Heat Wave (22 page)

She was as loyal to them as they were to
her. She gave them everything she had. She reviewed grammar,
twentieth-century poetry, Shakespeare comedies. Her classes had
covered so much material, and she wanted her kids to retain it all.
She wanted them to march out of the building on the last day of
school, in love with the written word, the logic of language, the
satisfaction of characters triumphing over their challenges and
achieving resolutions that were fair and just, the appreciation of
stories and essays that helped them to make sense of the world
around them.

Throughout the day, the truth she’d
discovered in the video hummed like a white noise inside her head.
The truth that Caleb Solomon, a man she’d fallen in love with, was
going to knock himself to absolve a guilty man rattled like a much
louder white noise, a noise so white it was blinding. He was a
lawyer, after all. To him, “fair” and “just” weren’t as important
as winning.

Somehow, she survived the day. As her last
class began filing out, she called to Matt Colson as he sauntered
toward the door, all cute male hormones and attitude. “Matt? Can I
have a word with you?”

He flashed a grin at her but stepped out of
the path of his classmates as they streamed through the maze of
desks and out of the room. She noticed him winking at
someone—Rachel Stafford, her star in the senior honors class.
Rachel seemed to ignore his flirting gesture, but she hovered
outside the open door, apparently waiting for him.

Were they a couple? Brilliant, dazzling
Rachel, and beguiling but shallow Matt? Meredith allowed that he
was probably as smart as Rachel, but intellectually lazy. Not
worthy of the girl.

Still, he was cute. Meredith supposed that
when you were eighteen years old, cuteness was more important than
intellectual heft.

When the room was empty of everyone but Matt
and herself, she drew in a breath, squared her shoulders, and said,
“I saw the video.”

“What video?” he asked, exuding wide-eyed
innocence.

“The video of you dumping ice on my back at
the beach.”

“Oh,” he drawled.
“
That
video. I
hope you didn’t mind. It was just a punk, you know? A senior
prank.”

“Matt. I could be losing my job because of
that video.”

His smile vanished. He looked aghast. “Your
job?”

“Yes. As it is, I got a police summons. I’ve
been mortified. I’ve been ridiculed. Even if I’m allowed to teach
next year to finish out my contract, I probably will be denied
tenure because of that video.”

“Oh, shit.” He gazed out the window, at the
floor, at the door where Rachel stood, her eyes wide and her face
pale. If she was eavesdropping, Meredith didn’t care. All that
mattered was that Matt heard what she was telling him. “Look. I
mean—it was just a prank. The last few weeks of school, that’s what
seniors do. And I didn’t know your bathing suit was, you know,
gonna fall off of you.”

“But it did. And you must have had an ally
willing to record my mortification.”

“That was me,” Rachel said, reentering the
classroom, her head bowed.

Meredith swayed slightly, reeling from the
blow. Rachel? Rachel Stafford? Her best student?

“It was a dare,” Rachel explained. “When
you’re one of the smart kids, everyone assumes you’re a—a—”

“An ass-kisser,” Matt said, lacking Rachel’s
restraint. “There were a bunch of kids hanging out near the beach
that Sunday, and we saw you sunning yourself, and they dared
us.”

“We didn’t know your swim suit was
unfastened,” Rachel said, her voice choked. “We never in a million
years thought you’d get in trouble.”

“Well.” Meredith was pleased
her own voice emerged calmly. “I
am
in trouble.”

“What can we do to fix this?” Rachel asked.
Matt shot her a harsh look. Evidently, he didn’t feel the same
obligation she felt to make things right.

“Why don’t we all go to Principal Kezerian’s
office, and you can explain to him how this happened.”

 “
You don’t have to
come,” Rachel said, lifting her face and meeting Meredith’s gaze.
“It’s not your fault. It’s ours. We’ll tell him that. Right,
Matt?”

He sighed heavily. “Yeah.”

“We’ll tell him you’re a great teacher and
you deserve tenure. Because you are, and you do.”

Meredith eyed Matt, who nodded. “You’re
cool, Ms. Benoit. Kezerian would be an idiot to fire you.”

“He
is
an idiot,” Rachel pointed out.
“But we’ll make sure he understands that this is all our
fault.”

Meredith felt a little of her tension drain
away. “Do your best, guys,” she said. “Email me and let me know how
it goes.”

“If you give us your phone number, we could
call you,” Matt suggested.

“I’d rather you emailed. Write up a report.
Five paragraphs.”

That merited faint smiles from her two
students. She watched them leave the classroom, whispering. They
didn’t look happy, but they looked determined.

She sank into her chair, utterly drained.
Her crisis might be reaching a fair resolution. But her heart…

Her heart still ached, because while she’d
been living through this long, difficult day, Caleb had been
scheming to defend a guilty man. And she just didn’t know how she
could accept that.

She waited until the school had grown quiet
before finally leaving her classroom. She didn’t want to talk to
Henry. She certainly didn’t want to talk to Stuart. She just wanted
to go home and close her eyes, and pretend she hadn’t heard Caleb’s
phone call last night.

He’d left a message in her voice mail some
time during the day, but she hadn’t returned his call. She didn’t
know what to say to him. He was who he was, and she had no right to
demand that he change. She only wished she could love a man who
earned his living by fighting for the right of embezzlers to walk
free.

Crossing the faculty parking
lot, she saw him standing beside her Prius. Leaning against it,
actually, his jacket off, his tie loosened, his sleeves rolled up.
That seemed to be his uniform—a lawyer in a suit, but not
totally
in it. At least
not when he was roasting in the oppressive air of yet another
sweltering June day.

He smiled and straightened when he saw her,
and then his smile faded. “How did it go?” he asked. “Did Ed Nolan
come through for you?”

The asphalt beneath her feet felt spongy
from the heat as she walked slowly to her car. Seeing Caleb made
her want to kiss him, collapse in his arms, unburden herself to him
and have him reassure her that all was well. But she couldn’t. All
might be well with her career—she’d have to wait for a report from
Matt and Rachel to know for sure. But all was not well with her and
Caleb.

“Detective Nolan was able to get me access
to the video,” she said. The words emerged leaden, and she lacked
the energy to lift their heavy weight.

“And?”

“And I refused to let Stuart
remove me from my classroom. I taught all day. Maybe I’ll be able
to finish out the year. I confronted the miscreants, and they’re
confessing all and accepting the blame.”
Which is what the guilty
should
do,
she thought. Matt and Rachel wouldn’t be hiring someone like
Caleb to scrub their souls clean for them. They’d agreed to face up
to what they’d done, and to repair the damage—without the
assistance of a highly paid lawyer.

“That sounds good.” Caleb studied her as she
neared him, his eyes dark with concern. “So why aren’t you
happy?”

“I heard your phone call last night,” she
said.

He winced. “That’s supposed to be
confidential. Attorney-client privilege.” He shook his head. “I
guess a client jeopardizes that confidentiality when he phones his
lawyer in the middle of the night. He had to assume I might not be
alone. I hope you didn’t mention anything you heard to anyone
else.”

Was that all he cared about? Attorney-client
privilege? “The man is guilty, Caleb.”

“Guilty as sin,” he said with a nod.

“And yet you’re going to defend him with
everything you’ve got.”

“That’s my job.”

Indeed. That was his job. “He robbed this
town, Caleb. He robbed the retirement funds of town employees like
me. And you’re going to get him off.”

“Hey, I’m good, but I can’t perform
miracles,” Caleb joked. When Meredith didn’t share his grin, he
grew sober again. “I’m going to try to get the best outcome for him
that I can. It’s what I do. In America, everyone is entitled to a
good defense. Guilty or innocent, that’s the way our system of
justice works.”

“How can you sleep at night, knowing you’re
fighting to get a blood-sucking snake like him the best outcome?”
After last night, she knew damned well that he slept a lot better
than she did.

He opened his mouth and then shut it and
ruminated for a minute. “You ran naked on a public beach.”

Why was he bringing that up?
They were discussing the town manager. The embezzler. The criminal.
“I wasn’t
naked
,”
she argued, deeply peeved. “I was just—”

“Half naked,” he corrected himself. “Still,
against the law. Against a public decency ordinance. I got you
off.”

“I didn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t steal
anything.”

“And you weren’t facing jail time, honey.
You were facing a twenty-five dollar fine. But I got you off.”

It wasn’t the same, she wanted to shout. And
yet…it wasn’t all that different. She slumped, her last shreds of
energy draining from her. Caleb arched an arm around her, and
snuggling against him felt too good. Even though his shirt was damp
with sweat, even though his arm rested heavy and warm against her,
leaning on him felt heavenly. “Maybe the American system of justice
needs some tweaking,” she said.

“Be my guest,” he urged her. “Tweak away.
But in the meantime, this is the system we’ve got. You teach. I
defend. We listen to music. We make love.”

She sighed. “I always swore I’d never fall
in love with a lawyer.”

“After you finish overhauling the American
system of justice, you can fall out of love with me.”

She leaned back and stared at him. “Is that
what you want?”

“I don’t think you’re ever going to overhaul
the American system of justice. So I’m pretty safe.” He touched his
lips to hers, sweetly, tenderly. “I want to meet your family. We
can all sit around talking lawyer talk, and you can bristle and
resent us. And then I’ll take you off to bed and ravish you, and
all that resentment will disappear.”

“Under my father’s roof?” She smiled. “I
don’t think that will go over very well with my parents. They’re
proper southern gentlefolk.”

“Would they let me make love to you in their
house if we were married?”

She frowned. Was Caleb actually asking her
to marry him?

“I’m not a proper southern gentleman. But I
do understand that the law has standing and merits respect. If I
make it legal with you, your parents probably won’t mind my making
love with you anywhere I want.”

“Not on a public beach,” she warned.

“Fair enough.”

“Well, then.” She leaned toward him, and
they kissed again. “I guess this day is ending better than it
started out.”

“As long as you don’t succeed in reforming
the American justice system, we’re good.” He grinned, then grew
solemn. “I’m not going to fall out of love with you, Meredith. And
you aren’t going to fall out of love with me.”

“You’re awfully sure of yourself.”

“Could it be the devil in
me?” he asked, and she recognized the words.
Heat Wave.

“This is the way love’s supposed to be,” she
quoted the song as it spun through her mind. And then he kissed
her, and she felt that love, their love, burning in her heart.

###

 
Judith Arnold is the
award-winning, bestselling author of more than ninety published
novels. A New York native, she currently lives in New England,
where she indulges in her passions for jogging, dark chocolate,
good music, good wine and good books. She is married and the mother
of two sons.

For more information about
Judith, or to contact her, please visit her
website
. Feel free to check
out her
other
books
and sign up for her
newsletter
.

If you
enjoyed
Heat Wave,
I hope you will consider posting a review of it online. Thank
you!

***

Here’s a peek
at
Moondance
, the next book
in the Magic Jukebox series:

Chapter One

If Talia had known Cory would be there, she
would have worn something nicer.

Actually, no. If she’d know he would be
there, she wouldn’t have come at all.

Blindsided by her own daughter. Was it too
late to put the kid up for adoption? Probably. Wendy was about to
graduate from high school. She had a driver’s license. She had a
boyfriend. She had a dorm room waiting for her at Tufts University.
No one was going to adopt her with those staggering tuition bills
hanging over her head.

Sighing, Talia entered Punjab Palace, a cozy
little Indian restaurant with unrolled saris hanging on the walls
and whiny sitar music blasting from speakers in the ceiling. The
room smelled of curry and cardamom, and about half the tables were
filled. One of them held Wendy, her boyfriend Anthony…and Cory.