Break for Me
Authors: Shiloh Walker
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Suspense, #Contemporary Women, #General, #Contemporary
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Contents
Dedication
Thanks to all of my readers. You all make this so worthwhile. Thanks to my editor
Monique, for taking a chance on me. Thanks to Aemelia for the early feedback for the
series. And thank you so much to my family, for the love and support. You’re my world.
I thank God for you.
Chapter One
Sexy, arrogant son of a bitch.
Running her tongue across her teeth, she watched as Dean West entered the room. Of
course, Dean just didn’t simply
enter
a room. He had a way of strolling in, lazy movements and lazy looks, a lazy smile
like he was just in to stop and chat.
The first time she’d met him, that lazy demeanor, that slow, lazy voice, and those
slow, lazy smiles had caught her off guard. He’d taken over for the previous DA and
nobody had been exactly prepared for him. Brent Cummings, a pricey defense attorney
who had been brought in after Maria Bingham’s third DUI had landed her snotty ass
in jail, had looked right through him, even after Dean had settled into the seat across
from him and Maria.
That little meeting had ended with Maria all but sobbing against Brent’s shoulder
and her parents bellowing about a misuse of power.
Maria was into her second year in jail. Her parents still cussed Dean out any time
his name was brought up. Personally, Jensen didn’t know why they were pissed off at
him—Indiana’s laws were a minimum of one year in jail after the third DUI. She was
lucky she wasn’t doing the full ten. The judge could have ordered that, especially
after she’d plowed her parents’ pricey Benz into a playground. If it had been any
earlier in the day…?
Dean’s gaze cut her way and she had to fight not to clench her jaw. Normally, she
didn’t mind seeing him around here. Well, that wasn’t
entirely
honest. She minded. Quite a bit. He made her itchy, in all sorts of ways, but on
a professional level, Dean did a kick-ass job.
But today? Yeah. She wasn’t thrilled.
Lou Pruitt, scum of a special sort, was sitting in a cage and he’d claimed he wanted
to make a deal, could give up all sorts of names. But he’d only give up those names
if he could speak with the attorney who could make him a deal.
That had been hours ago.
Now Dean was back. Dean, with his slick suits, his beautiful smile, and that too-canny
brain. Today the suit he wore was black, all black and the suit flowed against a body
that was practically imprinted on her brain. Not for the reasons she’d
like
—the man kept showing up on the same path where she liked to run, dreads tied at the
nape of his neck, sweat gleaming along smooth, brown skin. Every damn time she saw
him, it was enough to jerk her normally passive libido out of hibernation and make
her want to jump him.
Right now, though, if her instincts served her right, she wasn’t going to like what
was getting ready to happen.
He came to a stop in front of them and nodded.
No smiles today, huh?
Frustration chewed at her as his sober eyes met hers.
“I’m here to speak with Mr. Pruitt,” he said.
“Why?”
* * *
You already know.
Dean’s mother hadn’t raised an idiot and he wisely kept those words behind his teeth.
He had a feeling Jensen was already fantasizing about relieving him of a few of those
teeth—not that she would. She was a straight cop, clean as they came and while she
might fantasize about punching him, she’d vent her fury on the punching bag they kept
in the break room/locker room.
She might pin his picture to it, though.
Just then, he didn’t blame her.
This entire thing left him ready to chew nails.
But he was going to concentrate on the end goal.
That was what had to matter.
And no matter what Lou thought, he wasn’t getting out of here with just a smack on
the wrist.
Jensen was too good at her job and she’d wrapped him up tight, all but signed, sealed,
and delivered.
It would have been a pleasure to put that son of a bitch through a trial, though.
Dean had to focus on the bigger picture, which really sucked, and not the immediate
pleasure of walking in there, telling Pruitt to kiss his ass, and then walking away.
In the end, this saved the taxpayers the cost of the trial, Lou would do time, maybe
get his act together and they could all focus on some of the bigger problems.
Lou was like a greasy hot dog grabbed from a gas station.
Dean had his mind set on a ten-course meal. Thanks to the information he’d already
conned out of the man, he knew just where to start looking.
But first, that fucking deal.
As he went over the right way to answer the woman in front of him, Chief Sorenson
came out of his office.
Fuck me
, Dean thought sourly.
“I need to speak with Pruitt.” He managed to drum up a professional smile, although
smiling and small talk were two things he didn’t feel like engaging in. Drug cases
pissed him the hell off. They were the main reason he’d left Lexington. He had to
deal with them here to some extent, but not quite like this and he needed to level
out.
But he couldn’t go pissing off the cops, either.
They were ready to hand him his ass, though.
It seemed the entire police force of Madison, Indiana was watching him as they led
him through the station.
Jensen, her eyes were all but boring into him.
Somehow, he didn’t think this was going to increase his chances of getting her to
go out with him.
But those odds hadn’t ever been all that good.
* * *
Arms crossed over her chest, she listened as Dean laid it down for the man sitting
across the table from him.
If she clenched her jaw any harder, she was going to break the enamel off her teeth.
She’d consider it worth it, because it was either clench her teeth, or slam her fist
into the window in front of her and if she did that, her boss, Chief Sorenson, a man
she admired a lot, would see the evidence of her slow-burning fuse.
She was going to explode, and she didn’t want it to be here.
“Understand me now,” Dean said, his voice slow and lazy, sexy as a hot summer night.
“You’re giving up your right to a trial. We’re giving you a good deal here, but you
go to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. This is it.”
“Why the fuck do I gotta go to jail?” Lou demanded. He’d already asked it twice.
Dean explained it again, his eyes steady, patient, his voice just as easy, like he
could do this all day.
As he finished, he held out his hands. “I did what I could, man. This is what we got.
It’s this, or you go to trial, and let me tell you, I don’t think you want that. You
do that, and you could be looking at a much longer stretch. You got that assault charge
from a few months ago, another one from two years back. A history of violence complicates
things now that we’re looking at drug charges on top of it. You were making meth.
Crystal meth. The state’s cracking down on that.”
“Shit. I beat the fuck out of a man who touched my wife.”
Jensen rubbed her ear. “Beat the fuck out of him with a tire iron.”
Sorenson hummed under his breath and continued to watch Dean.
“Be that as it may, you were convicted. Did a short stretch then, were lucky to get
out when you did. Now here we are.”
“Here we are,” Lou muttered, his gaze bouncing around the room, one knee jiggling
madly under the table. For all his nervous fidgeting, the man was focused, and he
was pissed. Abruptly, he leaned forward, glaring at the documents the DA had put in
front of him. “Fuck. Fine. But you better get them sons of bitches who landed me here.
Got it?”
They would be thorough. Dean was just that, thorough, one of the best DAs the little
county had ever seen. Sometimes she wondered why he worked this little town instead
of someplace bigger. She’d heard he left Lexington to come here, but she didn’t quite
understand why. Someplace like Louisville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati—they’d probably
love to have a man with a brain like his.
But he was here, getting ready to put a man guilty of manufacturing crystal meth behind
bars.
The problem was Lou wasn’t going away for very long.
He’d been making that shit when he had a kid in the house, just fifty feet away from
the old pole barn where his lab was, while his pregnant wife was blissfully unaware
as she hung up clothes in their backyard every day of the week.
He was getting one hell of a deal of a lifetime.
Because Dean had his eye on bigger fish.
“He’s going to do time,” Sorenson said, his voice soft. “Pruitt might yet get his
act together. His wife…”
Jensen closed her eyes.
“Steffie is leaving him. She was loading up the car and her son this morning. Moving
back to Marengo with her folks, and if I know anything about Steffie’s dad, Lou isn’t
going to try and mess with her unless she’s willing to take him back. It’s going to
force him to take a good hard look at things. He wasn’t a bad kid. He might change.”
“I don’t give a damn about him,” she said, turning her back on the interview. “I care
about the wife, the kid he endangered every day at that lab.”
“And the lab is shut down. In the end, we have to be satisfied with that. Plus, he’s
turning on several other boys here. We’re getting the bigger fish, Bell.”
Maybe that helped ease the burn in her gut. But not by much.
Not much at all.
* * *
Nobody wore attitude quite the way Jensen Bell did.
Some women wore their jewelry, their makeup, all of it as armor.
Jensen didn’t bother with any of that. She wore
attitude
.
In spades.
Dean suspected she had reason. One of only two female cops in the small town of Madison,
she put up with her share of shit. He’d seen it.
Being in the minority was something he could appreciate. He was far from the only
black man in the little southern Indiana town, but he was the only black DA on the
payroll. The only black cop in town was fifty-two, and just then, as Dean moved through
the station, Luther Gardiner shot him a look and then shook his head, like he wasn’t
too inclined to waste any words with him today.
They usually bullshitted for a good ten minutes.
Not today.
Too fucking bad.
He wasn’t going to waste his time on a small-time thug like Pruitt when he could bring
down the bigger guns.
But while he could easily brush off Luther’s dismissal, and every other damn cop in
the department, it wasn’t so easy when Jensen glanced at him, then
through
him as she continued to speak with the chief.
He debated on just heading on out. Wasn’t like he didn’t have more work than he knew
what to do with, and as he continued toward them, Jensen’s shoulders tensed, while
her spine went ramrod straight.
That attitude of hers shouldn’t be so appealing.
He understood the need for the attitude—he’d learned young to cover his, though. Cover
the attitude, cover the teeth, all until he had reason otherwise. Jensen had either
never learned to hide that attitude, or she just didn’t see the point and as he came
to a stop next to her, she all but snarled at him.
“Yes?”
He didn’t even have a chance to figure out what to say—a problem with her, because
looking into her eyes had a habit of leaving him temporarily dumbstruck. It only lasted
a second or two—his mother had a habit of teasing him that she’d know he was serious
about a woman when he found the one that made him shut his mouth for more than two
seconds, and that woman, apparently, was Jensen.
But those two seconds were two seconds too long because a man he thoroughly disliked
decided to make his presence known.
“You know, if it was
me
,” Detective Jeb Sims said, edging his way into the knot of people, one hand gripping
a cup of coffee while the other rested on the butt of his weapon. He constantly seemed
to be touching it. “I would have gone for the bigger problem anyway, Bell. Pruitt
is a pimple on society’s ass, but you shoulda known he wasn’t going to do much time.
It wasn’t a big bust or anything. Don’t go getting your panties in a twist.”
