Tori Carrington - Never Say Never Again

Bronte fingered the grainy black-and-white photo of Connor on the front page of the Washington Times-Herald. He was wearing a dark bulletproof vest with U.S. Marshal printed across the chest, holding a sniper’s rifle at attention. Given the handcuffed and shackled men in institution dress behind him, the picture had likely been shot while transporting federal prisoners. The expression on his face… She caught herself almost caressing that inanimate face and snatched her hand back. The expression on his face was nothing if not arrogant.

“Oh, yes? Then why did you piss off Dennis Burns today by defending McCoy? Why don’t you just hand dimwit Dennis your job and be done with it?” she asked herself aloud.

She opened the paper to page four, where the meat of the story lay, and folded it back to the piece. Okay, so maybe she took a little too much pleasure in honking off a certain rotating junior attorney, aka pissant Dennis Burns, whenever the opportunity arose—which was often, given his interest in her permanent position in the Transnational/Major Crimes Section. It was an interest he’d made no secret of when he requested to assist her on the Pryka case—a request Bernie had immediately granted, putting her in nearly daily contact with the guy. Dennis had been with the section for four months and she’d caught him practically salivating outside her office no fewer than five times. And that wasn’t saying anything about his overt attempts to win the senior U.S. attorney’s affection by eavesdropping on her conversations and—she suspected but had yet to prove—going through her mail and beating her to the punch at status meetings whenever she got a snippet of interesting information.

If she were a man, she probably would have taken him out back and settled things with him months ago.

But she wasn’t a man, and her only effective means of ammo was working her butt off to prove herself the better person for her job. The key word being “her.”

She skimmed the news story. These guys really should get themselves some new sources. Most of the time they were so far off the mark—

Her eye caught on something and she traced her finger back up to the top of the section.

“This afternoon Senior U.S. Attorney Bernard Leighton has named junior attorney D.C. Dennis Burns to head up the investigation…”

Bronte leapt up so quickly, she nearly knocked over her chair.

No…it couldn’t be. Pryka was her case. She’d been the one Robbins had come to wanting to testify against her Serbian-by-birth ex-boyfriend for myriad criminal activities, not limited to but including the smuggling of illegal explosives into the country, purportedly for a third-party terrorist organization. She’d been the one who had nervously made her case before the attorney general to get Robbins accepted into the witness protection program. She had even begun doing some fancy footwork on how best to shore up the hole left by Melissa Robbins’s death—first and foremost, by putting a call into the FBI agents who had been working the case much longer than she had, trying to finger Pryka as being behind the murder of his ex-girlfriend, if not directly, then indirectly.

Of course, she’d have never guessed in a million years that Connor McCoy would be the one ultimately under suspicion.

Still wearing her gray skirt suit and hose, she padded to the front of the town house and yanked open the door. On the step lay the last of the day’s print news offerings. She snatched the paper up and quickly turned to the section on the case. There, in black and white, the information from the other piece was confirmed. According to two sources, Burns had succeeded in taking the case from her.

“Why that no good, scheming, conniving little son-of-a-bitch,” she murmured under her breath.

The sound of a passing car caught her attention. She looked up and distantly followed its passage. For a moment, she forgot that it was after eight o’clock. The deep shadows confirmed that it, indeed, was. Policewoman-to-the-core Kelli had once warned her that she should be a little more careful when opening her front door. That her daily routines were anal and predictable and, thus, made her more of a target for crime. Bronte told her friend that the only concession she would make was she’d vary the times she picked up her much-loved newspapers by five minutes.

She shook her head then turned to go back inside.

“Wait.”

Bronte nearly jumped clear out of her hose. She swiveled at the sound of the masculine voice coming from over the stoop, then continued toward her now more urgent goal to go back inside the house.

“For God’s sake, Bronte, it’s me.”

Her heart hammering against her rib cage, she stopped herself from closing the door all the way. She craned her head through the opening. “Connor?”

The instant she said the name, she wanted to kick herself. Admitting that she recognized his voice from the darkness and with very little to go on was far too telling in her book—both to him and to herself.

“Are you alone?”

She considered telling him no, then thought better of it. He probably already knew if she was alone or not and lying would only make her look sorrier than she already was. “Yes.”

All too quickly, he stood just on the other side of the door. She had to look up to see into his face. An involuntary shiver skittered down her spine—a shiver that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the man eyeing her in much the same way she was him.

“So are you going to invite me in or what?”

Bronte tightened her fingers on the door. “After the scare you just gave me, I’m more in the ‘or what’ frame of mind.”

She made out his frown in the porch light from a neighboring town house.

“Oh, all right,” she said and swung the door inward.

As soon as he was inside, she peeked back out, making sure no one had seen him come in. Though why she was so concerned, she couldn’t say. Maybe because this was Georgetown. And for some reason it mattered to her that her neighbors not think she was in cahoots with the person whose face was splattered all over the front page of the very newspaper she still clutched to her chest.

She closed the door and turned to face him. “An apology for scaring me out of my wits would be nice.”

“Sorry.”

“Gee, Connor, somehow that one just didn’t hit the mark.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the shiver that continued to skitter across her skin, she branded her wise-cracking for exactly what it was: her need to cover her thrill at seeing him again.

But that didn’t change that she was minus one lead witness, or that the man in front of her was accused of subtracting her.

She eyed him closely. “What are you doing here, Connor?”

He stood still as stone for several heartbeats. When he finally did shrug, he looked anything but casual. “Would you believe me if I said I was in the neighborhood and decided to drop in for a visit?”

She found herself smiling at him. “Not a chance.”

“Okay, then. How about I say I wanted to talk to you.”

She worried her bottom lip between her teeth, trying not to notice the fresh, crisp smell of his leather jacket, or the way the snug black T-shirt she could see between the flaps hugged his abdomen to perfection. “I’d buy that.”

“Good,” he said, grinning. “Then I want to talk to you.”

Bronte nearly took a step back. Boy, when he grinned, he was devastating. She’d have to remember not to make him grin.

“So…let’s talk.”

She led the way back into the kitchen, the only room downstairs that still showed significant signs that someone lived there. She plopped the paper down on top of the others, then moved to close the curtains on the back door and the window. For good measure, she switched off the television as well.