Raven's Prey

PERHAPS HE WAS MERELY an adventuresome tourist who had drifted into the obscure little Mexican town in search of some action. Perhaps he had wandered into the cantina for the same reason she had: to get a bite to eat and have a bottle of the local beer. Perhaps he was a perfectly innocuous male who, when he realized there was another North American in the cantina, would come over to her table to chat. Then again, perhaps he was her executioner. My God, Honor Knight thought bitterly, I'm really getting paranoid. She forced down another swallow of the robust beer she had been nursing for the last hour and deliberately looked away from the line of men who were standing and leaning with varying degrees of casualness against the bar. That was all she needed now, she chastised herself. She mustn't lose her grip on reality. She must not succumb to genuine paranoia or life would become intolerable. She really would go out of her mind with fear. But the image of the stranger as he hooked a booted foot over the bottom rung of the bar would not be banished simply because she chose to look away. It was natural that he would stand out in this crowd, Honor assured herself. He was the only othergringoin the room besides herself. Standing at the bar, even lounging against it on one elbow as he was, he topped the Mexican men around him by several inches in most cases. And while the other men were dressed in the dusty, loose-fitting trousers and shirts of poor, hard-working farmers, the stranger was dark and hard and lean in a pair of black jeans and a black cotton shirt. His clothes weren't the only things that were dark about him and that made him seem a part of the shadowy night outside. In the brief glance she had allowed herself, Honor had been aware of the deep black shade of his hair. There were subtle highlights of iron-gray in the heavy pelt which indicated the stranger at the bar would soon be staring his fortieth birthday in the face. Even without the iron in his hair Honor would have been able to guess his age from the unforgiving hardness of his features. Uneasily she allowed her eyes to slide once again over his profile. He had ordered tequila, not beer, she realized, watching from her sheltered table as he sipped the clear liquid in the small glass he held. How much longer before his roving gaze discovered her against the back wall? She hadn't yet confronted that gaze directly and, based on what she'd seen of the rest of him, Honor didn't particularly want to do so. There was a ruthless predatory quality about this man, which disturbed her on several levels. It was there in the hawkish nose, the grimly set mouth and the fiercely etched lines of his face. Somehow he seemed aloof and coldly removed from the scene around him, as if he didn't particularly need human companionship. Determinedly Honor picked up her fork and took another bite of the corn tamale she had been eating when the newcomer had walked through the door a few minutes earlier. There was nothing to fear, she told herself firmly. After all, she thought on a note of half-hysterical humor, she'd seen plenty of pictures of professional hit men and none of them had ever been wearing jeans and boots! They always seemed to be attired in suits that bulged in the wrong places, and they tended to speak in East Coast accents. Not that she'd heard the stranger when he'd ordered his tequila, but somehow Honor didn't think he would have an eastern accent. More likely a southwestern drawl. No, she wasn't going to give in to the lure of paranoia. She had to keep a realistic perspective on her present situation or she would become a gibbering idiot! Honor swallowed another sip of the warm beer and resolved to keep her head. It was the only way to survive. The stranger was probably from Texas or Arizona. Perhaps he had business here in this Mexican village or perhaps he'd merely come south looking for some amusement. One way orJames, Stephanie is the author of 'Raven's Prey', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373771707 and ISBN 0373771703.