The Night In Question. Harper Allen

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      “You couldn’t stop staring at me throughout the trial. I see you haven’t been able to break the habit.” Her voice held a thread of anger. “You must be attracted to dangerous women, Mr. Ross—or is it that girls-behind-bars fantasy that some men have?”

      “Get one thing very clear, Julia,” he said, leaning forward slightly. When she automatically moved away he reached over and grabbed both of her clasped hands in one of his, holding her there. “You’re not my fantasy. You’re a black widow spider, as far as I’m concerned—a cold-blooded murderer who killed the father of your child, the husband of your best friend and two other people you didn’t even know.”

      “Yeah, that’s right,” Julia said tightly. “I walked into prison that first day with quite a reputation to defend. You know how it is when you’re the new kid on the cell block.”

      “I’m sure you held your own.” He didn’t loosen his grip on her. “You’re the type who always lands on her feet. Your overturned conviction proved that.”

      “Too bad the court takes pesky little details like constitutional rights so seriously. Now let go of my hands. You’re hurting me.”

      Despite the lack of expression on her face, her voice had risen enough to attract attention, and Max released her fingers in reluctant frustration. What the hell had he expected? he asked himself. Some show of remorse? Some acknowledgement, however belated, of guilt?

      A part of him had never been able to believe that she was exactly what she appeared—devoid of any real emotion, unmoved by the lives she’d destroyed. He wasn’t naive enough to think that her all-too-brief incarceration would have worked any miracle of rehabilitation, but he’d held to the faint hope that her time in prison might have made her face up to what she’d done. He’d been a fool. Nothing touched Julia Tennant.

      Not even the loss of her child.

      He’d done what he’d come here to do, he thought heavily. He’d delivered the message, although from her reaction it hadn’t been necessary. Like a phoenix, Julia had risen from the funeral pyre of her old life and was ready to start a new one—unburdened by any inconvenient baggage from her past. He pushed his chair back, unwilling to spend even a moment longer with her, and then he stopped.

      “What’s that?” His gaze was on the back of her hand, and when she followed his glance her own wavered. Then she gave him a cold smile.

      “You don’t want to know, Ross. It might upset your preconceptions about me landing on my feet.” She held her hand up and studied the odd marks on the back of it, slowly turning it so that her palm faced outward at him.

      The same four red scars showed, a mirror image of the other side, but Max wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were steady and there was a tiny mocking hitch at the corner of her mouth, and all of a sudden he saw her coolness for what it was.

      Behind the mask was a woman just barely holding herself together. Julia Tennant had been through hell.

      Wrong tense. She was still there.

      He felt as if he’d just been kicked in the solar plexus. The stale air of the restaurant pressed in on him, making it hard to breathe, but he knew it wasn’t the haze of smoke drifting from a nearby table or the unpleasant odor of frying grease that was creating the suffocating miasma. The air around Julia was thick with despair. It was an almost palpable thing.

      “What was it—some kind of homemade weapon?” he asked, his throat dry and his voice a harsh rasp.

      “It was a fork, Max.” Her outspread fingers trembled, and she instantly stilled them. “They got the new girl in a corner one day, and they nailed my hand to a table with a fork. I guess it was an initiation rite or something.”

      She held her hand out a moment longer, in much the same pose as she might once have held it to admire the green fire of an emerald on her finger. Then she wrapped it around the coffee cup so that the wound wasn’t visible to him, drained the last of her coffee and set the cup back down on the table with an audible click.

      “I’m leaving now,” she said offhandedly. “I have to find a place to stay for tonight, and since I don’t have reservations at the Ritz I’d better start looking for a room. If you ever approach me again, Ross, I’m putting you in a world of pain that you’ll never crawl out of. Do you understand that?”

      The woman was threatening him. Compassion fled, and Max narrowed his gaze. “What are you planning, Julia—another gift-wrapped bomb?”

      “No. A gift-wrapped attempted rape charge,” she said, her tone as cold as his. “You come near me and I’ll have my blouse ripped so fast you won’t have time to pull your damn ID from your wallet before the cops come. The charge won’t stick, but that’s the kind of thing that stays on your personnel file. Think about it.”

      “And you think about this.” He’d passed the point where he could hide his anger and he knew it. “I’m never going to stop watching you. I’m making it my personal mission in life to ensure you don’t ever find her, Tennant, so keep that in mind if you get the urge to play mommy someday in the future and decide to go looking for her. She’s doing fine without you. She’s starting to get back to normal, and I won’t let you rip her world apart a second time.”

      “You—you’ve seen her?” Julia had already started to turn away. Now she froze. Slowly she turned back to face him, her shoulders rigidly set and what little color there’d been in her face ebbing away. “When did you see her? Is she all right? Has anything happened to her?”

      The questions tumbled from her bloodless lips too rapidly for him to answer, and the previously dull eyes blazed with sudden urgency. She looked down at him, and for a moment she seemed to be holding her breath.

      Then she let it out. One corner of her mouth lifted in a mocking grin, and she shrugged carelessly. Reaching into her windbreaker, she pulled out the pack of cigarettes, shook one free and tossed the pack on the table. From the front pocket of her worn jeans she extracted a box of wooden matches, and one-handedly she snapped a thumbnail against the head of a match and peered at him through the flaring flame.

      “Isn’t that what you wanted from me, Max?” There was a jeering note in the husky voice. She put the cigarette between her lips, raked back a limp strand of blond hair and brought the flame closer. “Isn’t that why you mentioned her—because you wanted to see if I would crack, just a little?”

      “You didn’t crack when you watched your husband’s plane go down. You didn’t crack on the stand.” Max ignored the tendril of smoke that curled down at him and kept his tone even. “I hear you didn’t crack in prison, Julia. No, I didn’t expect the mention of her would upset you. But tell me one thing—why can’t you bring yourself to say her name?”

      The shadow he thought he saw pass behind her eyes was gone so quickly that he realized it had to have been a distortion from the cigarette’s smoke. She was still holding the burning match in her right hand. With a deliberate movement she brought the fingers of her left to the flame, her gaze locked on his. Slowly she let her thumb and her index finger get closer, until he knew it had to be burning her. Then she pinched the flame out, her eyes still not leaving his face.

      “Willa,” she said flatly. “Her name’s Willa, and she used to be my daughter, before you people took her away from me. I can say it, Max. There’s just no reason to, since I’m never going to see her again.”

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