“In. Out,” Aiden said.

“What?” Grace gasped the word, and suddenly he could feel her trembling under his touch. Oh, man, he thought. Beautiful, mysterious and trembling.

“Inhale, exhale,” he explained. “That’s what I meant.”

“I’m breathing,” she retorted.

“Not well. And your pulse is going off like a machine gun.”

“What kind of mind uses machine guns in an analogy?”

He tightened his grip on her wrist. “Maybe a criminal mind,” he suggested. “Maybe dark characters excite you.”

“Go to hell.”

“I might, for what I’m thinking about doing to you right now. You know, there are only so many miles of legs, so much dark hair, a man can stand.” That did it.

She wrenched away from him.

He really rattled her, he realized, and he didn’t understand why. All this mystery was going to make for one very long night.

Dear Reader,

This is definitely a month to celebrate, because Kathleen Korbel is back! This award-winning, bestselling author continues the saga of the Kendall family with Some Men’s Dreams, a journey of the heart that will have you smiling through tears as you join Gen Kendall in meeting Dr. Jack O’Neill and his very special daughter, Elizabeth. Run—don’t walk—to the store to get your copy of this genuine keeper.

Don’t miss out on the rest of our books this month, either. Kylie Brant continues THE TREMAINE TRADITION with Truth or Lies, a dicey tale of love on both sides of the law. Then pick up RaeAnne Thayne’s Freefall for a haunting, mysterious, page-turner of a romance. Round out the month with new books by favorites Beverly Bird, who’s Risking It All, and Frances Housden, who’ll introduce you to a Heartbreak Hero, and brand-new author Madalyn Reese, who gives you No Place To Hide from her talented debut.

And, as always, come back again next month, when Silhouette Intimate Moments offers you six more of the best and most exciting romances around.

Enjoy!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Editor

Risking It All

BEVERLY BIRD

Books by Beverly Bird

Silhouette Intimate Moments

Emeralds in the Dark #3

The Fires of Winter #23

Ride the Wind #139

A Solitary Man #172

*

A Man Without Love #630

*

A Man Without a Haven #641

*

A Man Without a Wife #652

Undercover Cowboy #711

The Marrying Kind #732

Compromising Positions #777

†

Loving Mariah #790

†

Marrying Jake #802

†

Saving Susannah #814

It Had To Be You #970

I’ll Be Seeing You #1030

Out of Nowhere #1090

In the Line of Fire #1138

All the Way #1173

Risking It All #1240

Silhouette Desire

The Best Reasons #190

Fool’s Gold #209

All the Marbles #227

To Love a Stranger #411

Silhouette Romance

Ten Ways To Win Her Man #1550

Silhouette Special Edition

Playing by the Rules #1529

Silhouette Books

Lone Star Country Club

Doctor Seduction

BEVERLY BIRD

has lived in several places in the United States, but she is currently back where her roots began on an island in New Jersey. Her time is devoted to her family and her writing. She is the author of numerous romance novels, both contemporary and historical. Beverly loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at BvrlyeB@aol.com.

For Don again…. The Title Man.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 1

A idan McKenna decided that he could easily be provoked into hurting the man who was shoving him down Cell Block Nine of the county prison. One more nudge of that nightstick into the small of his back would do it, he thought, then the bastard did it again.

Aidan stopped walking and the guard ran up his heels. He pivoted and crowded him bodily against a gray brick wall that seemed to have absorbed the decaying odor of all the evil that had passed this way over the years. Every convict down the cell block was rattling the bars of his cage now, hooting and shouting obscenities.

He couldn’t stay here, Aidan thought. “Where are you taking me?”

“The holding cell for now,” the guard answered.

“That’s downstairs. Block One.”

The guard began inching to his left. Aidan looked that way. There was an alarm button on the wall there. He crowded the man harder into the brick to keep him from reaching it. Aidan had an easy twenty pounds on him and most of the guard’s pounds seemed given to fat anyway, so it didn’t take much effort.

“I’m a cop, you idiot,” he warned. “Did you read the paperwork that came in with me? Does the term protective custody mean anything to you? Listen to them!” They knew he was a cop—somehow the inmates always knew. And this was the worst of the bunch. Block Nine was for the hardened criminals waiting to be moved out to the state pen.

The guard’s belligerent expression faltered. “Your paperwork doesn’t say you’re a cop.”

“Look again. What’s my name?”

“Bran Downey.”

“Nope. Listen to them,” Aidan said again. He moved one shoulder in the direction of the cells and all the raucous inmates.

“They know.”

The guard glanced up and down the block, uncertainty putting creases in his expression now. The inmates’ hurled expletives left very little doubt as to Aidan’s identity. The man swore. “I’ll put you downstairs until we straighten this out. But if you’re pulling one on me, Baines is going to have my job.”

“He’s already got mine.” Edward Baines was the chief of police and Aidan was still trying to figure out what part he played in this.

They made a U-turn and went back to the elevator. The calls from the cells grew louder, more vicious. In eleven years on the streets, five in a uniform, six as a detective, Aidan had heard it all and he caught a few phrases now that even he wasn’t familiar with. Then the elevator doors slid shut behind them and sealed them into quiet.

“Call Plattsmier,” Aidan decided as the elevator doors slid open again. Plattsmier was the Robbery-Homicide captain.

“He’ll tell you who I am. If he sounds hinky about IDing me, ask him to check with Fox Whittington.” He had a few buddies in the R-H unit.

They stepped out onto the first floor. The guy pushed him again, this time toward a small temp cell halfway down a wing off the prison lobby. Aidan went in gladly, given the alternative. But he still winced when the bars clanged shut.

Fear was clawing madly in his gut now since he had temporarily fixed his most immediate problem—that of being locked up on Nine with a few guys he may well have put there. If it got out of control, he wouldn’t be able to think past it. Same thing with the image of his parents that kept trying to swim into his mind’s eye. Hell, if they got into the mix, he’d end up comatose with shame and bitterness and regret. Best to keep focused, he decided. Aidan sat down on a cold concrete bench to wait.

Grace Simkanian felt her blood trying to boil as she watched her client smirk at her over his shoulder. “Told you. No sweat,” the kid said as he crossed the courthouse lobby. He was nineteen years old and he still lived at home, had never gone to college or bothered to find gainful employment. His daddy was loaded. He spent his time getting drunk and ramming his Dodge Viper into various city fixtures. The last altercation had been with a fire hydrant.

Grace could not let herself despise him. She was a criminal defense attorney employed by the most prestigious firm in the city. She’d spent a long, arduous and destitute year clerking for the Honorable Lorenzo Castello after she’d finished law school, delaying a decent income by a full twelve months to add that ultrarespectable notch to her belt. She was going to be a judge herself one day. Then she could express her opinion of people who stepped outside the law because it was the easy way. But for now she was stuck with getting them off the hook.

“This latest incident will cost you over three thousand dollars,” Grace said to her client, pushing past him through the lobby doors. “No, wait. Forgive me. I’m wrong. It will be closer to four thousand with the hike in your car insurance.”

“It’ll take the insurance people a year to catch up.” He jogged down the steps.

Let it go, Grace told herself, but a hot little fist punched at her forehead from the inside out. There were days when she really hated her job.

Grace watched the kid cross the street to his car in the municipal lot—a new lemon-yellow Lotus that would probably be wrapped around the Liberty Bell in another two weeks. Then she turned up the street toward the bus stop.

She was almost there when her cell phone started chirping inside her briefcase. She leaned back against a building to fish it out.

“No,” she said into it without greeting. She was so tired parts of her throbbed.

“I beg your pardon?”

Grace swore mildly under her breath. It wasn’t Mandy or Jenny, her confidantes, her pals. It was Dan Lutz, one of the senior partners of her law firm.

“Where are you?” he asked. “I need you to head over to County prison.”

Instinctively Grace looked across the street for the kid who had just left her. He couldn’t possibly have gotten himself into trouble again so fast. Ergo, another of Lutz’s rich college chums had offspring in trouble. Those were the only cases she caught just now. She’d been with Russell and Lutz less than a month.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“His name is Aidan McKenna. Detective Third Grade, Vice, Philadelphia P.D.”

“Who am I supposed to be seeing him about?”

“Himself. They’re holding him in a temp cell over there.”

Her pulse kicked, not just at the usual places but in a chain reaction of little hitches all through her blood. Grace came off the building she was leaning against.

This was big. This was huge.

“And you’re giving it to me?” she asked bluntly.

“Everyone else is tied up with something.”

Either that, she decided, or Lutz thought this McKenna was a no-win case. “Details?” She curled her voice up at the end to turn the single-word demand into a polite question and started to look for a cab.

“They’ve got him up on morality charges, but that’s a departmental mess. His union liaison can deal with it. Our problem is an extortion charge, mob-related.”

Grace waved down a taxi. It hurt to spend the money on one, but there was no help for it. She had to get over to County fast. Her chest was starting to hurt. A cop on the take. This was the lowest of the low in her estimation.

She opened the cab door and dropped down onto the cracked pseudo-leather seat. “I guess he still has plenty of that cash stashed aside if he can afford us.”

“Captain Plattsmier called me and asked me to take him on,” Lutz said without actually answering.

Ah, she thought. Pro bono then, a freebie in the interest of firm-city relations. Now she understood why Lutz was giving it to her. “I’ll handle it.”

She disconnected and sat forward to direct the driver. It was time to go wrestle another loser free of the jaws of justice. But this particular loser would be her ticket out, she decided. When she got this guy off, her earn-her-stripes days of DUI cases and the other minor riffraff at the bottom of the firm’s barrel would be behind her.

Aidan McKenna didn’t know it yet, but she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“Your lawyer’s here,” the guard said.

Aidan jerked off the concrete bench and stood to approach the bars.

“She’s in one of the interrogation rooms now.”

She? There was just enough old-world Irish in him that he frowned briefly at that. He thought of his mother again, born in Killarney, a tough no-nonsense woman who was happiest at a stove.

The guard pulled open the cage door and Aidan stepped through, leaving thoughts of his mother’s face behind in the cell.

“Guess you did something,” the guard said with a little grunt.

“Even if it ain’t murder two. Plattsmier didn’t say to shove you out the door. He got you a mouthpiece instead.”

All that told Aidan was that Plattsmier knew something was going on. He knew that Aidan was being charged with a crime, but he wasn’t going to let him spend a night on Nine for a murder he hadn’t committed. So which side did that put him on?

Aidan didn’t know. It occurred to him that at the moment he didn’t know much at all.

He followed the guard up the hall to an interrogation room. Then the guy removed his cuffs and stepped aside. Aidan went through the door alone—and stopped cold.

She was seated at the head of the table and she was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her jet-black hair was a little wild, long, curling here and there in waves that just wouldn’t lie flat—the kind of hair that made a man think of sex, made him want to believe he’d been the one to take handfuls of it and tangle it. She was frowning down at some paperwork in front of her. A tiny crease dug into her smooth brow. Her nose was exquisitely straight, her mouth lush and, as he watched— God bless him, the tip of her tongue poked out to lick her bottom lip.

Everything inside him went painfully rigid. Not only a her, he thought. That kind of her. A knockout.

She looked up at him. “Who’s Bran Downey?”

Aidan found his voice. “That’s the question of the hour.”

“Sit down.” She motioned abruptly at one of the other chairs.

“Ask me nicely first.” Aidan leaned one shoulder against the wall.

Her nostrils flared delicately. She stared at him as though she needed a moment to digest his words. Then she frowned. “Are you antagonizing me?”

“Maybe.”

“Why?”

Aidan approved of the response. She was direct. And it was a good question. Maybe it was the bedroom hair that made him feel cantankerous. He’d had enough of gorgeous women for a lifetime.

“I wasn’t the one who started this off by giving orders,” he pointed out.

Her jaw hardened. “Please, Mr. McKenna, won’t you have a seat?”

She rebounded well, too. “Thanks, I think I will.”

He pushed off the wall and went to the table. He pulled a chair out, turned it around, and straddled it. She picked up his paperwork again.

“Is this the part where you ask me if I did it?” Aidan wondered.

She glanced up at him. Purple, he thought, her eyes were a hue of purple, at least in this harsh fluorescent light. And damned if he didn’t find himself wondering what they looked like when they were heavily lidded with satisfaction or opaque with need.

He never learned.

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered.

That ticked him off. “Well, I didn’t. Do it, that is.”

“Of course not.”

He came out of the chair so suddenly he saw her recoil a little. He slammed it back into place at the table and went to the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked quickly.

“I think I’ll call another lawyer. One who believes me.”

“Wait!” Her voice went sharp without really rising.

Aidan reached the door and looked back at her.

“Let’s…” She licked her lip again. “Let’s start over,” she finished as though the words tasted bad.

He wagged a finger back and forth between them. “This? Us?”

“I’ve had a long day. Maybe I was too…” She faltered, seeming unable to finish.

“Condescending?” he offered. “Judgmental?”

Ah, there, he thought. There was heat in those eyes. They’d been cold and blank up until now, but something that reminded him of a solar flare hit them as he watched.

It was enough to make him go back to the table. He wanted to see how many other ways they could change, and how quickly. There was a lot going on in there beneath her surface disdain, not that he trusted an ounce of it.

This time when he pulled the chair out, he sat properly. “Go ahead. Start over.”

He sounded as if he was giving her permission, Grace thought. In a way, he was, and that galled her.

Her heart was still beating with a sick thudding rhythm against her chest wall. How would she explain to Lutz if she lost the guy in the initial interview? Her head was fogged. Her thoughts seemed to be swimming through muck. She was tired, she thought, just tired. It had nothing at all to do with the fact that he…well, he unbalanced her.

If she was reading him right, he didn’t like her. Most men never got to the point of deciding whether they did or not. They saw her and that was enough. They looked at her and they wanted her. Grace had learned a long time ago that she need not have a single redeemable quality. They’d trail after her like pups looking for their mama anyway.

He was watching her, waiting for something, she realized. “You…ah, want me to ask you if you’re innocent.”

He nodded.

Grace swallowed carefully. “Okay. Are you innocent?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m not Bran Downey.”

He didn’t actually answer this time, she noticed. She looked down at the papers in front of her. “Bran Downey shot a cab driver on the corner of Broad and Vine. Of course, he was aiming for his wife at the time.”

Aidan reached for the other guy’s paperwork. “Did she get away?”

Grace fought the urge to slap his hand away. “Who cares?” Had she just sounded shrill? Grace briefly covered her face with her hands. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not Bran Downey.”

“Nope. But she did. Get away, that is. Good for her.”

“Yes.”

“If I’m here, where’s Downey?”

“How the hell should I know?” God bless her, now he was making her swear!

“It just makes me wonder about this fine city I’ve vowed to protect and serve. I’m here for undisclosed reasons. Meanwhile, Downey is probably in Bimini by now. What’s wrong with this picture?”

Undisclosed? What did that mean? “I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m not representing Downey.”

“Lucky for him. You’re a little tense there, lady.”

He had no idea, Grace thought. Her first felony case had damned near dumped her within minutes of meeting her. He wasn’t the man whose paperwork she’d been given. He wouldn’t let her take charge.

And he was big and blond.

She finally looked at him, really looked at him. He had sea-green eyes that moved between candid and flinty. And it was quite possible that that was a dimple there on the lower part of his left jaw. It showed up when he flashed that quick, arrogant grin. Burly guys with rough jaws ought not to have dimples, she decided.

And why, pray tell, was she thinking about that when she was sitting here with the wrong guy’s paperwork?

“Hold on,” she said sharply, pushing to her feet. Grace left the room to find the guard.

She didn’t see him anywhere in the corridor so she headed for the intake area near the prison lobby. The guy sitting at the desk there was reading something. He glanced her way at the sharp rat-tat-tat of her high heels on the flooring, then he looked back at his magazine for approximately a second. His head jerked up again and he grinned.

This was the kind of reaction she had expected from Aidan McKenna. She had wondered many, many times in the past ten years if her father would really have sent her from Maruja and everything she held dear if he hadn’t worried about the soldiers noticing her and doing unspeakable things.

She reached the desk and pointed a manicured finger at a file there. “Is that the paperwork for everyone who was brought in today?”

“Yeah.” He picked the folder up eagerly.

“Could you look through it for Aidan McKenna’s correct forms? You gave me the wrong ones.”

He grinned crookedly. “Sorry. It got a little hectic around here earlier.”

There hadn’t been another soul at Intake when she’d arrived, Grace thought.

The guard looked through the folder. Then he looked again.

“Is there a problem?” she asked finally, sweetly.

“I got nothing in here for him. Sorry, Miss…uh…”

“Ms.,” she corrected. “Ms. Simkanian. Okay, thank you.”

She went back to the interrogation room and pushed through the door. “Did they take anything from you when they brought you in here?” she asked McKenna. “Your wallet, for instance?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Then let’s go. We’re leaving.”

“Lady, I hate to break this to you, but I really don’t think they’re going to let me walk out of here just because you tell me to.”

Grace almost smiled. “Not only were they tagging you as Bran Downey, they have nothing here for you personally. No papers means no charge. Captain Plattsmier mentioned something about extortion charges—that’s what my senior partner told me—but they don’t have the proper forms so they can’t legally hold you.”

“So that’s it. Extortion.”

“What did you think they were charging you with?”

“I had no idea.”

What kind of game was he playing? She started to point out that charges generally stemmed from whatever a suspect had done, but he was claiming his innocence—sort of—and that would be inching a little too close to the ground that had ticked him off earlier. “I’m sure they’ll chase their tails all night and have you in custody again by morning on the proper ID,” she said instead. “But for now you’re a free man.”

“Can I kiss you?”

Grace backed off fast enough to ram her spine against the doorjamb.

“Purely in gratitude,” he explained.

“None necessary. I’m just doing my job. Keep your mouth to yourself.”

She was rattled, he thought. Interesting.

Since he wouldn’t be spending tonight in a cell, maybe he’d keep her for an attorney after all. Of course, that would involve deciding just how he was going to deal with that jet-black hair and those Violet Eyes. And the legs. Miles of them, he thought, watching her.

They were nearly back at the desk before someone noticed him strolling down the corridor as free as a bird. Four more guards came running. They seemed to come out of the crevices between the bricks in the walls, appearing out of nowhere. They included the man who’d listened to him earlier, the guard who had been reasonable enough to bring him back to the first floor. Aidan was almost sorry for that. Almost, but not quite.

“What are you doing?” the guard yelled. “What is this?”

“Please bring this man his wallet,” Grace said pleasantly.

“Are you crazy?” he demanded.

“Not in the slightest. There’s an easy way to do this and a hard way. You can compare this man standing beside me with the face on his driver’s license or we can call in various members of the P.P.D. to identify him—as one Aidan McKenna. Correct?” She glanced at Aidan.

He nodded agreeably. “That’s me.”

The guard looked frantic. “Hold it, just hold it. I need to call Chief Baines. Or the arresting officers. Jeez.”

“By all means,” Grace agreed. “Call someone. Maybe they can get the proper paperwork here in the next few seconds before my client and I walk out the door. Perhaps then—with the proper paperwork—you’d have cause to detain him, because as it is you have nothing on the basis of which to hold him. You are not going to incarcerate him as Bran Downey because that, you see, is against the law.”

Guards went running. He loved her, Aidan thought.

“Come on,” she said to him in an undertone. “We’re out of here.”

He loved her less. “What about my wallet? I had damned near a hundred dollars in there.”

“You’ll be back here in the morning, I’m sure. In the meantime, they’re not allowed to spend it.”

“Where are we going?” he asked outside as she hailed a cab.

“To track down a man who might or might not begin to regret hiring me.”

It was difficult to tell if Dan Lutz was annoyed or impressed when they finally found him at Bistro Romano, a historic restaurant in Society Hill near South Street. The maître d’ was much easier to read. He was appalled by their gutsy intrusion.

“This way,” he said, his voice as stiff as a pair of new jeans.

“I’m not dressed for it,” McKenna replied.

“I know,” the maître d’ agreed.

The man pulled a little ahead of them as they crossed the dining room. McKenna leaned closer to her to speak in an undertone. “Must be your legs,” he murmured. “That’s why he let us in without a reservation.”

“Leave my legs out of this.”

“Let me make sure I have this straight. I’m not allowed to kiss you and your legs are not a fair topic of conversation. Is there any part of your body you don’t get defensive about?”

Grace stopped dead in her tracks. “How is that any of your business?”

“I’m curious.”

“My body parts are the last thing you should be worried about right now.”

“They’re an intriguing alternative to thinking about my problems. Besides, I have you to think about my problems—at least until I fire you.”

That momentarily quelled her, but Grace rallied. “You won’t have to worry about firing me if you don’t cease and desist with this nonsense.”

“Cease and desist? Is that lawyer-speak?”

“It’s woman-speak. Trust me when I tell you that you’ll recognize the difference.”

“I’m not sure my feeble brain can handle the nuances.”

That startled her. “I never said your brain was feeble.”

“You were looking down your nose at me back there in the prison.”

“I was not.”

“You definitely were.”

He was relentless.

The maître d’ came back to them and cleared his throat. Now kissing was on her mind. Grace decided she would gladly pucker up for the dour-faced little gnome in gratitude for the interruption.

“If it wasn’t my intelligence you were casting aspersions on back there, then what was it?” McKenna asked as they started walking again.

Grace almost choked. “I never cast aspersions.”

“Lady, you had aspersions stamped all over that pretty face of yours.”

She decided to ignore him.

Dan Lutz rose when they reached him. He held a hand out to her. Grace braced herself and took it, knowing he would hold on for a while. It was his habit and it always made her uncomfortable.

There was a second place setting at the table with a half-touched plate of hors d’oeuvres, but Lutz was alone. Ah, she thought, this was a time to tread delicately.

“How in the world did you find me?” he asked.

“I called your secretary at home. She suggested that I contact Lou Russell,” she replied, referring to the firm’s other senior partner. “He said I might find you here.”

Lutz sat again, waving a hand at the other chairs to indicate that they should do so as well, then he motioned to the maître d’. “More wine, please, for my guests.”

They exchanged small talk until the wine steward brought two more glasses and another bottle. Lutz never liked to rush into anything. When the steward began to pour, McKenna held a hand out to prevent him from filling his glass.

“I’d prefer a Guinness,” he said.

Grace felt her blood pressure swell a notch. “Drink the damned wine.”

Lutz cleared his throat. “How did you manage to get a bail hearing so quickly?” he asked.

Time to get down to business, Grace thought. “Actually, I…ah, didn’t.”

“Yet here sits a man I presume is Mr. McKenna. Tell me.”

So she did. She explained about the paperwork glitch and how the authorities had no basis on which to hold him, while a waiter brought McKenna the beer. “By now they’re checking the computer system, of course,” she finished. “I’m sure someone has unearthed his proper paperwork and there are probably cops combing the city looking for him. That’s why I came here to find you and solicit your advice.”

“Some of those cops are my friends,” McKenna offered.

“They won’t look very hard.”

Grace felt something go ping behind her eyes. “Will you please shut up and let me handle this?”

“It was a salient point.” He lifted the Guinness to his mouth.

“I never said you were stupid!”

He ran his tongue over his lip to catch the foam, then he replaced his glass to the table. “Sorry, you lost me there. Must be those quicksilver turns of your own mind. What does my stupidity or lack thereof have to do with this?”

“You keep using college-degree words to prove your point.”

“I have a college degree. I’m also insightful and observant. Which reminds me. What were you casting aspersions on back at the prison? We never did answer that question to my satisfaction.”

Grace deliberately shifted her gaze back to Lutz. She grabbed her wineglass, drank deeply and waited for his verdict. She’d either just done something incredibly stupid…or she’d been brilliant.

Lutz stared into the ruby liquid in his own glass for a moment. “Technically, you should deliver him straight back to the arresting officers,” he said finally. “However, without the paperwork, we have no idea who they are, do we?”

Grace relaxed. He approved of what she had done. Then McKenna spoke up again and her nerves tightened.

“Well, technically, I do know who they are. At four o’clock this afternoon I was playing ball with a couple of my nephews at the city courts. Two uniformed patrolmen came by and slapped handcuffs on me. I don’t know how tight you all are with your families, but that’s something I’d have preferred my sister’s kids not be subjected to.”

Grace felt her heart twist. “We can’t always control what children are subjected to.”

“Yeah, well, I try.”

For the first time since she had made his acquaintance, he seemed sincerely angry. He might have slammed his chair around back at the jail, but that had been nothing compared to what simmered in his eyes now.

“They said they had a warrant for my arrest,” McKenna continued. “I went with them rather than play the whole thing out in front of the boys.”

He’d probably been expecting the arrest, she realized. He had to have known the extortion jig would be up for him sooner or later if he played it out too long. He was a cop; he’d know the odds.

“They took me to County and booked me,” he said. “It never occurred to me to check the name on all those blot pages they were affixing my thumbprints to. Stupid of me.”

Grace wasn’t touching that one.

He leaned forward suddenly, bracing his arms on the table to face her. “Funny that you haven’t gotten around yet to asking why Captain Plattsmier didn’t just have me sprung from that jail instead of calling you.”

Because you’ve been pocketing mob money. Grace shot a glance at Lutz. “Getting him out of County seemed paramount when I found the paperwork glitch. I decided to act first and ask questions later.”

“Tell us now,” Lutz said to McKenna.

“Plattsmier didn’t spring me, because this is payback and on some level he’s aware of it. He’s not going to cross whoever’s doing the paying back.”

Lutz and Grace spoke at once. “For what?”

“You’re implying that someone is framing you but you don’t know who?” Grace added.

“I blew the whistle on my partner about six months ago. She was on the take. Now they’re pulling me down for it, either the mob or the cops who’re involved with them.”

Lutz sat back thoughtfully. Grace glanced at her boss and realized that her head hurt. Badly. How much of this was he buying?

“I had no idea what they were hanging on me until Miss Lawyer here told me about the extortion charge.” McKenna inclined his head in her direction.

“What about those arresting officers?” Grace asked quickly.

“They didn’t tell you?”

“Nope.”

She felt something fire in her blood. “There’s a possible loophole.”

“I thought I was better off not pointing that out to them. I didn’t want to give them a chance to mend their mistake.”

She was almost starting to believe him, Grace realized. “The police department is doing this to you?” There had been rumors of corruption, but there were always rumors.

“I’ll put a call in to Chief Baines in the morning,” Lutz said.

“Baines may be in on it,” McKenna said.

“I know.”

Grace thought of another rumor she’d heard. Plattsmier was next in line for Baines’s job. If Baines was dirty, if he was found out and removed, then Plattsmier would become chief. Now she understood why Lutz was so willing to do Plattsmier this favor and take McKenna on free of charge.

“Plattsmier is hedging his bets,” Lutz said. “He’s not a good guy, and he’s not a bad one. I think the jury’s still out on which side he’ll line up on.”

Yes, Grace thought, he definitely believed McKenna.

In the meantime… “What am I supposed to do with him?” She pointed at McKenna.

Lutz took a hotel key from his trousers pocket. “Room 412 at the Penn’s Landing Hyatt.” He glanced at McKenna. “You can’t go home, not until we put this in some sort of order. That’s the first place they’ll look for you.”

Grace felt her headache getting worse. “You’re putting him up in a hotel for the night?” And not just any hotel, she thought. The Hyatt. “Doesn’t that leave us a little vulnerable on aiding and abetting technicalities?”

“At the moment, there’s no paperwork,” Lutz pointed out reasonably. “No one has yet arrested him a second time. Once that happens, of course, we’ll have a horse of a different color. Which is why I want to avoid it as long as possible. By the time I place that call to Baines in the morning, I want this man’s entire story in summary form on my desk. Let’s aim for nine o’clock.”

He’d just consigned her to working pretty much all night. Grace considered the raise she would get when this was over, when she had won.

She decided she didn’t have a problem with that.

Chapter 2

G race stood and took the key. She didn’t want to know why it had already been in Lutz’s pocket, not with that half-eaten plate of hors d’oeuvres over there on the other side of the table. He had a wife and several children at home.

McKenna remained seated. “How much is this going to cost me?” he asked.

Dan Lutz waved a hand. “That’s not important.”

“With all due respect, it’s kind of an issue for me.”

“We take on a few pro bono cases each year without charge,” Lutz replied.

“I’m not one of them.”

Who was this man? “Do you have any idea what this will cost you otherwise?” she demanded.

McKenna sat back in his chair and watched her. “Gosh, gee, I’ve been a cop in this city for some eleven years now. Have I ever heard of Russell and Lutz?”

An almost-grin pulled at Lutz’s mouth. “I would sincerely hope so.”

“A hundred thousand?” McKenna guessed. “Two hundred? I need to know what I’m up against here.”

“That would be a retainer,” Lutz said equably. “You’d be billed hourly from there, of course, if this escalates.”

“Which? The one hundred thousand or the two?”

“One,” Lutz said. “We’re not God.”

McKenna finally stood. “You’ll have the money by Friday. I don’t take handouts.”

Grace’s blood ran suddenly to ice. She didn’t wait to hear any more. She turned on her heel and left the restaurant. She’d almost bought his story.

She was on the curb outside before he caught up with her. “How does a cop have access to a hundred thousand dollars?” she demanded. “And you expect me to believe that you don’t have that extortion money stashed someplace, that this is all fabricated?”

Then he—this man on the take, this cop gone bad—had the absolute nerve to touch her. He cupped her chin in his hand.

Something happened there at the point of contact. If it had just been heat, she could have jerked from him and let her eyes spit fire. But there was a gentleness there in his grip, too, and it was so at odds with the rest of him that it had her going still, afraid to even take in air.

“I don’t have money stashed anywhere, lady.” Then he paused. “You know, I keep doing that. I keep calling you lady. First impressions and all that. But you’re not a lady at all, are you, despite those incredible legs?”

He was back to her legs again. That was all she could think.

“And you’re not a siren,” he continued. “Once again, your looks aside, I don’t know what you are.”

“You don’t need to know. This isn’t about me.”

“We’re about to share a hotel room tonight—I think that was your boss’s inference with all the talk of reports due by nine in the morning. So I’m thinking that maybe we ought to draw ourselves a few lines in the dirt here.”

She had the wild but certain thought that this man wouldn’t keep to his side of the lines anyway. “Let me go. Don’t touch me. Ever.”

“Sorry.” Finally, blessedly, he dropped his hand. He looked around for a cab. “Not a lady, not a siren. A drill sergeant, maybe. You’re used to giving orders.”

This time Grace found herself touching him. She grabbed his arm to keep him from stepping off the curb as a taxi pulled up. “You’re way out of line!”

He grinned back at her. Grace realized that he’d been deliberately provoking her. She dropped her hand fast.

“Lines,” she reminded him, her breath feeling a little short.

“You wanted lines drawn in the dirt.”

“I just like to know what I’m dealing with before I get cozy with a woman at the Hyatt.”

“I’m not a woman. I’m your attorney. And nobody’s getting cozy.”

It would be too easy, Aidan thought, to let his gaze drop to her breasts while he contemplated that comment, so he forced himself to focus on her mouth instead. What had God been thinking to give a woman a mouth like that? To make blood heat and roar right past common sense and prove that men were fools? But he watched, fascinated, as heat slid into her face, just under her skin, making it glow a soft red in the light that spilled from Bistro Romano.

It made her appear almost vulnerable. He was getting the idea that she was anything but, except she did rattle easily when a man took her off her stride.

“You’re causing a bit of a scene here, honey,” he said finally.

“Better get in the car.”

“I don’t make scenes. And ‘honey’ is not permissible either.”

“Then I guess we’d better start drawing those lines. Sir.”

“Stop it!”

She had a very nice way of turning on one hip, Aidan thought, watching her move toward the waiting car. As he watched her get in, that trim little crimson suit sliding up her thighs, that long dark hair twitching with her movement, he knew beyond a doubt that he had to start drawing those lines—and fast. Even with everything else going on in his life right now she was touching something inside him. And Aidan McKenna was not a man who was going to get sucked in by a beautiful face again.

Inside the cab, Grace made herself breathe. How had all this whirled out of control? One moment, she was just making a side trip to the County prison to see yet another low-life criminal client before heading home. Then he’d turned out to be all male arrogance, but in none of the usual ways. He hadn’t placed his hand coyly over hers when they’d been sitting at the table in the interrogation room the way she’d come to expect from men. He’d just ignited her, and then he’d move in for the kill.

He’d touched her.

Grace slid her palm over the underside of her jaw where his fingers had been. She had to get a grip on this situation. She had to do it five minutes ago.

He finally got into the car beside her. He slouched back against the cracked seat like a lazy tiger when everyone knew there was no such beast.

“The Hyatt, Penn’s Landing,” he said to the driver.

“No!” Grace said quickly.

He gave her a sideways look. “You’re quitting my case?”

“Of course not.” She leaned forward to give the driver her own Society Hill address. “We have to stop at my place first.” She sat back again, careful to keep distance between them.

“Why do I get the feeling we’re not stopping off for a few sweet unmentionables you might need to entice me?”

She honestly wasn’t sure if she was threatened by the laid-back sexual threat of him or if it was his utter disregard for the mess he was in that kept throwing her off. She seized on the latter because the former kept making her forget to breathe.

“You do realize that if they convict you, you’ll be going to jail for a substantially long period of time?” She heard her own voice, her own words, and was reassured that she sounded like herself. “I would suggest that you keep your mind off sex and keep your hands to yourself and let me concentrate on your defense.”

“The jury’s still out as to whether or not I’m keeping you as counsel.”

Grace felt her blood spike in her veins. This time the sensation felt like fear. “I just got you out of jail, didn’t I?”

“True. But you think I’m guilty.”

She did. “I never said that.”

“Lady—no, wait, what did we decide on? I can’t call you lady. Honey, then. Honey, it’s in your eyes.”

“We did not decide on honey. Ms. Simkanian will do just fine.”

“Is that a line in the dirt?”

“Yes. I’m establishing mine.”

“Before we spend the night together,” he clarified.

“We’re not—” Grace broke off suddenly, refusing to rise to the bait again. She gave a quick, hard nod.

“You know, that Ms. stuff never cut it for me,” he said. “My ma was always proud to be called Mrs.”

How did he do this? she wondered incredulously. How did he take every conversation and swing it around to his own agenda? “To the best of my knowledge your mother is not going to jail, so might we leave her out of this?”

“What were we talking about again?”

“I didn’t say you were guilty!”

“And I repeat, you didn’t have to…Ms.”

The cab lurched to a stop in front of her apartment building. Grace was so tense, sitting forward to stare sideways at him, that she almost hit the back of the driver’s seat. She swore under her breath and leaned her weight against the door to open it. “Wait here. I’ll be right back. If I’m going to give Dan a summary of your whole mess by morning, which, of course, you are in no way responsible for, then I’m going to need my laptop.”

“You only need a single sheet of paper, Ms. I didn’t do anything. That’s all you have to write down.”

“The judges I know are a little harder to sell than that.” Grace got out and slammed the cab door. Hard.

At the same moment she heard a familiar tsking sound come from the direction of the sidewalk. She looked that way and nearly groaned aloud. Sylvie Casamento. Her across-the-hall neighbor. The woman was out walking her cat.

This apartment building was Grace’s one true financial weakness, the one thing she allowed herself to spend money on.

She’d grabbed the top-floor, one-bedroom apartment for a mere thousand dollars per month in her last year of law school. The building was a nineteenth-century brownstone owned by an octogenarian who’d been dropped into a retirement home by his eventual heirs. Periodically they tried to prove that he was incompetent, but the old guy always triumphed over them. The sad truth was that when his wife had died he’d no longer been able to bear living in their home without her. He’d converted the place into apartments and had moved into a tiny, cramped studio that made his heirs fear for his mind. He charged next-to-nothing, by Philadelphia standards, for the units, probably just to irritate them.

All the same, the rent had required everything Grace could scrape together each month from waitressing. She’d been planning on picking up a second job when she’d found Jenny Tower standing outside Penn Center Station looking lost, overwhelmed or maybe ecstatic—Grace had yet to figure out which. Jenny was straight off a series of buses and trains from some farm outside Topeka. She had landed in Philly with nowhere particular to go and no real plan. Grace had taken her home with her if only to talk some sense into her.

That had been two years ago. Jenny had spent the better part of those two years sleeping on a sofa bed in the living room. Grace had had the apartment first so she figured she had the right to the only bedroom. Her rent had immediately dropped to five hundred a month. Then, a few months ago, Sam Case—who’d rented one of the two-bedroom units on the second floor—had married Mandy Hillman, who had the two-bedroom unit on the first floor. He’d moved downstairs and Grace and Jenny had taken over Sam’s old apartment. Now Jenny had her own room.

Sylvie Casamento was right there in the middle of all of them to keep her disparaging eye on anything that even remotely concerned her and a lot that didn’t. And at the moment she was very interested in the man in the cab. She was already inching toward the car to peer inside. Who knew what McKenna would tell her given the chance?

Grace turned back and yanked open the door again. “I changed my mind. You’re coming with me.”

“No, thanks,” McKenna said. “I’ll just wait.”

“That wasn’t an option. Now,” she added in a fierce undertone when he still didn’t move.

“On second thought, yes, sir, I’m on my way.”

Grace headed past Mrs. C toward the lobby, then she stalked across the pretty black-and-white tiles and the ferns there. She scooted past Sam and Mandy’s door and took the stairs two at a time to the second floor. She was on the landing before she finally heard McKenna behind her. She did not hear Sylvia Casamento. With any luck, the woman had walked on with that nasty beast she called a feline.

Grace burst into her apartment as if all the demons of hell were trying to grab her heels. Jenny was sitting on the sofa, watching TV.

“I’ve got to go out again,” Grace told her quickly.

Jenny’s gaze came around to find her. “Hmm? How come?”

Then all six-foot-two inches of green-eyed, blond-haired Aidan McKenna finally strolled in behind Grace. “I need her,” he explained conversationally.

There were a few things in life that Grace knew she really didn’t tolerate well. One of them was having a stranger touch her. Surprises weren’t high on her hit list either. In the past half hour, McKenna had done both.

When she wheeled on him, she felt all the telltale signs of an imminent temper tantrum. He was looking around as though contemplating where to sit.

“You will not move from that spot,” she told him.

“So what’s the price of admission?”

“There is none. I’ll only be a minute. There’s no need for you to come in.”

“He’s already as in as a bug in a rug,” Jenny pointed out.

Grace whipped back to look at her roommate and McKenna waltzed right past her. “Hey!” she shouted as he sat beside Jenny on the sofa.

“You know, I never understood that expression,” he said to Jenny.

Her head was starting to hurt again. Grace drove her fingers into her hair. “That’s because she said it wrong. Bugs aren’t ‘in.’ They’re ‘snug.’” She knew. She’d made it a point over the years to understand English colloquialisms and catalogue them in her memory. It was just another way of banishing her past. And why in the name of heaven was she discussing this anyway? Jenny always tortured analogies—it wasn’t worth the time or effort to try to set her straight.

But McKenna wasn’t willing to let the subject go. “‘In’ can be ‘snug,’” he said. “In my experience anyway.” Then he grinned wickedly.

Grace felt the heat of his look—and the innuendo of his comment—all the way to her bones. Something started to vibrate at the core of her. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?” he asked innocently. Then he glanced at Jenny again. “Does she mellow out toward the wee hours of the morning? I just ask because we’re about to spend the night together.”

“She’s kind of muzzy around the edges when she first wakes up in the morning,” Jenny replied. “Sort of like—you’re what?” She gasped when his comment hit her.

“Stop! Both of you, just stop!” Grace shouted. Oh, God, she thought, he’d made her shout again. “Don’t speak to him,” she told Jenny. “Don’t encourage him. And you—” She pointed at McKenna and then at the door. “You wait in the cab.”

“You just told me to wait in here.”

“That was because Mrs. Casamento was outside. Now I’ve changed my mind.”

“Is Mrs. C outside?” Jenny shot off the sofa. “I owe her ten bucks. She let me borrow her laptop the other day.”

Grace wasn’t sure which part of that threw her off more—that crotchety, nasty old Mrs. Casamento had a laptop, which she had actually charged Jenny for the use of it, or that Jenny had borrowed it at all when Grace had one right here in the apartment. Grace settled on the latter. “Why didn’t you use mine?”

Jenny headed to the door. “Because you’re proprietary.”

“And easy to provoke,” McKenna added.

“You stay out of this!” Grace pressed her palms to her cheeks.

“No, no, that’s not true.” Jenny addressed McKenna. “Grace is unflappable. She never flaps. She’s a port in a storm.”

“Couldn’t prove it by me,” he said.

“I got you out of jail, didn’t I?” Grace yelled, at the end of her rope.

“That was flapped,” he said to Jenny. “As in the antithesis of unflappable.”

Jenny smiled happily. “You must have a way with her.”

Grace turned for the bedrooms then she stopped and looked back again. “You didn’t borrow my laptop because I’m proprietary?” she asked her.

“You get edgy about your things when they cost you a lot of money.”

“I believe she just called you cheap,” McKenna pointed out.

“I’m not cheap. I’m responsible. You ought to try it sometime.”

“I’m trying it right now. I’m not paying for that cab you’ve got waiting downstairs, am I?”

“Damn it!” Grace veered for the hall again and this time she made it to her room if only because visions of escalating cab fare propelled her.

Her bedroom was dove-gray and spartan. She liked things clean and neat. It was virtually impossible to misplace something without clutter to camouflage it. She’d spent too much of her life never knowing what might happen to her next. She needed order.

Jenny tended to turn the rest of the apartment on its ear. There was never any telling what she was going to bring home or what she might do with it once she got it here. But in this room, there was only a double bed with perfectly pressed pewter sheets and a comforter a couple of shades darker. There was her desk—and her needed laptop—and a single dresser with a photo of her family on the farm in Maruja tucked into the top drawer where she kept her lingerie.

Grace was tempted to reach for the photo now, a crazy effort to center herself again. She hardly ever took it out, rarely looked at it. The memories it inspired made her ache inside. She kept it because it was all she had of her past. She hated it because it was her past and something inside her keened over it because it was the present for everyone she loved.

Grace moved deliberately past the dresser and went to her desk instead. With a few deft moves, she had the modem line and the printer cable disconnected and everything ready to go. She went back to the living room.

Jenny was gone, off paying Mrs. C, and McKenna was lounging on the sofa as if he owned it. He had turned the television on.

“I’m ready now.” She kept her tone flat, her voice on the far side of tantrum.

“Got your toothbrush?”

“I’ll have no need of a toothbrush tonight.” As soon as she got his statement, she would be coming home. Safely home, Grace thought.

“Maybe, maybe not.” But at least he turned the TV off and stood from the sofa.

“There is no maybe involved in this discussion.”

For a moment he looked pensive, she thought. “There are a lot of maybes,” he said finally. “And I have a feeling that it’s going to take us all night to unravel even a portion of them.”

“I’m very good at unraveling.”

He grinned again as he joined her at the door. “I’m very good at prognosticating. And procrastinating.”

Was he using the convoluted words again on purpose? Was he still hung up on the intelligence issue? She had the feeling that he could be like a dog with a bone when it came to something that bugged him. He wouldn’t let it go.

Grace decided that the best she could do was step around the issue. “At four hundred an hour?” She yanked the door open and stepped out into the hall.

“Is that what you’re costing me?”

“I’m the new kid on the block. I come cheap.”

“Do you now?”

Her heart jerked. How many hours was it going to take her to learn that this man could twist anything she said? She headed for the stairs.

“You’re just hired?” He followed her. “I got the rookie?”

“Lutz wasn’t going to charge you at all until you acted like a five-million-a-year extortionist.”

“I acted like no such thing. So what would a veteran cost me?”

“Five hundred and up.”

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

Grace snorted, doubting that. “I guess you’re stuck with me then.”

“Not necessarily. There are other firms, lesser fees.”

She stopped cold in the building lobby to stare at him. “Are you trying to convince me you’re stupid?”

“Wouldn’t take much work, would it?”

His face had hardened. She didn’t like the fact that it unnerved her a little. “I never said that, never insinuated it.”

“We’ll get into what you’ve insinuated once I’ve got you locked in a hotel room.”

“I’m not going to be locked there. You are.”

“You’re very argumentative. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

How had she come to be nose to nose with him? Grace backed off. She jerked toward the lobby door and all but jogged out onto the street.

The cab was still waiting and it was probably going to cost her a hundred dollars by now. Lutz was going to have a stroke when she put this expense in to the firm. Then again, he had just given up a room at the Hyatt for this character.

By the time they landed at the hotel, the meter had steadfastly clicked its way up to $67.40. Grace didn’t have that much cash on her. She rooted through her briefcase twice and still came up short by almost ten dollars. She squeezed the bills that she did have in her fist and closed her eyes in a last-ditch effort at composure. When McKenna’s voice came from beside her, it sounded amused. “Problem?”

She opened her eyes carefully. “Yes. You’ve been one since you first walked into that interrogation room.”

“No way can you hang it on me if you don’t have enough money on you.”

“You don’t have money?” the cabbie demanded, alarmed.

“I have money, damn it!” Grace shouted. So much for composure. “I can get more.”

“Is that your way of saying you are short?” McKenna asked.

Grace pushed on her door to open it and slid out.

“You know, this wouldn’t be a problem if you had just let me take my billfold from the jail,” McKenna said from inside the car.

“It was either you or your wallet,” Grace leaned back into the car to remind him. “Fire me if you’d have preferred to stay there yourself tonight!”

“I was saving the subject of firing you until we got inside,” McKenna answered. “Assuming we ever get there.”

Grace slammed the cab door on him. She managed to take two steps before the cabbie grabbed her from behind, someone else touching her without permission. But this was someone she didn’t have to toe any lines with. She spun back to him, snarling. “Get your hands off me.”

He hesitated, but then he dropped his hands and stepped back. “Can’t let you go in there, lady, not without paying me. That’s a hell of a fare you ran up.”

“Tell me about it,” she grated. “Here.” She shoved the fifty-eight dollars at him that she’d managed to rummage from her briefcase. “It’s short,” she said before he could point that out.

“I’m going inside to get the rest. You can keep…keep…” Temporarily, words failed her. “Him.” She gestured at the car. “For collateral.”

“What am I supposed to do with him if you don’t come back?”

Grace wasn’t even sure what she was supposed to be doing with him. “I’ll be back.”

Getting cash wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. She didn’t see an ATM anywhere in the lobby but she had the key, and the room was reserved in Lutz’s name. They had her boss’s credit card number on file. The desk clerk wanted to extend Lutz’s guest any courtesy, but how many women had the man brought here anyway? Grace wondered. Enough that forking over cash to be charged to his credit card alarmed the staff, she answered herself.

“I’m only asking for twenty dollars,” Grace hissed at the woman. Even as she spoke, she heard a horn bleating outside—again and again and again. She wondered if it was a traffic jam or the cabbie.

She hated McKenna.

“I’ll have to check with Mr. Lutz first,” the woman said. “I have his phone number on file—”

“No!” Grace raised her voice again, alarmed, as the woman started poking at the computer keyboard. She’d already been chastised once by Lutz for not keeping enough cash on her and she had only been with the firm for four weeks. She didn’t want him to know that she’d gotten caught short again.

There was an answer to this conundrum, but it made her skin itch a little. “Here,” she said, and dug her own credit card out of her briefcase. “Put it on this.”

“You want me to charge twenty dollars to your credit card and give you the cash?” The woman looked doubtful.

They could easily do it, Grace thought, but there’d be more fuss and she was in a hurry to pay the driver. “I want you to put the room on my credit card—and an extra twenty—and I want you to give the twenty dollars to me.” She’d put the whole damned expense into the firm and hope that Lutz didn’t ask her why she’d done it this way.

The clerk finally took her card and Grace felt a little out of breath again. She could have tried to tell herself that it was the stress of the past few hours but she didn’t bother. She felt a sudden, mini-panic-attack coming on at the idea that she was about to wham the hell out of her Visa with what would probably amount to a several-hundred-dollar charge. Not that the card wasn’t good—it was fine. She rarely used the thing and she paid off the balance monthly. But there was always that nagging question of what if?

What if something catastrophic happened to her and she needed to lay her hands on a few thousand dollars in a hurry before she paid the card off again? What if the firm didn’t reimburse her quickly enough and when an emergency came up, she was a few hundred dollars short because this expense was on there? What if there was no money left for groceries or for the electric bill or…

“You’re not looking too good there, lady.”

Grace turned sharply at the sound of McKenna’s voice. The abrupt movement, coupled with the fact that she hadn’t breathed right for probably thirty or forty seconds, almost had her passing out. Her vision got fuzzy around the edges.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“You brought me here.”

“The cabbie was supposed to be holding you for ransom.”

“I threatened him and he let me go.”

“You what?” She was appalled. He’d end up back in jail before the night was out on a totally unrelated charge and what would that do to her career?

“You need to calm down, honey,” McKenna said. “Seriously, you’re pale.”

Honey. He was calling her honey again. “I thought we agreed on ‘lady.’” Or had it been Ms.?

“By any name, you’re white as a sheet.”

“Has it occurred to you anywhere in that warped brain of yours that maybe you’re the cause?”

He seemed to honestly think about it. “I guess warped is a step up from stupid. Is it?”

“I never said you were stupid!” she screeched.

People around them took several quick, alarmed steps back. Grace caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and she was horrified at herself.

She wanted to cry, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried.

“Ms. Simkanian?” the desk clerk said tentatively.

Grace spun back to her. She was holding out her Visa, the receipt, and a twenty-dollar bill. Grace snatched all of it from her hand then somehow found the presence of mind to be polite.

“Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m fine now.”

“If you say so,” McKenna said.

She all but galloped out of the lobby. Part of it was the fact that she was afraid the cabbie would get tired of waiting for her to come back and call the cops. The other part was that she just wanted to get away from McKenna.

It was going to be a very long night.

Chapter 3

A idan watched his attorney whip through the hotel door. What exactly did he have on his hands?

He wasn’t a man who gave undue thought to his problems. Life was full of them, after all, and he knew what mattered in life. Family mattered. Love mattered, not that he’d ever want any of his buddies to hear him say that. The love of a good woman, the love of a niece or nephew who thought he was one step short of God, yeah, those things mattered. He tried to shrug off everything else.

Big problems could trip him up for a few strides, sure. But he’d been blessed with very few big things going wrong in his life until lately.

Grace Simkanian was a small problem, but she was nagging at him anyway. For reasons that totally escaped him, he liked her. He liked the heat of her temper and her cool rigidity and her mind. But she didn’t like him and at the moment he had big problems that mandated that his attorney at least tolerate him.

He really ought to fire her, but he didn’t want to.

She came back into the lobby, then she cut through the air beside him, heading right past him.

“I guess this means we’re staying?” he asked, going after her.

She stabbed the elevator button. “For $762 plus tax, you damned well better believe I’m staying.”

Aidan whistled under his breath. The big guy with the firm liked good rooms.

He caught her hand to stop her assault on the defenseless button. She did the same thing she had done all night when he’d gotten too close. She stopped breathing before she bristled. That intrigued him.

If he was going to succeed in disliking her, he was going to have to strip her of all this mystery she had going on, he realized. There was nothing more deadly than a beautiful, mysterious woman.

He leaned closer to her anyway, stopping only when his face was inches from hers. He kept holding her hand. He needed another beautiful, mysterious woman in his life right now like he needed a firing squad, and the fact that this one obviously believed he was guilty made her all the more treacherous. But he whispered to her all the same.

“In…out,” he said.

“What?” She gasped the word and suddenly he could feel her trembling under his touch. Oh, man, he thought. Beautiful, mysterious and trembling.

“Inhale, exhale,” he explained. “That’s what I meant.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. You’re not breathing.”

“I’m breathing.”

“Not well. And your pulse is going off like a machine gun.”

“What kind of mind uses machine guns in an analogy?”

He tightened his grip on her wrist. She tugged at his hold but she wouldn’t embarrass herself by going into all-out war to dislodge his grip.

“Maybe a criminal mind,” he suggested. “Maybe dark characters excite you.”

“Excite—” She choked then broke off.

“You,” he finished for her.

“Go to hell.”

“I might, for what I’m thinking about doing to you right now. You know, there are only so many miles of legs, so much dark, tossed hair a man can stand.”

That did it to her. She panicked and wrenched away from him. When she was free, she attacked the elevator button again, slamming her palm against it. She looked close to tears.

Good show, Aidan thought. Beautiful, mysterious, trembling and tears. Oh, yeah, he was on a roll here. The thought doused him enough that he stepped back suddenly to give her room.

“Sorry,” he said shortly.

She turned her head to glare at him. “For behaving like an ignorant ass?”

“That, too.” He couldn’t resist. “And for turning you on.”

Her eyes went huge. “You did not—”

“Lady, you were as ‘on’ as a bug in a rug.”

“That’s ‘in’!”

“Well, actually, it was snug, but that brings us back to fit, and that takes us to—”

“Shut up!”

Yeah, he thought, he rattled her. He really rattled her and he didn’t understand why. All this mystery was going to make for one very long night.

The elevator finally came and Grace all but leaped inside. It was crowded but that offered her no hope. Everyone spilled out into the lobby and left her alone with McKenna. She pressed herself into a corner as the doors slid shut again.

If he got out of line now, she could kill him without risking witnesses. And she wouldn’t give a damn about her credit card bill, either, when she fled the scene.

He stood in the middle, his back to her, silent. The elevator was quiet as a breath and moved like an underwater dream, and still he said nothing. The car reached their floor with a delicate chiming sound. The doors parted again soundlessly. Grace waited for him to move first since he was closest to them. He didn’t.

After all that nonsense downstairs, now he was mute, she thought. Deaf and blind, too. She stepped around him. The doors began closing again. She shot a hand out to hold them open. “Can we just do this now? Please?”

One corner of his mouth crooked up. Now what had she said? Grace felt her skin heat and she was reasonably sure that she hadn’t blushed since the age of fifteen.

Let him stand here, then, she decided. He could ride the elevator up and down all night. She had a job to do. She left the car and was four strides down the hall before she remembered that she couldn’t do the job without him. By then he was behind her. She went to their room and shot the key card into the lock.

The room staggered her. Her first thought was that Lutz really liked whomever he had been planning to bring here. Her second thought was that maybe he just really liked to pamper himself. She had never set foot in a place such as this in her life.

There were no visible beds and she blessed fate for that. God only knows what McKenna might pull with a bed in evidence. But there were doors on either end of the room and she figured that there was a bedroom beyond one, if not both, of them. Separating them was a sea of rich cream-colored carpet. Grace stared down at it almost dumbly. In a hotel? Weren’t hotel rooms supposed to be serviceable, built to withstand the masses? Then again, how many people could afford a place like this? In the Hyatt’s defense, there wasn’t a stain or a smudge to be found, not that she could see. And the decorator had had the good sense to place a forest-green and gold Persian rug beneath the cherrywood dining table, a table that could quite possibly be the size of her bedroom.

The chairs bracketing the table were done in the same elegant deep green as the rug. So were both of the sofas that formed a wedge at the far wall. There was a bar sided in smoky bronzed reflecting glass. Grace figured that, given the tab for this place, they’d probably already charged her for every bottle of liquor there. Opposite that was an armoire so huge she had to wonder how much clothing people generally brought to a place like this.

McKenna went to it and grabbed one of the brass handles to open the center doors. Of course, the people who stayed here would not want to store their clothes in the center room, Grace thought. It held a television the size of the country she’d escaped from as a teenager.

“We’re not here to watch TV,” she said a little hoarsely when he found a remote and stepped back to turn it on and play with the channels.

Flick, flick, flick. Channels flashed and vanished again as Grace watched.

“Of course not,” he said. “We’re here to—how did you put it?—just do this.”

She’d known that comment would come back to haunt her. Grace took her laptop to the table. “I’m not paying for premium channels.”

“No need. They’re free up here in heaven.”

“Are you serious?” She turned back to him, surprised.

McKenna switched to a skin flick and stepped back so she could see it. “That’s premium,” he observed.

“That’s—oh, my God!” Grace jerked around again fast and put her back to the television.

“Ah, come on. A savvy attorney like you, caught short on cab fare, must have more than enough aplomb to deal with a little skin-to-skin action like this.”

“That’s not skin-to-skin. It’s liver to pancreas.”

His laugh was rich, rumbling, genuinely amused. It made something kick inside her and Grace almost turned around again in surprise. She wondered if a man could manufacture a laugh like that just to make a woman move when she really didn’t want to.

She focused on plugging in her computer. “If the…ah, action on the television gets to be too much for you, you can simply grunt in response to my questions.”

“Will do.”

She would not look around at him. Her laptop purred to life and Grace seated herself at the table. “Let’s start at the beginning. You mentioned earlier that this is payback. I need to know exactly what you did to warrant payback of any sort.”

“I—whoa.”

“Whoa what?”

“Can women actually move like that?”

She would not look. “Stop it!”

“Well, you know, it’s bound to make a guy curious.”

“You’re paying four hundred dollars an hour to be curious?”

“Good point.”

Blessedly, there was another click and then the television went silent. Grace let out a careful breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He wouldn’t back off that easily. She knew the whole business with the skin flick had only been to get a rise out of her.

“Want a drink?” he asked. “It says here that the booze is complimentary.”

“The hell it is. I already paid for it. This room would have been three hundred dollars without it.”

“Well, we’re going highbrow tonight. So what do you think?”

“I think I just want to get your statement.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll help myself to a little of this Jameson’s. The better to dredge up nasty memories with.”

“By all means,” she said shortly. “As I said, it’s paid for.”

“That credit card receipt really knocked your socks off, didn’t it?”

“I’m wearing hose.”

“Oh, I noticed.”

Grace bit down hard on her tongue. “Exactly what did you do to warrant payback?” she tried again.

“I told you that already. At the restaurant.”

“Tell me again and give me the details.”

She heard ice tinkle into a glass. Something splashed delicately, then there was the suction-hissing sound of a bottle of cola opening. Grace couldn’t help it. She twisted around in her seat then she stared at him where he stood at the bar. “You’re mixing Jameson’s with cola?”

He cut a glance at her. “It’s Jameson’s, not vintage Bushmills.”

She didn’t know the difference. All she knew was that this room had cost her—until she put the chit in to the firm—seven hundred dollars plus change, so the liquor ought to be distilled from gold.

But she didn’t plan on admitting that she didn’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills until her next life. Grace lofted her brows. “I am impressed with a worldly man.”

“He would be your next case, honey. This man likes his Irish watered down. It lasts longer that way.”

He brought his glass back to the table and sat. He finally sat. Grace told herself that she should be grateful for that—now maybe they could get some work done. She watched him take a long swig of the whiskey and cola. He closed his eyes when he did it and he seemed to appreciate it deep in his bones.

“With the money they’re saying you took, you shouldn’t have to stretch out your whiskey,” she observed.

“The operative words there are…they’re saying.”

“Talk to me.”

“Sure. I grew up in a household where Jameson’s was considered manna from heaven. I still can’t take it for granted.”

Grace had to shake her head a little to clear her mind. She thought she’d finally gotten him on track. “Does that have anything to do with who’s…ah, framing you?”

He put the glass down on the table. “You were doing fine up until that ah.”

“What ah?” She pressed her spine to the back of the very well upholstered chair.

“As in…ah, framing you.”

“You said someone was framing you.”

“And—” He broke off to swig more whiskey. “You said ah.”

“What’s your point?”

“You don’t believe me. That ah was a classic measure of salt.”

That was an expression she knew. Grace clenched her jaw until it hurt. “My belief or lack thereof is not the issue here.”

“Of course it is. It’s the crux of the whole thing. It’s what stands between me keeping you or firing you.”

“We’ve been through all that.”

He grinned again. This time, she thought, it was the look of a wolf scenting prey. “No, honey, we haven’t.”

The tension in her jaw was giving her a headache. A worse headache, she amended. “Stop calling me that.”

“What you need to relax you is some Jameson’s,” he decided.

Arguing with him would get her nowhere. She already knew that. Grace told herself that that was why she clamped her jaw shut again and let him get up from the table to make her a drink. His voice came back to her from the bar, warm as smoke now.

“If you don’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills, the cola probably won’t throw you off too much,” he commented.

“I never said I didn’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills.”

“This may come as a shock to you—lady—but you’re as transparent as a hooker’s negligee.”

It was her curse, Grace thought. She’d escaped Maruja to come to America and her cross to bear for that was going to be a lifetime of weird analogies—first Jenny’s and now this man’s. The difference was that Jenny’s made a kind of sweet, warped sense, and McKenna’s were…heated.

She wasn’t sure what bothered her most—that heated reference or the fact that he thought she was transparent. Grace went for the latter and set about contradicting it.

“You see what I want you to see,” she told him.

He brought her the drink. Grace took the glass and sipped, choking as the fire went down.

“Whoa,” McKenna said.

Grace bore down hard on her breath. “I like Jameson’s.”

He gave that laugh again.

She couldn’t do this, Grace thought desperately. She could handle the crime he was accused of. She could handle his total disrespect for the situation he was in, and she could even handle his innuendos if she had to. But she could not handle that whiskey-rich laugh.

“You’re going to say ‘stop it’ again, aren’t you?” He sat and watched her. He was amused. “Or ‘shut up.’”

“It never occurred to me.” Grace took more whiskey.

“What is it about me that bothers you so much?”

“Wait. Hold on. Let me find my list.” She bit her tongue as soon as she said it, because it made him laugh again. “Please, I just want to do my job here and go home.”

He relaxed in his chair. “Let’s get back to the discussion of whether or not you even have a job—with me, that is.”

Every time he said that, it made her blood chill. Yes, Grace thought, yes, she had to fix that little issue right off the bat. “Are you telling me the truth?” she asked. “About being framed?”

“My ma would kick my butt for lying.”

“I’ve never met your mother, so I’ll settle for a simple yes or no here.”

“Then yes. I am telling the truth.” This time, when he got up, he brought the whole pint of Jameson’s back to the table, along with another bottle of cola. He topped his glass off with both of them. “But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that you don’t believe me.”

Grace sat back in her chair and gave him a level look. “Do you believe it?”

He frowned. “What kind of question is that?”

“Answer it.”

“Okay, sure, I believe I’m being framed. I am being framed.”

“Good. Fine.” She sat forward again and began tapping on the keyboard, opening a file for her McKenna notes. “Then I’m your lawyer. Let’s put that aside now and tell me why someone would frame you.”

“Clarify why we’re putting the issue of my representation aside.”

“Because you believe you’re innocent. You’d therefore want the best representation money can buy in order to prove it.”

“And that’s you?”

“Gosh. I just knew you weren’t stupid.”

“You’re a rookie.”

“I work for Russell and Lutz. Nobody gets hired by Russell and Lutz unless they’re ace.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then slowly he nodded. He gave her the point. If he was innocent, he was going to need the best representation money could buy, and that was exactly what he had unless he canned her or asked for someone else in the firm, and he didn’t have five-hundred-and-up an hour to spend on that.

“Let me start by telling you why someone would frame me,” he said finally. Then he tilted his head to the side and studied her. “Maybe I’m just a sucker for a pretty face.”

He’d pulled her right in, Grace realized. Her whole body stiffened in reaction. She’d thought he was finally ready and willing to talk to her. Instead he was playing games again.

She slapped her laptop shut and stood. “Enjoy your three squares. I hear the baloney sandwiches are great at the penitentiary.”

“Was it something I said?” he asked.

Grace headed for the door. “I’m not going to beg you to let me save your sorry backside.”

“Now, now. No disparaging of body parts. I’ve been very complimentary of yours.”

She felt her blood pressure spike. “So I’m ungrateful, too.”

He nodded. “And prickly.”

“You said argumentative earlier.” This was the craziest conversation she’d ever had. Why was she discussing anything with him? She’d had every intention of sailing out the door, but somehow she’d stalled.

Of course, Lutz was on the other side of that door, somewhere in Philadelphia. If she left here, sooner or later she’d have to face him and tell him that she had walked out on McKenna. She had a mental image of dollar bills fluttering away on the wind. Grace’s fingers tightened on her laptop handle.

“I am a sucker for a pretty face,” McKenna said, feigning indignation.

“Oh, yes. I can tell. You’ve been jumping through hoops to do my bidding since I met you.”

“I wasn’t talking about your face.”

It took the wind right out of her. Grace frowned as she turned back to him. “My face is pretty.”

“Damned tootin’.”

Damned what? “What kind of expression is that?” One she’d apparently missed in her pursuit of quirky Americanisms, she thought.

He was looking at her oddly. She’d just come unconscionably close to doing something she never did, Grace realized. She’d almost revealed her remaining ignorance of a few scant aspects of this incredible United States of America.

She’d lost her accent. She had never completely lost her befuddlement.

Grace went back to the table slowly. “Whose face were you talking about?”

“Katherine Cross.”

“And she has what to do with this?”

“I’m not completely sure.” He frowned down into his whiskey and cola. “You know, she might actually be better-looking than you are. Although Kat is blond, so that would kind of be like comparing apples to oranges, wouldn’t it?”

Grace sat again. She told herself she did it because her legs were about to fold. Confusion did that to her. “I don’t want to talk about fruit. I want to talk about your problem.”

“I thought you quit.”

No one should have eyes that perfectly green, Grace thought when he looked up again. She didn’t want to think about his eyes, but they were trained on her hard and she couldn’t quite escape them. “You’re going to fire me, so what difference does it make?”

“I thought we already decided that I can’t do better than Russell and Lutz.”

“Dan has other attorneys.”

“But are they either apples or oranges?”

That was when it hit her, when she finally understood.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?”

His sudden frown etched his forehead. “That word’s not in the macho dictionary.”

“That’s why you’re doing this,” she persisted.

“Doing what?”

“Dancing around the subject. You won’t address it. Every time I try to get you to talk about it, you go off on a tangent.”

“You’re a pretty interesting tangent, Ms.”

“There!” Grace slapped the table with the palm of her hand and launched to her feet. “See? You just did it.”

He held his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay. If you want me to be scared, I’m scared.”

“Stop it! They could put you away for upward of fifteen years for this!” Her voice ricocheted around the elegant room. Grace flinched. “What do I care?” she said. “It won’t be me eating baloney sandwiches.” This time, when she grabbed her laptop, she made it all the way to the door.

“Wait,” he said quietly. “All right. I’m scared. I guess I have reason to be.”

It almost melted her knees. And that made no sense. He was a criminal. Grace looked back at him. “Damned tootin’.”

He let his laugh roll. Grace braced herself for the low, sexy rumble of it this time. How could a man accused of extortion sound so happy, she wondered, so good?

“You’d have to know my ma,” he said finally, sobering again.

“I still haven’t figured out how Katherine Cross figures into this. Can I just deal with one woman at a time?”

“Kat may or may not be framing me, but my mother is sure as hell going to kick that body part of mine you were calling sorry a little while ago, and she’s going to do it all the way back to Ireland when she hears about this. What are the odds that you can dispose of this little problem before she finds out?”

Grace felt her jaw sag. Who was this guy? “You’re serious? You’re worried about your mother?”

“Hey, I’m Irish.”

“You mentioned that part.” But she didn’t understand the connection. “So?”

“Finola rules the roost.”

“Finola being…”

“Ma.”

She was having a very hard time equating a felon with a man cowed by Ma, but Grace returned to the table yet again and answered him. “Slim to none. Maybe slim to half-none. It will be weeks before we even get a preliminary hearing. Besides, if you don’t talk to me now, right now, you’re going to jail tomorrow and that might be hard to hide from her. I need something to work with just for a bail hearing.”

She was braced for more of his wit, more of his clever shenanigans, but this time his eyes didn’t change. They stayed dark green, the green of the sea before a storm. “Okay,” he said finally, “open your laptop again.”

“Ask me nicely,” she quipped, repeating what he had said at the jail.

Why did she do that? Grace asked herself as soon as the words were out. Why did she keep provoking him into behaving exactly the way she didn’t want him to behave? She did it, she realized, because nobody had ever laughed at things she said. Ever. She was steady, strong, cynical. Sometimes her tongue could cut glass and sometimes she was insightful. She was smart. But she wasn’t funny.

Grace sat a little unsteadily while he laughed, and opened the computer again. Then she glanced deliberately at her watch. “A tired attorney is not an effective attorney. Start spilling so I can still get some sleep tonight.”

“About Kat?”

“I’m assuming that she has some connection to all this since you made a point of mentioning her.” Grace poised her fingers over the keys to type down everything he said. Then she’d go home and put it into some kind of readable, report order.

“Maybe leave out her looks this time,” she added. Who was the woman anyway? she wondered. Venus?

“Tough to do.”

“Try harder.”

Well, Aidan thought, it looked like he had just about run out of evasive tactics. He took another mouthful of whiskey and cola and this time it washed around in his gut like oil.

“She…changed,” he said finally. But that made it sound black-and-white, which it definitely had not been. “Gradually. I mean, it wasn’t like I woke up one morning and she’d suddenly grown horns, nothing like that. It was…stealthy. That was why it was so easy for me to ignore it for a while.” They were the same words he’d given to the Internal Affairs officer, he realized, then to the D.A., then to the jury. They didn’t taste any better the fourth time around.

Her fingers started clicking on the keyboard. “Am I to understand this Kat…Katherine…was the partner you mentioned earlier at the restaurant?”

“Right. First she started to shake me occasionally—take calls without me.”

“That’s unusual.”

It wasn’t a question, he thought, but then, she practiced criminal law. It didn’t take a month to get a handle on the detectives’ routines. “A cop doesn’t want to be wandering around some of this city’s streets alone without backup.”

That got a quick nod out of her. When she didn’t look up from the computer screen, Aidan cleared his throat and went on. Suddenly he felt parched, hoarse. “There was that, all her mysterious disappearances and her lame excuses for them. Then, out of the blue, she started having money to burn. She was always offering to buy lunch, dinner, whatever. And no more soggy, premade, convenience-store sandwiches, either. All of a sudden we were going top of the line. I knew what she earned and it sure as hell didn’t equate to some of the things she was buying. Finally, when she tried to blow me off one day and head out without me again, I was curious enough to tail her.”

Aidan fell silent. The next part, he thought, was harder to tell. “She went to a restaurant on Filbert. She met with a man named Charlie Eagan.”

Grace stopped typing. She stared at him. “He’s the new Mafia don. Lou O’Bannon died a few years back and Eagan took over when another successor was killed.” She picked her glass up quickly, then put it down again without drinking.

Was she starting to believe him? Hard to tell, Aidan decided. “I dug a little deeper then. I got Kat’s bank records and found some regular, sizable deposits. I followed her again and took pictures of her consorting with the element, with guys named Liam Bradstoe and Bonnie Joe. I confronted her with them. I gave her every chance to get out. I told her I’d burn them if she’d only just stop.”

“Ah.”

Aidan felt his eyes narrow hard enough and suddenly enough that pain creased his forehead. “You just did it again.”

“What?” She looked startled.

“That ah business.”

“I was considering a response!”

“If it takes you that much effort, maybe I do need another lawyer.”

This time, when she grabbed her glass, she actually drank. He watched her swallow with a gulp and give another little cough. “You’re trying to tell me that this…this Kat, Katherine, your partner, was guilty of the same thing you are now coincidentally charged with?”

“No. I’m not trying. I am telling you. Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?”

“Of course. Go on.”

“When I knew I couldn’t save her—that she didn’t want to be saved—I turned her in to Internal Affairs.”

“Ah.” She started typing again. This time, Aidan thought the ah was deliberate, so he ignored it.

“They investigated her themselves and ultimately the D.A. charged her. I testified at her trial.”

“So you think this framing business is her doing? Revenge?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. No.”

Grace looked up at him. He saw the frown in her eyes though her face remained smooth and flawless. And he knew what she was thinking. Temper flared in him and it was real this time, as blistering as when the cops had come to the basketball court. “Say it.” He watched her face pale a little as he threw out the words. “You’re thinking that my explanation for my innocence should be smoother than that.”

“I didn’t say—”

“No, honey, you don’t say anything. You just ‘ah’ and frown.”

“I’m not frowning.”

“Try this on for size,” he persisted. “If I was making this up, if I was just covering that body part that my mother is going to kick, then I’d sure as hell have ironed out my story a little more and be able to point to who’s framing me. Damn it!” He punched the table and stood. His fingers were tunneling through his own hair before he realized he was doing it.

“Okay, you’re innocent because you didn’t think this through,” she said.

“Don’t push me.” The warning was quiet, dangerous.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice didn’t crack. It was cool and inflectionless. And damn it, that was tough to do with a man like him when he was angry. Aidan looked back at her.

She was sitting very straight, seemingly calm. But her hands were nowhere near the keyboard now. They were both clamped around her glass. She raised the drink to her mouth and sipped like she didn’t want it but knew she needed it.

“Kat could be getting even with me for turning her in,” he said finally, more calmly. “But I think it’s more likely that Eagan and his henchmen are behind all this.” Did he? Or did he just not want to believe—was he just incapable of believing—that Kat would do this to him?

“So you think it’s the mob instead.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he heard himself explaining to Ms. Lawyer why he had done it, why he had dug into Kat’s activities.

“I had to know why it had happened. I had to know for my own sanity. So I did my job. I investigated, bouncing from what little I had been able to glean on Kat’s activities, and I came up with a theory. And what I think is that Rafe Montiel—” He broke off when he heard her begin typing furiously again.

“What? What did I just say to make you start hitting the keys again just then?”

“You gave me another name.”

“Rafe Montiel is a P.P.D. detective.”

“Oh.” She stopped typing.

“Rafe Montiel is the department’s mob expert. He investigated Phil McGaffney’s death—O’Bannon’s heir-apparent before Eagan.”

“He wouldn’t be doing this to you?”

Then he understood. “You think I’m throwing in every name I can latch on to in order to save my skin?” In that moment, he couldn’t remember why he’d thought he’d liked her. Give the woman credit, Aidan thought, for raising more emotion in him than anyone since…well, Katharine.

Aidan went back to the table. He laid his palms carefully on the wood and leaned closer to her. Intimidating her…or trying to. But this time she didn’t recoil. She just held her breath again.

He was damned if he was going to admire her backbone. And double damned if he’d wonder about that no-breathing thing again.

“All I was going to say is that while Rafe has done a hell of a job dismantling a portion of the Irish mob, he hasn’t taken it down all the way. It’s alive. It’s thriving. And now I have reason to believe that it’s involving the Philadelphia Police Department.”

He watched her eyes flare. There’d been rumors of that sort of thing for a while now, he thought, so she’d be wondering if he was using those rumors toward his own ends or if he was substantiating them. Aidan grabbed the last of the pint of Jameson’s from the table. He decided it was better at the moment to put some space between them so he paced back into the center of the room to swig from the bottle.

“Start typing…lady.”

“Fine,” she said finally. “Since you didn’t call me honey or dear.”

“I’m saving those for when I want to get the most rise out of you.”

Did she snort? Women with hair like that and legs like that didn’t snort, he thought, looking back quickly. He watched her pause in her typing to run a delicate finger over her upper lip.

She’d snorted. Damned if he didn’t almost grin.

“You were saying?” she murmured.

“Through my investigation of Kat, I’m pretty convinced that the rumors of corruption are true. I think Eagan and his guys are laundering money through various Philadelphia pubs. They use them as locations for after-hours meetings and as a cover for other illegal enterprises.”

“Such as?”

He shrugged. “Prostitution. Drugs. Probably more highbrow crimes, too.”

“Like a hotel charging a woman for liquor she hasn’t consumed yet?”

She caught him off guard with that one. His bark of laughter startled even him. “That really has you bugged, doesn’t it?”

“Is there any left?”

“Jameson’s? No.” He looked at the empty bottle in his hand, then he thought maybe the little she’d drunk so far had loosened her up some. “Want more? We could order up from the bar.”

“They’d probably charge as much for it as my law school tuition. No, I’m almost done here.”

“Lady, we haven’t even gotten started yet.”

She cast him a surprised look. “There’s more?”

“Oh, yeah. What Katherine was doing for Eagan.”

She went still. “What?”

“She—and other officers, I imagine—have been taking a nice stipend from the mob to look the other way and leave those pubs alone. They’re protecting them from good cops.”

He watched her face change. He knew what she was thinking. If he was right and if he was on the up-and-up, what he had just handed her would make her name gold in the city of Philadelphia if she could prove it. And if he was lying to her and she ran with it anyway, it would make her a fool.

She needed to talk to Katherine Cross, Grace decided. Not that she didn’t believe her client but…well, he was her client. If he were scrupulously honest, he wouldn’t have needed to hire her in the first place. “Where is Katherine?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

That was convenient, Grace thought. She choked on another ah. “So she’s not in the penitentiary?”

“She struck a deal with the D.A. and got probation.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“I don’t know the details. I never wanted to know.”

Grace chose her next words carefully. “It could be that she rolled over on other people who are involved.”

He was silent. When she finally looked at him again, there was something stark in his eyes. Grace shook her head a little, confused. He’d joked his way right out of that jail and now he was stricken by the possibility that his partner had coughed up his name in exchange for leniency?

“Or her cronies pulled some strings for her,” he said finally.

“You’re saying that this corruption reaches past the police department and all the way into our court system?”

“I have no idea. I’m just throwing it out there.”

“Why is it so hard for you to swallow that she might have ratted you out?”

He crossed the room again, coming back at her fast. This time Grace flinched in spite of herself. He put a hand on each arm of her chair and leaned into her.

“Back off,” she whispered. She wondered if he heard the quaver in her voice.

“We’ve got one little bit of unfinished business here.”

“Finish it on the other side of the room.”

“Give me one answer here, lady. Am I innocent or guilty?”

“That’s not germane—” She broke off suddenly when he moved one of his hands to cup her chin. He held her face still when she tried to look away. Touching her again.

Grace felt her pulse begin ratcheting. The man was out of control. “You don’t need an assault charge right now on top of everything else,” she whispered.

“Who am I assaulting?”

Oh, God help her, his voice was like smoke again. “Me.”

“You think this is assault?”

“Yes. You’re touching me.”

“Am I hurting you?”

Yes. He was scaring the hell out of her. She was scaring the hell out of her. “No. But you’re doing it against my will.” She was finally able to move. Adrenaline spurted into her, hot and acidic. Grace smacked his hand away.

“Temper, temper,” he murmured, stepping back again. “Am I innocent or guilty?”

“I just told you, that isn’t—”

“Your representation of me depends on your answer, Violet Eyes.”

She didn’t like to be touched, she didn’t like surprises, and Grace hated being backed into corners. “I don’t like Violet Eyes, either.”

Blessedly, he let the issue drop. “Kat couldn’t have ratted me out for one simple reason, Counselor.”

Counselor. She could live with that, Grace decided.

“I never did anything to rat on,” he continued.

“So she made it up. We’ll know once we get to the prelim—to the preliminary hearing. But first we have to get through bail tomorrow.”

“There’s not a ‘we’ involved here yet, lady-honey-Violet Eyes.”

“Now you’re trying to provoke me.”

“Is it working?”

And like that, just like that, he was the devil again. Grinning, relaxed, irreverent, unperturbed, as though his temper moments ago hadn’t happened. The room wanted to tilt around her.

Grace turned carefully in her chair and started typing again. “Give me some character witnesses. What about Rafe Montiel? And that other guy you mentioned earlier at the restaurant?”

“Fox Whittington. He’s Rafe’s partner. Yeah, they’ll both come through for me. Note that I say ‘me,’ not ‘us.’”

“Stop holding my job over my head.”

“That’s tough to do when you’re virtually handing it to me.”

Suddenly she was on her feet as well. And she was vibrating.

“What do you want from me?”

“A little faith.”

She’d been dealing with criminals for over a year now, and she’d never met one who cared so much about the opinions of others. “Ninety-two percent of people accused of a crime actually commit them.”

He frowned. “I never heard that statistic. Where did you get it?”

“From my own experience.”

“A month’s worth?”

“Thirteen months’ worth. I clerked for a year before I went to Russell and Lutz. The odds are against you.”

“I’m supposed to be impressed with this?”

Grace folded her arms across her breasts. “I have an analytical mind. I can assure you, my results are accurate.”

“Law clerks work their—”

“Leave my body parts out of this, please,” she said quickly.

“Why? Mine seem to be up for grabs.”

Grace looked away as she felt her face heat again. “Trust me, I have no desire to grab any part of you.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get back to what parts you didn’t work off while you were clerking. How the hell did you find time to do a study?”

“The results were something I felt I needed to learn. I worked on it in law school, too. If you add those results in, you come up with something closer to four years’ worth of data.” She finally glanced over her shoulder. He was staring at her. For the first time since she had met him, he actually looked flummoxed.

“What?” she demanded.

“Why would a woman who looks like you spend her spare time poring over insignificant data?”

Her spine hardened and it hurt. “It’s not insignificant.”

“It’s erroneous.”

“It’s not that either.”

“I’m a cop. I know.”

“You were a cop, Mr. McKenna. Unless you let me do my job, your days of said employment might be a little numbered.” Grace moved back to the table to get her laptop. “I think I’m done here.”

“By the way, I’d put it at ninety-five percent.”

Her gaze jumped to him. “You’ve made a study, too?”

He had, but Aidan decided not to admit it. At the moment, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to have anything in common with her or not.

She should have been out partying, kicking up those pretty legs, bringing men to their knees, while she was in school. Instead, she’d been accumulating data.

“Either way,” he said instead, “I guess I’m in the minority. Work on your attitude overnight, Counselor. We’ll decide your fate in the morning.”

He was playing with her. Enjoying his upper hand to the hilt. And he was doing it on purpose. It made her crazy. That was the only excuse Grace could think of to explain why she rushed at him when the last thing in the world she ever wanted was to be in close proximity to him again and have her pulse shoot around inside her like a Ping-Pong ball.

She grabbed his arm. “Now. We’ll decide it now.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“I don’t think it works that way.” He closed his hand over hers where she held on to him.

Grace tried to tug away. He wouldn’t let her go.

He used his other hand to point a finger at her. “You—lady-honey-Counselor-Violet Eyes—are the attorney. You are the one selling services. I am the client. I am the one buying those services. Therefore, I get to decide whether I want to pay for them or not.”

“I hate you.” Oh, God, had she actually just said that to a client? But maybe he wasn’t a client, she reminded herself. Maybe he was the devil incarnate.

He let her go. Grace stepped back quickly. She fought the need to rub her hand where he had been touching her.

It wouldn’t wash up her career if he fired her…not quite. The D.A. would be thrilled to welcome her as a prosecutor, but the Commonwealth wasn’t renowned for paying their employees well. And, if she got dumped from her first major case, she’d never again hope to find a job as well paying as what Russell and Lutz dished out to their associates.

She’d opened a savings account this past month. She’d stashed aside almost a thousand dollars. She needed that money. She needed it desperately.

She collected her computer. “Enjoy your skin flick. I’ll be in touch as soon as Dan talks to Chief Baines in the morning.”

This time, he let her go when she made a beeline for the door. Grace wasn’t sure if she had ever been so grateful for anything in her life.

Chapter 4

A n almost tomblike silence fell over the room in her wake. Aidan wondered about that and any implications it might have as he finally—really—looked around the room.

He cleaned up the table—his mother had taught him well—and tossed the lady lawyer’s drink down the sink behind the bar. He wiped up the little dewy rings it had left on the table and threw out the empty bottle of Jameson’s. Then he decided to help himself to another bottle of whiskey. It was paid for, after all. And sometimes a man had just cause.

He eschewed the cola this time because even though the Jameson’s was gone, the other brand the hotel stocked was a really good bottle. He carried it with him to the door on the right side of the room and looked inside. The bedroom was pretty much everything he had expected. There was a king-size bed done up in hunter-green satin and more pillows than a guy alone would ever need. Hell, Aidan thought, he could bring a whole harem in here and there would be room and pillows to spare.

The thought barely made him crack a grin and he was generally pretty amused by his own humor. That disturbed him, so he opened the bottle of whiskey and swigged from it as he crossed to the bathroom.

“My, my, my.” He touched the white terry-cloth robes hung in a small closet. “I’ve got Dan Lutz’s bathrobe, the philandering old goat.” But Dan probably had one thing tonight that he didn’t have, Aidan realized—a warm body to wear the smaller robe.

Where the hell was his mind going? He hadn’t thought in terms like this in six long months.

He glanced at the sunken whirlpool tub and that brought more clever female images to mind, not a one of them involving a blonde like Kat, and that made him knock back more whiskey. There was a bidet. The contraptions had always made him seriously wonder about Frenchmen. But the room also had a real honest-to-God American toilet and a shower, in case one didn’t feel like going buoyant in a tub full of hot bubbles. Or, he thought, in the event that a man was staying here alone.

“Okay, that’s enough of that,” he said aloud.

Aidan left the bathroom. He crossed the bedroom quickly as though images of a woman who wasn’t blond by a long shot were chasing him. He went back to the big center room and stared at the telephone on an end table by one of the sofas. And that was when he admitted to himself why he was swilling still more whiskey, why he was touring his accommodations as if he actually gave a damn about them, why he was amusing himself with tantalizing thoughts of a brunette barracuda, though admittedly, she did rattle nicely. But all of that, he knew, was his way of putting off the inevitable.

Calling Ma.

Aidan capped the whiskey bottle again and put it down solidly on the table. He sat on the sofa, sprawling his legs out in front of him, and reached for the telephone, pulling it onto his lap. Then he bought more time trying to figure out what number he ought to push first to get an outside line.

He stalled by calling his own answering machine to retrieve messages. There were nine of them. That was bad. He hadn’t had nine messages waiting for him at any one time since he was seventeen and the darling of Bishop Eustace High School.

The first was from Shanna, his sister and the mother of Joe and Mickey who had been with him at the basketball court when this nightmare had started. “Oh, my God!” she cried. Then again, for good measure, “Oh, my God! What happened? Where are you?”

A click, and the machine rolled on to message number two. Shanna again.

“Duh. I just answered my own question. You’re probably still at the police station. I’d better call Ma.”

“No, no,” Aidan said aloud, as though she could hear him, as though he could stop it. “Don’t do that.”

Too late. Message number three. Ma.

“Aidan Jack.”

Aidan winced.

“Aidan Jack, your sister just called me with the most horrible tale. Please call home.”

Click. Message Four. His dad.

“Hey, buddy, call in. Ma’s upset.”

With due cause, Aidan thought, and he grimaced again.

Another four messages came in, one more from Ma, one from Shea, his youngest sister, one from Fox Whittington wondering if everything had turned out okay and asking if there was anything more he could do to help. And one from Jack Aidan, his older brother. Ma hadn’t been real amused when she’d had two kids within twelve months of each other. She said she’d been too worn out to be creative with names. Aidan believed that because, several kids later, she had come up with Shea.

Aidan got up from the sofa. He grabbed the whiskey bottle again and uncapped it.

“I’m thirty-four years old,” he said aloud. All the same, he was a good Irish boy. And he needed to call his mother. Because, unless he badly missed his guess, she was either throwing up from worry by now or she was making his dad’s life a duck-now-or-go-to-hell experience by throwing things. Finola threw things. Rarely, but when she was really, really stoked, it happened.

Aidan had always figured she had a right to that idiosyncrasy. She’d come to this country at sixteen, pregnant and alone except for a man she’d been married to for a mere seven months. She’d dug in, she’d survived, and she’d raised seven kids on a very short shoestring. She’d stayed married to the best, most honest man Aidan knew in a society that took marriage lightly. So if she got pissed off occasionally when life conspired against her and a pan or an iron took flight, well, so be it.

He was all out of procrastinating excuses, Aidan realized. He punched his parents’ number into the phone.

Finola answered on the first ring, which told him something. She hadn’t been throwing up. She’d been throwing—period. “Aidan? Aidan Jack? Where are you?”

“Enjoying nicer accommodations than one might expect under the circumstances,” he replied blithely.

“You’re not home.”

His heart cramped. “No.”

“What happened? It’s that woman, isn’t it?”

“Which one?”

His father had picked up the extension. Aidan heard Daniel McKenna choke on a laugh. Finola, however, was not amused.

“The blonde,” his mother said flatly.

“Many good women are blond.” And some scary ones were brunette, Aidan thought.

“I will not play games with you, Aidan Jack. Tell me what you need me to do.”

And that simply, that suddenly, the world yanked out from beneath him. First he was breathing and then a weight with the heft of Gibraltar came down on his chest. First he was trying to dodge…and then he was undone. Because no matter what, that was Finola with her brood. Not what did you do? But what do you need me to do?

Aidan found his voice. “I have it under control.”

“Control would be home in your own bed,” Ma said.

“Okay. Semi-control.” Then the words came, helpless and emasculating, and he couldn’t help them. “I didn’t do it, Ma.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Tell me what ‘it’ is.”

“Extortion. Apparently. Twisting money out of folks.”

“My boy? I’d kick his—”

“I’ve already explained that to someone, Ma,” he interrupted.

“Good. Come home then.”

“It’s not that easy. For one thing, my home hasn’t been there with you for a lot of years. And for another, in this country, I need a lawyer to prove it first before I can just go where I like.”

“Who is he? The lawyer?”

“She’s…ah, one of the best.”

He got the long silence he expected. “What kind of woman needs a highfalutin job like being a lawyer?”

“A smart one.” That came to him easily enough. On the tail end of that were words he didn’t say. A beautiful woman. A skittish woman with secrets. He wasn’t sure where that had come from, but it was there, in his gut. “She got me out of jail,” he added.

Ma gave a good, long sniff to that. Then, reluctantly, “Bless her heart.”

“Yeah. It was clever of her.”

“What now?” Finola asked.

“I’m not precisely sure, but there’s a paperwork glitch and if I know the people behind this, it will be worked out by morning. So tonight I’m in a safe place.”

“How safe?” she demanded.

Aidan looked around at the suite. “Safe. And spiffy.”

“Then what?”

“Tomorrow there will probably be a bail hearing.”

“Even though you didn’t do it?”

“It’s the American way, Ma,” he said again. “I’ve got to prove it.”

“Then what?”

“Then I either go to jail until trial, or I go home. It sort of depends on the lady lawyer.”

“She did it once, right? Kept you out of jail?”

Aidan nodded at the too-silent room. “She did it once.”

“I guess a lady lawyer like that is real expensive.”

Dear God, Aidan thought, he didn’t even want to think about that yet. How much did he have in savings right now? Six, seven thousand? Lutz had been talking in six figures. “I’ll be okay.” Somehow. He figured he could remortgage the town house and squeak out another thirty, forty thousand. But in all honesty, he’d known this was coming when he’d told Lutz he could raise the money. And he knew he was going to have to accept their help.

His father broke in. Aidan had forgotten he was still on the extension. “We have money saved,” he said.

His heart squeezed and his throat closed. “It’s your retirement.”

“We have equity in the house. The boys do, too. We’ll leave the girls out of this—we can’t expect their husbands to chip in—”

“We most certainly can,” Finola interrupted her husband.

“Daniel, when we’re done here, call Shea and Shanna.”

“Let’s tap the boys first,” Daniel said.

Aidan’s heart was clubbing. For the first time in a lot of years—maybe since Bishop Eustace High School when Pattie Ann O’Brien had dumped him—he wanted to cry. “Leave them all out of this,” he said. Patrick was in college. Declan was an artist, a starving one. Neither of them had a dime. Jack Aidan was more or less in the same financial boat that he was, and Danny Jr. had four kids.

“You need help, son,” Daniel said.

Yeah, Aidan thought, yeah, I do. And it was overwhelming.

“Listen to me,” he said hoarsely. “You remember when I took down Kat—Katherine? When I testified?”

“She was not a good girl,” Finola fretted.

Aidan moved past that. There had been no love lost between Finola and Katherine. “This is payback for that. I’m being framed.”

“Well, then, they will just have to unframe you, won’t they?” Finola asked.

“That’s where the lawyer comes in,” Daniel said. “We need to raise some money. What about your job, son? Do you still have that?”

“Too soon to tell,” Aidan admitted.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Finola decided. “We’ll fix this.”

Aidan couldn’t answer that. He was starting to understand Grace a little better, with all her bated breaths. Having everything in your heart torn open and exposed could definitely stop inhalation and exhalation, though he still wasn’t sure why it happened to her so frequently.

“Aidan Jack, where can we reach you?” Finola asked.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” He hung up the phone before she could ask anything more. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold himself together.

His life was in Grace Simkanian’s hands. His family’s life was going to be in her hands if he allowed them to help financially—and a McKenna had never accepted a handout like Lutz’s offer in their lives. McKennas paid their way. So for the first time in a very, very long time, Aidan stared at the wall and wondered what a certain woman was doing now. And that woman definitely wasn’t blond.

Grace was shaken down to her toes.

She was addled enough that she didn’t remember that she had spent every dime for the last fare she’d paid tonight. She didn’t remember until her cab pulled to the curb in front of her brownstone. She’d been sitting, frozen, in the same position since she’d gotten into the car, concentrating on inhaling and exhaling. When the taxi stopped, she started dazedly out the window at her lobby doors.

“That’s $8.60,” the driver said.

Grace finally got enough air into her lungs to groan. “Could you hold on a moment? I’ve got it inside.”

Something, maybe the look on her face, kept this man from arguing with her the way the first had done. Grace slid from the car and onto unsteady feet. Why had she taken a cab anyway? She always rode buses. Another twenty dollars down the drain, she thought helplessly. And this wasn’t something she could put to the firm with any amount of conscience. She wasn’t toting a client around this time.

She went inside and tried to jog to the second floor but found that she didn’t have the energy. She found her key in her briefcase and let herself inside, dumping everything to the floor there and creeping soundlessly to her room so as not to wake Jenny.

“Wow. You really did stay out with him most of the night.”

Grace shrieked in surprise and whirled back to face the living room. Jenny was sitting on the sofa in the dark. “Why are you sitting on the sofa in the dark?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You can’t do that in bed?”

“I was also kind of waiting up for you.”

Something inside Grace twisted. She hated to put people out. It always made her feel guilty. Jenny was an early riser. She shouldn’t have to sit up all night over an unprecedented Irishman. “I’m okay.”

“You were a little shook-up when you left here.”

She was still shaken up, Grace thought, probably even more so than when she had gone to the Hyatt.

“That was the first date I’ve seen you go out on in the entire time I’ve lived with you,” Jenny went on. “So what gives? Spill all.”

“He wasn’t a date! He was a client.”

“A yummy client.”

“You can have him if you want him. Assuming I can keep him out of jail. He’s not going to be able to make many babies in jail.” Jenny’s greatest aspiration was a passel of kids and she made no apologies for it. “I’ve got to get some money and pay the cab I left waiting downstairs.”

“You took a cab home? Grace, you’re scaring me.”

Grace escaped into her room and went to her desk, yanking out the center drawer. She found her checkbook and stuck a finger into the little fold at the back for the emergency stash she always kept there, peeling off a twenty. She’d made this guy wait, too. She had to tip him decently. Why had she bothered to go to law school? With women like her running around the city in taxis, she should have been a cab driver.

Grace hurried back downstairs and paid the driver. When she returned to the apartment, Jenny was in the kitchen making tea.

“Go to bed,” Grace said from the doorway, digging the heels of her hands into her own tired eyes.

“The night is young.”

“Jenny, your nights are ready for Social Security by ten o’clock.”

“It’s barely midnight.”

Startled, Grace looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. She felt as if dawn was rapidly approaching. How could her life have gotten so chaotic in such a short period of time?

The tea smelled delicious. It hinted of cinnamon. Jenny brought her a cup and moved it encouragingly back and forth under her nose. “It’s decaf,” she cooed.

“Doesn’t matter. A marching band couldn’t keep me awake tonight.” Grace took the cup and sipped gratefully. It was delicious. She closed her eyes and shuddered a little as the heat of it hit her stomach and forced her to relax. “Why are you waiting tables? You ought to be cooking somewhere.”

“I’ll cook for my babies when I get them.”

For some reason, the simple comment almost brought tears to Grace’s eyes. If she started bawling, Grace thought, Jenny would go for the nearest straightjacket. Probably with good cause. Grace never spent money on cabs and she didn’t date and she didn’t cry.

She hadn’t dated anyone tonight, Grace reminded herself. She’d just had a man blast into her neat, orderly world and turn it on end. He was a client.

She moved to the kitchen table and sat. “He accepted money from the mob, Jenny. My guess is that his job was to protect them from the more upstanding elements of the Philadelphia Police Department. That’s what he’s alleging that someone else did anyway. The best liars tend to keep their stories as close to the truth as possible.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “He’s an extortionist? But he seemed so…so funny and nice.”

“Extortionists can be funny and nice, I suppose. When they’re not extorting. I’ve read about serial killers whose neighbors swore they were the nicest guy they’d ever met.”

“And he admitted it? He just said, yup, I did it, now get me off?”

The tea needed cookies. Grace toed her high heels off and went for the tin on top of the refrigerator. “Of course not. He says he’s innocent.”

“Then how do you know he’s not?”

“Because the D.A. never presses charges without an ironclad case. It’s an elected position. If they lose too often, the voters won’t be so inclined to give them their jobs back come the next election. So if someone is charged with something, it’s a pretty good guess that the Commonwealth has a bunch of solid evidence against him. They wouldn’t take the chance otherwise.” Grace bit into a cookie and passed the tin to her roommate. These were Jenny’s creation, too, and they were also delicious. She really was going to make a fine mother one day.

“So the D.A. charged him?” Jenny said. She might not have had any career aspirations herself, but she was always interested in Grace’s job and in Mandy’s. Mandy was an attorney, as well, but she practiced family law.

Grace registered her question. “I…no. Actually, they haven’t yet.”

“So maybe he really is innocent.”

“He’s not! They’re going to charge him!” Her stomach was tightening up again. Grace went back to the table and realized that somehow her fingers had ended up thrust into her hair as she gripped her head against one more ache. “Trust me, Jenny, he did it. They always do it.”

“But you haven’t actually seen the evidence yet, so you can’t be sure.”

“Who are you?” Grace demanded. “The Civil Liberties Union?”

“I’m just saying, maybe they won’t even charge him. Maybe they’ll realize that they made a mistake and…” Jenny trailed off at Grace’s expression. “I’m being naive again, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

Jenny sighed. “That’s a shame. He’s gorgeous.”

“No, he’s not. He’s an arrogant, outrageous, obnoxious ass.” She finished her tea and stood again. She wanted nothing more in life than to slide between cool, clean sheets and close her eyes. Besides, she had to get up early to turn her quick notes into some semblance of a report for Dan. “Thanks for the tea. And for waiting up. You didn’t have to.”

“I needed to get the scoop to give Mandy tomorrow.”

That alarmed her. Grace stopped at the kitchen door and looked back. “Don’t.”

“Don’t tell Mandy about the hunk?”

The three of them had been best friends for years. They held each other up and sometimes—when it was in someone’s best interest—they pressed each other down. There was little they didn’t share. So if Jenny told Mandy about McKenna, that would make McKenna important. Not just another scumbag client, but a man.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Grace said finally, feebly.

“Except that you stayed out with him until nearly midnight—”

“I was taking his statement!”

“—and he has you all bamboozled.”

“He does not. I’m just tired.”

“And he’s gorgeous and no matter what you say, I’m going to believe he’s innocent until I know what the D.A. says about him.”

“You’d never make it as a defense attorney.”

“I don’t want to. I just want to believe the best of people.”

Grace groaned again. There was no talking sense to Jenny when she got like this. “I really need to sleep. I’ll need to be on my toes when they charge him tomorrow.”

This time she made it to her bedroom. Grace stripped out of her suit, and though she was sorely tempted to just drape it over the desk chair for tonight, that brought images of dry-cleaning bills if something should somehow get spilled on it. So she hung it in the closet and tugged her favorite red flannel granny gown out from beneath her pillow.

Then, because it was September, because it was still warm and reasonably muggy in Philly and she would be too warm in the nightgown, she opened her bedroom window all the way and turned on the overhead fan. The extra electricity she used would only cost pennies and she couldn’t sleep without the granny gown.

It was ten years old. It was the first thing she’d ever bought in this country. It was her security and it reminded her of who she was, where she had come from, and what she had left behind. She tugged it over her head and finally dropped onto the bed with a gusty sigh.

When Grace strode into the office at a quarter past eight the next morning, she was in a mood to chew McKenna up and spit him out in little pieces. Nobody messed with her sleep. Nobody, she thought. It was hard enough to come by under normal circumstances. Throw in an irreverent green-eyed Irishman trying to tangle up the first great case of her career, and she’d been doomed.

“Chief Baines for you, Grace,” the receptionist said as Grace sailed past her desk.

Grace came to a quick stop and stared at the girl. Already? At 8:15 a.m.? She wasn’t ready!

“Want me to tell him you’ll call him back?” the receptionist asked. Grace thought her name was Celie or Celia but she never let herself get too cozy with the staff so she couldn’t be sure.

“No, I’ll take it.” She started toward her office again then she stalled one more time. “On second thought, I won’t.” If she had learned nothing else from Sam Case over the years—the previous owner of her apartment and now married to Mandy—it was that the upper hand in any situation was gold. Never jump to an opponent’s bidding.

Celie—or Celia—waited.

“I definitely won’t take it,” Grace decided. “Make sure he knows I’m in but I’m already swamped.”

“Gotcha.” The girl reached for the phone again.

“Thanks…um, Celie.”

“Cici,” the receptionist corrected.

“Right. Sorry.”

Now what was that urge about? Grace wondered as she finally went to her office. She dumped her briefcase on her desk and found her fingers digging into her hair again in utter mystification. Why had she felt compelled to reach out and close a little of the gap between herself and another employee?

McKenna had called her prickly, she thought. And argumentative. Honey, you don’t say anything. You just ‘ah’ and frown.

She wasn’t that cold, Grace thought, that judgmental. It just wasn’t necessary to have strangers cozying up in her life. Too many acquaintances were like bedroom clutter. They made life unpredictable.

She dropped her hands and went to the lounge for a cup of coffee. On her way back she plucked her phone message from Cici’s desk. But before she called Baines, she called information and got the number for the Hyatt.

McKenna didn’t pick up until the fifth ring. He sounded gentle and sleepy and warm. It made her throat hurt.

“This is your attorney,” she said in a no-nonsense voice.

“Wake up.”

“Hey, I’m awake.” She could have sworn she heard covers rustling in the background. Was he even alone in Dan’s hotel room?

“You don’t sound awake,” she complained.

“I’m watching Rocket Power.”

He was watching what? Grace almost asked aloud, then she bit back on the words.

“It’s a cartoon,” he said, as though she had.

“Of course it’s a cartoon. I knew that.” Then the impact of that hit her. “Why are you lying in bed at eight-thirty watching cartoons?”

“Technically, it’s 8:24. And how do you know I’m in bed? We didn’t establish that, did we?”

“I can hear the covers moving.” As soon as the words were out, Grace wanted to chew her tongue off. This was the most bizarre conversation she’d ever had with a client. Although a couple of their around-and-arounds last night had come close.

He wasn’t answering and that, too, was dangerous. At least, Grace thought, she was starting to pick up on his warning signs.

“Baines already called me,” she rushed on. “I just wanted to make sure nothing new occurred to you overnight that I need to know before I call him back.”

“Three things.”

Grace grabbed a legal pad from the corner of her desk and plucked a pen from the holder. “Go on.”

“One, I’m innocent. Two, I’m innocent. And three, why were you listening to my sheets move?”

Grace threw the pen in exasperation. It skidded nicely across her big sleek desk and went airborne for a few feet before it landed on the carpet. “I was not listening to—”

“You heard them.”

“You moved! You made noise! I have ears!”

“Everything okay, Grace?” Lou Russell asked from her office door.

Oh, God, she was shouting again, Grace realized. No, that wasn’t entirely true. She’d screeched.

“Hold on,” she spit into the phone in an undertone, then she stabbed the hold button. She looked up at her boss. “I’m fine. Yes. Thanks for asking.”

“Everything worked out okay last night? You found Dan?”

“I did, and everything is…in process.”

“Good.” He nodded and moved off down the hall.

Grace counted to five, then she sprang up from her desk. She raced to the door and just barely caught herself from slamming it. She closed it with a gentle click, locked it, then jogged back to her desk. She sank into her chair again and grabbed the phone.

“Don’t you ever do that to me again!”

“What? Talk about beds?”

“Make me raise my voice!”

“You don’t actually raise it, Violet Eyes. It just sort of sharpens. Turns into a razor.”

“And don’t call me that! Don’t call me nicknames.”

“Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning or something?”

“At least I’m up!”

“And listening to my sheets.”

“Hold…on.” Carefully this time, Grace put the phone back on hold. She swallowed some coffee. She breathed. In, then out. She picked up the phone again and in her most level, pleasant voice, announced, “I’m going to call Baines now. Go do whatever men do in the morning. Shower, shave, et cetera. I have a feeling we’re going to be in court before too many more hours pass.”

He chuckled instead. “Whatever men do? You have a certain way with words, Counselor.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.” She hung up. This time her heart was positively slugging. He made her forget herself over and over again. Whatever men do? She was better than this. She didn’t let things like that slip. She never let anyone—not even Jenny or Mandy—know that she had never woken up and started the day off with a man in her life.

“Breathe in,” she whispered aloud. “Breathe out.”

She reached for the phone again. This time she called Baines like she should have the first time, before she’d given in to the ridiculous idea of calling her client first.

Baines made her wait, too. Nobody ever did this to Sam Case, Grace thought. Then again, he was a charmer. And she was…prickly and argumentative. She “ah-ed” and frowned.

Damn it, that really bothered her.

“Grace Simkanian.” Chief Baines’s voice boomed into the phone line. Baines always boomed. “How’d we lose you?”

Grace winced a little at his volume and remained silent. He knew the answer. Everyone knew the answer. The pay was better on her current side of the fence—getting criminals off rather than working within the justice system as she had for the past year. Then she thought that if McKenna was telling the truth and Baines was in on the P.P.D.-mob alliance, then he was making money a priority in his life as well.

Except McKenna wasn’t telling the truth. If he were innocent, wouldn’t he be pacing the floor, worrying about being unjustly convicted, instead of watching cartoons in bed?

Grace cleared her throat and finally spoke. “I’m returning your call, Chief. Are you referring someone to me?” She knew the purpose of his call, of course. Never ever jump to do your opponent’s bidding.

He got down to business. “You’ve got McKenna. Aidan McKenna.”

Grace glanced around her office. “No, at the moment, I really don’t.”

“Where is he?” Baines asked.

She could dodge this one without lying. “I honestly don’t know.” He could still be in bed, she thought, or he could be in the shower doing those things men did to start their days. He could even have gone out for a newspaper to see if he had made headlines yet.

“He hasn’t retained you?” Baines demanded.

Technically, no money had changed hands and McKenna was balking at going the pro bono route. “No,” she replied.

“Damn it, I know you sprang him from County yesterday.”

“I think we have a semantics problem going on here,” Grace allowed. “I didn’t actually spring him, either. There was nothing to spring. There were no charges.”

“Bunch of damned incompetents in the D.A.’s office these days,” Baines growled.

Grace saw her opening. “You wanted one of your own men to be kept there overnight?”

Got him, she thought when he missed a beat. “Justice is justice,” he said finally. “The boy got caught with his hand in Charlie Eagan’s pocket.”

“I’ve yet to see evidence of that.”

“You will at the prelim.”

She hoped the D.A. would go with a preliminary hearing and not just give the matter to a grand jury. A prelim meant that she got to hear what kind of a case they had against McKenna. The grand jury met behind closed doors and she’d have to spend six months before trial wrangling for discovery, groping in the dark without any real feel for what, if anything, the opposition might be trying to withhold from her.

“The point, Chief, is that at this particular juncture, I’ve yet to have a picture painted of McKenna with his hand in anyone’s pocket. There’s no case,” she repeated.

“There is now. Richter just filed extortion charges.”

Richter was the D.A. Grace’s heart rate remained steady. She had never doubted it. And again, it put Baines exactly where she wanted him. “Ah,” she said sympathetically. “I understand now.”

Baines missed another beat. “Yeah?”

“You’ll want the bail hearing toe to toe with McKenna turning himself in.”

“Yeah.” This time it wasn’t a question. The word was flat.

“I agree, Chief. We can’t let a cop spend even five minutes in jail. Too dangerous. Here’s how we’ll do this. Call Richter and tell him you’ve agreed to hold off on McKenna coming in until I’ve found an available judge.”

“Tell him what?”

“So one of your men doesn’t run the risk of bodily harm before he’s been proved innocent,” she explained. Baines couldn’t bellow that McKenna was guilty, Grace thought. He wouldn’t dare. Any honest superior officer—a superior officer who wasn’t trying to frame his own man—would do handstands to keep him out of jail until the dice were cast. “Let me call the court and see when I can line this up. As soon as I have a time, I’ll call you right back and we’ll make arrangements for me to bring McKenna in.”

“What if he runs?”

It was either a last-ditch effort on the part of a bad cop, Grace thought, or it was another Plattsmier-type maneuver, just covering his backside. Grace had no choice but to go with it. “Good point. Why don’t we do this? We’ll put two officers on him—one of your choosing and one of his. Two guys to plunk themselves down with him and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere until I get a judge to hear bail.”

“If you wanted to drag your feet, you could run up some overtime for the city with that,” Baines said. That comment said nothing about his guilt or innocence either, Grace thought. He was merely being a public servant concerned about the budget.

And she would not drag her feet. She wanted this case wrapped up as expeditiously as possible for reasons Baines would never imagine. Prickly and antagonistic, my butt, she thought. And she did not frown a lot.

“I’d really prefer not to build my case with McKenna within earshot of the opposition,” she said. “I want those cops to go home as quickly as the city manager does, Chief. I’ll call you back as soon as I know something from the court.”

Grace disconnected quickly.

She knew her first order of business should be to call the court and find an available judge. Her second move should be to contact McKenna about which cop he’d choose for a baby-sitter. But she decided that was something she really ought to do in person.

Things were heating up now and she wanted this case. She needed it. She couldn’t let him fire her. The sensible thing to do was make a quick trip over to the Hyatt and ask him which officer he wanted, she thought. And in the process, she was going to have to put on the acting job of her life and convince him that she’d decided he was innocent. Then she’d find a judge.

But before she did any of that, she reached for the telephone again and rang Mandy’s office. Mandy was at her desk, not in court.

“I’m on my way out, but I have one of those mother-type questions,” Grace said when Mandy picked up. Mandy had a seven-year-old daughter.

“Sure, shoot,” Mandy said.

“What’s Rocket Power?”

“It’s a cartoon about a bunch of sports-oriented kids getting into adventures,” Mandy reported promptly. “Uh…three boys and a girl, I think. No ball sports, though.”

“Ball sports,” Grace echoed, lost now.

“You know, football, basketball, soccer. It’s more things like skateboarding and snowboarding and volleyball. Although volleyball is a ball sport, I suppose. But it’s so California, I guess that’s why it’s Rocket Power-acceptable.”

“Volleyball is California?”

“Beaches, dude-ette.”

“I’ve got it.” Grace neatly hung up the phone. If the subject came up again, she might be able to convince McKenna that she wasn’t a Maruja-born idiot.

Chapter 5

M cKenna wasn’t still in bed when Grace returned to the Hyatt, and he wasn’t doing morning man-type things. He was keeping his cholesterol level up.

He answered the door just as she was about to knock a second time, wiping his mouth with a linen napkin. Grace pushed a brow up in what she hoped looked like disdain and sailed past him when he stepped back and held the door open for her.

“She’s gone,” he said, turning a little to watch her stride into the room.

That made Grace miss a step. “What?”

“Just kidding. I saw you glance at the bedroom door.”

“No, I didn’t.” But she probably had.

“You were wondering if I was alone.”

“I certainly wasn’t.”

“You were remembering those rustling sheets.”

She had been.

“Had you going there for a while, though, didn’t I?”

“Do you ever have a serious day in your life?” Grace demanded.

“I try not to.”

But the question sobered him. Something happened to his eyes again, that thing where they went darker and more turbulent. “So what’s up?” he asked in a deader tone, going back to the table.

That was when Grace noticed what was there. She crossed to it slowly. There was no room for her briefcase. It was a good thing she hadn’t brought her laptop this morning because there wouldn’t have been room for that, either. There was a plate laden with pancakes, another with bacon, a third with hash browns, and a veritable platter of eggs—scrambled—and the requisite fancy trimmings, up to and including sprigs of parsley. Parsley on a breakfast plate?

“Who’s paying for this?” she demanded.

“You are.”

“No, I’m not.” At the Hyatt’s prices, she was probably looking at a hundred dollars on this table, Grace thought.

“Want coffee?”

She’d kill for a cup. She hadn’t finished the one she’d had at the office. She wondered what they’d charged her for the carafe that was also sitting on the table. Since he was right—one way or the other, it was already paid for—Grace poured herself a cup.

She sipped and groaned in pleasure. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Top of the line,” he agreed, then sat again and dug in. “God knows where my next meal’s coming from,” he pointed out after he had swallowed.

“I don’t think it will be County.” Grace sipped more brew.

“At least not yet.”

“Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

“You don’t get nervous.”

“I just hide it well.”

Grace put her briefcase on the floor and sat, but she wasn’t letting go of her coffee cup. She looked at him over the rim, keeping it close to her nose so she could revel in its aroma.

“I’ve talked to Baines,” she explained.

“That comment would intimate that I am headed back to County in the near future.”

“No.”

He stopped chewing. “What did you do now?”

She wanted to believe that there was something like approval in his voice, maybe even respect, but she knew he’d hold back on that until he decided if he was going to keep her on or not, until she convinced him that she’d decided he was innocent. “Nothing as nifty as whisking you out of County in the first place. I just inferred that any honest superior officer would go to the wall to protect one of his men in a situation like this so he agreed to let you go home until I get a bail hearing lined up.”

“When will that be?”

“Probably this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”

“Cool.”

“There’s a catch.”

He’d expected one, she realized, because this time he didn’t stop chewing.

“We have to put two officers on you to make sure you don’t fly the coop.”

His green eyes shut down, narrowing, going flinty. “Baines’s cops or my cops?”

“One of each.”

He seemed to think about that for a moment, but again, the bacon took precedence where his attention was concerned. “I can live with that.”

“Good, because you more or less have to.” Grace drank more coffee. “Finish up there and I’ll take you home.”

He sat back. “I’m full.”

Grace felt something hard kick in her chest. “You can’t be serious.” There were still pancakes left, though he’d really demolished the eggs. There were bacon and potatoes. “What about the rest of this?”

“Want it?”

“I had breakfast.”

“Ah, but was it Hyatt apple pancakes?”

“There are apples in there?” She almost leaned over to look at them more closely, but she caught herself. A pancake was a pancake was a pancake. Nourishing, filling, amen. “I had Wheaties.”

“Good for you.” He pushed the hash browns at her. “Go ahead. Live large.”

“No.” Her voice was a little choked.

“Damn, you’re rigid. Are you still stuck on the cost of this place?”

Rigid? Prickly, argumentative and rigid? She wanted to tell him to go to hell, wanted to launch to her feet and escape the room. But she needed him, needed this case. So Grace reached past the potatoes and dutifully nabbed a strip of bacon.

She bit into it smartly, chewed and swallowed. “Satisfied?”

“Curious. You’re quite the enigma, Violet Eyes. I’ve never seen anyone get so worked up about a few pieces of pig and some spuds.”

He’d probably never wept at night for a single bite of either one, Grace thought. She reached for another piece so he’d get off the subject. It was no hardship. It really was delicious, though how that could be was beyond her. Bacon was bacon was bacon, too.

She swallowed again so it wouldn’t stick in her throat over what she was about to say next. “I’ve thought about this and I’ve decided that I believe you.”

He went too still. “About what?”

“About your version of events, that is, ah, regarding how you ended up in this predicament. Your…ah, innocence.” As soon as she finished, she choked anyway, though the bacon had already hit her stomach. Ah. She’d done it again. Twice. And one look at his face told her that he’d caught it, too.

She still wasn’t prepared for what he did next.

He threw his napkin. In his defense, she thought, as her heart started to jackhammer, he seemed to aim at his own plate, but his anger was enough that there was a lot of velocity in the action. The napkin sailed past his place setting, got midway over the table, and started fluttering. It settled down like a pretty, scallop-edged parachute, directly over the candle there.

Candles at breakfast?

Grace cried out and lunged for it. She caught it just in time before it landed and ignited. “Oh, my God.”

“Worried they’re going to charge you for that, too?” His voice was caustic.

She wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but her heart started moving even faster. “Go to hell.”

“I look forward to seeing you there.”

She jerked back into her seat and looked at him. Then he had her by the arm, and he had her firmly. It didn’t hurt—some instinct told her that he was too much the gentleman to hurt her, or maybe he was just afraid that his ma would kick his butt for that, too. But he was scaring her.

“Let me go,” she croaked.

He eased her up onto her toes instead. She could have resisted, could have pulled back, but that might have hurt. And it would be as good as admitting that his behavior was having an effect on her.

“That,” he said quietly, “was the last lie you are ever going to tell me.”

“It wasn’t—”

“Don’t lie to me. Don’t you ever do that.”

It wasn’t an argument she could win. Grace finally jerked her arm free.

“You don’t want this case because you have the opportunity to prove justice for a falsely accused man.”

His voice was still dangerous, so she didn’t dare speak.

“You want it because it’s going to make you a star. It’s going to put your name in the papers when you get me off. I have your number, lady. Now understand mine.”

Grace swallowed. “Go on.”

“Don’t lie to me again, and I won’t can you. Do it one more time, and I’ll do everything in my power to put you on the unemployment line. I can’t abide liars.”

She felt sick. The bacon was crunching around in her stomach with sharp edges. She had to rally from this, somehow she had to rally, but she wasn’t sure how. For one of the few times in her life, she couldn’t think of words. Safe words.

“I can’t figure out if you’re hungry, avaricious, or both.” His voice was still harsh. “But I damned well know your job is your weak spot.”

Grace finally found her voice. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

There was a threat there, she thought, some sort of implication, but she was too dazed to put a finger on it. “What are you saying?”

“I’m a cop. Figure it out for yourself.”

“Not at the moment, you’re not. I’m pretty sure they’ve probably put you on probation by now.”

His eyes continued to spear her. “I scoped you out last night. I still have connections. I had someone look into your background.”

“You scoped me out?” She had to sit down again. Rage hit her in a blistering wave. “How dare you?”

“My fate is in your hands. I think I had every right to dare.”

She had to know what he had found out. Pride wouldn’t let her ask. She stared at him.

“Where were you prior to Villanova, Grace?”

She gulped in breath and it calmed her. That was all he knew, she realized. He’d found out that much, but if he knew the rest, he wouldn’t have asked where she was before college.

Maybe he would find out yet—the information was there if he ever thought to check with Immigration. But he didn’t know yet.

“I guess you’re not such an ace detective as all that,” she said hoarsely. She stood again. It was time to reclaim the upper hand here, though her gut still hurt and her heart was still galloping. “I have to call Baines back. Who’s your choice for a baby-sitting officer?”

“We’re not done here yet.”

She paused with her hand over the phone and looked back at him. “I think we are.”

“Do we understand each other?”

“I don’t believe so.” She had the gratification of surprising him.

“I thought I outlined things pretty well.”

“I don’t like your terms. I don’t lie to you and you don’t fire me? I’m not satisfied with the equality of that.”

“Satisfied with the equality?”

“I want more.”

After his temper a moment ago, she had doubted that she’d ever hear his laugh again. “You’re a trip,” he said.

“You forgot prickly, argumentative and rigid.” She didn’t want to touch him—everything inside her recoiled from the very idea—but she did it anyway. Because she really did want the upper hand. Grace grabbed his arm the way he had grabbed hers.

“I don’t lie to you,” she said quietly, “and you don’t fire me.”

“That’s what I said.”

“But I’m adding a clause. If you don’t fire me, then you have to cooperate with me.”

“I’m cooperating.”

“The hell you are. You spent the night looking into my past, but I’m not on trial here. If you’re telling me the truth, then you should have put your time to trying to figure out who is ticked off enough to frame you. Gee, maybe it was Katherine, no, maybe it’s the mob, no, maybe it’s a corrupt Baines—”

“I get your point,” he interrupted.

“Do you?”

“You’re a tough woman, Violet Eyes.”

“Do we have a deal?”

She saw in his eyes that they did. For the first time since knocking on his room door, Grace breathed easily. “Good.” She went back to the phone again.

She was a hard woman, Aidan told himself. He might even believe it if it weren’t for the fact that he could watch things almost visibly uncurl and unclench inside her as she started to relax, as she got her feet on ground she was comfortable with.

He couldn’t think about her right now. He’d dreamed of her and that alone unsettled him to distraction. And she was right. He had to put his mind to his problem, distasteful though that was.

“I guess this means I’m losing my comfy safe house here,” he muttered as she punched buttons into the phone.

Her lips tried to curve, he noticed. She was probably thinking about getting out from beneath the cost of the keeping the room. He tried to imagine her actually smiling, and the prospect left him a little weak in the knees.

She held up a finger to gesture him into quiet. She was haughty, too, he thought. Autocratic.

But he still liked her legs.

Today they were caught in a second skin of black hose. Her suit was black pin-striped over an ivory-white silk blouse. He rarely noticed women’s clothing unless it was outrageous and sexy enough to demand attention, but something told him that Grace’s wardrobe choices each morning spoke a lot about what she expected from her day. She was that deliberate, that guarded. That was why he noticed the blouse. The suit was almost severe. Her incredible hair was scraped back from her face into some sort of twist-type thing—a real pity there. But the blouse belied the businesslike look of everything else. What he could see of it—she had the suit jacket pretty well buttoned up—was flimsy, almost gossamer, sliding over the skin at her throat like a wish.

What did that say about what she expected from working with him today? What did it say about what was on her mind? Yeah, it was definitely time to put his mind back to business. He dragged his gaze from her throat.

“What?” he asked. She’d said something.

“Name your cop.” She held the phone as though in anticipation of making another call. “Under the circumstances, Judge Castello is in no rush. You’re not going anywhere with two of Philadelphia’s finest assigned to you. He sees no cause to disrupt his afternoon golf game so he’ll hear your bail issue tomorrow morning at eight-thirty.”

She’d made an entire phone call while he had been wondering about her blouse. “He told you that golf is more important than an extorting cop?”

“No, but it’s Tuesday. There are light dockets on Tuesdays, so it’s his golf day.”

“You clerked for him,” Aidan remembered.

He could tell from her expression that she wasn’t entirely sure if she’d told him that or if it was something he had unearthed about her last night. In the end, she let it go.

“Your choice of officer?” she asked again, a little tartly.

As if it were an entrée from this staggering room service menu, Aidan thought. “Rafe Montiel,” he decided. Choosing Rafe would irritate the hell out of Baines if Baines was in on this.

Grace made another call. This time he paid attention. He could tell from her tone that she was talking to Baines again. After she spoke Montiel’s name, she covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “He says Montiel is wrapped up with a major case right now—he can’t pull him off it.”

“Sure. And I’m a cocker spaniel.”

“Please be serious.”

“I am. Want to see me wag my tail?”

The most amazing thing happened then. If he hadn’t been looking right at her, he wouldn’t have believed it. She colored—a deep, complete dusky shade of red. She was blushing to the roots of her hair.

What was this about? She’d done it before, a little, but not like this. All over a little tail-wagging? He had to fight not to show his surprise. No, he was definitely not going to show his surprise. He was going to file this away for future reference.

Dangerous ground, he thought again. She was really starting to fascinate him.

“You said you’d cooperate with me!” she snapped. “We made a deal.”

“I am cooperating. I want Montiel. Grace…” He trailed off when she twitched a little at his use of her name instead of one of his tags for her. He caught that, too.

“Grace,” he said again, if only to make her react again. “I just spoke to Montiel last night. His plate is reasonably clean at the moment. There is no major case. And even if there were, it’s not Baines’s jurisdiction as to whether or not he gets pulled off it for this.”

“He’s the chief of police!”

“And he would have no clue what Rafe is up to these days without checking with Plattsmier who heads up the R-H unit. Did he put you on hold to check with Plattsmier?”

“He…” She trailed off, set her jaw. “No.”

“He’s lying to you, Grace. He doesn’t want Rafe anywhere near this problem.”

“Why?”

“Because Rafe calls a spade a spade.”

“A what? Ah.”

This time, he thought, the word had nothing whatsoever to do with his innocence or lack thereof. It was more like she had taken a moment to figure something out. Sort of like she had with the “damned tootin’” business last night.

“He calls ’em as he sees ’em,” Aidan explained. “Even if it gets him into trouble with the department.”

“Then pick someone else.” She started to put the phone back to her ear.

Aidan moved quickly, catching her hand, pulling it back. “I want Rafe,” he said quietly.

She shrugged, nodded quickly. He stepped back and listened to her negotiate.

She really was good. After a little jousting wordplay, she got him his man. And she did it without actually calling Baines’s bluff, letting him know that they knew he was lying through his teeth about Rafe’s pressing case.

When she hung up this time, Aidan folded his arms over his chest. “Did he say who his choice was?”

“Not yet.” She stood again. “Let’s go. I happen to know that you don’t have a lot to pack.”

He ignored that. “It’s going to be interesting to see who he sends.”

She paused halfway to the door. “You mean because if he’s dirty, he’ll send someone else who is as well?”

“Right.”

“That would be stupid.”

“Stupid?” he repeated, startled.

“Assuming you’re telling the truth about all this, then yes, it would be stupid. If there are corrupt officers, Baines wouldn’t want to train a spotlight on them. He’d send in someone innocent. Maybe someone who’s a…ah, a thorn in his side.”

She had a really funny way with colloquialisms, he thought. But he nodded.

“At best, it would have us chasing down a wrong path if we fell into his trap and believed the guy had turned to the bad side.”

Yeah, he thought, she was good. He was running out of reasons to fire her. “You’ve got a criminal mind.”

She moved toward the door again. “I’ve just spent a lot of time among them.”

He felt temper flare behind his eyes again. “Would you be speaking of me?”

“You told me not to lie to you.”

He watched her open the door. Yeah, she was good, but he was better. “I also said I wasn’t going to fire you.”

“Exactly. I am therefore finished with placating you. I’ll…ah, call a spade a spade. With impunity.”

Yeah, she was stuck on that spade business, he thought. Layers, he thought. There were a lot of interesting layers here. But at the moment he had a point to make so he’d have to think about that later as well. “You’re trusting a criminal not to lie to you?”

She blinked. “Lie…how?”

“Why should my word be any good under the circumstances, if I’m an extortionist? Just because I said I wasn’t going to fire you doesn’t mean I won’t at any given time.”

She opened her mouth to answer, then she snapped it shut again. Satisfied, Aidan strode past her into the hall.

She was still in the doorway when he was halfway to the elevator. “Wait! Stop!” she called after him.

He turned to walk backward. “Any particular reason?”

“Are you serious? You lied? We have no deal?”

“I guess that depends on how much you trust me, Violet Eyes.”

He turned around again and decided to take the stairs. Let her chase him a little. Damn, it felt good to exact a little revenge, he thought. Just as long as his mother wasn’t around to witness what he had just done to a lady.

She didn’t chase him. He was a little nonplussed to find himself four floors down with no tap of heels sounding on the steps behind him. Then he grinned, because she’d done the same thing he would have done under the circumstances. She’d effectively told him to kiss her sweet little backside—he could be an idiot if he wanted to, could huff and puff and sweat, but she was going to take the easy way down, the elevator.

He slowed and took his time with the stroll.

She was waiting for him in the lobby when he got there. She had already checked out. He could tell because she was crunching the hotel bill in her fist and she looked pale.

“Was it really necessary to order seventy-two dollars’ worth of breakfast?” she demanded.

Aidan shrugged. “All of it looked good. I couldn’t decide what I wanted so I decided to have a little bit of everything.”

“That’s—that’s—that’s gluttony.”

She was sputtering. He really had her worked up this time.

“No. Gluttony would have been if I’d eaten all of it.”

“It’s wasteful!”

“I’ll give you that one. But I also figured you for showing up here shortly, so I was being polite and ordering enough for two.” He passed her and headed for the lobby doors.

“Stop! I want to finish this!”

He couldn’t resist that one. Aidan stopped and turned slowly to grin at her. “Honey, you haven’t even started with me yet.”

Her face flamed again. “No honeys.”

“Grace, you haven’t even started with me yet.”

She pulled her spine straight. “Nor am I planning to.”

“More’s the pity.” But probably not, he corrected himself immediately. He needed to tangle with this woman—romantically, physically speaking—like he needed a hole in the head.

But with each passing moment in her company, he wanted to. He never learned, Aidan thought, feeling his grin loosen and fall away again. He turned from her and went outside this time.

She tumbled out the lobby doors beside him. “Don’t you have any respect for money at all?” she asked a little breathlessly.

“That’s a hell of a thing to be asking an extortionist.” He caught her frown out of the corner of his eye as he stepped into the street to hail a cab.

“No!” she cried. “No, no, no!”

Aidan lowered his arm. “I’m not going home after all?”

“You’re going home, but not that way.” A taxi started to slow for him and she waved it on.

“What did you just do?” he asked, looking after it.

“We’ll take a bus.”

He knew he was gaping at her. “You want me to take a bus home?”

“I’ll accompany you.” She was clutching her briefcase against her chest like a shield now.

“No, you won’t, because I’m not taking one.”

“I have to see you home and wait with you until the officers get there. I gave my word to Baines.”

“And you’re a woman of your word.”

“Absolutely.”

“Good to know.” He turned back to look for another taxi.

“Didn’t you just hear a word I said?” she demanded.

“Yup. You’re taking a bus and I’m taking a cab. I’ll meet you at my town house—oh, hey, you’ll need the address.”

“How do you propose to pay a cabbie when you left your wallet at the County jail last night?”

“I’m going to use your trick. When I get there, I’ll tell him to sit and stay until I go inside and get some money.”

“From where? Your stash under the floorboards?”

She was talking about the extortion money, he thought, but he laughed anyway. He wasn’t sure if she was trying to be funny or not, but he appreciated her wit. “Actually, I keep it taped inside the toilet lid.”

Her jaw dropped. “How much could you possibly keep there?”

“I don’t know. A hundred bucks or so for emergencies. It’s an old trick Ma taught me.” A cab stopped and he opened the door. “Actually, she didn’t teach me so much as I busted her one time. I think I was about nine. It just struck me that every single time she cashed Dad’s paycheck she had to go to the bathroom as soon as she got home. Those were lean days.” He got in the car. “Anyway, this one time I hid in the tub behind the shower curtain and watched her stash a few bucks of it in the toilet tank. I jumped out of the tub and about scared the pants of her. When she calmed down, she told me it was her emergency fund and that Dad knew.”

“She kept it in the toilet? She could have been earning interest on it in the bank.”

Aidan frowned over at her. She was sitting beside him in the cab now, but he thought it prudent not to point that out just yet. “You really have issues, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your buffalo really howl.”

He’d lost her, he realized immediately. He’d really lost her with that one. She frowned and gave a tiny shake of her head. She had no idea what he was talking about. She was sharp as a tack, shrewd and canny—she’d proved all that ten times over in the short time he’d known her, handling his defense—but his reference to buffalo totally escaped her.

“Nickels?” he suggested. “That beast stamped on them?”

Her face cleared. “Oh.” Then she hesitated. “I make them howl?”

“As in being squeezed to death. You’re tightfisted. With money.”

She drew air in through her nose. “I’m not cheap. I’m fiscally responsible.”

“Honey, we’ve been all through this already. And you’re not so fiscally responsible that you’re taking a bus to my town house.”

“Of course, I’m not taking a bus. You’re paying for the cab.”

She caught him off guard with that one. Aidan laughed again.

“Fair enough.”

Tension was starting to hurt her forehead. She just didn’t know how to take him, Grace thought. She couldn’t get her bearings with him. All she knew was that she was going to have one hell of a raging headache if those cops didn’t show up at his town house quickly and take him off her hands in very short order.

Fair enough, he’d said. He could be very equable when he wanted to be. And what kind of an extortionist only kept a hundred dollars in his toilet? He really didn’t have much of a care or concern for money, and she didn’t know how to work that into what he was currently charged with. Either he had so much of it that he scarcely gave it a thought…or he’d never cried from hunger, she decided again.

When the cab stopped, she found herself standing on the sidewalk before she recovered from him. It seemed that she always had to recover from time spent with him. Grace looked around a bit dazedly and tried to get a feel for where she was. It was one of the old neighborhoods, she realized. Somewhere between South Philly and Center City. The pavement was aged and old, cracked in places like a spiderweb. The row homes were pressed tightly together, uniform in dark red brick. There were stoops with shrubs clumped against them as though to protect them. There were flowerpots balanced precariously on railings and threatening to topple over the sills of open windows. She heard music playing distantly—Elton John, Grace thought. And though it was barely ten in the morning, someone was already cooking something redolent with spices that wanted to make her mouth water.

She turned to look at McKenna. He was watching her closely enough that it made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t have said why the street—the whole neighborhood—gave her a tug inside, but she didn’t want him to know that it did.

“You said it was a town house,” she said finally.

He shrugged and began walking up the nearest concrete path. It bisected two small swatches of lawn. Grace followed him.

“It is now,” he answered. “Sixty years ago, it was a single-family row house. One of the big ones. About a decade ago, the city decided to try to turn this neighborhood into something tony. They got developers in here and threw subsidy money at owners to renovate the real estate. They threw some tax dollars into the whole plan for things like those fake gaslights on the street corner there and the trees. My place is half the original unit—somebody cleaved it in two and doubled his investment by selling both sides of it. The city almost got what they wanted. The area never turned arty, but it got as far as homey.”

Homey. That was it, Grace thought, that was what was tugging at her. It had been a very long time since she had had a home. Not that she wasn’t comfortable and happy with the place she shared with Jenny—and by extension, with Sam and Mandy down on the first floor. It was a great apartment and God knows it beat her family’s overcrowded cabin in the homeland. But home was a place where somebody’s mother started cooking dinner before noon. Her own always had…on the rare occasions when there’d been food.

Her stomach was starting to hurt as he reached the front door. She was a little too tight on his heels and she had to pull herself up short so she wouldn’t bump into him. Then he groaned and raised both hands to the screen door, resting his palms and his forehead against it.

“What’s wrong now?” Grace demanded.

“They don’t just have my wallet at County. They kept my keys, too.”

Grace lifted her free hand to massage her forehead. Okay, she thought, one of two things was happening here. Either he was telling the truth and they were locked out. Or this wasn’t his home at all. It was some great charade, and they were going to wait here for hours for cops who were never going to arrive to baby-sit him because they’d gone to wherever he really lived.

She wasn’t being paranoid. It had happened before—not to her personally, but she knew it had happened.

“Do you have a plan?” she asked finally, carefully.

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“Of course.” She balanced her briefcase against her thigh to get the phone from inside.

“No ‘of course’ about it,” he muttered, clearly feeling cantankerous now. “As tight as you are with money, you could rely on smoke signals for all I know.”

It hurt. She gave him the phone. “Who exactly are you planning to call?”

“My brother.” He tapped numbers in and put the phone to his ear. “We keep extra keys for each other.”

“Where does he live? Because my roaming is limited and there’s an extra fee—”

“Ah, hell. He’s working four blocks away, Grace. I’ll pay you back.”

He made the call and gave the phone back to her, then he sat on the stoop. After a moment, Grace sat cautiously beside him. She propped her briefcase against the step. On the bright side, all this was sort of putting the kibosh on the idea that this was some sort of ruse. Probably. Of course, the “brother” might never show up.

She glanced over at him. “We really need to discuss our approach for this hearing tomorrow.”

“I don’t foresee any complications. Two words, Grace. Just remember two words—not guilty.”

A police cruiser pulled to the curb. Grace let out her breath very carefully as an officer got out. Detectives didn’t generally wear uniforms, she thought, so this was Baines’s guy. And if Baines’s guy had come here, then it was a safe guess that this really was where Aidan McKenna lived.

“You’ve got to get over this, Grace,” McKenna said quietly.

And that quickly, her gut started to hurt again. “I beg your pardon?”

“Thinking the worst of every soul you meet.”

“I don’t.” She trusted Jenny and Mandy implicitly. She’d trusted Jonna, the woman who had taken her out of Maruja, although it had taken her some considerable time to learn. Getting shot at did that to a child, she thought. Some went to the first available port in a storm, and others trusted no port for a long time to come. She’d managed to fall into the latter category.

Since she didn’t want to admit that McKenna had pretty much just read her mind, Grace asked, “What do you know about the man walking up the sidewalk toward us?”

“Rookie. You called it. Baines has sent a lamb to slaughter.”

Grace stood from the step. “Either that, or Baines is just your average, nothing-to-hide police captain pinning the new guy with grunt duty.”

McKenna stood as well as the officer reached them. He looked uncomfortable and painfully young. His fair skin was faintly chapped from a very close shave. The hair under his hat was blond and he had dishwater-gray eyes. He shifted his weight back and forth, back and forth, foot to foot, before he found words.

“Sorry about this, Detective.”

“Me, too, Kenny. And call me Aidan. I guess we’re going to be cozy for the next twenty-four hours or so.”

“Assuming we ever get inside,” Grace said dryly.

“The key’s here now,” McKenna replied.

She looked to the street again. An older but well kept red Ford pickup had parked behind the cruiser. A man got out, a man who looked enough like Aidan that Grace felt another headache coming on. They might have been twins—same rangy build, same green eyes. Same lack of restraint.

The man jogged for the stoop. When he and McKenna met, they hit in a bear hug that drove her breath out. He kept patting McKenna—his hair, his shoulder, his back—as though to reassure himself that his brother was really standing there in the flesh before him.

“Ah, man,” the guy said. Then again, “Ah, man. Ma told me.”

For an alarming moment, Grace thought he might actually cry.

“It’ll work out,” McKenna said, patting the other guy right back as though to reassure himself that he was among kin again. “It’ll be fine. I have a top gun in my corner.” He shot a thumb in Grace’s direction.

They broke apart. Grace realized that everyone’s eyes were on her now. She tilted her head and put on her best keep-your-distance-I’m-only-here-on-business smile. She held a hand out to the man. “I’m Grace Simkanian, Mr. McKenna’s attorney.”

He didn’t take her hand right away and that disconcerted her. He watched her face for a moment, seemed to study it. It reminded her of the way McKenna had given her the once-over when he’d stepped into the interrogation room at the jail. And this man’s eyes went darker in that same way, as if to say Well, we’ll see.

Just as she was about to pull her hand back, feeling like a fool, he nodded and reached for it. “Jack McKenna.” Then he pushed both brows up and looked at Aidan. “Mr. McKenna? You step up in the world or something?”

“Apparently, the farther down you sink, the more respect you get from certain quarters,” he replied, then he turned away. “Let me in, will you, bro?”

Grace followed them back to the door, but that was as far as she got. Another car screeched to the curb, then another. Things prickled along Grace’s spine as she whipped around again to look at the street. All the commotion took Kenny off guard, too. She saw the officer’s hand move to his gun out of the corner of her eye.

Then two dervishes erupted from the first vehicle, a gold minivan. They tore across the small patch of lawn at full throttle. Neither McKenna brother seemed nonplussed. They turned simultaneously and held out their arms and the boys made leaping dives into them.

The woman who got out of the minivan after them made something inside Grace cramp again. Her burnt-copper hair was snagged into a ponytail and her mouth was open in a shout. She was wearing a man’s chambray shirt and jeans over boots and she was, simply put, everything Grace would never be. Pretty, not beautiful, chasing after two young boys for all she was worth. She held a foil-covered plate.

“Mickey! Joe! Show some restraint, would you, please?” She patted Grace on the shoulder as she shot past her. “Hi. I’m Shanna, Aidan’s sister. You must be the lawyer.”

“How’d you guess?” Jack asked, dropping the younger of the two boys to his feet again. The kid promptly wrapped himself around Aidan’s thigh.

“The suit,” Shanna said, and she touched Grace’s sleeve before she sighed. “If wishes were horses…”

Grace’s stomach was starting to curl in on itself. She looked to the curb again and saw a man get out of the second vehicle, a man she vaguely recognized. He was holding a lidded cooking pot. This was Rafe Montiel, she realized. She recognized him now. He’d been in the news several years ago for flattening a convicted felon on prime-time TV. This was who McKenna had selected? What were they planning to do? Overpower poor Kenny and tie him up in the laundry room so McKenna could make his escape?

Maybe, she thought, that would be for the best. She’d be free of McKenna without having been fired.

Either way, the second baby-sitter was in place now. And that meant she could go. “Ah…I think I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do here. I’ll…call you later,” she told McKenna.

She was halfway down the walk before Shanna’s voice called out to her. “Wait! I was going to put coffee on. And I brought cake!”

What kind of people were these? They brought cake to celebrate a man being charged with extortion?

The cab hadn’t left yet. Aidan had never been able to get inside to pay him. She opened the back door and dove inside. “Russell and Lutz,” she gasped. “Stop at an ATM on the way and I’ll pay you.”

“For both legs of the journey?”

“Yes! Yes! Now go!”

“Don’t know where I’m going. Where’s Russell and Lutz?”

Another car pulled up behind them. Grace twisted around in her seat to look out the window. The man who got out of this one had hair as black as night but those same green eyes. She was suffocating in family, and she couldn’t remember the address of her employer.

“Head toward center city. I’ll let you know when we get close.”

Chapter 6

I nhale. Exhale.

Grace was breathing again by the time she got back to the office. It lasted until she dropped her briefcase on her desk and the reality of what she had just done drove in on her.

She’d run. Run.

Grace ran from nobody.

But it hadn’t been from somebody. It had been from a whole lot of somebodies. Somebodies who had come yelling and leaping and bearing food. Somebodies who had formed a solid if raucous buffer of family around McKenna. It had all been overwhelming, threatening things inside her she just didn’t want touched.

The whole scene had basically been the kind of thing she avoided at all costs. Her dearest friends were unencumbered. Jenny had a passel of siblings somewhere in Kansas, but they were in Kansas. Mandy had Sam and Chloe, but she was estranged from the crowd she’d grown up with. They spent their Christmases in cozy little knots in one or the other’s apartment. Grace shuddered a little as she tried to even contemplate what a McKenna Christmas would be like.

“Grace?”

She whipped around. Dan Lutz was standing in her office door.

“I just got back,” she offered.

“Yes. Cici told me. The report?”

Grace frowned. The report! The one he’d wanted on his desk before nine. She’d been so shook-up and preoccupied with McKenna watching cartoons that she’d completely forgotten to give the report to Lutz before she’d left here.

Grace fumbled to open her briefcase. “It’s here, right here. But there have been developments since I wrote it up.”

“Obviously.” He came into the office to sit in the chair in front of her desk.

Grace drew air in and went to her own chair. She placed the report dead center on her desk then she sat and folded her hands together neatly on the sleek surface. “Chief Baines didn’t wait for us to call him. He was on the line to me by the time I got in this morning. He told me that the D.A. filed the proper charges. He wanted McKenna—” She caught herself. “He wanted Mr. McKenna to turn himself in immediately, but I negotiated with him to hold off until I got a bail hearing lined up.”

Lutz had yet to look at her report. “Good work. Go on.”

“Mc—our client—” she corrected herself again “—is at home right now. I further negotiated to put two police officers on him overnight so he won’t flee before the hearing. It’s set for first thing tomorrow.”

“Excellent. What’s the D.A.’s case?”

“I don’t know yet. I delivered Mr. McKenna into the officers’ care at his home.” I ran! “Once that was accomplished, I came back here as…ah, quickly as I could. I haven’t touched base with the D.A. yet.”

“Let’s do that, then.”

Grace reached for her phone, turned it about and pushed it toward him.

Lutz made no move to reach for it. “I don’t think you have any great need of a mentor here, Grace. Go ahead. It’s your case.”

She’d thought she’d wait years to hear those words. McKenna had been right. This case would put her on the fast track to the top. So why did that make wings of panic beat inside her again?

She pulled the telephone back and called the D.A.’s office. She was bumped around for a short time before Abe Koeling picked up the line. Grace’s heart sank. She had never liked Abe, even when they had played on the same side. He was arrogant, pompous, and he thought he was God’s gift to women.

“Hello, Grace.” Koeling’s voice came into the room when she put the call on speaker. “I already know this isn’t a social call.”

She’d never called him socially in her life. She’d never called any man socially. “If you know that, then you know what I want from you.”

“You may want it, but I’m not going to give it.” Koeling sounded smug. “You get only what we’ve filed.”

“Well, Abe, therein lies the problem.” Grace sat back in her chair, in the zone now. This was what she did best. She’d done it with Baines that morning and she would do it again now. As long as megafamilies and good-looking Irishmen were kept out of it, she was cool, sharp, an ace at her job. “I don’t have my client’s paperwork yet.”

“Why not?”

“Are you aware of where Mr. McKenna is at the moment?” she countered.

“County.”

“No. He’s at home.”

It got the reaction she wanted. “What the hell is he doing at home?”

Grace smiled at Dan. “Maybe I’d better step back a moment and let the prosecution catch up with themselves. Call Chief Baines, Abe, then get back to me. I’m willing to wait.”

“What did Baines do?”

She grinned more fully. “Mr. McKenna will turn himself in just prior to the bail hearing in the morning. In the meantime, he’s in protective custody. Obviously, I don’t have a copy of the paperwork you filed, because we haven’t been over to County yet. So why don’t you fax it over to me?”

Grace waited. Technically, he was within his rights to refuse, to let her wait until she actually produced McKenna for arrest. But Philadelphia’s legal community was built on favors owed and favors paid and who wasn’t holding a grudge against a person at any given time. Koeling didn’t want grudges with her. What he wanted was to get her naked. He wouldn’t risk annoying her.

She was right. “Give me your fax number,” he said finally.

Ten minutes later, Grace had the paperwork. She stood at the fax machine in the reception area, scanning it, then she went to find Dan Lutz again. He’d returned to his own office. She rapped on the door gently and went in when she heard him call to her.

She was off her stride again.

“Well?” Lutz asked.

“McKenna’s been under investigation for nearly six months.” She handed him the fax. Grace had memorized every word in the short time it had taken her to walk down the hall to his corner office. “He didn’t mention that to me.”

“Maybe he didn’t know.”

She didn’t want to admit that was a possibility, but she knew it was. “His name was given up in a related trial six months ago.”

“The one involving his partner?”

“That’s right. Her name is Katherine Cross. She plea-bargained at the eleventh hour, before a jury verdict. She gave up someone even more instrumental and powerful in the racket than she was.”

“Aidan McKenna.”

Grace could barely bring herself to nod. It substantiated everything he had told her last night. An image of his laughing green eyes flashed through her mind, then another one of his family descending on his town house.

If he was innocent, then these next few months were going to be the longest of her life. If he was innocent, she couldn’t think of one single good reason to hate him.

Within ten minutes after Grace left, nearly the entire McKenna clan had gathered in Aidan’s town house, with the exception of Patrick, who was three hundred miles away at college, and Declan, who could also be forgiven because he was thousands of miles away studying the old masters in Europe. Finola did what she always did when she was lucky enough to find herself surrounded by most of her family. She took over the kitchen.

Aidan entered the room to find most of his mother’s upper body inside his refrigerator. She was a small woman, but they all tended to forget that because she had the spine of a drill sergeant.

“There’s nothing in here, Aidan Jack.” Her voice came back to him muffled and with a vague echo after ringing off the barren shelves.

“Sure there is.”

“Half a loaf of bread. Mustard. Some milk that is…” She trailed off and he heard her sniffing. “Yes, indeed. Sour.”

Jack came into the room behind him. “There’s beer in the crisper,” he offered.

“What’s beer doing there?” Shea wanted to know, standing on tiptoe to peer over Jack’s shoulder.

“He thinks he’s hiding it from me,” Jack told her. He owned the town house next door and he raided his brother’s fridge with some regularity.

“Daniel!” Finola came out of the refrigerator to call for her husband. “Daniel, I need you to go to the market.”

“We just got here, love.”

“Yes, and I need you to go.”

“Kate sent corned beef and cabbage,” Rafe Montiel offered. He pointed at the casserole he’d left on the counter beside Shanna’s cake. Aidan’s mouth started watering simultaneously. Rafe’s wife could flat out cook. Kate Montiel had started out as a caterer, but now she owned an eclectic, out-of-this-world restaurant in Society Hill. All the same, Finola looked at it as though it might leap up and bite her at any moment.

“It’s not hers,” Shanna explained when Rafe frowned at her mother’s expression. “Ma didn’t personally cook it, so it’s suspect.”

Everyone started talking at once then, from Rafe explaining that Kate worried that he didn’t eat right on stakeouts—that was why she had sent food—to Finola demanding to know if this was a stakeout. Daniel tried to get out of going to the store, and Joe and Mickey got into it over the cable box and what channel it should be tuned to. They barreled into the kitchen to find a mediator.

All in all, it was chaos. And it was balm to Aidan’s nerves. The bedlam of his family was, and always had been, the only way Aidan knew how to relax.

His father, who never raised his voice, finally brought order with a sharp word. He seemed embarrassed when everyone quieted to look at him.

“Finola, love, you’ll be putting that frying pan down now,” he continued. “Shanna, take your bairns to the other room and come back. We have family business to discuss first ’fore anyone does a thing.”

Aidan’s gut knotted all over again. He watched his father take a check from his shirt pocket. With a small sound of understanding, Shea went for a bowl in the cupboard and placed it on the kitchen island. A flurry of paper landed in it. Checks.

Aidan grabbed Shea’s wrist. “No. Not you. You never had your honeymoon.” She’d been married two years. He knew her husband came from money, but he couldn’t stand this and he grasped at any excuse.

“We’re just too busy to get away,” Shea said. “Paul agrees with me, Aidan. Please take it. We want to help.”

It was ten thousand dollars. His father’s check was for forty thousand. Shanna tried to give almost fifteen thousand.

“That better not be the boys’ college fund,” Aidan said.

“Only part of it. And you’ll get it back to us long before they hit high school.”

“Not if I go to jail.” He took that check out. He would not risk his nephews’ future. It was bad enough that they’d seen what had happened yesterday at the basketball court.

“Innocent men don’t go to jail,” Finola snapped, but she blanched.

“Sometimes they do, Ma. Sometimes we—the cops—are wrong.”

“We’ll have another forty thousand or so by the end of the day,” Jack said. “I went to the bank this morning and refinanced both our roofs.” He had power of attorney for Aidan in case, God forbid, Aidan was ever radically indisposed in the line of duty. He had obviously thought—correctly—that this was a good time to use it.

Aidan felt strangled as he took the checks. “Ma, I’ll hit the market for you. Write down what you need. I want to get this to the bank and go pay up with the law firm.”

“I’ve got to go with you,” Kenny said. Rafe just rolled his shoulders and groaned.

But as he was leaving the chaos of his family to see a woman who was probably going to irritate him, amuse him, and perplex him in turn, he wondered just why he was doing it. He wondered what his hurry was. Lutz had been planning to take him on for free. The man wouldn’t be pacing the floor waiting for his retainer to turn up.

And as he helped himself to Jack’s truck—his own was still at the basketball court—Aidan knew the answer. He was doing it because everything was turned upside down for him right now. The family that was his strength and his comfort was breaking his heart with their love, and Grace Simkanian was turning out to be the only sane, predictable spot in this whole wretched situation.

Grace left the office ten minutes before Aidan got there. She told herself she was just doing her job. You could tell a lot about a man from what he carried in his pockets, she thought as a bus dropped her off two blocks from County prison.

She walked the distance and collected McKenna’s personal possessions at the desk. She finally nailed down a copy of his proper paperwork as well, but the plastic bag she took was what interested her most.

“This is it?” She held it up to the light to stare at its contents.

The guard was the same man she’d asked for McKenna’s paperwork the first time around. “Well, he was playing basketball when they picked him up, right?”

Right, Grace thought. And if she had no clue what routines men went through in the morning, then she knew even less about their penchant for sports and what they might deem to be necessary accoutrements to the process of playing one. Apparently, basketball required very little.

His wallet was there. As soon as she got back on the bus, she’d rifle through that. It was a thin professional conduct line, but she intended to breach it.

There was also a small key ring with a blue plastic doodad attached that read This Too Shall Pass. There was a half-empty package of cinnamon gum, fourteen coins in various denominations…and a little girl’s pink butterfly barrette.

That confused her the most.

“Oh, and this,” the guard said. He reached under the counter and brought out a boom box. “There’s a CD in it,” he added helpfully. “It’s on the list.”

Grace pulled the list toward her and ran down the items, checking against what she had in her possession. She signed for it all. “Thank you.” She dropped the plastic bag into her briefcase, hefted that and the boom box, and wandered back outside with an aimless stride that wasn’t her usual pace at all.

She waited for a bus to take her back to the office district of the city, but when one came she stepped back and let it pass. What was she doing? She was going to take McKenna’s belongings to his home.

Picking them up for him while she gathered the paperwork was one thing. That was in the line of duty. Delivering them to him was insane. But…

The news from the D.A. had rocked her boat, that Katherine Cross had given McKenna up. It corroborated McKenna’s version of events. So now, Grace thought, she had to learn everything she could about what kind of man he was. She had to find something wrong with him.

There had to be something wrong with him. He was probably still guilty on the extortion charge. The D.A. didn’t make mistakes, she told herself again. Okay, they were basing this charge on the word of a betrayed partner. But the D.A. wouldn’t run with that alone, so there had to be something more. The fact that the first part of his story had checked out didn’t mean a thing. It might only mean that he knew how to lie and lie well.

But what was with the barrette?

A bus came that would take her toward the south side and Grace got on it. Once she was seated, she fished the bag from her briefcase and shook the wallet out onto her lap. She opened it. She found a driver’s license, three credit cards—none of the platinum variety, though one was gold—three checks neatly folded and stuck in the back, probably for emergency use, she thought. He’d known almost to the penny how much money he’d had on him when they picked him up—one hundred in bills, plus those coins in the bag. That surprised her a bit. He had so little respect for the importance of money. Then again, as she had thought before, an extortionist would be perfectly aware of every dime he owned.

There were pictures—a lot of pictures. Six different school shots of youngsters—she recognized two of them as the human bullets who had ricocheted out of that minivan earlier. The other four were of three little girls and a boy.

And that was that. There was nothing else, nothing that gave her any insight at all into the man she was representing and who was really very adept at screwing up her breath.

Grace put everything back into the bag, tucked it into her briefcase and grabbed the boom box again. She tugged the overhead cord and stood. When she got off the bus she stood on the corner and opened the tray. The CD inside was a soundtrack from a movie she hadn’t caught, though she had heard of it. Grace never spent money on movies and she used only basic cable so she never saw any release until it had been out for a few years. This was the one with a megafamous basketball player and a bunch of cartoon characters.

What kind of man liked cartoons so much?

The kind that didn’t take anything seriously, she answered herself. The kind who was more interested in provoking her than on working with her against a guilty verdict that could send him away for years.

She’d been walking toward the town house as she mulled this over and when she reached it, she stopped dead on the sidewalk. There were three more vehicles parked outside now. She would have turned around and gone right back to the bus stop—of course she would have—but Jack chose that moment to come out of the door right next to McKenna’s. He stopped, eyed her for a moment, then he grinned and stepped over to Aidan’s door.

“Lady lawyer’s back!” he yelled inside.

She had the sudden understanding that not only were they brothers, but neighbors as well. Then there was a tumble of humanity out the door. Grace’s blood started ricocheting around in her veins. There were men and women and kids, some of them spilling out, the rest of them bottlenecking on the threshold. And she knew beyond a doubt that they were all there to get a look at her.

One compact woman in green sweatpants and a white short-sleeved turtleneck top popped through the mass. “You’ll be letting the lass through now, all of you!” she shouted. And the crowd parted like the Red Sea. Grace swallowed and pulled herself erect as the little woman bore down on her.

She held out a hand in greeting and the woman pumped it hard. “You don’t call yourself by any cute little animal name, do you?”

“I’m sorry?” Grace shook her head bemusedly. “No. No, I don’t. My name is Grace Simkanian.”

“Good enough.”

The woman was watching her now as though her entire past could be seen beneath the surface of her skin. Grace pushed ahead. “I’m here to see Mr. McKenna.”

“We’ve got three of them here right now—my Daniel and Jack and Danny Junior—but not the one you’d be wanting. So come inside and wait then.”

“No, I—” But it wasn’t an invitation and Grace did something she couldn’t ever remember doing since she had arrived in America. She shut up and did as she was told.

Well, she thought when she landed in the kitchen with everyone else, apparently the Irish ate when the chips were down. Then again, so had her family. There just had never been as much food. The cake that the pretty brunette had brought earlier had been dissipated, though there were a few crumbs left on the plate. Once everyone got over her arrival, most of them went back to the kitchen table to resume their diligent consumption of corned beef and cabbage.

“Eat,” the woman said. “Aidan Jack will be back shortly with more food.”

“Aidan or Jack?” Grace murmured. Her head was starting to hurt again.

“Aidan Jack, not Jack Aidan.”

She wasn’t going to touch that one. “Thank you, no. I’m not hungry.” She was always hungry. “I’ve brought Mr. McKenna’s possessions from the jail. I can leave it all with you if you’ll just sign for it.” She put her briefcase and the CD player on the center island of the kitchen.

“She brought the whomp song back!” one of the boys hollered, then he made off with the boom box, tearing out of the kitchen again.

“Can’t shoot hoops without music,” Jack explained, leaning back against a wall with his arms crossed over his chest, still studying her, Grace thought. She found the plastic bag in her briefcase and handed it to the older woman.

“My daughter’s barrette,” the dark-haired man said immediately. “Now where did he find that?”

“Danny-J, introduce yourself,” the older woman said immediately. “All of you, show the way I raised you.”

And that started it. They lined up in front of her, pressing in on her to shake her hand, one after the other. The brunette touched her cheek against hers as though they were long-lost sisters and Grace recoiled a little. “Save him,” the woman whispered in her ear. “Please save him. He’s the best man I know, well, one of them, including Da, Jack, Danny, Declan and Pat. Oh, and my husband.”

Danny-J came next. “Thank you,” he said, shaking her hand.

“I—”

“Now tell us how you’re going to fix this,” said the older woman Grace could only assume was Ma.

Grace didn’t answer. At the moment she could not think of legalities or strategies or charges, bogus or otherwise. She could think of nothing besides the faces on that old, old photograph in her lingerie drawer…family, where even when everything was wrong, everything was right.

“I’m sorry…I’ve got to go.” She whipped around and slammed into Aidan’s chest.

“Yeah, Violet Eyes, tell us how you’re going to fix this,” he said in an undertone. And then, as though he understood her panic, as though maybe, just maybe, he read the pain in her eyes, as though maybe, just maybe, he cared about that, he guided her out of the room.

She was shaking, Grace realized as they landed in a living room. She fisted her hands to hide it. She had left her briefcase back there in…in…purgatory. It was still on the kitchen’s center island.

“Sorry. They’re a bit much,” he said, watching her.

Grace couldn’t speak. Why had she come back here anyway?

“Where are those groceries, Aidan Jack?” Ma demanded, appearing in the living room door.

“In Jack’s truck. Send someone for them,” he answered without looking. “Can I have a moment here, Ma? It’s important.”

She snuffed in breath through her nose and left again.

“I…” Grace said, then she faltered again. “Who are you?” she blurted. What kind of extortionist, what kind of criminal, came from this?

He smiled slowly. “A real shook-up man at the moment. But if you hang around for a while, I’ll put money on Dad producing a bottle of Jameson’s. That ought to smooth things over a bit for all of us.”

“I had enough of that last night.”

He came toward her. “No, Violet Eyes, you didn’t. You curtailed yourself there the way I get the feeling you curtail yourself in every area of your life. Why, I wonder?”

“You don’t know me,” she said quickly, as she had too many times before. Maybe if she said it often enough, she could make sure it stayed true.

“And I don’t want to.”

Her jaw dropped. That was unexpected. Then he touched her again. He put his hand under her chin and tucked her mouth neatly closed. “There you go, lass.” He laughed that low, throaty, genuinely happy laugh that was starting to make her ache inside.

“I don’t want to know you,” he said again. “I wish to all Ma’s saints that you were six foot two and about one-eighty and all male brawn.”

She was swimming in confusion now. “You wish I was a man?”

“I love women. I love beautiful, complicated, arrogant, prickly women, of which you are one. I don’t want to be enticed by you, Violet Eyes, that’s all I’m saying. But I am. Do you know why I came back here so quickly?”

She didn’t even know where he had gone. “Why?”

“Because your receptionist said you went to the jail to get my stuff. And you should have been back some time ago. So I figured you brought everything here and I hightailed it back here fast to see if I could catch you. I don’t like that.”

Grace focused on the one thing she could rationally deal with. “Why did you go to my office?”

“To pay my retainer.”

“You gave the firm a hundred thousand dollars?” Her voice came up a notch. “You only had a hundred dollars in your toilet!” There was only one way he could get money like that. Grace stepped around him jerkily and headed for the door.

“Meet me in court tomorrow morning no later than seven o’clock,” she shot back over her shoulder. “We’ll need to talk some more before this hearing. There’s a coffee shop on the fourth floor—”

“Oh, come on, Violet Eyes. Untwist your underwear there.”

She wheeled on him. “What?”

“Your face is murder and you’re judging again.”

“I’m telling you where to meet me tomorrow.”

“No. You’re wondering where I got the money if I’m not guilty. And you know what? I don’t think I’m going to tell you.”

“I’m not going to like you!” She shouted it. Oh, God, she’d shouted again and the words were knee-jerk, helpless, raw from her heart.

He thought it over as though her outburst made all the sense in the world. “Fair enough. Let’s have a bet here.”

“I don’t want to bet with you.”

“Let’s see who gets around to liking who first. Fascination doesn’t count.”

“You certainly don’t fascinate me.”

But he laughed at that…and she knew he did. Grace turned for the door and ran again.

This time she did it without her briefcase.

He was waiting for her in the coffee shop at the appointed time the next morning. He was wearing a suit, a dark blue that turned his eyes to a color like teal. It made him look savvy and elegant, not at all like a man who would order a veritable gluttonous smorgasbord from room service because he couldn’t decide what he wanted, a man who kept spare money in the toilet. But before Grace could think about all that, she noticed that her briefcase was on the table in front of him. She felt heat inch up her neck and battled it by marching straight toward him.

She’d had a very long talk with herself last night after her second escape from Club McKenna. She was an intelligent, composed woman. She had infinite restraint. And she was not going to let him bait her any longer, or tweak her, or…or fascinate her. She was not going to do any of those things. She was simply going to be his lawyer. His dispassionate, intelligent, composed lawyer with a great deal of self-control.

She sat neatly at the table he’d chosen and crossed her legs deliberately, elegantly. He was wearing the half grin that warned her he thought he was going to be at his witty best this morning. Kenny and Rafe were nowhere to be seen.

“Do I need to ask what happened to your police escorts?” Grace asked.

“Not unless you want to.” He leaned back and his grin widened a little.

“I want to.”

He shrugged. “Rafe left early to take his kids to school. His wife works nights at the restaurant so taxi duty falls to him. Kenny took me by the ball court to pick up my truck. I seem to have lost him somewhere between there and here.”

Grace fought against reaction though she badly wanted to shut her eyes for a moment of utter and complete frustration. “Good move, Capone.”

He leaned toward her. “Was that a joke?”

“No. And stop invading my space.”

“I think that little phrase went out with the eighties.”

Grace took in a breath and leaned toward him as well. Intelligent, she reminded herself. I’m intelligent and composed and I have a great deal of self-control. Two could play his games. Two had to play his games, she thought, or he was going to keep winning them. “Obviously not,” she replied in a husky undertone, “because you’re doing it right now.”

“Violet Eyes, are you coming on to me?”

“You’re delusional.” But she leaned closer still. “Under the circumstances, I think I should be the one asking the questions here. Or would you prefer to walk into this hearing cold and trust your future to the Fates?”

“Just one more.”

Things inside her wanted to stiffen. He was capable of asking anything. She sat back. “Very well.”

“How can you not be walking in there cold when I’ve had your briefcase all night?”

Damn it, he was laughing at her. Grace straightened. “I didn’t need it. The only thing in there pertaining to you is an original copy of your booking paperwork. I called my office when I got home and had them fax me the copy I left there.”

“Ah.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Imitating me.”

“I did no such thing.”

“You said ah.”

Kenny chose that moment to rush into the coffee shop.

“There you are.” He hurried to their table.

“What happened to you?” Aidan asked innocently.

“I’m not sure. One minute your truck was ahead of me and the next there were six vehicles between us. I guess I lost you.” He looked sheepish.

McKenna sent her a look that said, He’s young, green behind the ears, but he’ll learn. “Coffee?” he offered the man, pointing to an extra cup on the table.

He was a glutton with coffee, too, Grace thought. Why did he need two cups? Maybe he couldn’t decide between decaf and cappuccino. “I think our time would be better spent preparing,” she suggested again. “Your services are no longer needed, Officer…” She trailed off. She’d never gotten his last name.

“Hoodink,” he supplied.

“Officer Hoodink. Thank you. But I can take custody of him from here.”

He looked doubtful. “Is that the way Chief wants it?”

“It’s the way Chief is going to have it. You may go.”

When he was gone, McKenna whistled under his breath. “Nice dispatch, tiger.”

“Don’t you ever call anyone by their rightful name?” She thought of his family again—Aidan Jack and Jack Aidan and Danny-J.

“You bring so many to mind.”

Grace clasped her hands together on the table and ignored the bait. “When we go in there, you’re going to speak once, and once only. That time will come when the judge asks you how you plead. Beyond that, you are going to let me do all the talking.”

For a marginal moment, he seemed to get serious. He nodded.

“Good,” Grace said briskly, then she took the other coffee even knowing that the brew there was abysmal. She needed something to do with her hands. “Let me explain what’s going to happen after that.”

“I’ve done this before, Ms. Lawyer.”

Her heart kicked hard enough to hurt. “You’ve previously been charged with a crime?”

His eyes hardened. “I’ve previously charged others with crimes.”

Of course. Grace felt like an idiot but refused to let it show. “All the same, I want to outline this for you.”

“Why?” he asked, seeming genuinely curious now.

“So you can’t say that I didn’t,” she replied bluntly.

He nodded again. “Covering thy posterior. You don’t trust me much, do you?”

“I trust very few people.”

“It must be lonely in that steel tower of yours.”

She ignored that, too. “Abe Koeling has caught your case. He does not have to show probable cause to hold you over for trial this morning. That will come in a few weeks at the prelim. All he has to do today is tell the court what you’re charged with and why we need bail. Of course, he’s going to end up offering more than that because I’m going to ask to have you released on your own recognizance. He’ll have to give up some of what the D.A. has against you in order to convince the judge that that’s not a good idea.”

One of his brows went up. “I like that part, about my own recognizance.”

Grace waved a hand. “It won’t happen.”

“Now let’s not be pessimistic here.”

“Hopefully, we’ll land somewhere in between a king’s ransom in bail and a pittance.”

“Go for the pittance. My coffers are running pretty dry.”

She wasn’t going to touch that topic again. Grace realized that she had drunk the whole cup of coffee, without multiple sugars, no less. Straight, the courthouse’s version of hot caffeine was like sipping motor oil.

“Let’s go,” she said, standing. “We’re going to sit at the defense table and whisper for a while and worry Koeling.”

“Abe Koeling doesn’t worry.”

“We all worry, McKenna. We just don’t show it.”

He finally stood. “Well, I guess that’s an improvement over the ‘Mr.’ business that had my brother ribbing me last night.”

She looked at him blankly as they started out of the coffee shop. “What ‘Mr.’ business?”

“Yesterday you kept calling me Mr. McKenna. Now we’re downright cozy, Violet Eyes. You’re calling me by my surname.”

She showed him her teeth as they hit the courtroom door. He had a long, easy stride, like a man who was comfortable in his skin. She didn’t want to think about that.

“We’re pleading not guilty,” she said as they reached the defense table.

His expression remained deliberately bland except for a vague tightening of his jaw. “Don’t doubt it for a moment.”

“Sit close to me. Whisper.” Grace didn’t look around to see if Koeling was watching them. She knew he would be.

“You are coming on to me.”

Grace shifted her weight slightly and moved her leg under the table. She brought the point of her high heel down smartly and firmly on his toes. He didn’t move.

“Isn’t that assault or something?” he asked finally.

“It’s just a warning to behave. And you’re not in a position to be pressing charges anyway.”

He seemed to think about that for a moment, then he moved in on her. Since it was precisely what she had just asked him to do, Grace couldn’t complain. He leaned toward her to rest his arm on the back of her chair and his breath tickled her cheek. His cologne was something with a faint hint of evergreen and it filled her head. It suited him, she thought inanely.

“Uh…” she began.

“A variation on a theme?”

Grace swallowed carefully. “Now what are you talking about?”

“Uh…not ah. That sounds like a woman who might be a little fascinated.”

“Go to hell.”

“County qualifies.”

Was he actually—really—putting his mind to his dilemma?

“Yes, it does.”

“So talk to me, Counselor.”

She scrambled to put her thoughts in some kind of order. “I want to plead not guilty in order to leave the door open for a plea bargain later. It gives us room to back down if we’re not already against the wall.”

She’d known he wouldn’t like the idea, but she wasn’t in the least prepared for the way his hand—the hand attached to the arm that was draped over her chair—found the back of her neck under her hair. It did odd things to her, sending frissons of heat and shivers down her spine. “No plea bargain.”

“It’s an option,” she insisted.

“Not for me.”

“You’d rather go to prison?”

“I’d rather be exonerated.”

“You’re touching me.”

“I know.”

“You’re hurting me.”

It was a lie and he had to have known it, but his hand fell away immediately. He looked almost ashamed, Grace thought dazedly.

She couldn’t let him daze her now. Costello was entering the courtroom.

“All rise,” the bailiff intoned.

The formalities took all of three minutes. Everyone settled into their seats and Judge Costello announced the case. Koeling identified himself and verified the charges. Grace stood again.

“Grace Simkanian for the defense,” she said.

“And how does your client plead, Counselor?”

Grace glanced at McKenna. He stood as well. “Not guilty.”

Costello nodded. He hadn’t expected anything else.

Koeling asked for fifty thousand dollars cash bail. That was about what she had expected, Grace thought. It wasn’t as high as it could have been, but then again, a mere ten percent from a bail bondsman wasn’t going to cut it. Cash bail meant the whole bundle, no nifty percentages. With bondable bail, the accused put up the percentage and left collateral. If he skipped trial, the bondsman paid the court and seized the collateral. Koeling was trying to ace out the middleman, hoping McKenna couldn’t raise that much cash.

Grace launched into her attack. “That’s ridiculous, Your Honor. We’re dealing with an officer of the court. Mr. McKenna is hardly a flight risk.”

“He has a driver’s license,” Koeling shot back. “He’s as capable as anyone else of hitting the highway.”

“I hope the Commonwealth has plenty of money, because he’s going to need special accommodations if we hold him until trial in a jail cell,” Grace argued. “He’ll need protection. Round-the-clock guards. He’s a police officer,” she said again, making sure that point was well belabored.

“What’s your counterproposal, Counselor?” the judge asked her.

“His own recognizance.” He’d expect that, too, Grace thought.

She was right. He barely nodded.

“Your Honor, the Commonwealth has shown absolutely no evidence to substantiate a fifty-thousand-dollar cash bail,” she went on. “As far as I’m aware, they’re basing their whole case on a six-month-old plea bargain with a convicted felon.”

“Won’t work, Grace,” she heard Koeling say in an undertone.

But of course it would, Grace thought. Costello was a fair man—sometimes too fair, she’d always privately thought. He wouldn’t hold a police officer on fifty thousand dollars just because someone had pointed a finger at him.

“Your Honor,” she said again, and stepped around the table to walk halfway to the bench. She held her hands out and gave a small smile as if to say, Please, this is absurd. “Officers of the law make any number of enemies among the element they help to convict. We can hardly take the word of one of those felons as gospel truth.”

“She’s got a point, Mr. Koeling. I’ll need more.”

She’d won. Grace wanted to pump a fist in the air.

Koeling’s voice vibrated with anger. “Ms. Cross maintains that the defendant is the man who introduced her to this particular criminal element to begin with. She’s a viable witness.”

“More,” Costello repeated.

“We can show that significant sums of money have appeared in various bank accounts in the defendant’s name over the past six months,” Koeling said.

“Maybe he sold some real estate,” the judge offered.

“We have photographs of him with known organized crime figures.”

Costello seemed to consider that. “That’s better.”

Grace’s stomach was knotting. This was bad. This was evidence. Good evidence, hard evidence.

“You still want more?” Koeling asked.

Costello nodded. “Humor me.”

“We also have several bar owners lined up to testify that they witnessed the defendant meeting with known organized crime figures at their establishments and that he was seen accepting money from them.”

He was guilty. She’d known the D.A. wouldn’t come after him without something like this to base their claims on. When had she started wanting to believe he was innocent?

She realized that Costello was looking her way now. “Under the circumstances, Counselor, I can’t go for recognizance,” the judge said.

Of course not, Grace thought, but she’d gotten what she wanted. She’d gotten some of the D.A.’s case.

“However, the defense has a valid point, Mr. Koeling,” Costello went on. “Police officers make enemies. Until the man has a chance at a fair trial, I can’t see incarcerating him among those enemies.”

He paused a beat to let Koeling offer more. Koeling didn’t. Either he didn’t have anything else, Grace thought, or he was holding the rest very close to his vest.

“Well then,” Costello said. “I’ll give you the fifty thousand, but bondable.”

Ten percent. Five thousand dollars and collateral. Better, much better, Grace thought, than she had hoped for.

Costello listed the preliminary hearing for a date a little more than three weeks away. He banged his gavel to signal that the proceedings had come to an end. When he left the bench, Grace breathed again and dared to look at McKenna. He didn’t look happy.

Grace went back to their table. “What’s wrong? This is a good turn of events. They’ll hold you here at the courthouse until we give them the money and the collateral, but then you can go home without guards.”

He speared her with a glare, then he got up and left the table without answering her. There was a pain in his eyes that rocked her down to her toes.

Chapter 7

A idan woke the next morning to the kind of silence he was more used to than the chaos that had descended upon his town house since his arrest.

He got out of bed and crossed to the window. The backyard he shared with Jack was a thirty-by-thirty-foot patch. During a good summer, the lawn stayed more or less green, but it had been a dry season and dirt showed through now, most notably near the other town house where Jack kept McKenzie, his retriever, tied in good weather. There was a doghouse over there, too, and a good-sized tunnel under the fence. The tunnel had necessitated the rope that prevented McKenzie from traveling to New Jersey on a regular basis.

A couple of wrens were trying to peck each other to death in the limbs of the spindly tree Shanna had planted for them when he and Jack had bought the properties. The wrens did that often; Aidan wondered if it was some sort of mating routine. There was the gas grill, a picnic table and two lawn chairs.

He could not lose this, Aidan thought. This—and the extended family sprinkled all over Philadelphia—defined who he was. The job was important, but he could live without it. As long as he had two strong hands, he could always work.

If he had known what it would ultimately cost him and his family in dollars and cents and heart; if he had known what it would cost him in terms of pride and dignity and integrity, would he still have turned Kat in? He just didn’t know.

Another five grand had come out of Paul and Shea’s coffers yesterday for his bail and they’d had to put a lien against his parents’ home for the collateral. He was in so deeply now to his family that it panicked him. So, he thought, there was only one thing to do. It was time to put on his best behavior and work with his classy attorney. He needed to get this monkey off his back so he could go back to earning a living and repay all of them.

Aidan came away from the window and headed downstairs. He opened his refrigerator. On the bright side of things, it now looked as though Ma anticipated he’d be feeding a family of six before the week was out. He took a fresh carton of milk and swigged from it. He figured he lived alone and the six were not likely to materialize as quickly as his mother wanted them to so he wasn’t concerned with etiquette.

He shot the fridge door shut with his elbow then he went to the telephone on the kitchen wall. Grace’s home number was scrawled on the little chalkboard next to it. It was part of the information Rafe had dug up on her the night she’d sprung him from County. Aidan had no doubt that the number was unlisted, which only made sense since she had clerked for Costello for a while. Court personnel could gather as many enemies as cops did.

He tapped in the number. Her roommate answered. Aidan had counted on it. “Good morning, Ms. Tower. Has anyone mentioned to you how nice it is to hear a cheerful, sunny voice this early in the day?”

He thought he heard her sigh. “That’s sweet. No wonder Grace is all tied up about you. This is her extortionist, right? I recognize your voice.”

Aidan didn’t know whether to growl at the extortionist part or grin that he had Grace tied up. “Right. I need a favor to help me get on her good side.”

“Why?”

Well, he thought, that was to the point. “I irritate her.”

He thought he could actually hear her smile. “She needs to be irritated now and again,” Jenny decided.

“Maybe, but I also need her to keep me out of jail so I don’t want to push my luck. I’m on my way over to her office now and I want to take her something that’ll make her smile. Any ideas?”

There was a beat of silence. “There’s a convenience store on the corner of Spring Garden and Second. The Moo-Along. It has a big orange cow on the roof.”

He knew the place. It was hard to miss.

“Stop by there and get her a cappuccino. Just the plain cappuccino. Nothing fancy, no vanilla or mocha.”

Of course not, Aidan thought. That would be a little too much like steeping herself in luxury. Or…what had she called it? Gluttony.

“And a muffin,” Jenny continued. “She loves their banana-nut muffins, but she hardly ever buys them for herself.”

“Probably because they cost more than fifteen cents,” he muttered.

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing.”

He exchanged a few more pleasantries with her and thanked her—she really was an easy, friendly soul—then he hung up. Time to start kissing up.

“We’ll need to file a pretrial motion to try and get our hands on the photos. I’d like to get it to the court by tomorrow on the off chance that Costello will hear it before the prelim. Draft something rough for me so I can look it over by the end of the day. We’ll go with the obvious angle, that they could be bogus and we want to get them authenticated by our own expert.”

Grace was dictating busily when she heard the slight buzz of activity in the reception area of the office. Her own door was only six feet away from Cici’s desk. But Russell and Lutz had awarded her her own paralegal assistant for McKenna’s case and she intended to take every advantage of it, so she only clicked the Dictaphone off for a moment, cocked her head and listened, then decided to ignore whatever was going on out there.

“Call down the list of investigators we regularly use and find one who thinks he can make a full sweep of all local banks and get me the account records by next week,” she continued into the Dictaphone. “We need to find out how much money Mr. McKenna allegedly took and where it is. Koeling’s not likely to tell us.”

“An investigator isn’t necessary.”

Grace jolted and looked at her door. McKenna. Now she knew what the reception-area hubbub was about. He was holding a cardboard coffee tray from the Moo-Along and a little bag. She could smell the muffins from across the room. He was also holding flowers—wilted, plastic-wrapped daisies with a couple of shoots of something orange and way too much leafy green.

Her skin went cold, then hot. Her heart literally jumped over a beat, then it settled down into an itchy, irregular rhythm. No one had ever given her flowers before. She never let anyone get close enough to her to risk it.

He was playing up to her. Why?

Grace put the microphone down and swiveled her chair around to face him fully. Then, for reasons she knew she’d never fathom if she lived to be a hundred ripe years, she ran her fingers through her hair to make sure it was neat and in place.

“Isn’t it a little early for you?” she asked finally. “Aren’t you usually busy with your cartoons at this hour of the day?”

“Oh, come on. I’m trying to get off on a good foot here.” He crossed to her desk and put everything down there. “Is it working?”

It was. Her mouth watered at the aroma of the muffins. The bag was bulging. There was definitely more than one in there. And they were a-buck-fifty apiece, too. “Why?” she asked.

“Why what?” He sat down across from her looking deliberately mystified.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Rocket Power is over by nine o’clock. I had nothing better to do.”

She felt herself grin like a cat. “Apparently a lot of kids playing California sports really appeal to you.”

“Huh?”

Had she gotten it wrong somehow—what Mandy had said about that cartoon? “Skateboarding? Volleyball?”

“I got the California reference. It’s just that you never struck me as the type to watch cartoons.” He held a hand up when she opened her mouth. “I know, I know, I don’t know anything about you.”

Grace gave a quick nod of agreement and wished her pulse would calm down.

The McKenna-in-a-suit yesterday had been an apparition, she thought. A nice one, but an apparition all the same. Here was the guy who watched cartoons and ordered eggs, pancakes and bacon and potatoes for breakfast. This was the man who touched her as if he had a right to, who respected no boundaries, and who came from a family that reminded her of a circus she’d seen once during her brief layover in Moscow, caught between Maruja and America.

She was damned glad to have the circus McKenna back, she realized.

“Am I to assume you know where this…ah, alleged money is?” she asked. “That’s why you don’t want me to hire an investigator?”

He pushed the bag toward her. “Have a muffin.”

How had he known they were her weakness? Grace was capable of only so much stubbornness. She opened the bag and managed not to groan in pleasure when the muffin scent hit her full force. “Thank you.”

“That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”

Grace pulled off a tiny piece, popped it into her mouth and forced a quick swallow. “What?”

“Being gracious.”

“I’m gracious.”

“Like a barracuda.”

She took another nip of muffin. It was hard to get insulted when she was munching banana and nuts. “Calling me a barracuda is your idea of conciliatory?”

He held up both hands as though in surrender. His palms were vaguely callused, she thought. They’d feel rough against skin, maybe deliciously so.

Grace heard her own thought and choked. Heat licked at her skin. He was on his feet in an instant to come around her desk and clap her on the back.

“Stop it,” she coughed. “Stop that. Don’t touch me.”

“You’d rather die?”

“I’m fine.”

“Too bad. I was just considering the necessity of mouth-to-mouth.”

“Go back over there and sit down. We were talking about investigators and why you think we don’t need one.”

He went away, but he was grinning at her when he sat again. “You’re fun, Grace.”

“I’m your lawyer.”

“You’re fun and you’re my lawyer.”

At least he wasn’t talking about firing her anymore. “We need to know exactly how many bank accounts there are, where they are, how much is in them, when the deposits were made—”

“I can take care of all that. It’s what I do. I’m a detective. Don’t fritter away my retainer on experts for work that I can do myself.”

Grace snagged the coffee and pried the lid off. Mocha. She felt almost dizzy with pleasure. “I always drink this plain.” She sipped. “Why do I always drink this plain?”

“Because you’re cheap. The mocha is a dime more—”

“Ten of them add up to a dollar.”

“—and also because you’re afraid that if you give that decadent side of you free rein, you’ll turn into a heathen.”

The coffee nearly came up her nose. “I don’t have a decadent side.”

“Yeah, but deep down you want to. If I tried to take that coffee back from you right now, you’d claw the skin off my hand.”

“Entirely true.” Then she heard her own words…and she laughed.

It was a little snort at first, and apparently she had the idea that she could stifle it with a hand over her mouth. When that didn’t work, she gave up. One corner of her mouth tucked up, then the other. And she laughed. He’d been right, Aidan thought. A smile from her chopped his legs out from under him, and he wasn’t even standing. The laugh made things move in his blood.

“You can have one of the muffins though,” she managed after a moment.

“Big of you. There are five of them.” He couldn’t help grinning himself.

“As for the flowers…”

“Okay, they’re pathetic. But I once gave Pattie Ann O’Brien a single chrysanthemum from Ma’s garden and she cried so I figured it was worth a shot.”

She decided not to ask who Pattie Ann O’Brien was. Give him a tangent and he’d take off with it for hours. Then she heard herself ask, “Did your mother know about this?”

“Hell, no. I still have all my arms and legs, don’t I?” Then he sobered. “The investigators,” he said again.

“You want to look into the bank accounts yourself?”

“That’s what I said. And judging from that little moue on your face—”

She swiped at her cheek. “Little what?”

“English Lit. Sophomore year in college. Come on, Counselor, keep up with me here.” She was wearing that odd expression again, he thought, as if she was trying to figure out what he had said.

“Then let’s leave my face out of this.”

“Fine. No faces. Just money. Come on, relax. It’s one of your favorite subjects.”

“Not that I have a lot of experience with playing up, but calling me cheap probably isn’t the best way to go about it, either.”

“I never said I was playing up to you.”

Grace fished another muffin out of the bag. “One of these would have meant that you were planning to start cooperating with me. Two would have meant you were sorry for being so outrageously rude. But five of them—”

“I’m not outrageously rude.”

She held a hand up to interrupt him. “Five is playing up.”

“Kissing up. There’s a fine difference. I think we’re going to have to work on your experience in that area.”

It happened again, he thought, fascinated. Pink slid over her face then turned a darker shade of rose as she caught his meaning. She had two hot buttons, he decided. Money. And sex.

He was supposed to be thinking about the banks. Aidan stood again.

“Where are you going?” she asked, startled.

“We can’t do this here.” He looked around her tidy office. It was austerely elegant—no personal touches but lots of high gloss.

“We can’t talk?”

“We can’t unravel the evidence the D.A. thinks he has against me. We can’t do that here.”

“Of course we can. This is where we’re supposed to do it.”

He leaned toward her, flattening his palms on her desk. She reared back in her seat. One of these days, when this was over, he was going to have to grab her and plant one on her, he thought, just to see how they’d both react. Maybe it would even get all this fascination out of his system. But for now there were the insidious little issues of pictures and bank accounts and pub witnesses.

“With all due respect, Violet Eyes—”

“Grace,” she interrupted. “Counselor was acceptable, too.”

“Counselor Grace,” he amended. “You’re in charge of—”

“It’s your family, isn’t it?” she asked suddenly. “All of you call people by strange nicknames. I noticed that yesterday.”

He stared at her blankly. “Do you want to save my backside here, or do you want to dissect my habits?”

She wanted to save his backside, Grace thought. She had to save it. It was her job, her future. But he…distracted her. What had his mother called that brother yesterday? “Danny-J.”

“What’s Dan Junior got to do with this?”

“Ah.”

“Ah what?”

“Junior. The J was for Junior.”

“What did you think it was for?”

“I had no idea.”

“And why are we talking about this?”

She couldn’t have said. “Because I just realized why you do it to me.”

“Does this matter?”

“No one calls me by nicknames.”

He finally backed off her desk. “No one? You must be an only child.”

The pain was as sudden as a gunshot wound. “No.”

“And your siblings never called you anything goofy?”

Grace stood. Then she sat again. Her legs felt a little empty. How had they gotten off in this direction anyway? “Please just call me by my name,” she said. Her voice was too quiet now.

“It if rocks your boat that much, I’ll try.”

He was watching her eyes very closely. She was afraid of what he might find there. Grace got up to pace to her narrow associate-sized window. She peered out, her hands clasped together behind her back. “What am I in charge of? You started to say that I was in charge of something.” She heard her own voice and cringed inwardly. She was supposed to be the lawyer in this little gathering! And now she was asking for a client’s viewpoint of how they should proceed?

“I was going to say that you’re in charge of legal finesse. I’m in charge of figuring out who’s framing me.”

Grace turned back to him. “That isn’t actually necessary. We only need reasonable doubt—” She broke off when his face changed to the same look he’d gotten when he’d walked out of court yesterday. “What?” she asked cautiously.

“Reasonable doubt isn’t good enough.”

“It’s all we need in a court of law.”

“Screw law. I’m not walking out of this with doubt hanging over my head.”

Pride. She recognized it, and, God help her, she understood it. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Screw luck, too.”

He was advancing on her with slow, measured strides. She took a single step backward, then paused. She didn’t fear him when he was like this, she realized. She only feared him when he was laughing and touching. Grace held her ground.

“By the time we walk out of that courtroom, Grace, every juror, every one of my peers, every reporter in Philadelphia, every man, woman or child who ever reads the papers, all of them are going to know beyond a doubt that Aidan McKenna was framed and why. I owe that to my family. I owe that to myself.”

“Yes, but—”

“Repeat after me. No reasonable doubt.”

She clamped her mouth shut. Then he reached her and twirled a long wisp of her hair around his finger thoughtfully. She had the absurd impression that he didn’t even know he was doing it so she went absolutely still and said nothing. But now she was scared.

“This means that it’s not enough for me to show those jurors that someone else could have deposited the money in my name,” he went on. “I’m going to prove who did it. And if I’m going to do that, I can’t work here.”

“Here,” she repeated faintly, afraid to move. If she moved, that finger in her hair was going to brush right across the top of her breast.

“Home,” he said. “We need someplace where we can spread out, tack up graphs, charts. Like my town house. I have an empty room upstairs.”

“We…no. I do fine right here.”

“We’re a team. You have to take my needs into consideration, too.”

What was he doing? He was leaning closer to her, into her, almost seductively, and oh, God, she couldn’t breathe. “We’ll touch base,” she gasped. “Once a day. Twice if you like. You work where you’re comfortable, and I’ll work where I’m comfortable.”

“Now that’s just making this difficult.”

She found her fists planted against his chest before she knew she was going to do it. Grace shoved. “Leave me alone.”

He stepped back, unperturbed. “All right. Your apartment then. Same premise.”

“I’m not going to do that!”

“Then you’re fired.”

“That’s blackmail! And you can’t fire me! We had a deal!” He preferred honesty, she remembered. She’d give him an earful then. “McKenna, I want to win this. Maybe not for the right reasons in…in your estimation. Maybe for selfish reasons, but I want to win with all my heart. The point is, no matter what angle we come at this from, we both want the same thing. And I couldn’t think at your house.”

He frowned. “Why not? It’s a nice place.”

“It is. It’s fine. But I wouldn’t be comfortable there.”

“I agreed that we could use your place instead.”

She threw her hands up in exasperation. “You’re not making any sense! What’s wrong with here?”

“We’ll mess it all up by the time we’re through.”

Flexibility had never been her strong suit, but she was desperate. Grace shot past him, put her full weight against the sofa on the far wall and pushed.

He lifted one brow. “Other than hurting yourself, I don’t get what you’re trying to accomplish here.”

“You want a bare wall. I want my office. We can have both.” She shoved again.

“Want some help with that?”

“Yes!”

“Where’s it going?”

“Put it in front of the closet over there.”

“Where are you planning to hang your coat?”

“I don’t need a coat. It’s September.” And he would be gone by the end of October. She prayed that he would be gone by the end of October and her office would be set back to rights. No more mocha cappuccino. No more banana-nut muffins or sickly flowers. But her world would revert to a matter of quiet survival.

The muffins aside, she honestly wasn’t sure how much more of his lunacy she could stand.

When he was finished moving the sofa, he stepped back to inspect his handiwork. Maybe she didn’t know exactly what routines men went through in the morning, Grace thought, but she knew pure male satisfaction when she saw it. He crossed his arms over his chest, all rugged in jeans and a soft gray sweatshirt. Then he turned, looked at the bare wall and nodded.

“Okay, this’ll work. Now we need poster board.”

“I’ll go check the storeroom.”

“And markers.”

“I’m sure we have some of those, too.”

“And lunch.”

“I—what?”

“I’m hungry.”

“You can’t be serious.” They’d just had the muffins.

“Well, not yet, but I will be by the time we gather poster board and markers. Come on, let’s go.”

Before Grace could brace herself, he had her by the hand. She tried to pull away but it was useless. His fingers linked with hers. So she planted her heels and held her whole body back.

“Now what?” He looked at her when he came up short.

“This is not your kitchen!”

“Not for lack of trying.”

She would not laugh. “It’s my office and as such, we’ll do this my way. I’m not walking out of here holding hands with my client. I don’t even know why I’m walking out of here at all.”

“If I don’t hold your hand, will you come with me?”

“Where are we going?” Her voice rose a notch. How had this gotten so crazy, so unprofessional, so off course?

“We’re getting markers, poster boards, and lunch,” he reminded her. “I’m not paying Russell and Lutz prices for their supplies, either.”

He knew as well as she did that Dan would nickel-and-dime his retainer right down into the red, Grace thought. It was how lawyers worked. She could sympathize with his concerns.

“I’ll buy lunch,” he wheedled.

Her mouth hurt from trying not to laugh. She tugged against his hold one more time, hard. “Fine.”

He watched her stride out of the office, businesslike and smooth, elegant and somehow vixen all at once. She gave her head a little toss as she passed the reception desk, then she stabbed a finger on the elevator button. She was probably worried about what her co-workers had thought of the flowers, he decided. They had caused a bit of a stir.

She was a lot of woman, a whole lot of complicated woman. One who got thoughtful at his verbal expressions and who damned near panicked at the idea of working with him anywhere but her pristine office. One who could laugh when she didn’t catch herself in time and who looked lost and helpless when she talked about family.

He turned back into her office for one of the limp daisies that still lay on her desk. He was an idiot. He was just going to tick her off again and he had nothing to gain by playing games with her. But damned if she wasn’t a challenge, the kind of challenge that waved a red flag in front of a bull. And she made him feel about as randy as a bull, too. He knew better…and he was charging anyway.

The elevator doors were just opening when he caught up with her. He tucked the daisy behind her ear. She made a strangled sound and groped for it.

“What’s wrong with you today?” she demanded.

“Leave it. It looks pretty there.” Aidan stepped into the elevator.

She hurried in after him. “I don’t hold hands and I don’t wear flowers.”

“Learn.” He pushed the button for the ground floor and grinned at her.

“It’s…limp.” She had the flower in her hand now.

He couldn’t argue with her there. “Does everything have to be perfect for you, Grace?”

She watched his face for a moment before she answered. “No. Just calm and orderly and…and…neat.”

“Life is not neat.”

“Mine is.”

He moved suddenly to crowd her against the wall as the elevator coasted smoothly downward. He braced a hand on the pseudo-mahogany paneling on either side of her head and heard her inhale. At least she was breathing today, he thought. “Maybe I need to stir it up some then.”

“You do. Have. Are.”

Aidan laughed. He wondered what she would do if he kissed her right then, right there. Then the car landed on the ground floor with an almost infinitesimal hitch and the doors slid open. He lost his opportunity. Grace ducked under his arm and hurried into the lobby.

“We are not taking a cab,” she said as they hit the street.

“We are if I’m paying for this little extravaganza.” He stepped to the curb to wave one down.

“You’re paying for the transportation, too?” she asked from behind him. “All right then.”

He didn’t laugh this time, but he grinned. A car stopped for them.

“It begs asking,” she said as she slid into the back seat beside him. “If you want me to believe you’re innocent, why do you keep throwing money around like you’ve got extortion millions to burn?”

Aidan was pretty sure he gaped at her. “Who’s throwing? I’m doing the exact opposite. I’m trying to preserve that mega-retainer I paid.”

She lifted a hand as though to indicate the taxi they were sitting in.

He recovered his wits enough to lean forward and give the driver the name of the office supply store he wanted. Then he sat back again. “Grace, this isn’t throwing money. Normal people take cabs all the time in this city.”

She looked at him as if she doubted it.

“Other cities, too. Really. It’s a prevailing tendency.”

He was rewarded when one corner of her mouth curled up.

He’d chosen one of the supply warehouses that sold everything under the sun, Grace noted when they stopped in front of a store that took up much of the city block. She got out of the car and watched critically as he paid the driver. As near as she could tell, he was working with the same hundred dollars she’d returned to him yesterday, but of course she couldn’t be sure. It could be the toilet money. It could be the cache-under-the-floorboard money. Grace headed inside.

She should have known that he wasn’t going to settle for poster board and markers, she thought an hour later. He whipped a shopping cart up and down aisles as though driving the Indy 500. Sometimes his hand flashed out to grab something and toss it inside so quickly she almost missed it. She held her tongue until he picked up a key-chain-sized electronic organizer.

“Tell me why we need that,” she demanded.

He looked up from it to loft a brow at her. “We don’t.”

“Then why is it in your hand?”

“It interests me. Don’t you find it just a little bit amazing that something this size can effectively hold a person’s whole life? Look at this. It’s got a checkbook section—”

“Which brings us to the subject of bank accounts,” she interrupted. “Something you ought to be working on instead of shopping.”

“—and an address book,” he went on without missing a beat.

“And a calculator and crossword puzzles.”

“Crosswords?” She leaned closer without thinking. “Let me see that.”

He almost handed it to her, then he realized she would only take it and move away again. She smelled like violets…to match her eyes.

Finally, reluctantly, he hung the gadget back on its little peg. “Okay, I guess we’re done here.”

“We were done an hour ago.” She looked into the cart. In addition to the poster board and the markers, he’d also gathered manila file folders, a loose-leaf binder, page dividers with colored tabs, a package of red pens, a spiral-bound notebook, and the makings of a cardboard filing cabinet. “What are we doing with all of this?”

“Organizing.” He headed for the cash register.

She moved after him. “You are the most disorganized person I’ve ever met.”

“Now that’s just unfair.” He started unloading the cart onto the counter. “You saw my town house. It’s neat.”

It had been, she thought, and she really couldn’t assimilate that, either, with the rest of him. “You probably spend good American dollars on a maid.”

“American dollars? What other kind are there?”

Grace bit her lip. She gave her head a little shake to negate the question.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I can be ultraorganized when my life is on the line.”

“Which again brings us back to bank accounts.”

“We’re going to tackle that issue as soon as we pick up some lunch and head back to your office.”

Grace glanced at her watch. Incredibly, it was already noon. Where had the morning gone? “The courthouse is only two blocks from here.”

“To the best of my recollection, I don’t have to go back there until the preliminary hearing, right?”

Right, she thought, at which time—given a ton of luck and some good detective work—he wouldn’t be held over for trial and he’d be blessedly out of her life. She could go back to her quiet, orderly, predictable days, her routine with her friends, all those things that never made her squirm. “There’s a really great hot dog vender there,” she said. “He has a monkey.”

This time he pulled one of the credit cards out of his wallet. Maybe the hundred dollars really was running low, she thought. “You want a hot dog for lunch?”

“This guy has grilled onions. And cheese.” Julio was her one real indulgence.

He was watching her closely. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you salivate before.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. She startled even herself. He threw back his head and laughed.

“That just earned you some onions and cheese,” he said.

“But don’t expect me to kiss you afterward.”

Her heart did that lurching-skipping-skittering thing again. “That won’t be a problem.”

He collected the bags and they went outside. This time when he started looking for a cab, Grace began walking. Determinedly. Doggedly. She wasn’t going to be a party to this.

“Where are you going?” he shouted after her.

“To the courthouse. It’s right up here a bit.”

When she heard his voice again, it was close. He’d followed her. “Okay, we can do this your way.”

Grace looked over her shoulder at him. “There are two things I never do.”

“Spend money and indulge in wild monkey sex?” he guessed, catching up with her.

Wild monkey sex? “Are primates more…ah…exuberant than say…ah, humans?”

“Ah, ah, ah, I don’t know. I’ve never watched them do it. If you’re going to insist on walking, you’ve got to carry one of these bags.” He tried to hand one to her.

“I wasn’t the one who saw fit to buy out the store.” She crossed her arms over her waist and tucked her hands stubbornly.

“If I had bought out the store, Violet Eyes, we’d have seventeen semis traveling behind us. Be reasonable.”

It hit her then. Hugely and in a wave. The comment was no more flippant or transgressing than anything else he had ever said. In fact, compared to a few of his comments, it was tame. Yet it reached inside her and pulled everything out, all her heart, her soul, her steadfast cynicism. And it left the truth in its wake.

She liked him. She actually liked him.

Grace missed a step. Her throat closed. Somewhere deep inside herself, something started shaking. “I’m not hungry,” she decided, and made an abrupt U-turn. She had to get away from him. She wasn’t going to like him.

McKenna planted himself on the sidewalk. She felt him staring after her in disbelief. “You are the most contrary female I have ever had the misfortune to tangle with!” he called after her.

She kept going.

“You’re crazy! I don’t care whether you eat or not, but I’m having an onion-cheese dog.”

“Fine. I’ll wait here.” She stopped. She was desperate now for some space from him, some room. But she should have known he wouldn’t give it to her. He caught her, snagged her elbow, and he pulled her along with him bodily.

“Okay, okay, I’ll watch you eat,” she said finally. “Just let me go.” Then she looked up and her heart sank like a stone. Julio was just ahead of them and he already had a couple of customers—Mandy and Sam.

She did not want to see Mandy and Sam while she was in the company of her extortionist. While her extortionist had his hands all over her. Okay, she thought, one hand. On her arm. But still… She gave one last hard jerk and got free of him at the same time Mandy looked up and saw them.

Mandy tucked her short black hair neatly behind one ear and grinned. Sam was busy with Julio’s monkey. The animal was on his shoulder, stroking his hair. She was a female and like so many other women she was infatuated with Sam Case.

“Where have you been these days?” Mandy demanded. “I hardly speak to you anymore except for that quick phone call when you asked me about—”

“Never mind that,” Grace said quickly, remembering the cartoon business.

“Who’s this?” Mandy asked, looking behind her at McKenna.

“He’s a client. Just a client.”

Mandy’s expression turned appraising as she eyed him. She held out a hand. “I’m Mandy Case. This is my husband, Sam. And that’s Jezebel.” She thrust a thumb at the monkey, then she leaned closer to Grace’s ear. “Is this the one you were out with until midnight the other night?”

Jenny had broken a promise? She’d told? “It was business.”

Mandy read her expression. “Jenny agonized over it, but in the end she decided that she had never actually promised you she wouldn’t tell me. And when he called her about the muffins and the coffee this morning, she couldn’t contain herself any longer.”

At least now she knew where the muffin tip had come from, Grace thought. Then her thoughts were scattered by the fact that Jezebel was practically clawing Sam’s hair off his head in an effort to get to McKenna. The monkey adored Sam. Sam was the only human being the monkey adored—until now.

“She likes you,” Sam said to McKenna, not seeming to take the rejection to heart. Then he added, “It’s said that monkeys are a great judge of character, Grace.”

She watched as McKenna cosseted the monkey against his chest.

“You want something?” Julio asked them.

“Two onion-cheese dogs,” McKenna told him. “I’m buying.”

Grace was floundering so she latched on to business. Sam had an uncanny winning percentage with his cases. Mandy said that it was because he had schmoozing down to a fine art and he played golf with the judges as often as he appeared before them. Whatever it was, Grace thought, it always seemed to work and she respected his advice. “I need to talk to you one of these nights,” she said to him.

Sam made an attempt to finger-comb his hair, but it was a moot point. It had a way of falling down over his forehead anyway. “About what?”

She inclined her head toward McKenna. “His case.”

“Which judge have you pulled?”

“Costello.”

“That won’t last,” he said immediately.

“No.” It was why she wanted to talk to him. Sam knew the other judges and their quirks better than she did. “I kicked some D.A. butt yesterday at the bail hearing, got Koeling to divulge more of his case than he wanted to. Now he’ll have to retaliate. He’ll file a motion for Costello to recuse himself because I clerked for him.”

“He almost has to,” Sam agreed. “Come downstairs tonight after we get Chloe to bed. I’ll divulge everything I know about the other judges.”

“Thank you,” Grace said. One corner of her eye was still on McKenna. He gave the monkey back to the vender in exchange for their hot dogs. Grace took one.

“Your appetite came back?” McKenna asked dryly.

Grace ignored him.

“So what are you charged with?” Sam asked McKenna.

“Extortion.” He paid Julio. “I’m being framed.”

Interest sparked in Sam’s eyes. “By whom?”

“Hard to call yet. Either Charlie Eagan or the girl I didn’t marry.”

Grace frowned. “Who?”

“Eagan,” he said, giving her an odd look as he bit down into his hot dog.

“Not him. I know about him. The other one.”

“You know about her, too. Katherine.”

“Katherine Cross?” Her pulse was doing calisthenics.

“Kat. Yeah.”

Kat, yeah, she thought. Her head was starting to hurt again. The bite she’d just taken of her hot dog didn’t want to go down. The woman hadn’t just been his partner. She’d been his…his lover.

“I’d go with it being the woman,” Sam said conversationally.

“Just on percentages.”

And, Grace thought helplessly, she would, too.

This changed everything.

Chapter 8

W hen they got back to her office, Grace used the heel of her shoe to pound thumbtacks into the wall to hold the poster boards up. She harbored fantasies of thunking it against McKenna’s head.

“You didn’t think it was pertinent?” she demanded again.

“I never said anything about pertinent. I said it was personal.”

“I’m your attorney! You were supposed to tell me everything!”

“Hold on.” He held a finger up for quiet then he spoke into the phone.

How had it worked out that she was doing the manual labor while he used her desk and made preliminary contact with the banks? Grace dropped her shoe and slipped it back on while he hung up. “Well?”

“That was First Federal.” He leaned back in her chair and laced his fingers behind his head. Relaxed, she thought, grinding her teeth. Comfortable. “They find themselves in a bit of a bind. They’re aware of what’s going on, thanks to the D.A. moving in and having the account in question frozen. By the same token, the funds are technically in my name and there’s no banking precedent for holding back information from an individual regarding what’s ostensibly his own money. They’re referring it to their own legal counsel. We’ll have to wait…unless we can get a subpoena and force their hand.”

That was when Grace realized something else about him. When he put his mind to the mess he was in, his vocabulary hiked up a notch. It was only when he was trying to avoid the subject—and take her along for the ride—that he used phrases like “damned tootin’.”

Nerves, she realized. It was the flip side of his nerves.

“Get up,” she said, approaching her desk. “That’s my seat,” she said. “Clients sit over there.” She pointed to one of the chairs.

“I’m not just a client. I’m your investigator.” But he finally stood and she slid into her chair.

Grace toed her shoes off again and curled her legs under her. Her feet were killing her from walking all the way back to the office from the courthouse. She’d refused to take another cab if only because she’d been ticked off at him after the Katherine Cross revelation.

“Where’d we put the markers?” he asked.

There was no “we” involved in this, she told herself. There was a him, and there was a her, but there was absolutely no union.

She’d let this situation get totally out of hand. She was a very soft touch for some cappuccino and a few banana-nut muffins, Grace realized.

She pointed to one of the shopping bags. He retrieved the markers, but in the process he made a show of leaning across the desk to peer at the shoes she’d abandoned.

“Winding down a bit there, are we? Watch out, Violet Eyes, you might become downright approachable.”

“Shut up. Write something.”

He began making a list on one of the poster boards. Grace held her tongue for two entire minutes before he asked her for the telephone book.

It was still on her desk because he had been using it to call the banks. She pushed it across toward him. “What are you doing?”

“Organizing the institutions I allegedly used for nefarious means.”

Nefarious? Yes, she thought, he was nervous. “Organizing how?”

He tore a map of center city out of the phone book and tacked that to the wall near the poster board he was writing on. “Hold on,” he said, then, a few minutes later when he was finished, he added, “Come here. Look at this.”

Grace got to her feet and moved across the office. He’d placed black numbers on the map, one through six. Six banks had accounts in his name. Actually, she thought, seven did, but one was legitimate. He’d owned savings and checking accounts before all this had started. The court had frozen them, too. They’d found out about it when he’d tried to tap an ATM on their way back to the office. It was the angriest she had seen him since he’d discussed the cops picking him up while he’d been playing ball with his nephews…and that business of her lying to him.

She already had her paralegal working on a second motion to get the court to free up his checking account. The man was going to have to pay his bills prior to trial and he was on leave from the department without pay. She had little or no hope of getting the savings account released and Grace knew it. Koeling would protest that McKenna could use that money to flee.

“What do you see?” he asked her.

“The banks are in a straight line.” It jumped out at her right away.

“Bingo.”

That was in her catalogue of peculiar American expressions. Grace started to respond, then she became aware of a slow warmth seeping into her. Their shoulders were touching. Or rather, her shoulder was touching his arm. She moved carefully away and fought hard against the urge to rub her hand over the spot.

“If I were going to go to all the elaborate trouble of spreading my…ah, nefarious money over six banks,” she said finally, “why would I then march straight up Broad Street and drop a bundle in each institution I came to?”

He beamed at her. “There’s my girl.”

More warmth, wrapping around her heart this time. When she got home—when she got free of him for the day—she was definitely going to have to spend a couple of minutes staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, because she didn’t even recognize herself anymore.

Grace cleared her throat. “I can’t argue that at the prelim,” she said. “I can’t say that someone is obviously setting you up because a real crook wouldn’t want to be so obvious. A real extortionist would stash the money out of state, not in a line down a single city street.”

McKenna moved away. “You can drop it into your opening argument.”

She decided not to mention that she was growing nearly desperate to pull a rabbit out of her hat at the prelim so this didn’t go all the way to trial. If they could debunk all of this evidence inside of three weeks he’d be out of her life and she’d recognize herself again.

Then she realized that he’d given her the perfect opening to get back to the subject she really wanted to pursue. “Speaking of my opening argument, I am going to need more information regarding your ah…liaison with Katherine.”

“We’ve discussed this, Grace.”

“No.” She went back to her desk. “You shrugged off my…my…”

“Tirade?” he suggested when she faltered.

“When I hit tirade status, you’ll know it.” She tried to curl her legs beneath her again without him noticing.

“Hissy fit then.”

It made her sound like a shrew. “Appalled concern,” she corrected. “It was appalled concern.”

“My relationship with Kat has nothing to do with this.”

Grace watched him sit again as well. He didn’t lounge this time. He didn’t lace his fingers behind his head. He looked braced for battle.

Well, that made two of them, she thought. How could he possibly believe the woman was a moot point in all this?

Unfortunately, if she was going to fire all of her ammunition, it was going to take Grace perilously close to a niggling little truth that she would have preferred to avoid. Women didn’t like being scorned. Women tended to react very, very badly to being scorned. Many of them could gnaw through concrete at the very hint of scorn. He’d been engaged to the woman and he’d turned her in to Internal Affairs. Which meant, Grace thought as her stomach soured a little, there was every possibility that she had been right in the first place—Katherine Cross was indeed framing him. And that went a long way toward saying that McKenna just might be innocent.

Grace bit her lip. She cleared her throat. “The mob isn’t doing this to you. A mob boss wouldn’t make the stupid mistake of depositing money in a straight line down Broad Street. That has the touch of a novice.”

“Counselor, there is a total of a million, six hundred thousand dollars in those accounts. Kat couldn’t get her hands on that kind of money.”

She could, Grace thought, if she was still involved with the mob, if she hated him to the tune of a million-six. “She’s our out, Aidan.”

His face darkened. “No.”

Grace blinked. “No? What do you mean, no?”

“You want to waltz into that prelim and put her on the stand and throw our relationship in her face? Drag her through the mud, prove to everyone concerned that she’s framing me because I broke her heart?”

“She broke her own heart! She went astray and put you in the position of having to do something about it!”

He stared at her for a long time. “You’ve never been in love, have you?”

Grace came abruptly to her feet. Her heart slugged her chest a little unevenly. “This isn’t about me.”

“Fine. It’s about Kat. But I’m not going to do that to her.”

“You’d rather go to jail?”

“You’re back in the reasonable-doubt arena again, Violet Eyes, and we agreed that we weren’t going there.”

“I never agreed to that.”

“Fine. Then I laid down those terms.”

“They’re stupid terms.”

“That may well be, but they’re my terms. I want to be exonerated. I want to show where that money came from and why. I don’t want to walk out of this a free man just because there was doubt. I want everyone to know the truth.”

“Katherine probably is the truth!” Oh, God, she’d shouted again. “What are we supposed to do if we manage to exonerate you only to prove that?”

She’d hurt him. Grace saw it in an instant. The pain that flared in his eyes made her want to snatch her words back. Which was asinine. This was a case. He was a client. She did not particularly care about a client’s feelings. And she found herself licking her lower lip briefly and placing a hand over her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the turmoil in his.

“We don’t know that yet,” he said. “We have no proof yet that it was her.”

It was obvious, Grace thought, but he was in denial. And that told her something else. He had really loved the woman. She found herself wondering what it would be like to be loved so fiercely, so emphatically, by a man like him, a man who knew no boundaries and seemed to grab life by the throat. She wondered how a woman could ever let a man like that go.

“McKenna,” she tried more calmly, “if I can get her to admit to your relationship with her and what you ultimately did to her, if I can do that in conjunction with the business of the banks being in a straight line, and if we can prove something hinky with those photographs, the D.A.’s case gets as thin as…as…” One of her father’s sows, Grace thought. “As a spiderweb.”

His jaw hardened. “I’m not going to let you put her on the stand.”

Her temper was tugging away from her. He was being irrational. “I can’t put her on the stand at the prelim. The defense isn’t allowed to call witnesses. You know that. I can only cross-examine the ones the prosecution produces. But if they use her, I can punch holes right through her testimony.”

This time he only shook his head.

“You’re tying one hand behind my back!”

“You’re smart. You’ll think of another way.” He stood suddenly. He crossed to where she was standing then pulled himself up short a step away. “I destroyed her once. I won’t do it twice.”

Suddenly, the air in the office went fragile and still. There was something here that she had to understand, Grace thought. “Why did you do it once?”

He seemed to think about it for a long time. Or maybe she was holding her breath again and that made it seem like time stretched out. “When my parents first came to this country, Danny-J was still three months from his first howl,” he said.

Oh, God, Grace thought, what was he talking about now? She put her mind to it. His mother had been pregnant with Dan Junior. That was what he was saying.

It hit her like a fist. His parents were immigrants, too.

“They came here dirt poor,” he said, “and this country gave them every opportunity to survive. This country has laws.”

It was why he was a cop, to protect that. She understood. It was why she was a lawyer.

“The laws hold this country together. They’re part of what makes it the kind of place where dirt-poor Irish farmers can start over. So they need to be respected and that’s why I did what I did. What Kat was doing was a crime. And if enough people keep doing what she was doing, it would undermine the whole foundation eventually. I felt kind of duty-bound to stop her. I guess I just don’t know any other way to live my life and pay it all back to the constitution that let me be born.”

“You were born here, in America.” He’d mentioned once that Danny was the McKenna firstborn.

“If they had stayed in Ireland, I wouldn’t have been.”

“You don’t know that.” She had to argue with him. If she fell into his eyes right now, she’d be lost.

“I might have been conceived, Grace, but I wouldn’t have made it much farther than that. Not the way my parents tell it.” He moved for the door.

She had to let him go. She’d be normal again if he went. She wouldn’t feel all this swirling emotion inside, this kinship with him. But Grace pivoted on a heel to watch him and heard herself speak anyway. “Would you do it all over again knowing what it would cost you? Would you turn Katherine in?”

He glanced back at her with a crooked grin. “Funny you should ask that. I was struggling with that question this morning and I’ve finally decided that I would. Yeah, I’d do it all over again. For the red, white and blue.”

“But you still won’t let me cross-examine her.”

“No. There are three things I honor in this life, Grace. My country, my family, and any woman I’ve ever shared a bed with.”

He left her then. She should have been glad, but she was more shaken than she’d been since a bullet had whizzed by, inches from her cheek as she’d fled Maruja.

It took Grace six more days to figure out that the man who embraced impulsive behavior as if it was a religion was equally determined about maintaining his ruts. McKenna was a creature of habit. Some habits anyway.

She was at her desk early the following Thursday morning, looking around at her office woozily—he had so many charts, graphs and lists tacked to her far wall now that she could barely see its delicate rose shade any longer—when he appeared in her office door as he had done every morning since she’d taken on his case. He was carrying the requisite cappuccino and muffin bag, but this time instead of flowers he held a large envelope.

“What’s that?” she asked suspiciously, straightening her spine.

McKenna sauntered in and laid everything on her desk. “The usual. I discovered early on that you’re at your best after a strong shot of caffeine.”

He was doing it again, dodging the subject. “Not the coffee. That.” She pointed to the envelope.

“Oh. It’s the incriminating photographs.”

The D.A.’s visual evidence. Grace popped the lid on the coffee and drank as deeply as she could—it was still very hot—and closed her eyes briefly. Somehow or other he had already managed to get his hands on the D.A.’s photographs.

“McKenna, I only just won that motion at two o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

He ignored that. “I marked the ones that are copies on the back.”

Only half of them would be originals. Judge Mason had ordered it that way so that both sides had the full array of evidence but both could also get the real prints tested by their independent experts. Koeling had managed to get Costello recused at the beginning of the week and Sam had warned her that Mason was a middle-of-the-road judge, balancing all his decisions meticulously so they didn’t really burn either side. He was a man of compromise.

“There are channels where these things are concerned,” she said finally, motioning at the pictures.

“And I swam right up one.” He sat and helped himself to a muffin, then he pried the lid on his own coffee.

He liked his strong and black, Grace thought dazedly. She wasn’t sure when—or why—she’d started noticing how he drank his coffee. “You’re not supposed to swim without me. We need to work in tandem.”

He frowned at her. “Did you forget your Wheaties this morning?”

“What does my breakfast have to do with this?”

“You’re cranky. Crankier than usual,” he amended.

“I’ve just got concerns about the way you do things.”

“Violet Eyes, you were born with concerns. And I’m starting to think I was put on earth to prove that those big old bad things can’t hurt you.”

It was so close to the truth that something clenched inside her. It seemed that every conversation she had with him made things clench inside her. So why was she fighting the urge to smile yet again? Grace pushed back from her desk and stood. “I should have signed for them, for the pictures. They’re official discovery.”

“Yes, they are. And I signed for them as your agent.”

“You’re also the defendant.” She left the rest unsaid. What he had done was unorthodox because theoretically, the defendant could very well tamper with the evidence to skew it in his favor. Give Koeling half a chance, and he’d use it.

McKenna shrugged. “The D.A.’s office is halfway between my town house and here. I thought it would expedite things if I swung by and picked them up on my way.”

“You don’t have to come here every day.” All day, she added silently.

“Ah, lass, what would you do then for comic relief?”

She couldn’t help it. She finally chuckled. “Have you looked at them yet?”

“I’m driving today. I didn’t have a chance while I was behind the wheel.” That was another of his idiosyncrasies. He owned a perfectly serviceable 1998 Dodge Ram pickup—which also confounded her because one would think an extortionist would be driving around in a Jaguar or Mercedes or some such thing. He paid city parking rates for the truck because there was rarely room on his street, and he called it “Darling.” But he only occasionally took it out of the lot. His excuse was that it was usually easier to take cabs than to fight for parking, and cabs were cheaper than paying hourly parking rates.

He so confused her, Grace thought.

She took the pictures and headed for the conference room. The envelope was stuffed with photos and she needed room to lay them all out. Her own desk was clogged with coffee, muffins and yesterday’s daisies. Why in the name of heaven did the man insist on bringing her flowers all the time?

She felt him on her heels but didn’t look back. She closed the conference room door—very nearly on McKenna’s face—and poured the envelope out onto the table. He came up close beside her to help sort them. That was another thing, she thought, not sure if she was disgruntled or titillated or just mystified by it. He was always crowding her space.

“You could do this from the other side of the table,” she grumbled.

“I like your perfume.”

Her heart jerked. “I don’t wear perfume.”

He stopped what he was doing with the pictures to stare at her. “You wear something. It matches your eyes.”

“I…it what?”

“You know, it’s violet, lavender…something.”

Her shampoo. He’d noticed her shampoo? “Can you like it while you tell me who these men are in these photographs with you?”

McKenna frowned down at the table. He took a step away from her, then another, moving the length of the table, giving each photo his utter attention. “No.”

Grace pressed her fingers to her temples. “No, as in you can’t like my shampoo while you study the photos, or no, as in you don’t recognize anyone?”

“It’s shampoo? Now why does that seem so sweet and girlie?”

“I’m not girlie.” Things were scrambling inside her. They were supposed to be discussing the pictures. “And I’m not sweet.”

“Touché on the second.” He grinned at her. “But trust me, honey, you’re all girl.”

She couldn’t do this, Grace thought desperately. She couldn’t do this with him every day. He was wearing her down. She hugged herself against a shiver. “Please,” she said quietly. Now she was begging.

He moved back toward her. “Please what, Grace? Your wish is my command.”

Why was he doing this? Why? With every day that passed, she was increasingly aware that he seemed to want more from her than legal services. But he didn’t want her. He’d called her prickly and cranky.

He just wanted the package, she told herself. He just wanted the pretty face. She’d spent her entire adult life feeling nothing but contempt for men who just wanted the package. But this man…this extortionist…made her laugh. There was something so utterly unique about his come-ons. The smell of her hair?

“Please look at the pictures,” she tried again a little weakly.

“I just did.”

“Look again.”

“Would that make you happy?”

“Very.”

So he did it. This time he meandered around the entire table. He picked one up, studied it closer, then made a disgusted sound and put it back again. “I don’t know any of these men,” he repeated finally.

Grace walked around the table as well. Because analyzing was what she did best, she started running the percentages in her head. “Twenty-six pictures, but only six different men. That’s something just above twenty-three percent. It indicates that you’ve had repeated contact with these characters.”

“It indicates squat. I’ve never in my life spoken to any of these guys.”

“Correction. You’re doing so right there.” She pointed to one where his mouth was open in conversation. “Which are the originals?” She flipped over a few to peer at the backs. “We need to get them to an expert. And no,” she said quickly before he could interrupt, “you can not act as the expert in this particular instance.”

He looked injured. “I own a camera.”

Grace bit down on her lip to keep from laughing. “Koeling would love that when it comes time to debunk your qualifications. You’re going to have to cough up retainer money on this one, McKenna.”

Something came into his eyes then. Not just pain, not just chagrin, but real and deep panic.

“What?” she asked, confused.

“Who do you have in mind?” he asked without answering.

“I’ll have to check with Dan. I’m sure the firm has a photographic expert we regularly use.”

“And in the meantime?”

“There is no meantime,” she said quietly. “We have less than two weeks now to the prelim. I’ll drop these off to the expert today and—if what you’re saying is true—then he’ll tell us these pics are rigged somehow.”

“What I’m saying is true.”

He never swayed from that, she thought. Not once. “Good, because we’ll need an ax of about that size to cut Koeling’s case out from under him if you won’t let me use Katherine.” They’d already come up empty with the banks. They’d gotten their subpoenas but every deposit had been made at a time when Aidan couldn’t prove he was elsewhere. All they had on that front was the dubious incongruity of the banks being stretched out in a neat line and the hope of additional subpoenas to get their security tapes for the dates in question. She could send copies of the signatures on file to handwriting experts, but she wanted to see the faces of the person or people who’d actually opened the accounts and made the deposits.

“So this leaves us with the pub witnesses,” McKenna said.

“Feel like partying, Violet Eyes?”

Her jaw dropped. “Partying?”

“What? You don’t party, either?”

“Of course, I do. Occasionally.” He had the most bizarre, unfair notions about her. She loved catching up with Jenny and Mandy at McGlinchey’s and they tried to do it once a week, though that hadn’t happened since McKenna had invaded her life.

Then she figured out where he was going with this. “You want to go to the pubs today?”

“Yeah. I want to scope them out. We can drop the photos off on the way.” Grace plucked the originals from the table and stuck the copies back into the envelope. She wouldn’t have admitted it for the world, but it sounded like a plan.

Dan’s secretary gave her the address of a Robert Steedle on Vine Street, the expert the firm used for all photographic disputes. While she snagged her suit jacket off the coat tree in her office, McKenna pulled one of his charts off the wall. Grace paused with one arm punched through a sleeve. “Why are you taking that?”

“I’m not going to copy the pub’s addresses all over again. Besides…” He rolled it into a tube and smacked it a couple of times against his open palm. “Might make a good weapon since I can’t carry a gun for the time being.”

Her gut did an odd, diving sensation. “You expect trouble at these places?”

“Honey, I always expect trouble.” He headed out the door again, then he tossed back over his shoulder, “Especially these days.”

Grace shrugged into her jacket the rest of the way and hurried after him. It made sense, she supposed, if he was telling the truth that someone was angry enough at him to frame him. And if Katherine wasn’t involved. Taking all that at face value, then some very nasty men wanted McKenna to pay for something.

“The Irish mob hasn’t succumbed to an outright hit for years now,” she said a little breathlessly when she caught up with him at the elevator.

“Not unless you count that snafu with Phil McGaffney a few years back, but that was largely a mix-up over some diamonds.” He punched the down button.

Snafu, she thought. So he was tense again, using clever words. “If they were going to whack you, they’d have done it already instead of trying to frame you.” Who was she trying to convince? Herself?

He stepped into the elevator. “That opinion sounds very much like an attorney who believes I’m innocent.”

It sounded like no such thing, Grace told herself. She was merely coming at this from all angles. “I’m concerned. If we have to make a run for it, I’m in trouble.”

He looked down at her high heels. “Now that is just plain stupid. You’re going to wear those to traipse all over the city?”

“I had no idea I would be traipsing when I got dressed this morning.”

“You’re almost forcing me to take a cab for this process. Either that, or we can swing by your place and you can change into jeans and sneakers.” The doors slid open and he stepped out into the lobby.

“I will not. I’m a lawyer and I intend to look like one. And we don’t have to take a cab, because you said you had Darling.”

His grin went wide. “Aw, you love her as much as I do.”

“I do not.” She’d ridden in the truck on one occasion and it had been a memorable experience, but not one she’d list in the pleasant column. Climbing up into the cab had required calisthenics she hadn’t been prepared to tackle in a skirt. And he drove like a man with a grudge against everyone who had the temerity to get behind the wheel of a vehicle in a city he’d once patrolled on four tires.

“You called her Darling,” he pointed out as they walked out onto the street.

“You call her Darling.”

“I do, and she’s staying in your firm’s parking lot today.”

“Then why did you drive in the first place?”

“Because I was picking up the photographs and it seemed more sensible than taking two cabs, one to the D.A.’s office and then another from there to here. So I stuck her in the lot here and I figured that from this point on, we could cab it.”

Here we go again, Grace thought. “Give me that chart.”

“Are you going to hit me with it?”

She let herself laugh this time because she was actually contemplating it.

He handed it over without breaking stride. Grace fell behind as she tried to unroll it and read it while they walked. It was the list of pub owners who were standing by to testify against him. The names had been turned over to her office without the necessity of a motion because witnesses qualified as immediately necessary discovery. She’d have the chance to cross-examine every one of these guys at the prelim…unlike Katherine Cross.

She rolled the list up again. It told her basically nothing. There were only names on there. “I’m presuming you know the corresponding addresses?”

“Sure do.” He moved toward the curb to hail a cab.

“No!” Grace snagged his arm and pulled him back. She had to put her full weight into it because he was hard to move when he had his mind set on something.

Did she even realize how often, how casually, she touched now? Aidan wondered. The thought intrigued him enough that he let her stop him. In the earliest times of their acquaintance, he might have been a leper for all the physical distance she kept between them. He was wearing on her, he thought. The idea pleased him. That should have sent him headlong to the nearest shrink’s sofa but at some point, he thought, it had stopped worrying him.

Maybe she was wearing on him, too. He didn’t see her beautiful face anymore when he looked at her, he realized. He saw her quirky I’m-not-going-to-laugh smile, the flash of her angry eyes, the jut of her chin when she was annoyed with him.

“Where exactly are these pubs?” she demanded.

“Mostly southeast. There are a few sprinkled through center city.”

“Then we’ll drive to the first and take it on foot from there.”

“I believe you’ve already mentioned that you’re not dressed for traipsing.”

“I’m tougher than I look. So are my feet.”

“Have it your way.” Aidan shrugged and headed for the parking lot instead. Actually, he thought, he wanted to watch her get up into the cab again in that skirt.

But she was on to him. She stopped at the passenger side door and crossed her arms over her chest militantly. “Go to your own side,” she said, and her chin jutted again.

His grin was wide enough now to hurt his mouth. “You know, that’s one of the things I appreciate about you.”

Her eyes went to suspicious slits. “What?”

“Your sheer acumen.”

“McKenna, figuring out men requires no acumen whatsoever. You’re all alike.”

He flattened a palm against his heart. “Ouch. And so untrue.”

“You’re denying that you were going to stand there and ogle my legs?”

“I’ve ogled them plenty of times when you thought I wasn’t looking.”

“I always knew you were looking.”

He leaned closer to her, loving the smell of her hair. “Then why didn’t you ever call me on it?”

She tried to back up, but the truck was behind her. “It was beneath me.”

“You liked it.”

“Liked it? Liked you ogling my legs?”

“Fed your ego, didn’t it?”

He wasn’t quite prepared for the fist she buried in his gut. He thought he grunted a little. Yeah, he thought, yeah, she was incredible. As coolly aloof as she was deadly and delicious. “Okay. Point taken.”

“Unlock Darling’s door,” she said. “From the inside.”

He went around to the other side of the truck. Grace made sure he was tucked neatly behind the wheel, and when she heard him pull up on the lock she opened the passenger door. She hiked her skirt up and slid her backside onto the seat. Much better than last time, she thought. She was getting the hang of this. She turned forward, crossed her legs and buckled the seat belt.

He parked illegally in front of Steedle’s storefront and Grace was forced to negotiate the truck seat again so she could run the photographs inside while he stayed behind the wheel in case a cop warned him to move on. Then they went on to southeast Philly. He found an open lot on First and this time he was out of the truck and at her door before she could protest, opening it. He ogled, she thought. He definitely ogled. And it filled her stomach with warm butterflies with velvet wings.

They headed out on foot. Not even for money, Grace thought after their sixth stop, would she admit that her feet were killing her. And all for nothing. She’d consumed so much cola her stomach was sloshing. Her eyes hurt and she wanted to cry in sheer frustration over their encounters.

When McKenna finally sat down on a bus stop bench, she almost whimpered as she slid onto the cool metal beside him. “Well, that was enlightening.”

“It tells us something.”

She noticed he rubbed the back of his own neck as though it was tight with tension. She had the truly absurd thought that maybe she could do that for him. She clenched her hands together in her lap before she could actually act on the urge.

“Then I missed the message.”

“No, you didn’t. You just don’t want to hear it.”

“Damn it, McKenna, six guys in a row looked at you like a long-lost relative they couldn’t quite place.”

“Exactly.”

“They didn’t know you!”

“Oh, babe, they knew me.”

Babe? Babe? He had to stop it with these nicknames. “How do you know?”

“They’ve already been subpoenaed to testify against me, right?”

It was true, she thought grudgingly. But every pub owner—or manager—had acted as though they possessed total ignorance of his name. So they’d clearly been lying. Maybe she had a bit to learn about the criminal mind after all. “What were you hoping they’d do?” she asked, slumping back against the bench.

“Just what they did.” He rubbed his neck again. “Jeez, Grace, they weren’t going to just decide they liked the color of my eyes and determine not to testify.”

“So we did all this for nothing?” She’d followed him blindly, she realized, just assuming he had some sort of concrete mission in mind.

“Of course not. They’re all on untraceable cell phones by now, reporting in to Eagan’s lieutenants that I was there.”

Grace turned her head to stare at him. “And this accomplishes what?”

“It tells them that I won’t go down without a fight.”

“So I walked four hundred city blocks today just to stoke your testosterone?”

“My testosterone is healthy, thanks.” That devil grin came to his lips again. “Want me to prove it?”

“No!”

“I’ll buy you a drink first,” he cajoled.

“I don’t drink before happy hour.”

“Honey, it is happy hour. And we have one last stop to make anyway.”

Grace dragged up her sleeve to look at her watch. It was twenty past four. “We’ve been at this all day?”

“You were so enchanted with my company that you lost track of time.”

“Not yours. It was the guy in the tight black pants at our second stop.”

She counted one heartbeat, then two, before he finally turned his head to look at her. “Jimmy Fudge? You were enchanted by Jimmy Fudge?”

Grace fought a smile. “Why do they call him that, do you suppose?”

“I don’t think it’s because he makes good chocolate.”

“But we don’t know that.” She’d gotten his goat, she realized, and she was enjoying the hell out of it.

“Grace, you’d last an hour with a guy like that. He’s got no finesse.”

“He was a gentleman. He pretended not to ogle my legs when I went to the rest room.”

“He was imagining feeding you fudge.”

She grinned privately. “I like fudge.”

“Not his kind.”

She slanted a look at him. “So you do know how he got his nickname.”

“Obviously it happened before you magically appeared at Villanova or you’d know, too. You would remember reading it in the papers.”

Her heart slugged her ribs. Suddenly she felt physically sick. Grace stood abruptly. “Let’s hit our last stop.”

She was crazy, she thought, heading away from the bench. She was sitting here playing with this man who was probably guilty of extortion. She’d let down every barrier she’d ever built since setting foot in America. She’d forgotten that he’d already figured out that there was virtually no trace of her in the American system before her admission to college. She’d just been…having fun.

“Where were you fifteen years ago, Grace?” he asked, falling into step beside her. “Not in Philly, obviously.”

“No. I wasn’t in Philly.”

“Jimmy planted a small cherry bomb in some fudge,” he said in an undertone, leaning close to her ear.

Grace paused. “Please tell me you’re just trying to upset me.”

“It’s called yanking your chain, Violet Eyes. Besides, I look better in tight black pants.”

Yanking her chain, Grace thought. That was a very appropriate saying. She’d never given that one much thought before, but she liked it. Then he ducked into a doorway.

“Whoa. This is the pub. I promised you a drink first before I prove my testosterone.”

“Actually, I think we were talking about Jimmy Fudge’s testosterone.”

“Mr. Cherry Bomb.”

“He did not do that.”

“Oh, he did, lass. He spent twelve inside, three off for good behavior. So they say. Inside word has it that the then-boss got to someone on the parole board. It’s an ugly world we’re looking into here, and without your cooperation I’m apt to be a casualty of it. So can we please enter the pub now?”

That made her mad. “You’ve got my cooperation. I’m working my tail off for you. I’ve followed you around this city on foot all day. I won the motion yesterday.”

“So now let me buy you a drink.”

“So you can show one more pub owner that you’re not going to back down?”

“Exactly. You can even go to the rest room and I won’t ogle your legs.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “One drink,” she hedged.

“One,” he agreed.

“And you’ll keep your testosterone to yourself.”

He didn’t answer. That should have warned her.

He caught her hair in his fist as she started to move past him through the door. It was a gentle tug. He never hurt her, she thought wildly. He just made sure she knew he was there. She knew. Oh, God, she knew. When she stopped he used his body to trap her against the open door.

His face was suddenly so close to hers she couldn’t inhale without taking his breath in. Then again, she could never breathe when he got like this.

“Don’t take all the fun out of this, Violet Eyes,” he murmured.

“Okay. Fine. Enjoy your testosterone. Move away now.”

“No.”

He’d never said no before. Her heart vaulted. It landed somewhere in her throat. “McKenna, you’re making an ass of yourself.”

“I’m making a point.”

And then he kissed her.

She’d been kissed before. Invariably, it had happened—some hot-blooded stud would try to move in on her, or some eager college frosh had overstepped his bounds. There’d even been a boy back in Maruja, another peasant, her best friend from the age of six. He’d kissed her so sweetly he’d made her want to cry. But it had been nothing…nothing like this.

Everything inside her gathered instantaneously with the first touch of his mouth to hers. No, not a touch, she thought, and somehow she found her fingers diving into his hair, holding him so he wouldn’t stop. It was an assault that made something throb low and deep inside her. He made her skin feel like parchment over her nerve endings. He tasted like too much Coke and his tongue did something to hers, something demanding, something that said, You’re a woman, stop trying to hide.

And for a wild, reckless instant, she did.

She met his tongue. She’d worry about all the nasty repercussions of this later. It tangled with hers, teased, left, came back. His lips almost hurt hers because the kiss was hard in a way that wasn’t going to let her deny that this had ever happened. His hand cupped the back of her neck and his hands were as rough and sweet and exciting as she’d thought. Then he pulled back and nipped her bottom lip.

“That,” he said, “was testosterone.”

He left her and went inside. Grace slumped back against the open door and pressed a hand to her stomach.

She knew in that moment. She knew. No matter what happened at the prelim, even if she got rid of him then, she was never going to be the same.

Chapter 9

G race decided that the only possible course of action was to act as though what had just happened had had no effect on her at all. She strolled to the table McKenna had chosen. It would be the acting job of her life.

He was reading the menu. “We missed lunch,” he said without looking up.

She felt as if she’d been lunch—his. Grace sat with exquisite care. “Just a glass of chardonnay for me, thank you.”

He finally looked up at her over the rim of the menu with those clever green eyes. “Holding me to the drink, huh? I’ll buy you food, too.”

“I’m not hungry.” Her stomach chose that moment to make a faint, squishy, empty sound.

She looked around the pub so she could pretend she hadn’t heard it. The place was unquestionably Irish without trying too hard. The wooden tables were golden and scarred in places. There was a tiny, round, raised stage in a corner with one stool and a microphone; she imagined that a lone guitar player would take the perch in a few hours and sing the kind of quaint folk songs that always made her ache inside. There was lots of green and, judging by the ivy on the room divider next to their table, it was real. She caught the vague aroma of earth from it.

It was as much a family place as a bar, she realized. At the table next to them there sat two women with four kids between them. One shoveled a French fry absently through a puddle of ketchup for her toddler as she talked to her friend. How could this place be connected to organized crime?

“I’m still not entirely sure what we’re doing here,” she said finally.

He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest to study her. “When people are rattled, they make mistakes.”

They’d already made one, Grace mused, using Katherine Cross as their prime witness. Without her, so much of their case would be circumstantial, but McKenna still wouldn’t let her take that advantage.

A waitress hustled up to their table, her pencil poised. “Can I help you folks?”

“A Guinness and a chardonnay,” McKenna said. “Then you can throw in two corned beef specials, too.”

The woman jotted it down. “Fries or slaw?”

“Both for me.” He looked at Grace questioningly.

He’d ordered for her, she thought. He’d just gone ahead and ordered for her, taking over her stomach the way he’d taken over her life. She tried to frown but, oh, she was hungry. “You’re buying?” she asked, just to make absolutely sure.

“You need to get over this frugality thing, Violet Eyes.”

The waitress chuckled.

“And I’m sure—” He broke off to look at the waitress’s name tag. “I’m sure Gwen doesn’t have all day, so go for broke but do it fast.”

Grace grabbed the menu. “I’d rather have the ham and cabbage,” she said the instant she spotted the entrée. “It’s dinnertime,” she told McKenna. “Not lunch.”

“When you decide to let go, you don’t fool around.”

The waitress moved off and Grace wondered if he was talking about the food. She wondered if his mouth still felt soft and bruised the way hers did.

“You know, you remind me of my mother,” he said suddenly.

“I have never once kicked you in any part of your anatomy.”

“Sure, you have. My heart.”

She’d been reaching for her water glass. Grace almost bobbled it. It was so absurd she half laughed, half choked. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I was referring to the way you keep nudging me into crucifying Kat.”

She had too many reactions to that. First there was a faint, sinking sensation that she couldn’t explain. He wasn’t saying she affected his heart. He was talking about the elusive Katherine again.

Then came indignation. She had not been nudging him, Grace thought. She thought she’d shown remarkable restraint under the circumstances.

Finally, there was the familiar zing of frustration at the way he was sabotaging his own defense. It ricocheted around in her blood and made her want to scream. She gulped water, then the waitress brought her wine. She gulped that, too.

“It’s your hundred thousand dollars,” she said finally. “If you want to spend it and still go to jail, that’s entirely your choice.”

“It’s not actually my hundred thousand. But at those rates, I guess I have the right to expect a miracle or two.”

Grace put her wineglass down. Whose money was it then? Was he suddenly changing tactics and admitting that he’d stolen it? She didn’t dare ask.

“You said you’d cooperate,” she pointed out instead.

“I am. I’m doing my own investigative work and I’m feeding you. That’s definitely above and beyond the call of cooperation.”

The wine was warming her inside. “You still love her.” Where had that come from? There was no possible way she could convince herself that the answer would help her frame her case.

At first she didn’t think he would respond. He picked up his beer and drank, then he ran a finger thoughtfully over his upper lip to erase the foam. “No,” he said finally. “I would have to say the answer to that is a definite no.”

Grace’s heart chugged. “But you won’t hurt her.”

“I loved her once. That requires a code of honor in my book.”

She didn’t want him to have honor of any kind. It made something happen in the area of her heart. “So you’ll spare her at risk to yourself.”

He thought about that, too. “Yes. But I can state unequivocally that I no longer love her. Want to know why?”

No, she thought. “Why?”

“Because I kissed you.”

The whole room tilted. “That was a moment of insanity on both our parts.”

“No, I really thought about it first.”

Her heart was bouncing around in her chest now like a Rocket Power volleyball. “That has nothing to do with anything, McKenna.”

“It has everything to do with the question you asked me. When I’m in love with someone, I never, ever experience the urge to kiss anyone else. Historically speaking. But in this instance, I experienced, contemplated, did it.”

His words made her throat close and made her eyes feel hot.

“You do that like Ma, too,” he said suddenly.

She had no idea what he was talking about, but that wasn’t unusual. The waitress came back with their food and spared her from asking.

“This is where you ask me, ‘do what?’” he suggested, biting into his sandwich.

Grace popped ham into her mouth. It was good. It reminded her too much of home, of special, sacred Sundays when the government had left her family something…anything…to eat. That something had generally been a pig.

“You stick your chin out,” he clarified.

Grace swallowed, frowned. “No, I don’t.”

“You do it whenever you’re losing an argument.”

“Well, there you have it. Since I don’t lose arguments, you must be mistaken.”

He laughed, that rumbling sexy laugh. “Well, on the rare occasions when you are wrong, you shove your chin out. You’re cheap like Ma is and you shove your chin out like she does.”

Grace frowned when he stood. Now what was he doing?

“When I was little, Ma used to let the hems down on my sisters’ skirts six times before she’d cough up money to the school for new ones,” he continued.

Grace’s gaze slid to follow his path as he moved to the table beside them. The women and their kids had gotten up to go. The one with the ketchup-addicted toddler was trying to shove his chubby little legs through the seating gaps in his stroller. Her purse was flapping open.

“She and my dad spent everything they earned to give us all a good Catholic education,” McKenna said, glancing back at her. “No public schools for the McKenna clan. That meant uniforms—definitely not in the budget without a lot of scrimping and finagling.”

“How…interesting.” Grace’s throat was tight. The words didn’t want to come out. She was starting to understand what he was up to.

The woman straightened after getting her son situated and the movement had her wallet spilling out of her purse. McKenna had seen it before it happened. He bent, picked it up, and handed it back to her without even breaking in his dialogue. Grace’s ears started to buzz with the woman’s effusive thanks. McKenna didn’t seem to hear her. He was too focused on what he was saying to her.

“So you’ve got to know that it killed me to take their money the other day for this whiz-kid defense you’re providing, knowing that they’ve already given all six of us everything they could. They’d finally gotten to a point where they could think about retirement. Dad’s retirement, that is. Ma more or less gave up all but a few favored customers a couple of years ago.”

“Customers,” Grace repeated vacantly. The young mother was still trying to pump his hand in thanks.

McKenna disengaged gently and came back to sit down. He picked up his sandwich again. “Ma’s a seamstress. Dad talked her into retiring when they could swing it financially, after all of us were raised and gone, but she had a few old-time customers who wouldn’t let her go, so she still takes stuff in from them occasionally.”

She watched him bite into corned beef. He was biting into corned beef while her entire world imploded.

Not her world, she told herself. Just all her preconceived notions and her defenses against him.

“What did you just do?” she asked, because she had to be sure.

He frowned while he reached for his beer, then he looked around blankly. “What? Where? We were talking about Ma.”

If Katherine had changed the complexion of the case, then this changed everything else, Grace thought wildly. He’d given that woman her money back without any conscious thought whatsoever. He didn’t even realize he’d done it. An extortionist might have given it back, too, especially if he was putting on a show for his attorney. But he’d have thought about it.

She knew then. She knew. He was innocent.

Grace shoved back from the table. “I need to go now.”

He was midway through another bite. “Now?” He put the sandwich down. “All right, what did I miss?”

“Nothing. I’m preoccupied. I’m trying to figure out how to get you off the hook without using Katherine.” It was the first thing that came to her mind.

“I’m talking about Ma and you’re back to Kat?”

Yes. No. Grace turned away from the table. Then she froze. Something else he’d thrown at her in the past few moments finally jumped up and grabbed her by the throat. “Your parents paid for your defense?”

“Violet Eyes, you’re just plain being rude now. Even for you. Don’t shout.”

She wasn’t going to let him lead her off on a tangent this time. “Have your parents paid for your defense?” she repeated, moving closer to the table again, lowering her voice.

“Will you please sit back down?”

“No. Answer me.”

He swigged more beer and put the mug down exaggeratedly. “No.”

“You just said they did.”

“Well, they helped. But my siblings contributed as well and Jack and I refinanced the town houses.”

His family. Dear God, his family had put up everything they had to get him good legal representation. And she’d thought—had wanted to think, had needed to think—that it was dirty money.

Grace wrapped her arms around her waist and hugged herself tightly. Then she jerked away from the table again and headed for the door.

As soon as she reached the street, she began looking frantically for a cab. This time she would pay for one and pay for it gladly. She had minutes, she thought, maybe as many as five, before he could settle their tab and come outside.

She was running from a client. She was running full tilt. Again. But when she’d fled his town house, she’d only been overwhelmed and panicked. This time she was devastated, not so much by what all this said about McKenna, but by what it said about herself.

A taxi approached. Grace stepped down into the street and pinwheeled her arms. She knew she probably looked like an idiot but she’d already forsaken all measure of dignity in the past few minutes. The car stopped and she dragged on the door handle, spilling inside.

This time she remembered the law firm’s address. Grace slid down in the street as the cab started moving again. She covered her face with her hands, then she dropped them again quickly to steal a look out the side window. McKenna was still in the pub.

What if he reported her bizarre behavior to Dan? It would be her word against his, Grace decided. She’d say she’d gotten an emergency phone call. So what if her briefcase and her cell phone were back in the office?

The car stopped at the Rittenhauer Building. Grace reached for the briefcase she’d just been thinking about, the one that was still under her desk, and swore aloud. The driver watched her warily in the rearview mirror. The way her luck was running, it was probably the same guy she’d tangled with after the trip to the Hyatt.

“Wait here a moment,” she growled. She got out and went inside to charm the guard at the lobby desk. He loaned her ten dollars.

Five minutes later, the taxi was gone, the guard was repaid, and she sank down at her desk feeling as though someone had surgically removed the bones from her legs while she hadn’t been paying attention. “Okay,” she whispered aloud. “Okay. I can handle this.”

One of the other associates passed her open door and called out a good-night. Grace clasped her hands together on the desk in front of her and sat very still. What had changed, really, except for the fact that an innocent man’s fate rested in her hands? A man who wouldn’t let her cross-examine his lover. Ex-lover, she corrected herself. He’d said he didn’t love Katherine any longer because he’d kissed her.

Her head spun again. She was not going to think about that again. She focused on the case.

Somehow, having one hand tied behind her back defense-wise had been nowhere near this terrifying when she’d thought a guilty man might be paying for his actions if she failed. Grace pushed to her feet again and began walking along the far wall, frowning at the charts he’d tacked there. She had nothing—nothing—with which to shatter any semblance of probable cause. That wasn’t unusual. If the D.A. felt strongly enough about something to charge a man with it, the judge almost invariably held the guy over for trial. When she’d first come to this country, she’d honed her English by voraciously reading Erle Stanley Gardner novels, but the sad fact of the matter was that Perry Mason was the only attorney she’d ever heard of who regularly dodged the probable cause bullet.

“Okay,” she said again, and studied the charts.

The banks were in a neat line down Broad Street. Big deal. There was no way Judge Mason would take that into consideration. It might—might—nag a juror or two once this went to trial. But she didn’t want this to go to trial.

She had to get McKenna off before that. Soon. Now. She had to get him out of her life. Because he was innocent…and he’d kissed her.

He didn’t keep a day planner so there was no way he could produce witnesses for the times the deposits had been made. He’d said he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing at a certain time of day six months ago so she lost that defense as well.

Grace left the wall and went back to her desk, booting up her computer. No tacky paper phone messages for Russell and Lutz. The receptionist shot them straight to each lawyer’s computer via interoffice e-mail. She didn’t find what she was looking for. Her subpoenas hadn’t yet come through for the bank security tapes, but she had to believe the court would allow her access to them. Fair was fair, after all.

If she had any unused miracles left in her fate account—and somehow she doubted it—then those disks would show Katherine Cross making the deposits. Then McKenna would have to let her go after the woman. But if it was the mob who was framing him, then Grace knew they’d never use anyone who could be recognized, any face known to be in cahoots with them. The person or persons shown on the tapes would be homogenous strangers.

Then again, they’d laid the banks out in a straight line. That had been pretty stupid. As she had told Aidan, it had the mark of an amateur. Katherine again, she thought. It always came back to Katherine. The woman he wouldn’t let her touch. The woman he said he didn’t love anymore because he’d kissed her.

What kind of man had that kind of honor in this day and age? The well-raised, Ma-fearing, honest, good, strong son of grateful immigrants, she answered herself.

She couldn’t think about that right now.

The very idea of comparing the faces that would appear on the security tapes with all the police department’s mug shots was staggering. But she’d do it if need be. She’d set McKenna to the task. Now that she knew where his retainer had come from, she didn’t want to nickel-and-dime it to death with paid help, either.

It was a long shot that either Katherine or the mob would enlist a small-time crook to make the deposits for them, but it wasn’t out of the question, Grace thought, rubbing at an ache behind her forehead. They might trust huge sums of cash to a hoodlum if said hoodlum knew there was a car tracing his progress down Broad Street and if that car contained an aimed and primed shotgun. If the same face turned out to have made all the deposits, Grace thought, then it would support that theory. It would also push this a little further into the mob’s corner. Would Katherine follow a thug down Broad Street to effectively keep a gun to his head?

Don’t think about Katherine. Grace swept to her feet and went back to the wall.

There was nothing new there to comfort her, nothing on Aidan’s remaining charts. The photographer had promised her an opinion on the pictures by late tomorrow. As for the pub owners, she was reasonably convinced that she had wasted her entire day with that particular debacle. So…there was nothing to do now but go home.

Grace sank down onto the sofa instead. If she went home, if she couldn’t work and think about McKenna’s defense, she’d be doomed. There was no telling where her mind might go. If she didn’t work, she’d start thinking about the kind of man who returned a wallet to a young mother without any thought whatsoever. A man who—she finally realized now—had been stressed at his bail hearing because coming up with five thousand more dollars had meant digging a little deeper into his family’s coffers. A man who’d blanched at using a photographic expert because that would whittle away at his family’s money, too. A man who’d loved a woman enough that he wouldn’t rake her through muck even to save his own neck, even if there was a possibility that she was the one trying to destroy him.

A man who was innocent. A man she could fall in love with.

Grace’s stomach swelled and pushed up into her throat. She couldn’t love. She wouldn’t love. She’d promised herself.

She flew off the sofa. She hurried for her office door and realized she wasn’t going to make it to the rest room in time if she tried to run in the heels that had reduced her feet to a thousand throbbing nerve endings. She kicked them off and raced barefoot up the hall. If anyone saw this, she thought, crashing through the door, they’d think she’d truly lost her mind.

She had, she thought, diving headlong for a stall. She’d fallen in love.

Grace lost what little ham she’d eaten and finally made her way shakily to the basin. The face that looked back at her from the mirror there looked dead, she thought helplessly. Colorless, waxen, her eyes too huge. No soldier would want her now.

A crazed giggle tickled her throat. She clapped a hand over her mouth, then she bent over the sink to splash cool water on her face. When she straightened, she looked at her reflection again.

Better. Not by much, but a little better. Grace pulled her spine straight and strode out of the rest room again. Halfway back to her office, she heard the distant, muted chirp of her cell phone. She started jogging again. She told herself she was doing it so that whoever else was still working at this hour would not come into the hall and glimpse Grace Simkanian walking down the plush center hallway of Russell and Lutz in her stocking feet. But in the back of her mind was one word, one name.

Aidan.

McKenna would call, she thought, because she’d bolted on him. He’d call for no other reason than to rib her about it. She reached her office again and lunged for her briefcase. It was opened on the floor beside her desk. She found the phone and remembered in that instant that he probably didn’t have her cell phone number.

“Hello,” she gasped, sinking into her chair again. Be him. Don’t be him.

“Grace?” It was Mandy and she seemed uncertain that she’d reached the right number.

Get a grip, Grace told herself. Be the woman your friends know. No one—no one—must ever know that she was going off the deep end over a man with sea-green eyes and the devil’s smile. “Of course, it’s me. If anyone else answered this phone, you’d have to report it stolen.”

“Maybe it’s the phone. You sound funny.”

“Wait. Let me get closer to the window.” Grace didn’t move from her chair. “How’s that?”

“Maybe better,” Mandy said. “Where are you?”

“At my desk.”

“It’s six-thirty,” she said. “Time for all good girls to ditch duty and join their best friends for happy hour at McGlinchey’s.”

Her last effort at happy hour had sent her plunging straight for the bathroom a little while ago, Grace thought. But suddenly she knew that taking another stab at it was exactly what she needed. She needed her pals. She needed Mandy to overanalyze the commonplace and Jenny to blink at the world through rose-colored glasses. She needed to be the cynical glue that held them all together. “Where’s Sam?” she asked, still trying to sound like herself and not give in too easily.

“Can you say pennant race?” Mandy asked. Her husband was an avid baseball fan. The Phillies were Sam’s adopted team. He hailed originally from Texas so only an Astros game on television would come between him and Veterans Stadium in September when he was lucky enough to get choice seats.

“Chloe is with him,” Mandy added. Her daughter also believed that baseball was worth an early afterlife. “I’m a free woman until at least eleven-thirty tonight. And what is a free woman to do but swill wine with her friends?”

“Hold me a seat,” Grace said.

“I knew we could count on you.”

Grace moved her thumb to the disconnect button. She looked at the phone in her hand for a moment. It occurred to her that maybe she had just used up one of those miracles in her fate account. She would never have called Jenny or Mandy herself to see if they could get together tonight, because Grace Simkanian did not need. She needed no one.

She put the phone back in her briefcase, tugged her black not-really-leather clutch bag from the back compartment, and rooted in it for lipstick and blush. She wasn’t going anywhere looking as if she had just fallen in love.

She went back to the rest room to repair her makeup. She remembered to put her shoes back on first, even if her feet were still killing her. Finally, limping only slightly, she returned to her office, put the clutch back in her briefcase, closed it and snapped the locks. She fluffed her hair with her fingers, hefted the case again and sailed out the door. She tried not to wonder why McKenna hadn’t tracked her down to…what had he called it? Yank her chain about the way she’d run. It didn’t matter, she told herself as the elevator coasted down. Because in no time at all, the prelim would be history. He’d be gone, and she’d be a hero when she got him off. She could forget this lunacy about being in love.

She stepped out onto the street and glanced at her watch. She had the bus schedule committed to memory. One should be coming by to head in the direction of McGlinchey’s at any moment now. She moved toward the corner to wait for it.

And managed a step.

An outright blow would have knocked her out, sent her sprawling, she had an absurd moment to think. But the guy didn’t hit her, and he didn’t go for her briefcase. He wrapped himself around her instead, from behind, touching her, his foul breath wafting against her cheek, his arm crooked around her neck. Grace drew in breath for an instinctual scream and he clamped a hand over her mouth.

There were people, dear God, there were people all over the street! No one was going to help her. Grace tried to jerk her head back and forth. His hold on her neck tightened and his hand pressed down harder on her mouth. Grace screamed anyway, a muffled, squealing sound trapped under his palm. Then she went limp.

Soldiers, she thought crazily. It was just like that soldier.

She surprised him. He had to let go of her throat to hold her up. His hand moved marginally and Grace shrieked. Now people were stopping, staring, confused. A man in a business suit yelled, “Hey!” and took a step toward them. Grace didn’t wait to see what he would do next. She twisted in her assailant’s arms and managed to get her knee up. She missed her target.

She swung her briefcase wildly, aiming for his head. He grabbed her again, this time with both hands at her throat. His thumbs pressed.

Grace’s arms were still free. She tried to swing her briefcase up against his back. But her throat was on fire now and the edges of her vision were blurring. She lost her grip on the handle. The case went flying.

She screamed again, crazily. “Stop this! Stop!”

Grace was losing her equilibrium. The fuzz was covering her vision. His thumbs digging into her throat were sending out deep, shooting waves of pain. She couldn’t fight when she couldn’t breathe. Where was that other man, the one with the briefcase, the one who had looked like he might help her?

“I don’t…have any…money.” She couldn’t yell anymore, no more air. Her voice was squeaky.

The man laughed. His breath hit her full in the face this time and it smelled like old onions. “I don’t want your money. I want you to drop the ball with Aidan McKenna.”

He was talking about ball? No, oh, God, no, he was talking about Aidan. This was about Aidan.

It gave her new strength. He was threatening her. Warning her to go against every moral bone in her body. Against everything that, as Aidan had said, made this country great. She pummeled her fists against the guy’s sides, his chest. “Go away, go away, go away, go away!” It turned into a chant and that, too, energized her.

“Make sure he’s found guilty!”

“Go to hell!” she wailed. His hold on her was loosening.

“Hey!” the other man said again from behind them.

Then the thug finally let go of her throat and shoved her hard. Grace careened backward, straight into the other man. He caught her before she fell. Grace wrapped her own hands around her throat and gasped in air. Her vision was sharpening again…too slowly, too slowly. But she saw the thug jerk past them, run around them and away.

A confused woman stood clutching Grace’s briefcase as though she was unsure whether to give it back to her or take off after her attacker. The man behind her was still trying to keep her on her feet. So many people touching her, Grace thought hectically. She stumbled forward to get free.

“I’m fine. Thank you. I’m fine.”

“I should go after him.” But the guy seemed as uncertain as the woman who was approaching tentatively now, holding her briefcase out to her.

Grace took it. She was shaking badly. “Don’t anyone go after him. He’ll hurt you.”

“We should call the police or something,” the woman said.

“I will.” Grace moved again, her feet still unsteady. She had to get back inside, into her office. She would be safe there. She’d call the cops from there. Then she hesitated. The lawyer in her thrust up through the muddled mess of her brain. “Do…ah, either of you have business cards? The police may want to speak with you.”

“We’re witnesses,” the woman said as though just figuring it out.

“Here, I do.” The guy opened his briefcase and fished inside.

Grace took the card and almost dropped it. Then she found herself alone on the sidewalk again with the card in one hand and her briefcase in the other.

She had to call the police, she thought again. This was America.

Her first steps back into the building lobby were still wobbly, but each one she took was surer, steadier. She made it to the elevator and rode up again. When she got to her office, she eased down into her desk chair, feeling fragile. It never occurred to her to call 9-1-1. She phoned the nearest precinct. She identified herself then she took in a shuddering breath. “I want to report an assault.”

Aidan was feeling pretty pleased with himself. He didn’t even try to hide his beer in the refrigerator crisper when he got home. He placed the package he’d picked up on the kitchen counter, then he stepped outside onto the postage stamp of his back stoop. He reached across the railing and beat a fist against Jack’s door.

Jack came out almost immediately. “Tell me something good,” his brother said.

“Bad day?” Aidan felt like whistling.

“I heard this afternoon that Lindsey’s getting married.”

“Ouch.” Lindsey had been Jack’s long-standing girlfriend. She’d stuck with him for a long time until it had become apparent to her that Jack wasn’t going to settle down anytime in the near future. Then she’d moved on. It had been painful for both of them, but they wanted different things from life, at least for the time being.

“Come over and have a beer,” Aidan said. “We’ll talk about women.”

Jack didn’t need to be invited twice. He vaulted over the railing. “Yes to the beer. To hell with the women. I’m joining a monastery.”

Aidan laughed good and hard at that one as he went back inside.

Though Jack was a few steps behind him, he reached the package first. He pulled out the six-pack of Guinness and popped a beer for each of them. “Women are nuts,” he decided, swigging.

“They’re delightfully complex creatures.” Aidan grinned and drank as well. He’d rattled her this afternoon, he thought again, more than he’d ever managed to do before. She’d taken off like her tail was on fire. He was definitely getting to her. He wondered how much time he wanted to give it until he called her to mention that to her.

“Aw, man,” Jack said. “I know that look.”

“Seen it in the bathroom mirror a time or two, have you?” Aidan went to the kitchen table, pulled a chair out and turned it around, and straddled it.

“Not me,” Jack said.

“Once a week.”

“It’s a bum rap.”

“You’ve fallen for a new pretty face once a week since Lindsey left.”

“Whereas you’ve been a monk in good standing since Kat.”

Aidan waited for the pang. It didn’t come. The pang didn’t come and he’d kissed another woman and he felt fine. His life was on the verge of shattering into slivers and pieces, but he felt fine. “I’m considering turning over a new leaf.”

“Ah, man, man, man.” Jack joined him at the table.

“No. Woman, woman, woman.” And the world was a much better place for one of them, too, Aidan thought.

“It’s the lady lawyer. Ms. Suit, right?”

Aidan raised his bottle in a toast.

“She’s not for you, bro.”

Aidan frowned, startled by that. “How so?”

“She’s class.”

“I can do class,” he said indignantly.

“Yeah, but will class do you?” Jack laughed at his own joke.

“She’s going to break your heart. A woman like that doesn’t do working-men cops, sons of Irish potato farmers. Ten to one she’s dating a politician.”

Aidan thought about it and grinned slowly. “She’s not dating anyone.”

“You asked her?”

“Nope.” Aidan got up again for the bag of Fritos he’d also bought. “My guess is that she got burned recently. She’s as skittish with the opposite sex as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

“Aidan Freud,” Jack muttered.

“I’m not wrong. I can read women like a book.”

“As long as it’s a first-grade primer.”

“You’re on a witty roll tonight.” He brought the chips back, scooped out a handful and gave the bag to his brother.

“And you’re headed straight for another spell in hell.” Jack frowned. “Skittish? That means you haven’t gotten her out of the suit yet.”

He’d only finally accepted this afternoon that he really wanted to and caution and common sense could be damned. And, he discovered, he felt uncomfortable talking about it with Jack. Somehow, Grace seemed above that sort of banter. He wondered if that was a clue that he was already in way deeper than he knew.

“She wanted to believe I was guilty at first,” he thought aloud. “She didn’t want to trust me.” But man, he thought, she’d kissed him back. Then she’d fled.

When Grace ran, he figured she was generally doing it from herself.

The phone rang. Aidan grinned again. “That’s her, now, begging to see me again.”

Jack hooted. Aidan stretched for the wall phone and got it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Rafe.”

Aidan’s grin hurt for a moment, then dropped away. He got a bad feeling in his gut. He respected the hell out of Rafe Montiel. They had a great working relationship. But he had never sat around his kitchen talking to Rafe the way he was talking to his brother now. They weren’t that tight. They didn’t call just to say hi.

Ergo, Aidan thought, something was wrong.

“What’s happened?” he demanded. Had the D.A. come up with new evidence they could twist to damn him?

“Buddy Mercer over at the first precinct just gave me a call,” Rafe answered. “He would have called you, but…”

Yeah, Aidan thought. But. He was a pariah within the department right now until all the chips fell and the picture was clear. Guys who liked him still liked him, but most of them were steering clear of him until the verdict was in. It was only politic.

Buddy wanted to tip him on something without calling him himself, so he’d tagged a guy he’d known would report back to him. “What, damn it?” Aidan demanded again.

“They hit your lawyer, pal.”

His blood went to ice, jagged little pieces of it that scraped his veins from the inside out. “Hit?”

“Hell. Sorry. Not that way. Grabbed her. Roughed her up a little. It was just a while ago. She called it in herself. They’re sending a couple of officers over to her office now. Brian Salsie and Tony Fianco. Know them?”

Aidan was on his feet. “No. Which side of this do they fall on?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know them either.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“She hasn’t given a statement yet,” Rafe repeated. “They’re just on their way to her now. But I don’t think it’s a random mugging. It smells like your enemies.”

Aidan was picking up the same odor. He barked his thanks and hung up the phone. “I have to go,” he said again, this time to his brother. “They grabbed her.”

Regardless of what Jack thought Aidan’s chances might be with the drop-dead gorgeous lawyer, his face went a dark, angry red. “I’ll go with you.”

“No.” If he ended up having to hurt someone, Aidan thought, he didn’t want his brother involved. His family didn’t need two of them in jail.

And he would hurt someone. He would…if Salsie and Fianco were dirty, if anyone else touched another hair on her head, if he ever found out who’d done it in the first place. He grabbed his keys and jogged from the town house.

“Lock up for me,” he called over his shoulder to Jack. “Do it tight. Set the alarm.” He didn’t need anyone planting anything here. Maybe this had all been a ruse to get him out of the house.

They’d just raised the stakes in this game, he thought, running for his truck. He told himself that he was only protecting his own interests as he stabbed the key into the ignition as if his enemies were inside the steering column and he wanted to gouge them. But he wasn’t. They’d hurt her. Being exonerated wasn’t good enough now, he thought, peeling away from the curb. Now, now, someone was going to have to pay.

Chapter 10

G race waited at her desk for the police to arrive. She wasn’t calm so much as she was dazed, she realized. She felt like there was a fly buzzing around inside her head with a persistent drone. Her hands were white-knuckled claws clasped together on her desk.

Worse things than this had happened to her in her life, she thought. Her escape from Maruja with Jonna had been heartbreaking and treacherous. She was thinking about that when Aidan appeared in her office door.

She’d been expecting uniformed officers. At first she couldn’t assimilate what she was seeing. Then a sweet, agonizing relief swept her—here was someone who would protect her, though she’d long since become a woman who needed protection from no one. Finally, her brain came back to life, tracking forward, trying to figure out what he was doing here.

He didn’t work at the first precinct—he didn’t work anywhere at all right now—so this was obviously not about the mugging or whatever had just happened to her downstairs. This was because she had run from him. Grace cleared her throat, dredging for her voice.

“This isn’t a good time, Aidan.”

She realized belatedly that it was the first time she’d called him by his first name—surely he would have something to say about that. The man let nothing slide. But he only made a growling sound in his throat and came toward her desk fast. Grace’s mind still felt smudgy. First she didn’t react fast enough, then she overreacted on instinct. She shoved her chair back hard and leaped to her feet to retreat from him.

It froze him in his tracks, then he was moving again, slowly this time, his hands held out as though in supplication. “No, no,” he said, shaking his head. “No, baby, I wouldn’t hurt you.”

I won’t hurt you. You’ll like what I’m going to do. The soldier’s voice lashed out at her from her memory. Grace realized that she was still shaking. Everything was all twisted up in her gut…yesterday and today, this new shining life and the one she had left behind. One trauma, her rational brain said, one silly little trauma after all these years, and it plunged her right back across the years into hell.

She fisted her hands and, when that didn’t steady her, she hugged herself. “I know. I know that.”

He held his arms out to her, but he had the sense not to move toward her again, to encroach on her space this time unless she wanted to let him in. Maybe that was why she rushed for him. Grace veered around the corner of her desk and into his arms. And for the first time in her life, she found a rock.

“You’re all right,” he murmured soothingly. His hand stroked her hair. “You’re all right. Did he hurt you?”

The incongruity of his words hit her and she laughed a little hysterically. It was a sound like glass shattering in her throat. “I can’t be both, McKenna.”

“Now come on, Violet Eyes. No backsliding. We were on a first-name basis a moment ago.”

She laughed again. Oh, God, he felt good, so good, and she’d known he’d pick up on that business of his given name. She wrapped her arms around his waist and held on.

“So which is it?” he asked as though he dreaded the answer.

“Are you all right or are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” Now. But her throat was killing her. “Maybe a little of both after all.”

“Excuse me,” came a voice from the doorway.

Grace jerked her head up and saw the police she’d been expecting on her threshold. A couple of her associates were right behind them. She tried to pull away from Aidan, but he wouldn’t let her go. She wasn’t sure if he kept touching her in order to comfort her…or himself.

Then she realized that he was holding on to her for an entirely different reason, so he could murmur in her ear and she wouldn’t mistake what he said next. “Follow my lead here, Violet Eyes.”

It didn’t annoy her. She didn’t know how he’d found out what had happened to her, but he was here now and he was taking over.

He finally let her slide out of his arms and then it hit her. The cops. She’d called the cops. It had been a natural reaction to what had happened to her, even for someone who had only lived in this country for ten years. But the cops—some cops in this city—were the enemy. Stupid, stupid, she chided herself.

Aidan seemed to read her mind. He squeezed her hand in comfort and reassurance before he let it go.

“What’s the problem here?” asked the guy who came in first. He was tall and ruddy, middle-aged, with too many broken capillaries sprouting a nest across his nose. It made his complexion look even redder. His name tag said B. Salsie.

“No problem.” Aidan turned to face him.

He seemed to…to swell, Grace thought, amazed. He crossed his arms over his chest and suddenly he looked bigger, stronger, more dangerous. Testosterone again, she thought. Just another perplexing side effect of the stuff. But she was glad it was on her side.

“The lady called in an assault,” Salsie said.

Maybe it was the way he said lady, or it might even have been the word assault. There was a sneer to his tone. Every instinct in her body kicked in then and told Grace that Salsie was not to be trusted. Was the other guy—the dark-haired one by the door with the name tag that said Fianco—was he dirty, too? Would they have finished off what that thug downstairs had left dangling?

Her heart started to thud. This would have been Aidan’s last best chance for a defense. He wouldn’t let her cross-examine Katherine, but she could trot this little scene out in court, could get it onto the record that she had been threatened to let him be convicted. But Fianco was dirty, too—she could see it in his eyes. No matter what she said to these men, there would be no incident report. They wouldn’t file anything when they left here. And without an incident report, she’d look like an idiot trying to get this admitted in court.

“The lady overreacted.” Grace heard her own voice crack into the room like a whip.

Fianco stepped up behind his partner with his brows pushed high. “This isn’t the guy?” He cocked his head in Aidan’s direction.

Grace gave a decidedly unladylike snort. “It happened downstairs on the street, not here in my office.”

Salsie took his notepad out. “So why don’t you tell us what happened and we’ll decide if it was an assault or not?”

“I tripped. A man graciously caught me. It all happened fast and I thought he was trying to hurt me.”

“Then who’s this?” Fianco looked at Aidan. He knew exactly who he was, Grace thought.

“I’m a client,” Aidan said.

“At seven-thirty at night?” Fianco asked.

Grace shot Aidan a look. “Good thing it wasn’t a real emergency. They sent me a rookie. What sort of police officer doesn’t know that lawyers work late hours on big cases?”

“Were there any witnesses?” Fianco asked.

Grace crumpled the guy’s business card in her fist circumspectly. For some reason, it was still in her hand. “No. None.”

“Too bad,” Salsie said. “Name?” he asked Aidan again.

“That’s privileged information, Officer,” Grace said.

“Why, if he wasn’t involved in the crime scene?”

“That’s precisely why his identity is not germane.” She heard Aidan give a low whistle under his breath. She imagined that she could hear his voice in her head. Good comeback, Violet Eyes. “You can go now, officers,” she added.

“You know, it’s against the law to call in a false emergency,” Salsie said.

“A woman grabbed by a strange man on the street is liable if she panics a little?” Now, she thought, now she was sure whose side they were on. “Oh, yes, that would play out well with a jury. Good night, gentlemen.”

It was only after they were finally gone that Grace realized her associates were still right on the other side of the door, gaping at the scene. “What the hell was that all about?” Eddie Grunion asked.

Grace made her way back to her desk. “You basically heard the whole thing. I’m not sure what I can say to enlighten you further. I was surprised and I panicked.”

The other woman, Leah Kessler, shook her head as she backed off. “And I am the queen of Egypt. Good show, Grace.”

Grace decided in that moment that she liked Leah. She wondered why she had kept her associates at such a distance this past month.

Then they were both gone and everything plunged in on her. “What did I just do?” she murmured.

Aidan came to sit on the corner of her desk. “You robbed them of all satisfaction.”

She’d thrown down a gauntlet, she thought. And she’d done it on purpose. By behaving the way she had, she’d let Salsie and Fianco—and all the guys behind them—know that she was fully aware that the cops were in on this. She’d made them wonder about her. Did that mean they would come back at her now or leave her alone?

And she knew something else. If they had done this to her, then they probably would go after a juror—maybe more than one—next. They had no intention of letting Aidan continue to walk the streets and she had no intention of letting this go to trial.

“You knew they were dirty, too, didn’t you?” she asked.

“No more than you did. Gut instinct. Hey, babe, we work well together.”

She tried very hard to glare at him. “You didn’t do anything. I did all the talking.”

His grin widened. “See the bum rap the macho ego gets? I’m a real man. I have no problem with letting a woman take over when she’s doing such a swell job.”

She could love him for that alone, Grace thought. “I need to go home now.”

“Oh, well, now there’s another whole can of worms. I can’t let you do that, babe.”

If his words hadn’t jarred her so much, she would have given much more thought to this segue of his nicknames. Violet Eyes and Counselor and Lady had given way to more intimate endearments. She knew there was something wrong about that, some reason she had to protest, but at the moment she was too wrapped up in the fact that he seemed to be telling her she couldn’t go home. “I beg your pardon?”

His jaw jutted, too, she thought. It actually jutted. She’d had enough of testosterone tonight to last her a lifetime.

“You can’t go home,” he said again.

“Why not?” Grace kept her voice very complacent. But something was starting to pump inside her.

“Because you’re in danger. They hit you tonight because of me.”

She folded her hands together again neatly. “And you’re volunteering for watchdog duty?”

He grinned at her. “Now you’re catching on.”

But it wasn’t going to happen. Grace gave her head a little shake. “I have to go home.”

“What’s there that’s not at my place? We’ll swing by and pick it up.”

My life. Everything I am. “No.” She couldn’t do it. She had to have her red flannel nightgown. She had to have her bedroom window open. She had to stay just the way she was.

If she went to his town house, if she spent the night there, then she knew—she knew—nothing would ever be the same again. This was a point of no return.

Grace stood carefully and looked around for her briefcase. What had she done with it when she’d come back upstairs? She couldn’t remember. She’d been so fogged.

She spotted it on the floor beside the door. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

Aidan got to the briefcase before she did. “Good. That’ll make this easier.”

She let out a gust of breath. “I’m not staying at your place.”

“Just until this is over. Yeah, you are.”

She pushed a brow up at him. “You think once I get you acquitted, they’ll think more of me? Do you know what that guy said to me tonight, Aidan? He warned me to make sure you’re convicted. And maybe you will be. I don’t know anymore. But I can tell you one thing. If it happens, it’s not going to be for lack of effort on my part.”

He frowned. Ah, she thought, she’d gotten him there.

“I can’t stay at your place for the rest of my life,” she pressed on.

“I just refuse to have you hurt again because of me.”

He was holding her briefcase right out of reach. Grace swiped at it, missed. “Damn it.”

“Temper, temper, Violet Eyes.”

She stabbed a finger in the direction of the briefcase. “I’ve gotten through the night without it before. I can get through again. And I didn’t get hurt because of you. I got hurt because of me. Did you hold a gun to my head and force me into law school?”

He was only listening to her with half an ear, Aidan realized. Because as soon as the word hurt left her mouth, his gaze dropped to her neck. To her throat. To the livid, still-reddening thumbprints there.

He touched a finger gently to one of the spots. Oh, yeah, he thought, this was war. With his enemies, and with her, because he wasn’t letting her out of his sight until this was resolved. He knew better than to think she would go down without a fight on that score.

“Besides,” she said, “if you think I’d walk out of my apartment and leave Jenny there alone to fend off whoever might come looking for me, you’re out of your mind.”

Jenny. Her roommate. He’d completely forgotten about her roommate. “Okay.” He gave her the briefcase back.

“Okay?” Grace repeated warily.

“Have it your way. Let’s go.”

“My way,” she echoed. “Why does it occur to me that you’re being too amenable?”

“It was a good plan while it lasted.” Aidan began turning off her office lights. He knew she was still skeptical as they walked down the hall to the elevator. He figured that his best bet was to keep her in the dark until they arrived at her apartment. Otherwise she might try to leap from his truck.

When they hit the street, she headed for the bus stop. He caught her elbow and she jumped, whirling back to face him. Maybe because she was still expecting a fight, he thought.

“Violet Eyes, it’s just plain silly to take a bus when I have Darling right here at the curb.”

Her gaze jumped to the truck. “Darling also got a ticket for illegal parking.”

“She’s not sensitive.”

A little laugh escaped her. He was gaining headway, Aidan thought. He gave her a tug in the direction of the truck.

“I’ll let you give me a ride home,” she said, sliding into the cab. “But then you’re leaving.”

We’ll see. He noticed that she didn’t make him go around to the driver’s side before getting into the truck this time. He watched the view and enjoyed it. Then he plucked the ticket from his windshield and went around to slide behind the wheel. He really missed the parking perks that came with being a police officer. At least a few cops now were actually gunning for him, he knew. It was his fourth ticket since this had started.

He remembered the way to her apartment. A block away, he veered into a lot with a vacancy. He could almost hear her spine crack as she sat abruptly straighter beside him. Or maybe it was the seat belt snapping taut.

“This is not necessary!” Her voice rose a notch.

“Yeah, babe, it is.” He found a space.

“I’m serious! And stop calling me babe!”

“So am I.” He turned the ignition off.

“Aidan—”

It was time to bring out the heavy artillery, he thought. “Grace, there is not the slightest chance that I’m going to leave you and your roommate alone to face whoever might still want a piece of you. We can pick up Jenny and you can both come to my place. Or I’ll have my parents put the two of you up for the duration. Or I can stay here. Those are your choices, but they’re your only choices.”

Grace shoved her fingers into her hair. There had to be a way out of this.

Jenny, she thought. Oh, God, she couldn’t abandon Jenny. And she couldn’t ask her to pack up and move somewhere for what could turn out to be weeks. She couldn’t let her live in danger, either. She was trapped.

And that ticked her off. She smacked her palm against his chest. “Back off.”

He rubbed his chest, feigning a good look of bewilderment. “From what?”

“You’re leaning too close to me again.”

“You didn’t seem to mind an hour ago when you were wrapping yourself all around me.”

She felt her skin heat. “I did no such thing. And I was shaken.”

“Then get shaken again. I liked it.”

She groped for the door handle and practically leaped out of the truck.

“Does this mean I’m staying?” she heard him call from behind her. “That’s your choice?”

Grace spun on a heel to glare back at him. “You fight dirty!”

He locked up the truck and came after her. “I can’t argue that.”

“You might be a little less smug about it.” She stalked for her apartment doors.

“Nah. Gloating is fun.”

“I could hate you.” She could hate him just for making her love him.

“But you don’t.”

Her heart galloped and she had to rein it back in. He didn’t know, couldn’t know how she felt. She’d done nothing, nothing, to tip her hand. And she wouldn’t, either. This would all be over soon. Grace swept into the lobby and trotted up the stairs to the second floor.

She fumbled with her briefcase and got her key, stabbing it into the lock of her door. She wasn’t sure who she was actually angry with. Aidan for being right that she and Jenny couldn’t stay here alone? Eagan and his thugs for forcing the situation? She left her briefcase by the door and picked up her pace as she headed for the kitchen. If a glass of wine had sounded good when Mandy had called, it sounded even better now.

He was right behind her.

“Not going to share?” he asked in that low, intimate, amused voice as she poured.

“This is the only wineglass we have.” For some reason, she and Jenny had never gotten around to buying any. Sam had left the one behind as a housewarming gift.

“I’m not too proud for a jelly glass,” he said.

How could he make her laugh when she was tied up in knots inside? Grace bit hard on her inner cheek and reached into the cupboard for a water glass. She poured him a splash.

“Ah, come on, love, be generous. I’ll buy tomorrow night.”

The simple reference to the no-doubt longevity of this arrangement made things clench inside her again. Grace poured him more wine and topped off her own glass as well, then she helped herself to a gulp.

She put the wine back in the fridge and that was when she noticed the note taped to the front of it. She snatched it off and read it.

Mandy and I will try to reach you from McGlinchey’s. If you show up there, you’ll know I’m going back to Kansas for a few days. If you don’t and come home to find this note instead, well, I’m going back to Kansas for a few days. I’ll be leaving straight from the bar. Mandy will drop me off at the airport. Have fun with your hunk. He didn’t do it. Love, Jen.

Grace coughed on her wine.

“Something wrong?” Aidan asked.

“Yes.” No, she thought immediately. No, no, no. Because if Jenny had popped off for an unprecedented trip back to Kansas then Grace didn’t have to worry about protecting her, too. At least for the time being, at least until she came home. She crumpled the note in her fist and tossed it into the trash basket under the sink, turning back to Aidan. “Well, that solves one problem.”

He reached for his glass and took a mouthful of wine. “What problem would that be?”

“You no longer have to feel compelled to stay here. Jenny took off for a few days.”

“And this changes things how? Outside of the fact that now I only have to worry about one of you.”

“You don’t need to worry about me at all. I’ll humor you and stay at a hotel.”

“Yeah, right.”

That seemed to genuinely amuse him, then she realized why.

“I can put the expense in to the firm.”

“Are you going to lie and tell them there was no other alternative?”

“Of course.”

“You can’t lie, Grace.”

“Yes, I can. I’m a lawyer.” She took more wine.

“You lick your lips when you lie.” And how had he managed to discover that in such a short period of time? Aidan wondered. He’d discovered it because from the time he’d walked into that interrogation room to find her waiting for him, he’d been fascinated with everything about her.

But there was still one big question mark. He thought he knew the answer, but maybe it was time to be sure. He put his glass on the kitchen counter.

“What are you afraid of, Grace? Why are you so panicked about letting me stick close to you for a while?”

“Afraid?” But she took a quick, half step back. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

He took another step forward. She took another one back. She was running out of room, he thought. She had maybe three more steps before her spine was going to come in contact with her kitchen window.

“Remind me to thank Jenny for this,” he murmured. “For leaving us some time alone.”

“You don’t want to be alone with me.” She said it too quickly.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided that I do, really very much.”

“Stop this. Please stop this.”

He noticed the tone of begging in her voice. She was beyond panicked, he realized. Why? “Talk to me, Grace.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“There are whole worlds going on behind your eyes right now.”

He was everything she had a weakness for, Grace thought, and now he was a poet, too. She felt like crying. “Please. Please just go away.”

“Is it me you don’t trust, or yourself?”

Both. Grace fought hard to regroup. “Look, I’m a loner. Jenny is gone for a few days and I have a priceless opportunity for some very rare solitude. I don’t want you around.” She prayed that her eyes wouldn’t lie.

But they did. She knew they did because he grinned slowly. And he kept closing the distance between them.

Grace retreated again and her back hit smartly against the window. It hurt and she gasped and jumped forward. Right into his arms.

He was going to do it again. He was going to kiss her.

The thought shivered through her just before his mouth closed over hers. He was everything he had been before, heat and finesse, gentleness and the ultimate tease. He licked, he tasted, he groaned in his throat.

He didn’t put his arms around her. She thought that if he had only just done that, it would have given her the will to fight her way free. Instead she felt herself easing into him. He slanted his head to take her mouth more fully and things started happening inside her again. It was a coiling, she thought helplessly. It was a warm, ready sensation at the deepest parts of her.

She had to stop this…had to stop this…before…

But she didn’t. She pulled back and nipped at his lower lip instead. His groan got deeper, darker, and his hands left her hair. He dragged her against his chest.

That was when things finally shattered inside her. Grace yanked back, breathing hard. “Stop it. Stop it right now!”

He was too much the gentleman not to let her go. She supposed she had his mother to thank for it when his hands only fell to his sides and he fisted them there. “Damn it, Grace. You’ve got to stop doing this to me, giving me a little taste then pulling back.”

“You pulled away last time. And I didn’t start this!”

“You went with it, though.”

She had, oh, God, she had. “I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

“There was nothing wrong with what we just did.”

“Everything was wrong with it!” she cried.

“Honey, I’m not him.”

Her thoughts crumbled into a million tiny pieces. “Who?” she asked, baffled.

“Whoever burned you.”

“Nobody burned me.”

“Whoever you were involved with before.”

Grace gaped at him. Then she laughed. The reflex came up from deep inside her, and it was full and rich enough to hurt her bruised throat. She held her stomach and moved for one of the kitchen chairs. She dropped down into it and realized that her eyes burned because she was crying. When she glanced up at him, he was staring at her like she had grown horns.

“Stick to police work, Aidan,” she gasped. Grace swiped at her eyes. “Psychology really isn’t your forte.”

“Talk to me,” he said again.

And she would, Grace thought. She should have done it before, as soon as she’d felt things escalating between them, as soon as their whole relationship had started that deadly shift from professional into bantering into kissing into loving him. “Nothing will ever—ever—happen between you and I. I want you to know that.”

“And I want to understand why,” he countered, angry. “You can at least give me a why.”

“Because nothing is ever going to happen between me and anyone.” She paused to sort through the words that wanted to tumble out helter-skelter. “I have things to do.”

“Like what?”

She was going to earn enough money to bring the rest of her family from Maruja. And she was never, ever going to take her mother’s path through life, popping out mouths to feed that couldn’t be fed, loving a man to such distraction that when he said let your daughter go on to something better, she let her go.

But she’d cried, Grace thought. The last memory she had of her mother’s face was of the woman crying and looking ten years older than she ought.

She wasn’t going to let love do that to her, Grace thought. She had responsibilities. She owed a staggering debt. She was not going to get married and she was not going to have babies and she would never go hungry again.

She pushed up out of the chair. “I’ll get my things together. You can drop me at a hotel if it will make you feel better.”

“Big of you.” He watched her leave the kitchen. He would have thought she moved like royalty, but she was trembling.

She was lying, Aidan realized. She was lying about something, some part of that. That no guy had burned her? That she had these mysterious things to do so she couldn’t get involved? He waited for a kick of the old anger—it was the only thing he’d ever asked of her, that she not lie to him—but it didn’t come. Maybe it was because this time he sensed it was a lie of omission. There was a whole lot she wasn’t telling him.

Well, he had plenty of time to figure it out because he wasn’t going anywhere, and neither was she.

Grace felt more sure of herself as she returned to the living room with a small overnight bag. Then she found him lounging on her sofa with the TV remote in his hand. The television was on and he was whizzing through channels. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Trying to decide between a movie or a sitcom.” He pressed more buttons. The television screen flashed. Disjointed phrases of dialogue jumped at her.

“We’re leaving,” she said.

“No need. I ordered fried chicken. I figured that was safer than Chinese or pizza—everybody likes chicken.”

He was going to feed her again? Had he figured out that the way to her heart was through her stomach? Grace still felt queasy. She wasn’t even sure she could swallow. “You were going to take me to a hotel,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but I figured that by the time you did whatever you were doing back there—” He motioned at the hallway.

“Packing,” she interrupted.

“Well, by then you’d have realized how idiotic going to a hotel really is.”

Idiotic? He’d gone from wooing her with food to disparaging her intelligence? “Would you please look at me when you talk to me?” He was still focused on the television. “And get your feet off my furniture.”

His gaze swiveled back to her, surprised. “Hey, I took my shoes off first.”

“You’re not staying here, damn it!”

“Well, yeah, I am. Even I can’t see the point of spending good money on a hotel when we can stay here or at one of those other options I gave you earlier.”

Suddenly she thought she understood. “You’re only doing this because I stopped you earlier. You’re going out of your way to irritate me.”

“Stopped what?”

Damn him, damn him! She had his full attention now and he was grinning again. “I stopped you from kissing me.”

“You were kissing me,” he corrected. “And I maintain that it took you long enough to knock it off.” He held up a hand when she opened her mouth to argue. “But no,” he went on, “I’m not trying to irritate you. I’m just trying to get you to see reason. You wouldn’t be any safer in a hotel room than you are here, except in the respect that it might take them a little longer to find you. You’re only safe with me.”

Grace felt her eyes narrow. “You forgot to scratch your armpits when you said that. Isn’t that what big he-men apes do?” But he was right, she thought helplessly. And she hated it.

He laughed and looked back at the television. Grace went to the easy chair on the opposite side of the sofa and sank down into it. She toed off her shoes and curled her legs under her.

“You’re doing the dishes,” she said.

“Is that your idea of a concession speech?”

It was as close as she was going to come to admitting that she was scared. Not just of Eagan’s thugs, but of the way she’d unraveled earlier when faced with the slightest hint of violence. She didn’t want it to happen again and she wasn’t an idiot. Only a fool would insist on being alone right now. Grace cleared her throat. “And you’re going to keep your hands and your mouth to yourself,” she added.

“For the time being.”

“I mean it.”

“Duly noted.”

Her temper heated again. “Do you get everything you decide you want?”

“About as often as you do, which is what makes this interesting.” He finally put the remote down. “And while the topic of me touching you really appeals to me and I’d like to pursue it, we have something a little more important to discuss first. We need to talk about your family.”

Grace felt her blood drain. It was a bizarre sensation, all her heat sliding down, down, down to her toes, leaving frigid hollowness behind. He knew. How could he know? “They have nothing to do with this.”

He tilted his head back a little and studied her. “I’ve already called mine.”

She pressed her fingers to her temples and put her feet back on the floor. What had she missed here? What leap had she failed to make? “You want me to call my family about this?” They didn’t even have a telephone. She communicated with them by letter.

Aidan got to his feet and crossed the living room toward her. She needed to recoil before he could touch her again, but there was nowhere for her to go. The chair was big, deep, and it swallowed her. Grace pulled herself back against the cushions and watched him warily.

He knelt in front of her. “Why do I get the feeling that there’s so much more to you than what meets the eye?”

She didn’t know which was worse—talking about herself or talking about her family. Grace clenched her jaw and remained silent.

He sighed. “The people we’re up against have nasty ways of getting their points across, Violet Eyes.”

Oh, she thought. Oh. “They might go after your family.”

“Or yours. Not yet, not until they see what you do these next few days. They’ll give you a chance to heed their warning. If it becomes apparent to them that you’re not going to do that, they’ll up the stakes. They’ll go after your loved ones.”

Grace shook her head fretfully. She couldn’t let him bleed inside over this. Telling him the truth—a tiny piece of the truth—didn’t mean she had to love him. She opened her mouth then she closed it again. She’d arrived at Villanova all those years ago and she’d become a woman without a past. Why? she wondered now. Why had that been so important to her? She had less of an answer for that than she did for why she had so steadfastly pushed potential friends and associates away. She didn’t even give Jenny and Mandy all of herself, she knew.

She’d never told them the truth, but she was about to tell a piece of it to this man. It terrified her, and that was when she finally understood herself.

It happened with a burst inside her brain, a kind of whiteness. She knew suddenly that she’d locked the past away and never spoke of it not because she was hiding it from others but because she was hiding from it herself. Because remembering it was agony. She’d stopped letting it touch her because when it did, she ached and churned inside for everything, everyone, she’d lost.

And she’d never let herself get close to anyone again because, damn it, she was not going to lose anyone she loved ever again. Better to not love in the first place, she thought. Better to not care.

Better to not even know your receptionist’s name.

“Grace?” His voice was a caress.

She shook her head, a fretful gesture of neither denial or acceptance. “They can’t hurt my family.”

“You’re underestimating them, babe.”

Don’t call me that! Please call me that! “No.”

“They’ll—”

“Stop it!” She put her hands on his shoulders. That was her first mistake, she realized almost instantly. Touching him. Reaching out and touching him of her own free will. Again. But she wanted to shake him into understanding without having to say the words. “They cannot get to my family,” she said again.

“They’re safe.”

His hands came up and covered hers. “Tell me why you think that.”

She could tell him they were dead, but he’d warned her never to lie to him again. She wanted him out of her life—desperately, before this could go any further—and she already dreaded the day he would leave. She couldn’t lie to him and have him go hating her for it. “They’re just too far away.”

“Crime families have connections in other states.”

“My family isn’t in this country.”

He frowned. “Where’d they go?”

“They didn’t. I did.” And that, she thought, that was all she was going to say.

He’d push it, of course. When he wanted something—her laughter, her agreement, his own way—he always pushed. He’d resort to the ridiculous, to the outrageous, but he’d get what he was angling for. That was why Grace decided she needed to untrack him fast.

It was what she told herself. There was no sense in torturing herself with the truth…that every single time he touched her, she craved. That somehow he was making her need everything she’d always denied herself. Just a taste, she thought, just one more simple little taste—and he’d forget about her family. He’d focus on her instead and then she’d dance back a step or two and the subject of Maruja would be dropped. Everything would be fine.

What was this? Aidan thought when she kissed him. She kissed him. She did it hard and fast and without warning. One moment her hands were caught in his, then the next she was dragging them free to cup his head and hold him still so she could attack his mouth. He was human enough to wonder about that, and man enough not to care.

So he let his hands tangle in her hair again. It was, he thought, one of the first things he’d noticed about her, how it was so long and dark and tousled. Bedroom hair, he thought again. It felt cool and liquid between his fingers, gathered in his palms, an onyx waterfall. It was the essence of her, he decided. A little wild but smooth as glass. Dark with secrets and alive with shine.

He decided not to let her have her way with him—not entirely. Maybe it was because he still wasn’t sure what her way was, where she was going with this. Maybe he had just enough macho male ego in him after all to need some semblance of the upper hand. So he made his mouth leave hers and slide to her neck.

It was a moment when Grace knew she really needed to pull back. He wasn’t kissing her any longer and it would be an easy matter to slip from his hands now. He’d let go of her hair, she’d curl back up in her chair, and she’d be safe. Safe from feeling. Safe from needing.

But she knew, somehow she knew, that the need wasn’t going to go away this time when they broke contact. And what he was doing to her neck was making small shocks dance through her blood. They were little pinging sensations of warmth, bubbles rising to the top, bursting, spreading more heat. So she dragged his mouth back to hers.

She wasn’t sure if she was ashamed or mystified when a single word slipped from her mouth. “Please.”

“Tell me what you want, lass. Tell me what this is.”

She didn’t know. Oh, God, she had no clue. She was being driven along by something she’d never known before.

Sex was an act. A thing men did. The soldier, assorted others. Cold, rough, demanding. Trying to take pieces of her she had no intention of sharing…because of her looks. But this wasn’t like that. This man kept trying to ease away from her to search her eyes.

What would he find there? That she’d fallen in love with him.

“Does it matter?” she whispered.

“No lies.” His voice dropped a notch, into a growl.

He saw the torment in her eyes. She didn’t know how to say it, he thought, amazed. He’d never known a woman who couldn’t just reach out and grab what she wanted from a man. But this one…this very special one…couldn’t seem to open her mouth and ask for something he’d give without a backward glance. She wasn’t shy. She wasn’t timid. She was just…Grace.

For now he’d make it easy for her. He found her mouth again. He thought she’d pour herself into another kiss. He never expected to pull back for half a second’s worth of breath and see her eyes brimming.

“Oh, lass, oh, there. What is it?” He caught a tear with his thumb. She shuddered.

She was keeping her hands to herself now, he realized. Fisting them in her lap. Fighting some last internal war. Then she was gripping the front of his shirt in both hands. She plunged for his mouth again. He knew there was a certain measure of trust in that, and of abandoning things she held dear. So he gave up a few of his own. He gave up the part of him that hadn’t been with anyone since Kat, the part of him that had refused to try again with a woman like this.

He caught her hands in his own and tugged until she was sliding off the chair, spilling with him to the carpet. He tried to leave her mouth again so he could rediscover the pulse he’d found behind her ear. She turned her head and her hair spilled into his eyes. He caught handfuls of it again. Cool and hot, smooth and wild.

He left it—reluctantly—to run his hands up her spine. He felt her muscles going stiff beneath his palms. Braced himself that she was probably going to scramble away again. She started to. She reared up…then eased down again with a groan.

“I’ve got to touch you,” he said against her mouth.

“Yes,” she whispered. And then she melted.

She flowed over him, all heat and need and surrender. His hands went to her waist, caught the gathered fabric of her blouse there. More silk, more smooth coolness. He remembered the first time he’d wondered about what she wore, that morning at the Hyatt.

And that was when he knew he was damned because he remembered every moment of every hour they’d spent together.

He pulled her blouse free of the waistband of her skirt, suddenly desperate. The government had all his money, but he popped the buttons free recklessly anyway, even if he really wasn’t in a position to buy her a new one right now. A button broke free and flew, dancing over the carpet like a tiny, opaque ballerina.

She couldn’t stand any more, Grace thought. She had a terrifying, near-paralyzing moment when she thought she would just dissolve into need and beg him to take her, whimpering. Then somehow he had her blouse free of her skirt, was pushing it back off her shoulders, and she still straddled him. He took the peak of her breast in his mouth, right through the lace of her bra.

And all she could do was laugh.

She laughed with the pure, giddy freedom of it. She laughed with the delight of sensation that sparked through every other part of her body from that single point of contact. And he understood. There was a sound of pure pleasure in his throat, then he rolled her beneath him.

His fingers caught the edge of her bra and tugged it down and his mouth found her flesh. Everything inside her surged there. It was more than she had ever dared believe in, and it was too much. It was agony and it was incredible. It was everything.

Then her bra was gone and his fingers were at the waistband of her skirt. He eased it down and pressed his mouth to a point inside her hip that had her arching into him even as he stripped the fabric along her thighs and off. And he changed then…she felt it. She wanted to tell herself that he had become what every other man was, driven to get what he wanted, but she couldn’t get past her heart telling her that it wasn’t true. He wasn’t grabbing. He just needed her, too.

She wasn’t sure how he managed to keep kissing her while he pulled his shirt over his head. Or how his hands never left her long enough for her to miss them as he rolled aside and stripped off his jeans. She wasn’t sure where her stockings or panties went to. Before she could wonder about any of that, his mouth was sealed on hers again and his weight was warm and heavy on top of her.

Skin to skin, she thought, and his was hot and ever so slightly rough, making sparks ignite from the friction. And that was when she gave in entirely. To him…and to herself.

She peeled his boxers away and slid her hands over all of him. He said something, she wasn’t sure what, and found his way inside her. It was fast, sudden, and there was a flash of pain. Then there was heaven.

He hesitated as she’d known he would, but she arched up into him again, taking him deeper. And whatever he had been about to say was lost.

They rode together, higher, faster, hotter. Grace felt tears gather in her eyes again as everything tightened inside her then released, a rain of sensation, parts of herself falling like stars.

She was limp and dazed when the knock came on the door. Their dinner had arrived. She was wrapped around a man who had changed everything for her, and she was naked.

Chapter 11

N ow, Grace thought, the real questions would start. But he only chuckled to himself as he sat up and looked for his jeans.

“This guy needs to work on his timing,” he laughed.

Grace stared at him. That was it? A comment about the chicken delivery guy? He was standing, stepping into the jeans, zipping the fly, patting his back pocket as though looking for his wallet…and she was still sprawled on the carpet wearing—if one didn’t count her earrings and watch—pretty much what she had been born in. Grace rolled and came to her feet fast. She thought about grabbing the various pieces of her clothing but he was halfway to the door so she fled instead.

She reached her bedroom and shut the door, leaning her back against it with a gusty sigh as though she half expected both Aidan and the chicken man to try to gain entrance. She looked blankly around the room, trying to remember what she needed to do here. She was on overload, Grace realized. Sensory and psychological and physical—just about any kind of overload ever imagined or coined. She was pretty sure she was succumbing to all of them.

Did she regret what had just happened? She didn’t know. She went to the bed and sank down there slowly, hugging herself. She might regret it once he got around to grilling her. But she didn’t yet. Maybe because she was still reeling from realizing that she loved him, from being attacked on the street, from telling him a partial truth about her family, not to mention all those neat little inner revelations she’d had in the moment she’d done it.

She heard the front door close. He called out to her, something about not saving her any. Surprisingly, Grace realized that she was starved after all.

She stood again and hurried to her dresser. She was reaching for panties and a bra when her fingers nudged against the photo in the drawer, the one of her family. She snatched her hand back. Not now. Her emotions couldn’t stand any more.

She found her favorite red shorts and white tee and dressed again. A woman had a right to feel good in what she was wearing right after she’d lost her virginity. She hoped he wouldn’t mention that little detail until after she’d appeased her hunger. Something told her the topic would make her lose her appetite again.

He had a way of making himself right at home, Grace thought when she joined him in the kitchen. He’d found plates, poured more wine, and he’d dished up the food. There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob. Her mouth watered.

He picked up a plate, then he hesitated. “Are you one of those women who gets hypertensive about people eating in front of the TV?”

It wasn’t the question she’d expected. “Ah…no.”

“Amen.” He took his plate and wine back to the living room.

Grace started to move after him then she remembered her own plate. She went back for it then settled down at the coffee table opposite him.

She had absolutely no postcoital experience, Grace thought, had nothing to fall back on here. Should they be discussing mundane things or making eyes at each other? She decided to play it safe. Besides, she thought again, she didn’t want to bring up that other topic before she’d filled her stomach.

“Amen?” she asked. “That’s your total summation of the issue?”

He did that thing where he tilted his head back while he studied her. “Which issue might we be speaking of?”

“The TV issue,” she clarified.

“Oh, that one.” He dug in.

Grace took her own bite. Then another. The food was good. Her brain started to come back to life with the nourishment.

“Oh, that,” she prompted him.

“I had this scary moment where I realized I probably should have ascertained your position on eating and television before I made love to you.”

She swallowed carefully. “Why?”

“Well, it’s a damned important issue. Television is pretty important to me.”

“What does it have to do with…ah…sex?”

“Because I don’t have ah-sex with a woman I don’t intend to settle down with for an extended period of time. And settling down with a woman who has a ban on the television-eating thing would be difficult for me, to say the least.”

Grace’s appetite vanished. She put her fork down. “Who said anything about settling down?”

Aidan frowned at her fork. “I did.”

“Men…ah…have sex with women all the time without…ah, staying. Staying around.”

“I don’t. You know you’re ah-ing again, right?” They weren’t going to get through dinner first without discussing what had just happened, Aidan thought.

He gave himself a little credit. When he was wrong about something, he was usually wrong in a big way. No half-rate measures. She’d been telling the truth and he’d been way off base. There had never been another guy who had burned her. Or if there had been, then the man had never had the luxury of steeping himself in every glorious thing that she was. And judging by what he’d encountered a little while ago, she hadn’t been messing around when she’d said she’d never get involved with anyone, either. At least, she’d apparently been steadfast in that decision until tonight.

Which begged the big question, he thought. He put his own fork down, watched her grab her wine. “Why me?”

“Why not?” she countered.

“Come on, lass, that’s not going to fly for several reasons.”

She didn’t answer. He wondered if she was even capable of it at the moment. So he decided to lay his cards out on the table and give her time to collect her own. “Grace, a woman who looks like you does not get to be a savvy lawyer in her mid-to-late twenties without encountering megaopportunities with the opposite sex.”

“I’ve had opportunities.”

“But you’ve done nothing with them before tonight. So the question remains, why me?”

The man could dance around a subject for hours when he wanted to, she thought, but when someone else tried it, he virtually tackled them.

There were so many reasons, so many answers to his questions. Because he believed in this country and in its laws. Because he saw through her sometimes and laughed at things she said. Because he was a little scared of his mother and because he always told the truth and because he’d saved a butterfly barrette for his niece.

So many reasons.

She couldn’t tell him all that. Couldn’t. Because then he’d know that she’d fallen in love with him. So she gave a simplified version. “Because I believe you.”

He smiled slowly, kind of crookedly. He reached across the coffee table and caught her hand. “That’ll do.”

He understood, she realized. If he wasn’t what she’d thought at first, then he was everything she needed.

Grace eased her hand free. Her overload was reaching staggering proportions. “Are you always that easy to please?” She was talking about his interrogation.

He wasn’t. “Come up on the sofa with me and I’ll show you.”

And like that, just like that, things heated inside her again. As if she had been feasting on him through a lifetime and had already developed a huge dependency on his touch. That was something she wasn’t going to admit. Grace cocked her head to the side. “You promised you’d do the dishes.”

“No. You told me I had to. I never agreed.”

“It’s a condition of your temporary tenancy.”

“Come on up here,” he said again, levering himself onto the sofa, “and we’ll talk about that temporary part.”

And because she did crave again, because she wanted so desperately to feel again the way he had made her feel a little while ago, Grace stood and walked around the coffee table. When she reached him, he caught her hand and tumbled her down on top of him. And this time there was laughter and snickers and nuzzling, and it was as good as before, maybe better.

When he found his way inside her, she shattered again. Grace fell asleep on the sofa, sprawled beneath him, emptied of everything she’d ever thought really mattered. Her last thought was that she really needed to get up and find her red nightgown. But moving would have been too difficult and when she closed her eyes and dozed off, he wrapped his arms around her and let her sleep.

Grace still felt strange and dazed inside her own skin when they arrived at the office the next morning, and it was starting to irritate her.

He’d been as close as her shadow for more than two weeks now, she thought, first taking over the investigative end of the case, and now with this bodyguard business. When she sat at her desk, he pulled files from the cardboard cabinet he’d bought and dropped down on the sofa to read them, settling in.

She couldn’t think when a man she’d spent half the night making love with was lounging around her office.

“Don’t you think this is a bit excessive?” she asked finally.

His gaze came up from the file. “What?”

“What exactly do you think the odds are that Eagan is going to send a masked gunman to the sixteenth floor of the Rittenhauer Building in the middle of a workday with thousands of witnesses for the express purpose of scaring me into obedience?”

“Oh. That what.” He looked down again at the paperwork again. “Slim to none.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I have a vested interest in not going to jail.”

Grace closed her eyes. If there was a more stubborn man on the face of the earth, she couldn’t think of him at the moment. She swiveled in her chair and turned on her computer, then she stared at the monitor bleakly.

She couldn’t think.

She was pressed into service anyway when her intercom buzzed and Cici’s voice came into the room. “Mr. Steedle is on line three for you.”

The photographer. Grace took the call. “Well?” she asked without preamble.

“It’s not good news,” Steedle said. “I’m sorry.”

Grace felt as though the entire sixteenth floor wobbled around her. “The photos are real?” That couldn’t be. They’d been her last, best hope.

“They’re as real as the nose on my face,” Steedle said. “If your client is telling you that he never met these guys, then he’s lying.”

“No,” she said flatly. “He’s not.” It made no sense, she thought again, none at all, but Aidan was not lying. She believed in him now as fiercely as she had tried to doubt him, and what did that say about the state of her heart?

Aidan got up from the sofa and crossed slowly to her desk. His face looked the way her stomach felt—worried and confused. Then Grace had a brainstorm.

“Can you blow them up for me?” she asked Steedle.

“Sure.”

“How long will it take you to do it?”

“Give me an hour.”

“Thanks.” She looked at her desk clock. “Be there by ten o’clock.”

She hung up and looked at Aidan. “They’re real.”

“I caught that part. Why are we having the damned things blown up then? To shout my guilt to the world?”

She loved the occasions when she managed to outwit him. “If they’re real, then you met with every one of those men at some point in your life—the point at which the photos were taken. You just don’t remember it.” She stood to go top off her convenience store cappuccino with the office’s coffee.

He followed her up the hall to the lounge. “Or maybe Eagan got to Steedle and threatened him into giving a false opinion.”

“Saying they’re real when they’re not?” Her gut sank. If that were the case, they were doomed. “I want you to take a look at the blowups anyway. Maybe once they’re enlarged some detail will jump out at you. Did you notice that there wasn’t a lot of background detail to any of them?”

“I’m a trained investigator. Of course, I noticed.”

“Well, Mr. Trained Investigator, what does that tell you?”

“That they were close-ups,” he said slowly, stating the obvious.

“Wrong.” She headed back to her office with fresh coffee.

“It also says that it’s a deliberate effort to confuse you. With the photo narrowed to just you and the other guy, your focus would go to exactly where it went—the other face. Taken alone, your gut reaction to that would just be that you never met him.”

“Enlargements can’t magically produce background that isn’t there, Grace.”

“Ah.” She held up a finger. “But they can bring into sharper focus the things immediately around you.”

He sat on her office sofa again. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re going to nag me to death about this until I agree with you?”

She threw one of his own lines back at him. “Because I get my way just about as often as you do. That’s what makes this interesting.” Then her smile faded. “It won’t hurt to try, Aidan. And we don’t have many other options left.”

Their gazes connected with that truth. But there was something more than just worry in his now. Grace felt her heart start to thrum.

“What are the odds that I can get you naked again before we have to go see the photographer?” he asked.

She was supposed to say slim and none. They were in her office, for God’s good sake. They had urgent matters to attend to if she was going to pull a rabbit out of her hat at that prelim. Grace opened her mouth and nothing came out. What was wrong with her? What had become of her? She was actually contemplating it!

She was saved by the intercom again. “The subpoenas are finally here, Grace,” Cici said.

“Damn. For a minute there, I thought you were going to let me have my way with you again.”

Grace swallowed carefully. She couldn’t quite manage the lie to deny it. “They’re the subpoenas for the bank security tapes.” She hit the intercom to buzz her paralegal. She’d send her to the banks to get the tapes while she and Aidan went to the photographer’s shop. They could look at them when they got back.

When they reached the street, she left him absolutely no opportunity to hail a cab—not if he really did want to protect her, Aidan thought. He stopped at the curb and she sailed on toward the bus stop. He watched her go, a little irritated, a lot amused, and then it struck him.

Then. There. With absolutely clarity in a moment that had nothing to do with anything. She was more stubborn than he was and more frugal than his own mother. She was tart and dry and witty and aloof. Beautiful and haunted. Rich with secrets, layer upon layer. She was every blessed thing he knew could be his undoing.

And he loved her anyway. He’d gone and fallen in love with her.

She was a block away now—so much for protecting her, he thought absently—her purse swinging loosely in her hand, at her side, so that any penny ante hoodlum could come along and try to snatch it from her. And wouldn’t that hoodlum pay the price, Aidan thought, actually laughing aloud again.

He loved her.

She was wearing one of those weird dresses today that he had never been able to figure out. A coat, but a dress. Indigo-blue. Killer blue heels. That black hair danced at her back.

He loved her.

She was another beautiful face, something he’d sworn to avoid, but at least, he thought, at least this one didn’t lie to him.

Aidan jogged to catch up with her. “Thought I’d take the cab, didn’t you? You thought I’d let you go off on your own and meet me there.”

He loved the way one corner of her mouth curled. “It was worth a try.”

“When I marry you and we have the income of two, will you stop being so cheap?”

She stumbled. He’d thought she might. He caught her.

“What?” she demanded. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“You’re crazy!” She wrenched out of his hands.

“Crazy in love. With you,” he clarified.

How could this be happening? This couldn’t be happening! Grace didn’t know if she wanted to howl with laugher or sob her heart out. Nothing had changed. “I told you…I told you…” She choked. “I won’t ever go there, do that. And you don’t know me. You don’t even like me. I say ‘ah’ all the time. And I’m prickly and…and…” She desperately needed to remember everything else he had called her. “An idiot.”

“I only said that last one out of sheer frustration last night. I didn’t mean it.”

“You don’t love me!”

“I love you.”

“No, no, no!” She pounded him in the chest with her purse.

It was the damnedest reaction he’d ever gotten to those words, though he’d said them rarely enough. And it was about what he’d expected from her. Rich with secrets, he thought again, layer upon layer. Some year, when he finished peeling back all those layers, would he stop being fascinated by her? He knew he wouldn’t.

He caught her arm again. “Come on. We’re going to be late for the photographer.”

“Photographer?” she shouted.

People on the street stopped to look at them. She was coming undone and he liked that. She’d run now, too, if she could, he thought, but they had that pressing engagement. “That appointment you made for ten o’clock, remember? The one you insist upon taking a bus to?”

“Let me go!” She kept trying to jerk free of his grip.

“You know, if you really want me to stop being your bodyguard, you could always capitulate with Eagan and his thugs.”

Capitulate. He was changing the subject again, Grace realized. And he was nervous. He never used clever words unless he was nervous. And she knew that this time it had nothing—nothing—to do with a prison term hanging over his head. It had everything to do with her.

Her heart was clubbing. “We have to finish this.”

“We can do it later when I get your clothes off again. In the meantime, if you want me to leave you alone and get out of your hair, resign from my case.”

“What does that accomplish?”

“Nobody will want a piece of you if you’re not the one trying to get me off.”

She knew, suddenly, watching his face, that it was something he’d probably thought about all night, all those times she’d roused enough to feel him shift beside her. “No,” she said, and started walking again.

“Your life isn’t something I’m willing to play with, Grace.”

“It’s not up to you.” She stopped at the bus kiosk.

“I could still fire you.” He caught up with her.

She dug in her purse for change. “You said you wouldn’t.”

“I gave you the word of an extortionist….” He trailed off and let that hang.

This time she knew how to come back at him. “Aidan, if you lied to me, your mother would kick your backside to China.” She saw a bus approaching out of the corner of her eye and timed what she was about to say next for a neat exit line. “By the way, it’s every bit as nice as you promised.”

When the bus stopped, she climbed onboard and left him standing there on the sidewalk, looking first tongue-tied, then laughing as the bus doors closed again. The engine rumbled, the bus moved from the curb, and she left him there.

She’d shaken free of him for a little while and she knew she was supposed to be glad about that, but she just missed him. She missed him before the bus even rolled a block.

Grace snickered, pleased with herself. The snicker turned into a giggle, then she let her head fall back and she laughed with everything in her heart. People were looking at her again. She didn’t care.

She was happy.

Her grin froze on her face. The laugh caught like a thorn in her throat. She couldn’t be happy. How could she be happy? She had no right to be happy when she was the only Simkanian in the world who’d ever had a shot at anything. Then a cab pulled up beside her window, honking its horn furiously, and her thoughts scattered. When she looked, there was Aidan’s face in the rear window of the car, grinning at her. The taxi gunned the engine and passed the bus.

She laughed harder. She was doomed, she thought. She loved him, and the idiot thought he loved her, too.

He was waiting for her when the bus reached Steedle’s shop. Grace strode past him where he stood on the sidewalk and headed for the door. “What exactly did you just prove except that you still have the heart of a five-year-old?”

“I have no idea, but it felt good.” He opened the door for her. “And five was a very good year.”

Steedle was waiting behind the counter for them with a very large envelope. He handed it over. Grace looked around the shop. She had the frightening feeling that sand was sliding through their hourglass much too fast now. The prelim was days away. “Do you have some available space where we could tack these up on a wall and take a look at them now?” she asked the man.

“Come with me.”

Five minutes later they were set up in a back room. The walls were draped with black velvet. The only lighting came from spotlights above each photograph which they’d tacked to the fabric. The walls were dotted with replicas of Aidan and some very bad men.

“Look at them,” she instructed him.

“I’m looking,” he muttered. Her idea was a shot in the dark, he thought, but he’d humor her. He began strolling along the walls, studying each enlarged photograph in turn.

“Really look,” she said.

“I’m really looking.”

There was nothing he hadn’t seen in the smaller versions. The backgrounds had been carefully cropped. The photos were all incongruous close-ups. There wasn’t a thing that stood out…and then he saw it.

He could feel her breathing against his neck when he stopped moving. She came up close behind him to stare as well. Under other circumstances, the warm tickle might have been enough to have him toppling her on the floor and taking her right then and there. The shop owner could be damned. They’d lock the door. But…but…there was that sliver of plate right there, beside his left hand in the seventh picture. The print was black-and-white, but it didn’t matter.

“What?” Grace demanded. “What?”

The plate, he thought. Just enough of it showed that he caught an edge of the swirling letter M in the center of it. A logo. Milbourne Catering. Their employees had been crawling all over a certain country club two years ago, the day his sister had gotten married, the day Shea had married Paul.

“I know this one,” he said.

“You remember the guy?” she asked breathlessly.

“No. But I know where it was taken now. At Camelot.”

She rubbed her forehead. He was confusing her again, he realized. “It’s a country club out on the Mainline,” he explained. “I’ve only been there once, when my sister got married.” He pointed to the plate. “That’s the caterer’s emblem. It was on all the china. And there.” He stroked a finger down a glimpse of white balustrade. “They have them all over the Camelot ballroom.”

“This was taken at your sister’s wedding?” she asked disbelievingly. “There were mob associates at your sister’s wedding? Why?”

“I have no idea but we’re going to find out. Let’s go.” He began untacking the pictures from the wall. “I need to talk to Shea. If she doesn’t know the guy, we’ll ask Paul. Hold on to that one, lass,” he said distractedly of the Camelot picture. “Don’t put it with the others.”

She’d already taken it down and set it aside. Grace thrust the others back into the envelope. Her heart was beating hard now. They had something. They finally had something. But as they hurried from the shop, she still envisioned sand sliding through an hourglass, through her fingers, much too fast.

She didn’t argue about taking a taxi this time. She even handed over her cell phone without worrying about extra roaming charges once they were in the car. Aidan spoke for a moment and handed it back to her.

“Shea’s home. Paul’s working but she’s going to call him and get him to swing by for a minute. He’ll meet us there.”

Grace held on to the armrest when the cab swerved around a corner a little too exuberantly. She wondered if the driver felt the same urgency she felt. A known organized crime affiliate at his sister’s wedding?

“It’s why you don’t remember meeting him,” she said suddenly. “He just struck up some innocuous conversation with you that left you with absolutely no impression.”

“Yeah. A hello-how-are-you on the way to the champagne tray.”

She had to joke him out of this, Grace thought. He looked pensive and scared. “Champagne? No Jameson’s?”

He shot her a quick, absent grin. “That came later, something for which Shea will probably never forgive my dad.”

The cab stopped in front of an apartment building that surprised Grace. It was tall, a high-rise built in a sweeping semi-circle on Poplar Drive. It was gleaming white, the sun reflecting off a dizzying number of windows. There was a neat, small park tucked across a narrow band of street. Shea and her husband lived well. Grace couldn’t even imagine how much an apartment like this would cost.

Aidan seemed to read her mind. “Paul comes from a little bit of money,” he explained as they got out of the car. “His grandfather was in textiles.”

“Ah.”

That made him grin again. “Trying to decide if you want to hold that against him?”

How had he come to know her so well? She knew she wasn’t transparent. She’d worked hard to make that so. But still…he read her every time.

“One of the things I’ve noticed since—” She broke off suddenly.

“Since what?” he asked, taking her hand as they approached the lobby doors.

Since I came to this country. “Since practicing law. Joining up with Russell and Lutz specifically. I’ve handled a lot of ridiculous municipal matters for rich kids. When people are born with everything, they never seem to see what they’ve got.”

He tugged her into him for a quick kiss. “That is not a problem with the McKennas. So do I pass muster?”

“Would you stop this?” She put a hand against his chest, laughed.

“You love it. You know you do.”

And she did. But something still cringed inside her and she was too honest with herself not to admit why. In a way, in a big way, she was doing the precise thing that he’d asked her never to do. She’d given herself to him…and she was lying to him, because Aidan McKenna had no idea who she was.

She pulled away from him and hurried to a bank of elevators. He followed at his usual lackadaisical pace. Paul had beaten them home. When they got upstairs, he answered the door.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, clapping Aidan on the shoulder and stepping back to beckon them inside. “What’s going on? What’s so important?”

“We’ve got new evidence,” Aidan said, then he went to hug his sister. Shea was standing right behind her husband.

“What does it have to do with us?” Shea asked.

“Nothing, really. It’s just by association.”

Grace took the photo from the envelope, but she was dealing with a McKenna. Shea never even glanced at it. She came at her instead and hugged her.

“You found something!” she said. “You found something that will set Aidan Jack free from these fools who are trying to hang him. Thank you. Thank you.”

All this touching was starting to grow on her, Grace realized. She didn’t feel the usual claustrophobic panic to get out of the woman’s embrace. “Could you look at this?” She held the picture up again.

“Anybody want coffee?” Paul asked.

“We don’t have a lot of time.”

“Yeah,” Aidan said, ruffling his sister’s hair. “Sorry, Tinker Two. It’s not a social call.”

Tinker Two?

Aidan must have read her face again. “Tinkerbelle,” he explained. “Tinkerbelle the second. Shea is the family’s second girl. Shanna is Tinker One.”

“I get it.”

“What’s this?” Shea asked, reaching for the photo. “Hey, that’s the tie you wore to my wedding.”

“How do you know?” Grace asked. How could she remember such a thing?

“It was hideous.” Shea laughed. “Remember?” she asked Aidan. “It was bright yellow with red stripes.”

Grace decided she didn’t even want to know why he would wear such a thing to his sister’s wedding. Knowing him, the reason could be anything.

“It was a test,” Aidan said. “Jack wore a kelly-green tuxedo. We were trying to scare Mr. Money Bags here off before they actually tied the knot. We figured we’d give him the worst of us and make sure he really wanted to join this family.”

Paul reached for the picture. “And that was before your dad broke out the Jameson’s.”

“I heard about that part,” Grace murmured.

Shea made a sound in her throat and tucked an arm through hers. “Then you’re practically one of the family. Come on, one cup of coffee?”

Grace was saved from answering by Paul. “This is Joey Malone. Isn’t it? What was he doing at our wedding? Are you sure this was taken at our wedding?”

Aidan pointed to the plate.

“Jeez,” Paul said, recognizing it.

“You know him?” Aidan asked.

“Yeah. Of course. He was a minor league suspect in that Donegal killing a while back, remember?”

“One of his cases,” Aidan told Grace. She remembered that Paul was with the police department, too.

“We knew it was a mob hit,” Paul explained. “We were trying to figure out who actually pulled the trigger. We brought Malone in for questioning but couldn’t pin it on him.” He gave the picture back to Grace.

“Was this before or after your wedding?” she asked.

“After,” Paul said. “Definitely after. I was out late a lot of nights, working that one. Remember, honey?”

He hooked an arm around his wife’s neck. Shea patted his hand. Grace watched bemusedly, wondering how people ever got to be that comfortable with affection. Had she ever been that way, even back in Maruja? Her parents had been, she thought, and look where that had gotten them.

“We were married in April and Donegal went down in September,” Paul said. “I remember thinking, well, this is it, she’ll dump me when she sees the hours I have to put in sometimes.”

That clicked Grace’s brain back. It wasn’t what she had wanted to hear. “So he couldn’t have been there for some sort of retaliatory strike against you?”

“Not unless he was psychic,” Paul said, “and he knew what I was going to do to him five months later. And he didn’t even end up being the one who pulled the trigger.”

Every time she thought she had a grip on this mess, she lost it again, Grace thought. “We’ve got to go.”

“Did we help?” Shea asked.

“Lots, Tinker.” Aidan kissed her on the crown of her head.

It took them a while to get out of the apartment. One McKenna could derail a mission for whole minutes, Grace thought. Two of them could turn it into hours.

It was almost noon when Aidan hailed them another cab. Sand through an hourglass, she thought again. And there was so precious little sand left.

“There are still the bank security tapes,” he said when they were in the car.

Grace shook her head fretfully. “They won’t matter.” Because Katherine Cross wasn’t behind this. And the mob would not allow any face to appear on those tapes that would incriminate them.

Joey Malone had been at Shea and Paul’s wedding for one reason, and that reason had been Aidan. Malone had been a gate crasher. Neither Paul nor Shea had known him. So the only possible purpose for his attendance would have been the bride’s brother, the one he’d been photographed with in a picture that magically turned up in the D.A.’s hands two and a half years later.

They’d already been working toward setting Aidan up when the couple was married, Grace thought, feeling sick. They’d started before Aidan had betrayed Katherine Cross. Before Katherine had given his name to the D.A. in a plea bargain. Katherine might have helped to take Aidan down, but Aidan’s participation in what had happened to her had just been a fluke. A lucky stroke for the other side, for the mob, something else they could use. When she’d been charged, it had given them a chance to seal the case they’d been laying out against him. They’d told her to point a finger at him, and she had.

“What did you do?” she whispered aloud. “What do you know? Why? Why would they do this? Why would they have begun gunning for you as long as two years ago?”

“I’m sorry, babe. I’m clueless.”

When he put an arm around her and pulled her against his side, Grace went without protest this time. She needed the comfort.

Chapter 12

I t was half past five before they finished studying the last bank tape. Grace groaned aloud and let her head fall back against the plush conference room chair.

She had a blazing headache. And she couldn’t stand looking at Aidan. He was trying to hide it, but he was scared now, very scared. So she closed her eyes. She wasn’t going to be able to win this, she thought. Not in two days at the prelim, and maybe not at trial. The thought of him going to jail brought an actual, physical pain to her gut, a burning sensation. She pressed her hand there.

It struck her how far they had come in the past few weeks. She hadn’t the slightest care for what this would do to her career anymore. If this was justice—an innocent man going down because his enemy was cunning and had planned years in advance—then she wanted no part of it. And that was staggering, because this—her career, her future—had been all that had mattered to her for a very long time.

“If I put my feet up on this expensive conference room table, is anyone going to rush in here and shoot me?” Aidan asked.

Grace cocked one eye open and turned her head against the chair to look at him. “You’re doing it again.”

“Now, now, lass, don’t start disparaging my manners at this late date.”

The joke didn’t reach his eyes. “You change the subject and joke when you don’t want to deal with this, Aidan.”

“I love the way you say my name.”

She threw her hands up in exasperation. “There. I rest my case.”

“All right. I agree that this mountain is starting to look like it’s a little on the insurmountable side, and I don’t want to think about that.” He put his feet up on the table anyway, lounging back in his chair.

“You do that, too,” Grace murmured. “When you do get around to dealing with it, you start using long words. Your vocabulary moves up a notch.”

“Let’s talk about how you’ve noticed as much about me as I’ve noticed about you.”

She had to squeeze her eyes shut again or she was going to cry. She’d wanted him out of her life, she thought. She might get the wish when the bailiff took him out of the courtroom and straight to the state penitentiary. Because she couldn’t bear to think about that—and the fact that she had no right to ache for him to stay when she hadn’t given him all of herself—Grace forced herself to her feet to unload the last bank disk from the DVD player. “The night that guy caught me downstairs and tried to hurt me, I was thinking that if the same face showed up on all these tapes, if the same person made all the deposits, then it was probably the mob behind this.” And that was exactly what had happened. “They gave this guy the money and someone literally followed him down Broad Street with a gun to his head so he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to take off with the cash. Maybe they even gave it to him in deposit-sized increments. Anyway, that’s why the banks are laid out in a straight line. They couldn’t overcomplicate the process. The money had to go into separate banks so it would look somewhat legitimate, like you didn’t want to alert the feds or anyone else with one giant deposit, but the mob would have had a hard time following this guy all over the city.”

He took his feet off the table, stood as well, and pushed his chair back in. “I’ll have to drag both Rafe and Fox Whittington into this now. Paul, too. I’ll call anyone I know who might be willing to help me. I’ll need one of those disks, babe. And we’re going to have to go to my place tonight. You don’t have a DVD player.”

Grace managed to nod. What difference did it make? Her red nightgown had been lost somewhere in the shambles of her old life. “DVD players are expensive.”

He gave a bark of laughter that sounded almost like his old self. “Ten to one the pretty face on these tapes has been convicted of some stupid thing somewhere down the line. He’ll be in our mug shots. We’ll go over every damned one and maybe we’ll match him. Maybe we’ll get a name for the face. If we can track the guy down, maybe we can convince him to spit out the truth.”

Grace nodded and followed him out of the room. She’d thought of the same approach days ago if this had turned out to be the case with the disks. She preferred not to dwell on what Aidan, Rafe, Fox and Paul might do to the guy if they found him, to convince him that he wanted to come clean. She abhorred violence. It had been too real to her once. And she knew she wouldn’t stand in their way regardless.

They stopped back in her office so she could collect her briefcase. There was no need for her to swing by her own apartment first, she decided. They could do it in the morning. She could get a change of clothing then. It was more important for him to hook up with Rafe and Fox and Paul as soon as possible so they could all see that disk and start looking at mug shots.

Sand, she thought again, sand trickling so fast.

“Jenny wanted to get a cat once,” she said suddenly as they waited for the elevator.

Aidan glanced at her. “Okay, you lost me with that one.”

“If I had agreed, I’d have to worry about going home to feed an animal tonight instead of going straight to your place. It would have slowed us down.”

“True. So why didn’t you agree to the kitty?”

Because it would have been something else to love. Her family had had several cats. They’d been starving, too. And she’d had to leave them behind in Maruja. Grace shrugged. “They think they can always have their way.”

He did something then that unnerved her as much as anything he had done yet. He kissed the crown of her head the way he had done with his sister. “You’re a sucker for the male of the species bucking you for his own way.”

The elevator came and the doors slid open. Grace stepped inside. She would not cry.

“Your friends and family give whole new meaning to the term ‘support system,’” she said an hour later.

They were in the spare bedroom of his town house. Ten minutes ago, it had been empty. Now the kitchen table was shoved up against one wall, one of the chairs was tucked against that, and duplicate files—apparently Aidan had been copying everything he had stashed at her office—were spread over the floor. It sounded like bedlam downstairs. Paul and Shea had come. Rafe and Fox Whittington and their wives and children had arrived. Shanna and her husband, the formidable Ma, Aidan’s father, and Danny-J and his family were all in attendance. They were all going to look at the disk, then they were going to the Robbery-Homicide unit to study mug shots. Aidan had no doubt that if the guy was in there, they’d have his name before dawn, and everyone seemed happy. They were finally able to do something toward helping him.

Grace gave him the key to her apartment. He was going to retrieve her laptop. While everyone else tried to track down the guy who had actually made the bank deposits, she would be up here working on her plan of attack for the preliminary hearing. It was looming at them now, scheduled for the day after tomorrow.

Aidan left and she closed the door behind him. She tried to tune out all the noise from downstairs. Until she had her laptop and could begin writing out what she wanted to say to the judge, she’d sift through Aidan’s file copies and make sure there was nothing she was missing. Grace settled down on the floor, her back against the wall, and dug into the first carton of copied notes.

The smell of food drifted up the stairs. Something delicious. Beef, Grace thought. Kate—Rafe’s wife—and Ma had come to a tentative truce over who had dibs on the kitchen. They were doing something to feed the masses.

Grace wondered if Aidan would think to bring her a change of clothes. She was still dressed from the office and it was going to be a long night. Did she want him pawing through her drawers?

He’d find the photo of her family.

Her heart chugged. She pressed a hand to her tummy when it rolled over. She’d have to tell him then. She’d have to let him all the way in. He’d make her explain. She waited for things inside her to protest, but the reason she’d hidden her past all these years felt as far gone now as her red nightgown.

Grace gave a gusty sigh and realized that the release of it felt good. She turned her attention to the files.

There was a knock on the door an hour later. Aidan didn’t wait for her to call to him to come in. He never waited for her approval on anything. He’d just barged in.

She would have smiled at that, but suddenly she was too worried about what he might have with him besides the laptop. If he had found the picture, would he bring it back here to confront her with it?

“Hey,” he said. He only had her laptop and a plate laden with what appeared to be a steak and a baked potato.

“Oh,” Grace murmured. “Oh. I take back anything bad I ever said about you.”

He put everything on the table. “Not good enough.” Then he turned to take her in his arms and hold her when she got to her feet. “I’ll think of some suitable way you can repay me later.”

Her pulse quickened. “We can negotiate it,” she allowed.

He grinned but his smile faded too fast. “I grabbed those shorts you were wearing last night, too. Figured you’d want to change into something comfortable. I’ll bring them up in a minute. I thought you’d want the food first if you’ve decided to let yourself eat. I’ve never met anyone as conflicted about food as you are.”

“You forgot the money and the wild monkey sex.”

“You seem to have gotten over the sex part well enough.”

Grace smiled fleetingly. She’d left her shorts on her bed so he hadn’t gone into her drawer. Odd that her relief wasn’t greater.

“Okay, get out of here now,” she said. “Let me think of some great legal strategies.”

“My life is in your hands.”

That sobered both of them. He held her again and they clung. She’d never clung to anyone in her life, Grace thought, but it always felt so right with him.

When he was gone, she opened her laptop and plugged it in. Then she sat at the table and tried to figure out how it would be even remotely possible to convince Judge Mason not to hold Aidan over for trial. She chewed, but she didn’t taste the steak. Shea brought her a glass of wine, then Shanna brought her a carafe of coffee.

There was nothing, Grace thought, staring at the screen. Not a blessed thing to fight for him with. She had the banks in a line down Broad Street and maybe a potential name for a mug shot if everyone’s efforts panned out. But she couldn’t put the mug shot guy on the stand until trial.

She could point out that the face on the bank tapes wasn’t Aidan’s and Koeling would come right back with the possibility that Aidan had hired the guy himself to deposit the money.

If she didn’t get him off in two days at the prelim, what would happen then? The mob wanted him. They wanted him so badly, for some unknown reason, that they’d started working to dismantle his reputation more than two years ago. Grace sat back in her chair and raked her fingers through her hair. She knew what would happen if she didn’t get him off at the prelim.

First they’d hurt her again before trial, or they’d try to. They’d warn her again, more forcefully this time, to get her to back off from an adequate defense. The trial wouldn’t be scheduled for at least a month after the preliminary hearing so they’d have plenty of time to work on convincing her. The prosecution could get the date pushed back even further if they wanted to, though there were laws that said a man had to be tried in an expeditious manner and Grace could evoke them. If the D.A.’s office was in on this, they’d want the extra time, too, she realized. They’d want it so they could do as much as possible to skew the case in their favor. Then the mob would get to a juror.

If this went to trial, there was no possible way she could win. They wouldn’t let her.

Katherine, she thought. Katherine Cross. The woman remained the only prayer she had for the preliminary hearing. She wasn’t framing him, but she was doing Eagan’s bidding, pointing her finger at him. Katherine was the only possible peg Grace could knock out from under Koeling’s case. Without Katherine—or by at least casting doubt on Katherine—the other evidence would be shaky enough that Judge Mason might not hold him over for trial. Might not, Grace thought again. It was a long shot.

And what would she lose if she went after the woman? She’d lose Aidan’s trust. She’d lose him. He’d expressly forbidden her from doing it. But, Grace thought, this wasn’t about her. It was about keeping an innocent man—a man she loved—from doing time for a crime he hadn’t committed.

Grace pushed away from the desk and stood. She needed a telephone.

She couldn’t go downstairs, couldn’t let anyone hear this. Grace went out into the hallway, moving slowly in the murky darkness, one hand against the wall to guide herself. She didn’t want to flick on the overhead lights either. She didn’t want to call anyone’s attention to what she was doing.

She slipped into the only other bedroom on the second floor, closed the door and pressed her back against it. Then she lifted a hand and searched along the wall for a light switch. She found it and flicked it. Light spilled.

The room was so him, she thought helplessly. There’d been a time when she’d craved the date of this prelim just so she would never have to face this moment, so she wouldn’t have to press a hand to her mouth as she looked around and realized she loved every little nuance of him. His bed was haphazardly made. The Ma influence would have forced him to pull up the covers, she thought, but the man inside would have been eager to rush out and embrace the day.

Laundry was folded and piled up in stacks on dressers and on the floor, but it had never quite gotten put away. There was a pile of change and a half-empty bottle of water on the nightstand. Gym shoes were cast aside on the floor and…what was that? Grace crossed to the dresser and found the button from her blouse, the one that had flown free last night when they’d made love. He’d picked it up and saved it.

Her eyes swam. No, she had never wanted to come to this moment and say to herself, Yes, yes, yes, I do. I love him. And she’d known all along that the longer he was in her life, the more that would become inevitable.

So now she had to save him. Grace went to the telephone on the bedside table.

She picked it up carefully just in case someone was on the line downstairs, but she got a dial tone. She pressed the fingers of her free hand to her forehead for a moment, trying to remember Lou Russell’s home number. She’d called it once, that first night, when she’d had to track Dan down at Bistro Romano. She’d thought she might need it at a later time so she’d tried to commit it to memory.

She thought—555-6179. She tapped the number in. A female voice answered and she asked for Russell. He came on the line a moment later.

“It’s Grace Simkanian. I’m sorry to bother you at home again.”

“You don’t strike me as the type to do it unnecessarily,” the man said. “The last time you did this, we brought a major case aboard.”

Grace gulped air. “There’s a slim—a very slim—chance that I can get that major case off at the prelim on Friday. But I need something from you. I need the name of the best investigator we’ve ever used, someone who can work fast.”

“That would be Ethan Petkovich. If you can hold on a moment, I think I have a phone number for him here at home.”

“I can hold.”

When he came back, he gave her the number. “He’ll bill the firm,” Russell added.

Suddenly Grace had all the breath she needed. “That won’t be necessary. For personal reasons, I’ll be paying for this one myself.”

She should have known the press would come out for this en masse, Grace thought Friday morning.

She and Aidan made their way up the steps of the courthouse with the media horde pressing their heels. Behind that throng, she knew the McKenna clan was in attendance. They’d seen Paul and Shea in the parking lot. Ma was probably already inside, having grabbed a seat on the railing.

Grace did something stupid as they passed through the courthouse doors. In full view of all the press cameras, she stopped and hugged Aidan.

“Hey, hey,” he said, closing his arms around her. “What’s this?”

“I’m sorry.”

He misunderstood—he couldn’t possibly understand what she was going to do today. “Let it go, lass. You’re not a defeatist. They’ll nail me today, but by the time this goes to trial we’ll have Edgar Rose on our side.”

Edgar Rose, she thought. They’d gotten the name of the guy on the bank tapes. Rafe and Fox were out looking for the guy now to convince him to testify at trial. But Grace wasn’t going to let this go that far. She wasn’t going to give Eagan any more time. She pulled away from Aidan again and they went to the courtroom.

The next half hour was chaos. People tended to hate cops, even while they were the men and women they entrusted their safety to. It was a bizarre tendency that had always perplexed Grace. The gallery of the courtroom was full to overflowing with members of the public waiting to see an officer go down.

But he wouldn’t, because when it came to those she loved, there had only been one time in her life when she hadn’t been willing to give her all. There’d only been one time in her life when she’d turned her back on them and run. She’d vowed she’d never do it again.

She’d thought she could prevent it by isolating herself from anyone she might potentially love or care about too deeply. Then Jenny and Mandy had sneaked into her orb. And Aidan…well, he hadn’t sneaked. He’d been a meteor streaking through the ozone, finding his target.

They’d been seated at the defense table for five good minutes when Judge Mason finally entered the courtroom and the throng quieted.

Koeling presented the prosecution’s case seamlessly, smoothly. He trotted out bank officers to testify about the deposits. Grace cross-examined. She had them dead-to-rights in that Aidan hadn’t deposited the money. She got them to admit that his wasn’t the face on the security tapes. Koeling did just what she’d known he would do. He came back and got the bank officers to outline that anybody could deposit money into another person’s account, that Aidan could have hired the man they now knew as Edgar Rose. She tried to argue that the man had signed Aidan’s name, but the judge didn’t seem impressed.

They moved on to the photographs. The prosecution’s own experts testified that they were real. There wasn’t a thing Grace could do to refute that.

Then, then Koeling started trotting out his star witnesses. Katherine Cross came last.

They’d kept her out of the courtroom until the penultimate moment. Grace had expected that, too, but she found she was hungry for a look at the woman. Who was she, to have had the love of Aidan McKenna and thrown it away for an assortment of mobsters and some easy money? When Koeling called Katherine, Grace turned in her chair. And her heart squeezed.

Well, she thought, at least now she understood why Aidan was willing to go to jail for her. Did he still love her? It didn’t matter anymore, Grace reminded herself. But she—a woman whose life had been changed because of her looks—felt dark and drab and dowdy compared to the woman who took the stand. Katherine had pixie blond hair and a face that could stand on its own even with such a short haircut. She was beautiful, tiny, elfin, with sapphire eyes that swam Aidan’s way then teared up.

Koeling took her through her paces. She admitted to her conviction and told how Aidan had gotten her involved with the city’s Irish Mafia in the first place. They stayed clear of any personal liaison between the couple and concentrated on their working relationship.

Koeling turned his witness over to the defense with a smug grin. Grace was going to wipe that smile off his face. Ethan Petkovich had given her her money’s worth. She stood and approached the witness stand. She tried not to think about the man she was leaving at the defense table.

“I’ll keep this short, Ms. Cross,” she began. “There’s probably not much I can get you to add to your previous testimony.”

The woman gave a shy half smile and nodded. Grace hated her. He touched you like he touched me and then you helped to destroy him. “I’m just curious about this property you own northeast of Allentown. Undeveloped land in the Poconos. I have a copy of the deed here if that will help jog your memory.”

The woman’s smile fell away. “No, I know the land you mean.”

“How much did you pay for this land?”

“I think it was a dollar.”

Grace glanced at Judge Mason. “Can we stipulate for the record that when land is given as a gift it’s customary for a nominal transaction to appear on the deed?”

“So stipulated,” Mason said.

Grace went back to Katherine. “So this land was transferred to you for a dollar. When did this occur?”

“You said you had the deed,” the woman answered tightly.

“It would be on there.”

Not so shy and sweet now, Grace thought. Katherine knew what was coming. “I do have it,” Grace said. “Please hold on.”

She went back to the defense table. She couldn’t look at Aidan’s eyes, but she felt them, their impact, their searching intent. Katherine knew what she was up to and Aidan would be starting to figure it out, too.

“Here we go.” Grace found the deed in her files and entered it into evidence. Predictably, Koeling protested.

“She’s your witness, Counselor,” Judge Mason pointed out.

“You put her up for grabs today by putting her on the stand. If the defense has something with her signature on it, it could be pertinent.”

Overruled, Grace thought. She’d counted on it. She gave the deed to Katherine. “Could you read the date to the court?”

The woman barely glanced at it. “January tenth of this year.”

“And the land is granted from whom to whom?”

“William Cross to Katherine Cross.”

“And?” Grace pushed.

“And Aidan McKenna.”

“Who’s William Cross?” Grace asked.

“My father.”

Grace scratched her temple exaggeratedly. “Why on earth would your father give valuable land to you and your law enforcement partner?”

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Katherine snapped. “I guess you’d have to put him on this stand and ask him.”

She was good, Grace thought. But Grace knew she was better. She cast a pleading look at the judge.

“Answer the question, Ms. Cross,” Mason said. “Tell us why you believe your father would give you and the defendant this land.”

Katherine closed her mouth and remained silent.

Grace waited for a heartbeat and pushed on. “Tell the court, Ms. Cross,” she said quietly. “It’s really rather a waste of time not to. Because if you don’t, I’ll just call your father at trial. I’ll call Mr. McKenna at trial.” Of course, Grace thought, he was going to fire her well before then. “For that matter, I can also line up the city clerk you got your marriage license through, and…ah, your best friend, Lily Moss, who I believe was going to be the maid of honor in your wedding. The same story will come to light. You were engaged to be married to the defendant. Your father gave the two of you this land as an early wedding gift. Am I right so far? You had a personal relationship with him, did you not?”

Katherine looked at the judge. “Why do I have to answer that?”

“Because I, for one, am very interested in your response.”

Grace knew then that she had won. “Did you have a personal relationship with the defendant?” she asked again. “A romantic relationship?”

The woman teared up. “I loved him.”

“You loved him,” Grace repeated. The words tasted sour in her mouth. “You loved him, and his answer to that was to turn you over to Internal Affairs when he discovered your liaison with Charlie Eagan’s organization.”

Koeling objected.

“It’s a matter of public record, Your Honor. She’s been convicted,” Grace reminded the judge.

Mason nodded. “Go on, Ms. Cross. Answer the question.”

“It wasn’t a question,” she snapped.

“Then let me phrase it as one,” Grace said. “Ms. Cross, did Aidan McKenna report you to the Philadelphia Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau because he’d ascertained that you were involved with the Mafia?”

She started crying harder. “Yes.”

“And did you then negotiate a plea bargain with the District Attorney by giving them the defendant, by making a similar accusation against him?”

“I told them what he made me do.”

“Ms. Cross, if Mr. McKenna was involved in the same illegal activities you were convicted for, why would he turn you in?” Grace didn’t wait for an answer. “Judge Mason, it’s obvious that the District Attorney has no case here. This is a trumped-up charge based almost entirely on the accusation of a scorned woman, a woman who was hurt and who struck back to save herself and get a plea bargain. And given Ms. Cross’s associations with the Mafia, I have to doubt the veracity of the prosecution’s other evidence as well. There’s every possibility that her associates have influenced that, too. A few cleverly contrived photographs? It would take no effort at all for a man to stop beside another man on a street and wish him good day while someone else clicked a photo of the encounter. Some unknown face on bank security films? It’s not the defendant’s face, Your Honor, so those deposits prove nothing. And finally, we’re left with several more perjuring witnesses—the pub owners who are also mob-associated. These mob meetings—the meetings the defendant allegedly attended—were taking place in their establishments, were they not? Of course they’ll testify as Mr. Eagan has instructed them to. This essentially comes down to a matter of their word against the defendant’s. This is America and I believe the rule of thumb here is that a man is innocent until proven guilty. I see nothing here that points to reasonable cause for holding the defendant over for trial.”

She was shaking inside. Everything inside her had turned to jelly. She waited for the judge to do what he almost had to do, given what Sam had said about him and his decisions so far. Mason would be excruciatingly fair to both sides.

The judge folded his hands in front of him and looked down from the bench, first at the defense table, then at Koeling. “I’m not prepared to make a decision today until I review the record of this testimony.”

Koeling protested and Mason shut him down.

“I’ll issue a statement as soon as I make a decision,” the judge said.

Grace knew she wouldn’t be here to hear the outcome, but she nodded.

The media in the gallery erupted. Grace finally turned away from the bench to look for Aidan.

There was no one at the defense table. He was gone.

Grace left the courtroom. There were only a few question marks left now. She knew Aidan would find her, that he’d have to confront her. It wasn’t a matter of if, but when. In the meantime, she had a few other matters to tidy up. She stopped on the courthouse steps to dig her cell phone out of her briefcase. She called Mandy. “Can you meet me at McGlinchey’s in about two hours?” She paused, swallowed, then she just blurted the rest. “I need you.”

The pressure inside Aidan’s head was intense.

He drove Darling blindly, not really sure where he was going. Then the answer came to him. His family. He needed his family.

Damn you, Grace, damn you. He’d never seen it coming. Had never doubted her integrity for a moment. Kat, yes. On some level, he supposed he’d always harbored doubts about Kat. She’d always possessed that glibness, the ever-ready answers. But Grace scurried, hid, avoided. And when he’d finally pinned her down, he’d thought the things she’d said were true. It was why he’d let his reservations about another beautiful woman slip away without a fuss.

But the things she’d said hadn’t been true. They couldn’t have been. Because he had never told her about that parcel of land. So she’d gone behind his back, had found it, planning to use it today all the while she was loving him, laughing for him, pretending to look for other ways to save him. We only need reasonable doubt. Katherine’s the answer.

She’d said that many times. But he hadn’t believed she’d go that way without his consent.

He’d known how much this case meant to her career. But at some point, at some moment, he’d believed that her integrity—and what they had shared—meant more. God bless him, but he was a poor judge of female character.

He pulled to the curb in front of his parents’ tidy, small home. They weren’t back from court yet. They were probably combing the city looking for him. It didn’t matter. He’d wait for them. Aidan leaned back against the headrest, closed his eyes and prepared to bide his time.

Ma and his father arrived first. Then the rest of the family came in torrents, cars screeching up to the curb, people yanking at the truck doors, trying to get him to come out, trying to hug him. They had no clue that there was nothing to celebrate.

He let them pull him inside. He was enjoying his first mouthful of Jameson’s when the phone rang. If he hadn’t been anticipating the flush of whiskey heat in his blood, he would have read the look on his mother’s face when she answered the kitchen phone. He would have seen the utter contempt. Ma had a feral sense of protection when it came to her young.

Ma held out the phone toward him. “It’s that woman,” she spit.

Aidan shook his head. Not Grace, he thought. His family thought Grace was the heroine of the hour. Only he knew what she had really done.

“The one who calls herself after an animal,” Ma clarified.

Kat.

He took the phone. He hadn’t spoken to her for more than six months and his gut clenched. “What is it?” he demanded.

“Aidan, come to the hospital please.”

Things inside him turned to rock. “Why?”

“They got me. They hurt me.”

Aidan slammed down the phone. He was behind the wheel of Darling again before he realized that he’d never asked her which hospital she was in. It didn’t matter. He’d drive to all of them until he found her. If nothing else, today he would clean up his life.

Grace hesitated before she pushed open the door to McGlinchey’s. The pub had TVs in all four corners of the dining room and two over the bar. Aidan’s case would be the front-runner of the five-o’clock news, she thought. His face would be on every one of those screens, and Dan Lutz’s might be, as well.

She put her shoulder to the wood and eased the door open anyway. Mandy had gotten a table and she had brought Sam. Only Jenny was missing because she was still revisiting her corn-roots in Kansas. Grace was glad for that. Jenny was so sensitive. This would tear her apart.

“Hi,” she said, striding up to the table. Her voice had a hollow ring.

Mandy had just taken a sip of wine. Grace watched it try to come up through her nose. “You quit?”

Grace slid into a chair. “Yeah.”

“Not just the case, but the best, most prestigious criminal law firm in the city?” Mandy all but shrieked.

“That’s right. I need a drink.”

Sam jumped up to get it without waiting for a waitress to beat through the usual McGlinchey’s crowd to get to their table. When he was gone, Mandy stared at her.

“You had a moment of truth,” Mandy whispered.

Grace almost smiled. Mandy had had one of her own not too long ago. Sometimes everything in a person’s life just reached a crescendo and demanded a good, square look in the eye. There was no going back and there was no going forward. All a woman could do was stare herself in the heart and act accordingly. When it had happened to Mandy, she’d blasted her daughter’s father and had declared her love for Sam all over the course of one fateful morning.

Sam came back and Grace accepted a glass of wine from him. She sipped, then she closed her eyes. “I can’t believe the news got out this fast. How did you hear?”

“Channel Six followed up Mason’s decision with a statement from Dan Lutz,” Sam said. “Not more than five minutes ago.”

Grace frowned. “Mason didn’t make a decision. He said he would when he…” She trailed off, understanding. Mason had made a decision.

“You left the courthouse too soon,” Mandy said. “He was only off the bench for about an hour, then he came back to say that he wouldn’t hold Aidan McKenna over for trial.”

Grace stared. Her heart was rioting. It had happened after she’d left Dan Lutz’s office, she realized, or she would have heard of it. For that matter, her cell phone had been ringing itself to pieces. They would have wanted her back in the courtroom. She hadn’t answered it. She’d figured it was Aidan and she had to steady herself before she heard what he had to say.

She’d saved him. Grace took another quick hit of her wine. The proof of the deed had done it.

“Why?” Mandy asked.

Grace knew what she was talking about. She put her glass down. Why had she quit the job that meant everything in the world to her, the single thing she’d been working toward for years? “The easy answer is that I could very well have gone into this hearing today believing Aidan was guilty. I had my mind set before I met him.”

Sam waved a hand as though to dismiss that. “We all have to battle preconceived notions.”

“If I had gone to trial believing that, he would have gone to jail,” Grace said. “I would have thought, deep in my heart, that he was only getting what he deserved and I would have lost. I wouldn’t have tried so hard, so desperately, to save him.” She certainly wouldn’t have hired Petkovich to find that deed. “It happened every time I got a rich kid on a municipal charge, but those cases are effortless. I couldn’t have managed it with a case this difficult.”

Mandy and Sam waited.

“I can’t be a defense lawyer. I’m not cut out for it. I have…ideals.” She’d accused Aidan once of being idealistic, she remembered. The memory was a knife through her heart.

“So now what?” Mandy asked.

“I’ll see if the prosecutor’s office will take me, although I imagine they’re a little ticked off at me right now since I just showed them up pretty good.”

“How about private practice?” Sam asked. “With a partner?”

Grace let out the snort she rarely allowed anyone to hear. “Who would have me? I have a month’s worth of real experience.”

“Yeah,” Mandy said. “But your name was all over the news tonight. You’re pretty notorious.”

“I’d have you,” Sam said. “I hate doing criminal law. I turn those cases away. I’d be glad to have you join me if you’re willing to go out on a limb financially. I mean, the pay is a little more irregular than Russell and Lutz’s impressive salaries.”

She never cried, Grace thought. Never.

Then the tears came.

Chapter 13

A idan found Katherine propped up in bed in Room 612 of the fourth hospital he went to, looking not quite as bad as he’d feared. Her arm was in a cast. She had one black eye and the other one was swollen shut. But they watered nicely when she saw him in the door.

“You came,” she whispered.

He’d come to see for himself how badly she was hurt. He’d done it because he wouldn’t have believed anything she told him. He’d come because he wanted to hear her version of why this had happened to her. And because he was cleaning up the past.

He studied her, waiting for some sense of emotion. It didn’t come. He wondered if he’d ever be able to do this with Grace, look at her and feel nothing.

“This can’t be because of the deed,” he said finally, harshly.

“That’s not why they did this to you. You didn’t melt down that badly on the stand.”

She winced and made a show of how much pain she was in. “Will you sit here with me? Don’t just stand there.”

“No thanks.” He didn’t want to be anywhere near her, he discovered. She’d done her best to destroy him.

And that was when it hit him. Kat had set out to destroy him. Grace had set out to save him. But she’d still betrayed him and that didn’t go down any easier.

His gut clenched painfully. He’d been so focused on the fact that she’d gone behind his back that he hadn’t been able to think of why she’d done it. Did it change anything? He didn’t know.

“I suffered this for you!” Kat cried.

Just what he needed, he thought, another beautiful face falling on her sword for him. “I’m telling you, you held up on the stand. They wouldn’t hurt you for that. You didn’t give the court that deed.” That stalled him. “Did you? Did you turn it over to Grace?” No, he thought. No, he’d never trust a woman again.

Katherine’s eyes swam some more. “Of course not. I’d forgotten all about it. But we still own it together. We never resolved that.”

“Keep it. It’s yours.” He made a move to leave.

“They did this to me because I was going to come forward and admit I lied!”

Aidan looked back at her slowly. “There’s a news flash.”

“I was going to admit that you were never involved with Eagan!”

“Why?” he asked bluntly. He’d never know if she really would have or not.

She gave a moist sniff. “I’ve been miserable without you.”

No, he thought, no, there would be something more in it for her than that. Maybe she was in trouble with Eagan for other reasons now, reasons that had nothing to do with Aidan at all. Maybe she thought Aidan was the only one who could protect her and he could only do that if he wasn’t in jail. But there’d be another reason.

He nodded slowly anyway. Either way, it made sense now, why they would hurt her like this. That would have ticked them off, especially if she was already in hot water.

“You haven’t heard yet, have you?” she asked suddenly.

“Heard what?”

“You didn’t see the news.”

“I spent a while driving around the city when I left court and I only had a minute with my family before you called. No, I haven’t been near a TV.”

“The judge refused to hold you over for trial. You got off. And your nasty lawyer bailed on you.”

“My…” He trailed off. Bailed on him? “Grace quit my case?” Of course, there was no case now. So what had she done?

“She quit that law firm she was working for.”

The events today would have made her career golden. Aidan almost physically swayed with the impact of the news. She’d gone to the wall for him—for him—knowing how he would react, and she’d taken nothing from it for herself? She’d quit?

He had to go. He had to think about this. But Katherine stopped him one last time. “She turned out to be a real nut case, didn’t she?” She gave him a watery smile. “It must be the foreigner thing.”

Aidan stared at her. “The what?”

“You know. Foreigner. Whatever that country is that she came from. Charlie dug up everything on her when she took on your case to find out where her weak spots were. She doesn’t really have any. She doesn’t own much and she doesn’t have any family here. She grew up in some communist country. Women are weird there.”

In that moment, Aidan hated Katherine Cross. Then everything clicked together in his mind and he finally understood Grace Simkanian.

The way she sometimes didn’t understand his expressions. All the things she had to do yet that were supposed to keep her from getting involved. Was she planning to go back there?

“I’ve got to go,” he said again, and this time he didn’t let Katherine stop him.

Grace took a cab home from the pub. She couldn’t seem to find any part of herself any longer, even the part that hated spending unnecessary money.

She paid the driver and got out, then she stood staring at her lobby doors. She was unemployed. She’d lost Aidan. She was numb. She wasn’t sure if she wished Jenny was home because she didn’t want to be alone right now, or if she was glad Jenny wasn’t because she didn’t want to talk. She needed desperately to sleep.

Yes, she’d sleep, Grace decided, moving toward the brownstone. She’d sleep for a long, long time and maybe when she woke up, this would all turn out to have been a nightmare. She went inside and upstairs, letting herself into her apartment. She dropped her briefcase and kicked her shoes off at the door.

The answering machine on the little table there was blinking its light. Her heart lurched. Aidan. She still didn’t feel ready to face him but she hit the play button anyway.

There were nine messages but they were all from various law firms wanting to speak to her about possible employment. Grace didn’t know if she wanted to laugh or cry at the irony. But she knew she wasn’t prepared for the sound of someone slowly and rhythmically clapping from the shadows that were trying to gather in a corner of her living room. Grace gave a small cry and turned that way.

“Congratulations, Grace. You almost landed on your feet.”

Someone was in her living room. She couldn’t see him in the murky last of daylight but her pulse exploded. Payback. It was time for payback for what she had done today. They couldn’t coerce her before trial now because there wasn’t going to be a trial. But they would still hurt her in retaliation.

She whipped around for the door again, dragging on the handle, ready to run. Then, finally, she registered the voice. She knew that voice. Grace stalled, despair slushing around in her veins like melting ice. No, no, no.

“Don’t bother running, Grace. I’ve got men on the street. They’ll catch you if you try to make a dash, so let’s do this the easy way and end it here.”

Grace jerked back toward the living room and Paul stepped out of the shadows.

“You’re a lady in demand now, aren’t you?” he asked, motioning at the answering machine. “Unfortunately, I’ve got to tell you that you won’t be around to take any of those jobs they’re offering you.”

He was going to kill her? “That’s insane,” she gasped. Then she came back to the same question, the same mystery. “What does Aidan know? Why are you so afraid of him? What is it that’s so huge you’d kill me because I got him off?”

“You misunderstand.” Paul came farther into the room.

“We’re killing you to ruin him. He loves you, you know. Shea figured that out early on. He might get his job back now, but once you die for it, he won’t want it anymore. Regardless, there’ll be great satisfaction in making you pay for the mess you’ve made, in making him pay for not going down without a fuss.”

Shea, Grace thought. Her heart broke for the woman, for all the McKennas when this came to light. Paul. And it would come to light. She had to figure out what was going on and she had to get out of here alive so she could tell everyone about it.

They didn’t want Aidan active with the police department. But they didn’t know him, not the way she did. “He’s stronger than you know,” she said. “He might take a leave of absence, dance around the issue for a while, but then he’d focus and he’d start using long words and he’d stay on. He’d pick up the pieces and he’d fight back.”

Paul looked at her oddly. She was rambling, Grace thought. She was terrified. But she pushed on. It was starting to come clear to her now.

“Sooner or later he’d start poking into the rumors about the department-mob alliance again. And he’d find you. He’d pick up on something in your routines, your behavior, the way he did with Katherine. Because he knows you as well as he knew her—you’re family.” She spit the word. “That’s why you were trying to put him away as long as two years ago when you married Shea. Because you knew you’d be too close to him then and he’d eventually pick up on something. You didn’t want to deprive yourself of marrying Shea to prevent that, so you decided that Aidan had to be removed from the police force. That’s why you had the pictures taken. You were lining everything up to eventually drag him down.”

Paul nodded complacently. “Rumor had it that you were very smart.”

Were. Past tense. Her heart spasmed. Oh, dear God, how was she ever going to get out of here if they had guys downstairs? “Textiles?” she laughed crazily. “You told the McKennas that your family was in textiles and that’s why you had money?”

He shrugged. “They’re stupid damned peasants. They bought it.”

Fury blazed through her. The man had a thing or two to learn about stupid peasants. Instead of running, Grace began to advance on him. She might well die, Grace thought, but she’d die fighting. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d risked it. Paul was tangling with the wrong peasant.

“Then Katherine gave you the last opportunity you needed!” she shouted, her anger pumping. “You made her accuse him. Who are you?” He would have to be important, she thought, very important within the organization for them to go to this much trouble to protect him. Paul hadn’t done this all by himself.

Then she figured that out, too. The dirty cops. Paul was a high-ranking detective. He’d be the liaison, the cog between the mob and the police department.

“Make hay while the sun shines.” Paul shrugged. “We saw opportunity when the Cross woman was charged and we grabbed it. He could have just gone to jail and everything would have been fine. He would have been out of the way. End of problem. But then you came along and there was no way to control you. And you were hell-bent on getting him off. Come here, Grace,” he said again. “Don’t make me chase you down like an animal. You’re too beautiful for that sort of humiliation.”

She went. She went with a vengeance.

Grace screamed and rushed at him. At the last possible moment she thought to grab the cheap, spindly lamp on the table near the sofa. She swung it in a wild arc and missed him, then she saw that he had a gun. He’d taken it from inside his jacket pocket—the suit jacket he’d worn to court to support Aidan.

That made her insane. She went at him again.

This time she connected the lamp with the side of his head just as he fired the gun. The report was deafening. Grace waited for pain. Nothing happened. He hadn’t hit her. But he lost his balance from the blow and he fell.

Then there was a shout and another resounding crash from behind her. Grace jerked around. Aidan. Aidan? He bellowed and ran for Paul as the other man was struggling back to his feet.

“He has a gun!” Grace screamed in warning. Then he hit Paul with a grunt and they both went down.

Grace saw the gun fly free of Paul’s hand and skitter across the floor. She lunged for it, tripped and went down on her knees. She reached it and wrapped her hands around it, brought it up, aimed it at Paul—and she couldn’t shoot. She couldn’t shoot because Aidan was all over him. She couldn’t get a clear shot.

Grace groaned. She needed help.

She kept the gun trained on the two of them as they wrestled on the floor, fists flying. She backed up toward the kitchen, alternately jerking around to aim at the door. There were other guys downstairs, she thought again. They’d let Aidan through—she didn’t know how or why, but probably so Paul could kill him, too. They’d be here soon when they heard the next gunshot.

She reached the kitchen door. Without turning around, she groped behind her and along the wall for the phone there. She got it in her other hand and punched in 9-1-1. When the call connected, she finally left the kitchen door.

She began grabbing the cushions from the kitchen chairs. “Mob hit!” she cried when the emergency operator spoke, then she shoved the pillows into the oven. Would this prevent the bullet from going through the floor into Sam and Mandy’s apartment? She didn’t know so she tried to angle her aim toward the wall. She only knew she had to fire the gun, had to make sure that cops all over the city—good and bad—would swarm to this address.

Grace reached into the oven and fired the gun into the pillows, making sure to hold the phone close so the operator heard it loud and clear. They wouldn’t be able to send just their dirty guys now. They didn’t have the luxury of that kind of time. She dropped the phone and ran back to the living room.

The gunshot had startled Paul enough that it had given Aidan an edge. He had the man down now and his fist was driving again and again and again into Paul’s face. Grace didn’t try to stop him.

She heard movement behind her and jerked around just as another man barreled through the door that Aidan had crashed through when he’d heard Paul’s gunshot. She’d known they’d come when they heard the second report. Grace brought the gun up and aimed it at the man’s chest.

“You’ll want to stop right there,” she said, and marveled that her voice only hitched a little bit. “Don’t test me. I’ll pull the trigger. I’m from Maruja.”

“From where?” Aidan asked an hour later. “Never heard of the place.”

She decided to counter the question with one of her own before she tried to answer. “Why? Why did you come here?” she asked levelly.

She couldn’t watch his face. She couldn’t stand the betrayal, the anger she’d see there, so she turned and began pulling the cushions out of her oven.

“You’re going to buy new ones, right?” he said. “Even you aren’t that cheap.”

She knew then. She knew. Everything was going to be okay.

Things inside her went weak and unsteady, but she managed to cross to the trash can and shove the cushions down inside. “You’re doing it again. Stop dancing around the subject.”

Aidan sat down on a hard chair without a cushion. Yeah, he thought, he was doing it again. And she had a right to an answer. “Because you deceived me.”

She nodded once, jerkily. “I did. Yes.”

And that, he thought, exactly that, was why he trusted her anyway. She didn’t even try to deny it.

“I’d do it again, as well,” she said, going to the sink to wash her hands. “If it was the only way to save you.”

“I came back here to have it out with you. Then I heard the gunshot while I was still on the stairs and I knew they wouldn’t let you walk away the way Russell and Lutz did.”

So he knew about that, she thought. Grace leaned back against the stove. “You decided to save me first and have it out with me later.”

“More or less. I decided to save you first and marry you later.”

Her heart stalled. “After what I did?”

“Yeah, well, the next time I’m in danger of going to jail, I’ll be on red alert where you’re concerned.”

Grace pressed a hand to her mouth, not sure if she was trying to stifle a laugh or a sob. “I can’t even say I’m sorry.”

“I know. You’re tough. It must be those genes from…where did you say?”

Grace took a deep breath—effortless now—and felt utterly calm. “Maruja. It’s a tiny country sharing a border with Russia.”

“And they raise lunatics there who shoot guns into chair cushions?”

One corner of her mouth tucked up. “It worked.” She’d had fourteen cops here within five minutes. There had been enough good ones among them to take Paul and his lurking cohorts in. Soon she and Aidan would have to go down to the precinct and give their statements.

Mandy had been right. Sam Case was going to get one really notorious partner.

“Maruja was a communist country up until the time I turned sixteen.” Time to tell him, she thought. “My father is a farmer. I have six brothers and sisters.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Aidan said.

She knew he was thinking of his own family. “Unless you can’t feed them. The government took every crop my father planted, every piglet his sows bore, everything…everything.” It still hurt, she thought, it still really hurt. “We were starving. I remember when I was five, six. So hungry. My stomach would just gnaw at night.”

He wanted to go to her, Aidan thought. He needed to hold her. Her gaze had turned inward and she was in pain. But something told him to keep his distance, to let her get through it. He was definitely going to marry her and spend a whole lot of years with her, but he had the feeling this might be the one and only time she talked of this.

So he did one of the things he did best. He eased around the subject a little to make it easier for her, to give her a moment to collect her thoughts. “You’ve more than made up for the food thing, Violet Eyes. When you get around to eating, you don’t mess around.”

Grace thought about digging one of the cushions out of the trash and throwing it at him. Later, she decided. She needed to get through this first. “My parents were so in love. They kept making more babies anyway. I was mystified by that until I hit my teens and understood the connection. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other, so my piece of bread at mealtime became half a piece of bread and then it became a quarter piece of bread as they whittled it down to feed my siblings, too.” She paused. “On some level, I guess I was young enough to hate them for that. I hated them even while I loved them.”

“Grace…”

She held a hand up. “Let me finish.” She gulped in air. “I ran and left them to it. I left them to their hunger and their miserable lives. I came here.”

“At sixteen?”

“My father sent me away and I let him.”

“Again, babe, it bears repeating. You were only sixteen.”

Yes, she thought, but she’d always been stubborn. She could have fought her father. “There was an uprising, a revolt, a lot of the farmers banding together and storming the capital to try to seize the dictator. It was chaos, ugly. There were bullets and homemade bombs concocted with fertilizer. My older brother fought. My father saw the opportunity in all the upheaval. He knew a woman—her name was Jonna. I never knew what his connection to her was, or why she would risk anything for him. She only told me that she owed him a huge favor. I’d guess maybe they’d meant something to each other once, but it would have to have been before he’d met my mother.

Yes, Aidan thought, because once a man loved, once he really loved, there was no other. He nodded.

“Jonna was with the communist government. When it became apparent that the peasants might succeed and kill anyone affiliated with the government, a lot of the officials fled for their lives. Jonna was one of them. Since she was going, my father asked her to take me with her. He told me he was doing it for my own good. If the peasants failed, communist soldiers would be all over the countryside within hours. With the way…I look…”

She stumbled over that one, Aidan thought. No, she was not like Katherine. Katherine had always played on her looks, had used them.

“With the way I look,” she repeated more forcefully, “he said he knew that I would catch their attention. He was afraid for me, of what they might do to me. I begged him to just hide me instead. He said that no matter what happened next, my life would be wasted there. I was too smart, too special, to stay. Even if the peasants succeeded in overthrowing the government, there were years of hardship and transition ahead for Maruja.”

He had a vague memory of reading some of this now. “They did succeed.”

She nodded jerkily. “He sent me away in that little window of opportunity while the communist soldiers were so occupied with the warring peasants that they couldn’t keep their usual surveillance on the borders. He sent me with Jonna because she was one of them and probably wouldn’t be stopped, at least not by the soldiers. And if we encountered any peasants, I could probably protect Jonna, too. They’d let me go and they’d probably let her go with me to take care of me.” She paused. “A soldier tried to grab me anyway, even though I was with her.”

“What happened?”

“Jonna killed him. She had a gun. I hadn’t known she had a gun. She said he’d have raped me.”

Yeah, he thought, yeah, he really needed to hold her. “You got through.” It wasn’t a question.

Grace nodded again. “We went to Moscow for two months. She adopted me there, then we came here. My father had known her ultimate destination was America. This was the chance he wanted to give me.”

“Voilà. Villanova.” He grinned to soften it.

She smiled back faintly. “Not quite. We arrived in America on my seventeenth birthday. We became citizens. Jonna had me tutored so I could catch up fast, but it still took me a year. I had some schooling in Maruja, but mostly I stayed home and worked on the farm.”

Her father had made the right choice, Aidan thought, and he loved the guy for sending her away, straight into his arms.

“I passed my G.E.D.,” she said. “I got some grants. Then voilàa Villanova.”

He had to ask. “Did you think this would matter to me? Is that why you wouldn’t tell me?”

“I knew it wouldn’t matter to you. I knew as soon as I understood about your own family. That was why I couldn’t tell you. It would close the last gap between us. And if I lost you, too—the way I lost them—it would kill me.”

But she’d gone after Katherine anyway, he thought, knowing that he might never forgive her for it.

He couldn’t do it anymore. He had to touch her. He got up and crossed to her to take her hands in his. “They’re still there?” he asked. “Your family is still in Maruja?”

“They’re still there,” she agreed. “And I finally understood why after I left the courthouse today. They’re there because they want to be there, Aidan. They could have left with Jonna as well as I did. My parents didn’t want to go. They had everything they needed as long as they were together. They just wanted more for me. For all of us, probably—all my brothers and sisters. But only my brother and I were old enough to go, and he chose to stay and fight.” She hesitated, trying to think it all through.

“I’ve spent every moment here on American soil atoning. Depriving myself, because I got out when the rest of them didn’t.”

“Atoning? Is that another word for cheap?”

She pulled her hand from his and tapped it against his stomach in a mock blow. “Frugal. Responsible.”

“Cheap,” he repeated.

“I was going to bring them here. Then I realized they wouldn’t come, so I quit my job. No sense in doing something I hate for money I don’t need.”

He didn’t have to ask why. He knew. This country had laws and they made the place great. She wouldn’t be able to work indefinitely getting people off from breaking them. Her heart couldn’t have stood it.

“What about your sisters and brothers? They wouldn’t come here?”

“Their lives are there. It’s not the same as when I left. They farm for themselves, not for the government. They’re still poor, but they’re not starving. It’s what they know and none of them want to leave it.”

“So having realized all this, will you be willing to take a cab occasionally now?” he asked, trying to lighten her pensive mood.

Grace finally grinned. She grinned with all of her heart. “Hell, no. We owe your family a hundred thousand dollars.”

Oh, God, he thought, he loved her. “Say it. Say you’ll marry me. I don’t even care if you’re unemployed. I’m getting my job back because you’re sneaky.”

“I wasn’t sneaky.” She thought about creeping to his room to use the phone and being afraid to turn the lights on. “It was a little bit sneaky.”

Aidan sobered. “Thank you.”

Grace touched her mouth to his. She knew then, for sure, that he had forgiven her. “I’m not unemployed. I’m going to go into partnership with Sam. That way I can pick and choose my cases. I can take on clients that the D.A. is trying to…ah…”

“Railroad?” he suggested. Yeah, he thought, now he understood her uncertainty with certain expressions. She’d crammed a lot into ten years, but she’d isolated herself to do it, studying, memorizing, learning. If something didn’t appear in a book, she might have missed it.

She frowned. “Now that one makes no sense. What does a train have to do with falsely accusing someone?”

“I’ll explain later.” Right now, he thought, he wanted to kiss her.

“By the way,” she murmured against his mouth.

“Hmm?” He was busy tasting her.

“I love you, too.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. “But I’m going to have a problem with your brother wearing a kelly-green tuxedo to my wedding.”

“Damned tootin’.”

ISBN: 978-1-4268-8087-2

RISKING IT ALL

Copyright © 2003 by Beverly Bird

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