fun.”
     
    DUNCAN WAITED UNTIL SEVEN and, when he still hadn’t heard from her, called Jane’s cell phone. When she answered, he said, “Well?”
     
    “Has anybody ever told you your conversational skills stink?”
     
    “You’ve hinted as much.” He frowned. There had been something in her voice. Only tiredness, or had something happened to upset her? “So?”
     
    She sighed. “About what you probably expect. Lupe couldn’t say no to her own father. I caught Hector taking Tito out to shoot baskets without supervision.”
     
    Duncan swore. “Are you going to do anything about it, or did you issue a gentle warning?”
     
    “Do I really give the impression of being such a pushover?”
     
    She sounded offended enough, he was taken aback. No, he thought, Jane Brooks was anything but a pushover.
     
    He’d been silent long enough she didn’t wait for an answer.
     
    “I’ve told Hector he can no longer see Tito at Lupe’s apartment. No family dinners. He will see his son only under my direct supervision. Does that satisfy you, Captain?”
     
    He didn’t know. The same indefinable something was in her voice.
     
    “How did he take it?”
     
    “Not well,” she admitted.
     
    Duncan tensed. “He didn’t lay a hand on you?”
     
    “No. Nothing like that. Only said some bad words, complained we have no intention of really letting him have custody of his son and stormed away.”
     
    Duncan’s doorbell rang. Frowning, he went to answer it. To Jane, he said, “I should have gone with you.”
     
    He was flinging the front door open to find his brother on the porch when Jane said, “Get real. That would have made everything way worse. He suspects you want to steal his son from him.” After a brief pause, she said, “With reason.”
     
    “What the hell are you talking about?” he snapped.
     
    Waiting with his hands shoved in the pockets of his leather jacket, Niall raised his eyebrows and grinned. Duncan glared at him and briefly covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “What do you