“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

MILLS & BOON

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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

Aidan 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

Grace 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

Aidan 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.

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