Risking It All. Beverly Bird

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ