Beverly Bird - Risking It All

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.”