Читать книгу Risking It All - Beverly Bird - Страница 10

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.