Fearless. Diana Palmer

six months.

      The day the Pendletons arrived, the two teenage boys who had victimized Glory were released to the custody of the foster parents, pending trial. Glory had been running away from the teenagers all day. They’d already torn her blouse and left bruises on her. She’d been afraid to call the police again. So Jason found Glory in the closet in the bedroom she shared with the two little girls, hiding under her pitiful handful of clothes on wire hangers, crying. Her arms were bruised all over, and there was a smear of blood on her mouth. When he reached in, she cowered and shook all over with fear.

      Years later, she could still remember how gently he picked her up and carried her out of the room, out of the house. She was placed tenderly in the backseat of his Jaguar, with Gracie, while Jason went back into the foster home. His deeply tanned, lean face was stiff with bridled fury when he returned. He didn’t say a word. He started the car and drove Glory away.

      Despite her mother’s barely contained rage at having Glory in the same house where she lived, Glory was given her own room between Gracie’s and Jason’s, and her mother was not allowed near her. In one of their more infamous battles, Jason had threatened to have his own legal team reopen the child abuse case. He had no doubt that Glory was telling the truth about who the real abuser was. Beverly had stormed out without a reply to Jason’s threats. But she left Glory alone.

      It became a magical time for the tragic young girl, belonging to a family which valued her. Even Myron found her delightful company.

      After Beverly died unexpectedly of a stroke when her daughter was fifteen, Glory’s life settled into something approaching normalcy. But the trauma of her youth had consequences that none of her adoptive family had anticipated.

      Her broken hip, despite two surgeries and the insertion of a steel pin, was never the same. She had a pronounced limp that no physical therapy could erase. And there was something else; her family had a history of hypertension, which Glory inherited. No one actually said that the stress of her young life had added to the genetic predisposition toward it. But Glory thought it did. She was put on medication during her last year in high school. Severely overweight, shy, introverted and uncomfortable around boys, she was also the target of bullies. Other girls made fun of her. They went so far as to put false messages about her on the Internet and one girl formed a club devoted to ridiculing Glory.

      Jason Pendleton found out about it. The girls were dealt with, one charged with harassment and another’s parents threatened with lawsuits. The abuse stopped. Mostly. But it left Glory feeling alone and out of place wherever she went. Her health, never good, caused many absences during the time of turmoil. She lost weight. She was a good student and made excellent grades, despite it. She went on to college and then to law school with the support of her stepsiblings, and graduated magna cum laude. From there, she went to the San Antonio District Attorney’s office as a junior public prosecutor. Four years later, she was a highly respected assistant prosecutor with an impressive record of convictions against gang members and, most recently, drug smugglers. Her weight problem was in the past now, thanks to a good dietician.

      But in her private life, she was alone. She had no close friends. She couldn’t trust people, especially men. Her traumatic youth in foster care had predisposed her to be suspicious of everyone, especially anyone male. She had male friends, but she had never had a lover. She never wanted one. Nobody got close enough to Glory Barnes to hurt her.

      Now this stubborn San Antonio detective was trying to force her to leave her job and hide in a small town from the drug lord she’d prosecuted for distributing cocaine.

      Fuentes was the newest in a long line of drug lords who’d crossed the border into Texas, enlarging his drug territory with the help of his street gang associates. One of them, with the promise of immunity from Glory, had testified in the trial and despite his millions, the drug czar had been facing up to fifteen years in federal prison for distribution of crack cocaine. A hung jury on that case had let him walk.

      After she lost the drug case against him, she’d been sitting in the hall when Fuentes came out of the courtroom. He couldn’t resist bragging about his victory. Fuentes sat down beside her and made a threat. He had worldwide connections and he could have anybody killed, even cops. He had, he said, taken out a persistent local deputy sheriff who’d harassed him by hiring a contract killer only two weeks ago. Glory would be next if she didn’t lay off investigating him, he’d added with an arrogant smile. Sadly for him, Glory had been wearing a court-sanctioned wire at the time. His arrest had come the very next day.

      His fury had been far-reaching. Someone had actually fired a gun at Glory when she walked out of the courthouse two days ago, missing her head by a fraction of an inch. She’d turned to look for her bus when her assailant fired. It had been such a close call that Detective Marquez was determined not to risk her a second time.

      “Even if he gets me, you’ve still got the tape,” she argued.

      “The defense will swear it’s been tampered with,” he muttered. “It’s why the D.A. didn’t put it in evidence.”

      She swore under her breath. Her color was higher than usual, too.

      As if on a signal, the door opened and Haynes walked in with a glass of water and a pill bottle. Sy Haynes was Glory’s administrative assistant, a paralegal with a sharp tongue and the authority of a drill sergeant. “You haven’t taken your capsule today,” she muttered, popping the lid on the medicine bottle and shaking one capsule into Glory’s outheld hand. “One close call a month is enough,” she added, referring to what Glory’s doctor had termed a possible mild heart attack arising from the pressure of the trial. A stress test had detected a problem that might require surgery if Glory didn’t take her medicine and keep to her low-fat diet and adopt a low-stress lifestyle.

      Marquez wanted her to leave town and she didn’t want to go. But what her doctor had said to her was something she wasn’t willing to share with Marquez or Sy. He’d told her that if she didn’t get out of town, and into some sort of sedentary lifestyle, she was going to have a major heart attack and die at the prosecutor’s table in her courtroom.

      She swallowed the capsule. “The damned things include a diuretic,” she said irritably. “I have to go to the bathroom every few minutes. How am I supposed to prosecute a case when I have to interrupt myself six times an hour?”

      “Wear a diaper,” Haynes replied imperturbably.

      Glory gave her a glare.

      “The D.A. doesn’t want you to die in the courtroom.” Marquez pressed his advantage now that he had backup. “He might not get reelected. Besides, he likes you.”

      “He likes me because I have no private life,” she retorted. “I carry case files home with me every night. I’d miss yelling at people.”

      “You can yell at the workers on the Pendletons’s organic truck farm in Jacobsville,” Marquez assured her.

      “At least I do know something about farming. My father had a little truck farm…” She closed up like a flower. It still hurt, after all these years, to remember the pain of seeing him taken away in an orange jumpsuit, cringing when she sobbed and begged the judge to let him go.

      “Your father would be proud of you,” Haynes interjected. “Especially now that you’ve cleared his name of that child abuse charge.”

      “It won’t bring him back,” she said dully. Her eyes narrowed. “But at least they finally found the man who killed him. He’ll never get out now. If he ever goes up before the parole board, I’ll be sitting there with pictures of my father at every hearing for the rest of my life.”

      They didn’t doubt it. She was a vengeful woman, in her quiet way.

      “Come on,” Marquez coaxed. “You need a rest, anyway. It’s peaceful in Jacobsville.”

      “Peaceful,” she nodded. “Right. Last year, there was a shootout in Jacobsville with drug dealers who moved hundreds of kilos of cocaine into the city limits and kidnapped a child. Two years before that, drug lord Manuel Lopez’s men were stormed on his property