Lawyers In Love: In His Own Defense (10 page)

“I’d better be going,” he said, but it felt so good to lie in Krissy’s lap and enjoy the way she rubbed away the tension from his mind that Tony couldn’t make himself get up.

Her softly spoken invitation poured over him like molten honey. “You can stay if you want.”

Chapter Nine

“You know what’s going to happen if I do.”

Kristine did, at least in theory. She wanted to comfort and be comforted, to hide from the nasty realities of the world in this man’s arms. She needed to be close to him, as close as she could get, more than she feared falling in love when they had no future together.

“I know, Tony.”

When she stroked his cheek, he turned, nuzzling her palm. “Oh, God, Krissy,” he muttered, his hazel gaze meeting hers. “You’re too good. Too young and sweet. Honey, I don’t deserve you.”

“Tony, please.” She pressed a hand against the hard plane of his chest, let his heartbeat flow from him to her. “I know what I want.”

“I want you, too, Krissy. Too much to think about all the reasons I should go. You’ve got me, unless you change your mind and toss me out in the next few minutes.”

Kristine bent and kissed him. A long, slow, open-mouthed response. What he’d said he needed. What she wanted. For tonight and however long it lasted. No strings, no forever promises they would surely break.

She savored the sweet taste of Belgian chocolate and cool mint their waiter had brought with the bill for their dinner. Cherished the warm, sheltered feeling she got when he held her.

The sweet feeling of lethargy and sexual tension simmered rather than boiled this summer night, and the night promised its own kind of forever. The kind that wouldn’t end until the morning sun poured in on lovers who had shared the darkness. Sex and secrets that wouldn’t come out in the light of day.

“We’ve got all night, Krissy,” he told her when she lifted her head and studied his handsome face, her breath ragged. “Longer.”

A slow, soft rasp of his callused fingers across her lips echoed the promise in his words, the unspoken commitment that this thing between them went beyond lust. Beyond physical yearning. Kristine laid her head on Tony’s shoulder, rested one hand on his thigh. Savored the easy silence that settled between them.

“I want to see what the press has to say about the appeal judge having overturned Ezra’s conviction,” Tony said after a few minutes.

Reaching for the remote control on the cocktail table, Kristine flipped on the TV.

State Attorney Harper Wells filled the screen, blustering and smiling, glad-handing the voters as he kicked off his bid for re-election. He’d asked everybody in his office to show up at Lowry Park for the event. Kristine had begged off, figuring an evening with Tony would beat the hoopla of an old-fashioned political picnic where her presence wouldn’t have been noticed in the crowd.

She was right. There must have been a thousand people milling around, sipping sodas and gnawing on chicken legs. Mr. Wells apparently was just warming up to his subject, the way the noise level suddenly diminished. Kristine concentrated on the steady beat of Tony’s heart beneath her hand, the heat he generated as he stroked the length of her bare leg from ankle to thigh. She tuned out her boss’s political mumbo-jumbo for the vote-gathering hype it was.

“Son of a bitch!” Tony sat up and hit the volume button on the remote. “Self-serving, rotten bastard.”

Kristine heard the last of her boss’s comments about Tony’s having gotten that poor boy a new trial. “…Ezra Ruggles was guilty five years ago, and he’s just as guilty now. No matter what Tony Landry says, the boy’s a child molester. I intend to see he spends the rest of his unnatural life in prison.”

“Mr. Wells, how did you feel about Landry getting Manny Garcia off last month?” asked a reporter on the front row.

The state attorney cleared his throat and met the reporter’s gaze. “Well, sir, I’m looking into that. I’m not convinced there wasn’t tampering with that jury.”

“He knows better than that,” Kristine said, suddenly embarrassed that she worked for her daddy’s old friend Harper Wells.

Tony squeezed her hand. “Listen.”

Another reporter shot a question at Wells. “Why did you entrust Garcia’s prosecution to an attorney who had never tried a case before?”

“…one of the best young lawyers in my office. She had Garcia nailed dead to rights … showed Landry up… can’t understand why the jury voted to acquit him…”

Kristine could hardly believe the man’s deluded blustering. The nerve! Harper Wells had foisted the Garcia case off on Andi, who had dumped it on her. He had then refused to let her accept the plea bargain Tony’s associate had offered and insisted she take the case to trial. He had to have figured before she or Tony made opening statements that Garcia would be acquitted. Garcia hadn’t needed Tony’s expertise. The newest lawyer in the public defender’s office could have won him acquittal.

“Tony, what Mr. Wells just said isn’t true. He knew the evidence against Garcia was weak. Even I realized that. Damn it, the judge did all but call for a directed verdict of not guilty.”

Tony smiled as he silenced Wells with the remote, and the dimple on his cheek deepened. “I know. So does Harper. He’s just trying to make political hay. Can’t say I like his doing it at my expense, though. He’d better watch himself, making comments about me tampering with juries. That could get him a passel of trouble.”

“From Manny Garcia?”

“From Winston Roe. I wouldn’t hesitate to okay slapping Wells with a lawsuit if the civil liberties people in the firm think there’s a good chance of knocking him off his soapbox.”

Kristine shook her head. “Mr. Wells was a good friend of my dad’s. He’s the one who hired me. I’ve never worked with him on a case, though.” She paused, reaching up to brush her hand across Tony’s cheek.

“He was lying about the Garcia case. They didn’t give it to me because I’m so good. I got that case because my boss, Andi Young, knew how I feel about drug trafficking. She knew I’d take it to trial since that was what Mr. Wells wanted. She also knew the case was too weak to win. If it hadn’t been, she’d have jumped on it herself.”

“Don’t worry about it. You can’t help what your boss does, any more than I can keep all my clients on the straight and narrow.”

Kristine couldn’t have felt colder if Tony had upended a bucket of ice on her head. Some—a lot—of the people he defended
were
guilty. He bought a lifestyle most people only dreamed about with the blood of those guilty clients’ victims. “Some of your clients kill people, Tony. Yet you defend them. Mr. Wells confines his sins to lying and blustering.”

Tony caught her chin between his fingers and forced her to meet his gaze. “Are you rescinding your invitation, Krissy?”

She didn’t know. On the one hand, she wanted him. On the other, she wasn’t sure. “No,” she said, less decisively than she intended.

“I think you mean yes, Counselor. Think about us. Us, as in the two of us, tangled up in the sheets. Naked, as close to each other as two people can get. My cock buried in you so deep we can’t tell where I end and you begin. Decide whether you can stomach sleeping with a man who defends the kind of people you’re bound and determined to see locked up in jail.

“Make up your mind, honey, because once you cross that line, there will be no going back. I’m not looking for a night or two of fucking. I want a hell of a lot more from you than that. If you sleep with me, you’re mine. And I don’t give up what’s mine without a fight.”

He looked so fierce he frightened her. He’d tossed down the gauntlet, challenged her to pick it up, turn her back on everything but him and the passion that burned between them.

Could she? Did she dare?

“You’d better go,” she told him, her voice little more than a whisper in the charged silence. “Go, Tony, before I betray myself to have you.”

* * * * *

Just after closing time the following Wednesday afternoon, Andi and Kristine sat in Harper Wells’s office for the first time in over a year, being quizzed about the Manny Garcia trial.

Wells riddled Kristine with a steely gaze. “There was no chance Landry could have tampered with the jury?”

She glanced away from Andi, making herself look Wells in the eye. “No. It surprised me the judge didn’t direct an acquittal. The evidence was circumstantial, too weak to convict Garcia.”

“Word in the office has it that you went with Tony Landry to a Bar Association party. People say you two spent a good portion of the evening alone—aboard his boat if gossip can be believed. Your personal relationship with the defense counsel hasn’t colored your opinion, has it, Kristine?” The look on Wells’ face reminded Kristine of the way someone might grimace if he’d just bitten into a rotten oyster.

Relationship? What relationship? She’d tossed the opportunity for an affair with Tony out the window last weekend by sending him away. Never mind that she’d hardly slept since then for wanting him. “No, sir.”

“You might be interested in knowing Landry just won acquittal this morning for a client who was caught red-handed, selling cocaine to school kids like your sister. Like Helen.”

Kristine struggled to stay composed. Tony had convinced her many of the clients he represented were innocent of the crimes they stood accused of. And that he tried to plea-bargain most of the cases where he believed clients to be guilty. She’d believed him when he told her his real love was seeing justice served, helping innocent clients like Ezra Ruggles win freedom on appeal.

He’d made her question her beliefs and wonder if her goals weren’t off base. Tony had made her want him more than she hated dope dealers, need him more than the retribution she’d been seeking for eight long years.

She fought to keep her emotions under control, but when she left her boss’s office she was close to tears. “I’ve got to go,” she muttered, not meeting anyone’s gaze as she stumbled out of the office and onto the street.

For a long time she sat on a bench by the bus stop, too torn by conflicting wants and needs to move. Then she got in her car and headed for Harbour Island. Though Wells obviously disliked Tony, the man had no reason she could see to lie. And Tony had never claimed that all the clients he represented were without blame. Still, she owed Tony the chance to explain. She pulled into a parking space close to the boat dock.

He’d told her he lived here, in one of these high-rise condos developers had thought would attract up-and-coming professionals who worked in downtown Tampa. She should have asked which one.

Kristine gasped for breath when she stepped out of the car into the steamy air. Six o’clock in the evening, and still the sun bore down on her. When sand blew against her sweaty pantyhose, it stuck, making her itch in places she couldn’t scratch. Damn it, she’d never find him in this maze of high-dollar tenements.

She spied a pay phone over by the dock where boats bobbed on gentle waves. Ignoring the sand in her shoes, she hurried to it. She had to talk to Tony, though by this time she’d almost managed to convince herself he was as guilty as Wells had charged.

“Krissy!”

She set the receiver back on its cradle and looked toward the sound. Tony. Naked except for boxer-style swim trunks, he stood on the deck of his boat. He had the nerve to grin at her as she stomped down the wooden dock toward
Miss Trial
.

“You. You…shyster. Do you feel good, knowing you pay for this—and that black toy you drive—with the blood of children?”

Chapter Ten

If tears hadn’t been pooling in her gorgeous eyes, and if Kristine hadn’t looked so adorably disheveled standing on the dock yelling at him, Tony might have picked her up and dunked her in the bay to cool her off. Instead he reached up and grabbed her, setting her down on the deck but keeping a good hold on her. He didn’t let her go until he’d untied the boat, walked up to the cockpit, and started the engine.

He scanned the sky for signs of the thunderstorms he’d heard predictions of earlier, shook his head. Not a cloud, or any other indication the steamy, sunny weather was about to change.

“Here, Krissy. Calm down and tell me what’s upset you. We’re going for a little ride.” Maneuvering between the buoys, Tony headed for the channel that would take them into the deeper water of the open bay.

“Let me off this boat. Tony, I don’t want to be with you.”

“Really? Then why did you come looking for me?”

She opened her pretty mouth, snapped it shut, and scratched a spot just below her knee. If looks could have killed, Tony figured he’d be six feet under.

“Tony, I mean it.”

He grinned as he revved up the powerful inboard engine and held
Miss Trial
on course. “Go on, honey, get out of those hot sweaty clothes. You should find something you can wear down in the cabin.”

She squirmed, scratched again. Sand, he figured. It had a way of catching in whatever you were wearing and making you want to strip down.

“Where?”

Was it his imagination, or had Krissy begun to cool off? “You’ll find some shorts and T-shirts in the second drawer of the chest by the bed,” he yelled over the engine’s roar.

His clothes would be way too big for her, but at least she wouldn’t find any feminine garments since Gretchen had cleared her stuff out on her last visit two weeks earlier.