Risking It All

He put the glass down on the table. “You were doing fine up until that ah.”

“What ah?” She pressed her spine to the back of the very well upholstered chair.

“As in…ah, framing you.”

“You said someone was framing you.”

“And—” He broke off to swig more whiskey. “You said ah.”

“What’s your point?”

“You don’t believe me. That ah was a classic measure of salt.”

That was an expression she knew. Grace clenched her jaw until it hurt. “My belief or lack thereof is not the issue here.”

“Of course it is. It’s the crux of the whole thing. It’s what stands between me keeping you or firing you.”

“We’ve been through all that.”

He grinned again. This time, she thought, it was the look of a wolf scenting prey. “No, honey, we haven’t.”

The tension in her jaw was giving her a headache. A worse headache, she amended. “Stop calling me that.”

“What you need to relax you is some Jameson’s,” he decided.

Arguing with him would get her nowhere. She already knew that. Grace told herself that that was why she clamped her jaw shut again and let him get up from the table to make her a drink. His voice came back to her from the bar, warm as smoke now.

“If you don’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills, the cola probably won’t throw you off too much,” he commented.

“I never said I didn’t know the difference between Jameson’s and Bushmills.”

“This may come as a shock to you—lady—but you’re as transparent as a hooker’s negligee.”

It was her curse, Grace thought. She’d escaped Maruja to come to America and her cross to bear for that was going to be a lifetime of weird analogies—first Jenny’s and now this man’s. The difference was that Jenny’s made a kind of sweet, warped sense, and McKenna’s were…heated.

She wasn’t sure what bothered her most—that heated reference or the fact that he thought she was transparent. Grace went for the latter and set about contradicting it.

“You see what I want you to see,” she told him.

He brought her the drink. Grace took the glass and sipped, choking as the fire went down.

“Whoa,” McKenna said.

Grace bore down hard on her breath. “I like Jameson’s.”

He gave that laugh again.

She couldn’t do this, Grace thought desperately. She could handle the crime he was accused of. She could handle his total disrespect for the situation he was in, and she could even handle his innuendos if she had to. But she could not handle that whiskey-rich laugh.

“You’re going to say ‘stop it’ again, aren’t you?” He sat and watched her. He was amused. “Or ‘shut up.’”

“It never occurred to me.” Grace took more whiskey.

“What is it about me that bothers you so much?”

“Wait. Hold on. Let me find my list.” She bit her tongue as soon as she said it, because it made him laugh again. “Please, I just want to do my job here and go home.”

He relaxed in his chair. “Let’s get back to the discussion of whether or not you even have a job—with me, that is.”

Every time he said that, it made her blood chill. Yes, Grace thought, yes, she had to fix that little issue right off the bat. “Are you telling me the truth?” she asked. “About being framed?”

“My ma would kick my butt for lying.”

“I’ve never met your mother, so I’ll settle for a simple yes or no here.”

“Then yes. I am telling the truth.” This time, when he got up, he brought the whole pint of Jameson’s back to the table, along with another bottle of cola. He topped his glass off with both of them. “But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that you don’t believe me.”

Grace sat back in her chair and gave him a level look. “Do you believe it?”

He frowned. “What kind of question is that?”

“Answer it.”

“Okay, sure, I believe I’m being framed. I am being framed.”

“Good. Fine.” She sat forward again and began tapping on the keyboard, opening a file for her McKenna notes. “Then I’m your lawyer. Let’s put that aside now and tell me why someone would frame you.”

“Clarify why we’re putting the issue of my representation aside.”

“Because you believe you’re innocent. You’d therefore want the best representation money can buy in order to prove it.”

“And that’s you?”

“Gosh. I just knew you weren’t stupid.”

“You’re a rookie.”

“I work for Russell and Lutz. Nobody gets hired by Russell and Lutz unless they’re ace.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then slowly he nodded. He gave her the point. If he was innocent, he was going to need the best representation money could buy, and that was exactly what he had unless he canned her or asked for someone else in the firm, and he didn’t have five-hundred-and-up an hour to spend on that.

“Let me start by telling you why someone would frame me,” he said finally. Then he tilted his head to the side and studied her. “Maybe I’m just a sucker for a pretty face.”

He’d pulled her right in, Grace realized. Her whole body stiffened in reaction. She’d thought he was finally ready and willing to talk to her. Instead he was playing games again.

She slapped her laptop shut and stood. “Enjoy your three squares. I hear the baloney sandwiches are great at the penitentiary.”

“Was it something I said?” he asked.

Grace headed for the door. “I’m not going to beg you to let me save your sorry backside.”

“Now, now. No disparaging of body parts. I’ve been very complimentary of yours.”

She felt her blood pressure spike. “So I’m ungrateful, too.”

He nodded. “And prickly.”

“You said argumentative earlier.” This was the craziest conversation she’d ever had. Why was she discussing anything with him? She’d had every intention of sailing out the door, but somehow she’d stalled.

Of course, Lutz was on the other side of that door, somewhere in Philadelphia. If she left here, sooner or later she’d have to face him and tell him that she had walked out on McKenna. She had a mental image of dollar bills fluttering away on the wind. Grace’s fingers tightened on her laptop handle.

“I am a sucker for a pretty face,” McKenna said, feigning indignation.

“Oh, yes. I can tell. You’ve been jumping through hoops to do my bidding since I met you.”

“I wasn’t talking about your face.”

It took the wind right out of her. Grace frowned as she turned back to him. “My face is pretty.”

“Damned tootin’.”

Damned what? “What kind of expression is that?” One she’d apparently missed in her pursuit of quirky Americanisms, she thought.

He was looking at her oddly. She’d just come unconscionably close to doing something she never did, Grace realized. She’d almost revealed her remaining ignorance of a few scant aspects of this incredible United States of America.

She’d lost her accent. She had never completely lost her befuddlement.

Grace went back to the table slowly. “Whose face were you talking about?”

“Katherine Cross.”

“And she has what to do with this?”

“I’m not completely sure.” He frowned down into his whiskey and cola. “You know, she might actually be better-looking than you are. Although Kat is blond, so that would kind of be like comparing apples to oranges, wouldn’t it?”

Grace sat again. She told herself she did it because her legs were about to fold. Confusion did that to her. “I don’t want to talk about fruit. I want to talk about your problem.”

“I thought you quit.”

No one should have eyes that perfectly green, Grace thought when he looked up again. She didn’t want to think about his eyes, but they were trained on her hard and she couldn’t quite escape them. “You’re going to fire me, so what difference does it make?”

“I thought we already decided that I can’t do better than Russell and Lutz.”

“Dan has other attorneys.”

“But are they either apples or oranges?”

That was when it hit her, when she finally understood.

“You’re scared, aren’t you?”

His sudden frown etched his forehead. “That word’s not in the macho dictionary.”

“That’s why you’re doing this,” she persisted.

“Doing what?”

“Dancing around the subject. You won’t address it. Every time I try to get you to talk about it, you go off on a tangent.”

“You’re a pretty interesting tangent, Ms.”

“There!” Grace slapped the table with the palm of her hand and launched to her feet. “See? You just did it.”

He held his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay. If you want me to be scared, I’m scared.”

“Stop it! They could put you away for upward of fifteen years for this!” Her voice ricocheted around the elegant room. Grace flinched. “What do I care?” she said. “It won’t be me eating baloney sandwiches.” This time, when she grabbed her laptop, she made it all the way to the door.

“Wait,” he said quietly. “All right. I’m scared. I guess I have reason to be.”

It almost melted her knees. And that made no sense. He was a criminal. Grace looked back at him. “Damned tootin’.”

He let his laugh roll. Grace braced herself for the low, sexy rumble of it this time. How could a man accused of extortion sound so happy, she wondered, so good?

“You’d have to know my ma,” he said finally, sobering again.

“I still haven’t figured out how Katherine Cross figures into this. Can I just deal with one woman at a time?”

“Kat may or may not be framing me, but my mother is sure as hell going to kick that body part of mine you were calling sorry a little while ago, and she’s going to do it all the way back to Ireland when she hears about this. What are the odds that you can dispose of this little problem before she finds out?”

Grace felt her jaw sag. Who was this guy? “You’re serious? You’re worried about your mother?”

“Hey, I’m Irish.”

“You mentioned that part.” But she didn’t understand the connection. “So?”

“Finola rules the roost.”

“Finola being…”

“Ma.”

She was having a very hard time equating a felon with a man cowed by Ma, but Grace returned to the table yet again and answered him. “Slim to none. Maybe slim to half-none. It will be weeks before we even get a preliminary hearing. Besides, if you don’t talk to me now, right now, you’re going to jail tomorrow and that might be hard to hide from her. I need something to work with just for a bail hearing.”

She was braced for more of his wit, more of his clever shenanigans, but this time his eyes didn’t change. They stayed dark green, the green of the sea before a storm. “Okay,” he said finally, “open your laptop again.”

“Ask me nicely,” she quipped, repeating what he had said at the jail.

Why did she do that? Grace asked herself as soon as the words were out. Why did she keep provoking him into behaving exactly the way she didn’t want him to behave? She did it, she realized, because nobody had ever laughed at things she said. Ever. She was steady, strong, cynical. Sometimes her tongue could cut glass and sometimes she was insightful. She was smart. But she wasn’t funny.

Grace sat a little unsteadily while he laughed, and opened the computer again. Then she glanced deliberately at her watch. “A tired attorney is not an effective attorney. Start spilling so I can still get some sleep tonight.”

“About Kat?”

“I’m assuming that she has some connection to all this since you made a point of mentioning her.” Grace poised her fingers over the keys to type down everything he said. Then she’d go home and put it into some kind of readable, report order.

“Maybe leave out her looks this time,” she added. Who was the woman anyway? she wondered. Venus?

“Tough to do.”

“Try harder.”

Well, Aidan thought, it looked like he had just about run out of evasive tactics. He took another mouthful of whiskey and cola and this time it washed around in his gut like oil.

“She…changed,” he said finally. But that made it sound black-and-white, which it definitely had not been. “Gradually. I mean, it wasn’t like I woke up one morning and she’d suddenly grown horns, nothing like that. It was…stealthy. That was why it was so easy for me to ignore it for a while.” They were the same words he’d given to the Internal Affairs officer, he realized, then to the D.A., then to the jury. They didn’t taste any better the fourth time around.

Her fingers started clicking on the keyboard. “Am I to understand this Kat…Katherine…was the partner you mentioned earlier at the restaurant?”

“Right. First she started to shake me occasionally—take calls without me.”

“That’s unusual.”

It wasn’t a question, he thought, but then, she practiced criminal law. It didn’t take a month to get a handle on the detectives’ routines. “A cop doesn’t want to be wandering around some of this city’s streets alone without backup.”

That got a quick nod out of her. When she didn’t look up from the computer screen, Aidan cleared his throat and went on. Suddenly he felt parched, hoarse. “There was that, all her mysterious disappearances and her lame excuses for them. Then, out of the blue, she started having money to burn. She was always offering to buy lunch, dinner, whatever. And no more soggy, premade, convenience-store sandwiches, either. All of a sudden we were going top of the line. I knew what she earned and it sure as hell didn’t equate to some of the things she was buying. Finally, when she tried to blow me off one day and head out without me again, I was curious enough to tail her.”

Aidan fell silent. The next part, he thought, was harder to tell. “She went to a restaurant on Filbert. She met with a man named Charlie Eagan.”

Grace stopped typing. She stared at him. “He’s the new Mafia don. Lou O’Bannon died a few years back and Eagan took over when another successor was killed.” She picked her glass up quickly, then put it down again without drinking.

Was she starting to believe him? Hard to tell, Aidan decided. “I dug a little deeper then. I got Kat’s bank records and found some regular, sizable deposits. I followed her again and took pictures of her consorting with the element, with guys named Liam Bradstoe and Bonnie Joe. I confronted her with them. I gave her every chance to get out. I told her I’d burn them if she’d only just stop.”

“Ah.”

Aidan felt his eyes narrow hard enough and suddenly enough that pain creased his forehead. “You just did it again.”

“What?” She looked startled.

“That ah business.”

“I was considering a response!”

“If it takes you that much effort, maybe I do need another lawyer.”

This time, when she grabbed her glass, she actually drank. He watched her swallow with a gulp and give another little cough. “You’re trying to tell me that this…this Kat, Katherine, your partner, was guilty of the same thing you are now coincidentally charged with?”

“No. I’m not trying. I am telling you. Do you want to hear the rest of this or not?”

“Of course. Go on.”

“When I knew I couldn’t save her—that she didn’t want to be saved—I turned her in to Internal Affairs.”

“Ah.” She started typing again. This time, Aidan thought the ah was deliberate, so he ignored it.

“They investigated her themselves and ultimately the D.A. charged her. I testified at her trial.”

“So you think this framing business is her doing? Revenge?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. No.”

Grace looked up at him. He saw the frown in her eyes though her face remained smooth and flawless. And he knew what she was thinking. Temper flared in him and it was real this time, as blistering as when the cops had come to the basketball court. “Say it.” He watched her face pale a little as he threw out the words. “You’re thinking that my explanation for my innocence should be smoother than that.”

“I didn’t say—”

“No, honey, you don’t say anything. You just ‘ah’ and frown.”

“I’m not frowning.”

“Try this on for size,” he persisted. “If I was making this up, if I was just covering that body part that my mother is going to kick, then I’d sure as hell have ironed out my story a little more and be able to point to who’s framing me. Damn it!” He punched the table and stood. His fingers were tunneling through his own hair before he realized he was doing it.

“Okay, you’re innocent because you didn’t think this through,” she said.

“Don’t push me.” The warning was quiet, dangerous.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice didn’t crack. It was cool and inflectionless. And damn it, that was tough to do with a man like him when he was angry. Aidan looked back at her.

She was sitting very straight, seemingly calm. But her hands were nowhere near the keyboard now. They were both clamped around her glass. She raised the drink to her mouth and sipped like she didn’t want it but knew she needed it.

“Kat could be getting even with me for turning her in,” he said finally, more calmly. “But I think it’s more likely that Eagan and his henchmen are behind all this.” Did he? Or did he just not want to believe—was he just incapable of believing—that Kat would do this to him?

“So you think it’s the mob instead.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he heard himself explaining to Ms. Lawyer why he had done it, why he had dug into Kat’s activities.

“I had to know why it had happened. I had to know for my own sanity. So I did my job. I investigated, bouncing from what little I had been able to glean on Kat’s activities, and I came up with a theory. And what I think is that Rafe Montiel—” He broke off when he heard her begin typing furiously again.

“What? What did I just say to make you start hitting the keys again just then?”

“You gave me another name.”

“Rafe Montiel is a P.P.D. detective.”

“Oh.” She stopped typing.

“Rafe Montiel is the department’s mob expert. He investigated Phil McGaffney’s death—O’Bannon’s heir-apparent before Eagan.”

“He wouldn’t be doing this to you?”

Then he understood. “You think I’m throwing in every name I can latch on to in order to save my skin?” In that moment, he couldn’t remember why he’d thought he’d liked her. Give the woman credit, Aidan thought, for raising more emotion in him than anyone since…well, Katharine.

Aidan went back to the table. He laid his palms carefully on the wood and leaned closer to her. Intimidating her…or trying to. But this time she didn’t recoil. She just held her breath again.

He was damned if he was going to admire her backbone. And double damned if he’d wonder about that no-breathing thing again.

“All I was going to say is that while Rafe has done a hell of a job dismantling a portion of the Irish mob, he hasn’t taken it down all the way. It’s alive. It’s thriving. And now I have reason to believe that it’s involving the Philadelphia Police Department.”

He watched her eyes flare. There’d been rumors of that sort of thing for a while now, he thought, so she’d be wondering if he was using those rumors toward his own ends or if he was substantiating them. Aidan grabbed the last of the pint of Jameson’s from the table. He decided it was better at the moment to put some space between them so he paced back into the center of the room to swig from the bottle.

“Start typing…lady.”

“Fine,” she said finally. “Since you didn’t call me honey or dear.”

“I’m saving those for when I want to get the most rise out of you.”

Did she snort? Women with hair like that and legs like that didn’t snort, he thought, looking back quickly. He watched her pause in her typing to run a delicate finger over her upper lip.

She’d snorted. Damned if he didn’t almost grin.

“You were saying?” she murmured.

“Through my investigation of Kat, I’m pretty convinced that the rumors of corruption are true. I think Eagan and his guys are laundering money through various Philadelphia pubs. They use them as locations for after-hours meetings and as a cover for other illegal enterprises.”

“Such as?”

He shrugged. “Prostitution. Drugs. Probably more highbrow crimes, too.”

“Like a hotel charging a woman for liquor she hasn’t consumed yet?”

She caught him off guard with that one. His bark of laughter startled even him. “That really has you bugged, doesn’t it?”

“Is there any left?”

“Jameson’s? No.” He looked at the empty bottle in his hand, then he thought maybe the little she’d drunk so far had loosened her up some. “Want more? We could order up from the bar.”

“They’d probably charge as much for it as my law school tuition. No, I’m almost done here.”

“Lady, we haven’t even gotten started yet.”

She cast him a surprised look. “There’s more?”

“Oh, yeah. What Katherine was doing for Eagan.”

She went still. “What?”

“She—and other officers, I imagine—have been taking a nice stipend from the mob to look the other way and leave those pubs alone. They’re protecting them from good cops.”

He watched her face change. He knew what she was thinking. If he was right and if he was on the up-and-up, what he had just handed her would make her name gold in the city of Philadelphia if she could prove it. And if he was lying to her and she ran with it anyway, it would make her a fool.

She needed to talk to Katherine Cross, Grace decided. Not that she didn’t believe her client but…well, he was her client. If he were scrupulously honest, he wouldn’t have needed to hire her in the first place. “Where is Katherine?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

That was convenient, Grace thought. She choked on another ah. “So she’s not in the penitentiary?”

“She struck a deal with the D.A. and got probation.”

“What kind of a deal?”

“I don’t know the details. I never wanted to know.”

Grace chose her next words carefully. “It could be that she rolled over on other people who are involved.”

He was silent. When she finally looked at him again, there was something stark in his eyes. Grace shook her head a little, confused. He’d joked his way right out of that jail and now he was stricken by the possibility that his partner had coughed up his name in exchange for leniency?

“Or her cronies pulled some strings for her,” he said finally.

“You’re saying that this corruption reaches past the police department and all the way into our court system?”

“I have no idea. I’m just throwing it out there.”

“Why is it so hard for you to swallow that she might have ratted you out?”

He crossed the room again, coming back at her fast. This time Grace flinched in spite of herself. He put a hand on each arm of her chair and leaned into her.

“Back off,” she whispered. She wondered if he heard the quaver in her voice.

“We’ve got one little bit of unfinished business here.”

“Finish it on the other side of the room.”

“Give me one answer here, lady. Am I innocent or guilty?”

“That’s not germane—” She broke off suddenly when he moved one of his hands to cup her chin. He held her face still when she tried to look away. Touching her again.

Grace felt her pulse begin ratcheting. The man was out of control. “You don’t need an assault charge right now on top of everything else,” she whispered.

“Who am I assaulting?”

Oh, God help her, his voice was like smoke again. “Me.”

“You think this is assault?”

“Yes. You’re touching me.”

“Am I hurting you?”

Yes. He was scaring the hell out of her. She was scaring the hell out of her. “No. But you’re doing it against my will.” She was finally able to move. Adrenaline spurted into her, hot and acidic. Grace smacked his hand away.

“Temper, temper,” he murmured, stepping back again. “Am I innocent or guilty?”

“I just told you, that isn’t—”

“Your representation of me depends on your answer, Violet Eyes.”

She didn’t like to be touched, she didn’t like surprises, and Grace hated being backed into corners. “I don’t like Violet Eyes, either.”

Blessedly, he let the issue drop. “Kat couldn’t have ratted me out for one simple reason, Counselor.”