Читать книгу Risking It All - Beverly Bird - Страница 9

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.