Smooth-Talking Texan

“And when did this happen?”

“Day before yesterday.”

“So you’ve been here ever since? Were you arraigned? Taken into court for a hearing?”

He shook his head. “I ain’t been nowhere but my cell.”

“What did he tell you he was charging you with?”

“I don’t know. MIP, I guess. He said he was going to let me think about it and then we’d talk some more.” His lip curled expressively. “Trying to scare me.”

“Did he hit you?” Lisa asked. “Hurt you in any way? Threaten you with bodily harm?”

The teenager looked at her in faint surprise. “Nah. He’s not like that. He’s okay, most of the time.” He paused, then added, “He’s just…you know, playing his game. And I’m playing mine.”

Lisa sighed. This was not the first time she had encountered this attitude of being locked with the police in some sort of elaborate game, the rules and movements of which were known to her clients and the cops. Benny had his game face on, the blank mask that withheld emotions, giving nothing away. She had seen it on a hundred faces of young men, black, white, and Latino, when she had worked at the Dallas Public Defenders office the last summer of law school.

“You know, Benny, this is a game where he holds most of the cards,” she pointed out. “The best thing for you to do is not play. Just clam up and call for your attorney next time. Will you do that? Will you call me?”

He nodded. “You gonna get me out of here?”

“Yes. When we get through here, I’ll have a talk with the sheriff. He knows he doesn’t have enough to hold you here. And if he refuses to release you, then I’ll get a writ and go to court.”

Lisa stood up, picking up the pad on which she had taken a few notes and sticking it back into her briefcase. She shook Benny’s hand and went to the door. The deputy opened it and escorted her through the set of locked doors back into the courthouse.

She walked purposefully up the stairs and though the halls, getting lost once, but finding her way back to the wide central hall of the main part of the courthouse. She wondered if the sheriff had led her the most confusing way on purpose.

Her heels clacked briskly on the old granite floors as she headed toward the sheriff’s office. She was sure that everyone along the corridor would know that she was coming. She turned into the large outer office, where the secretary and two deputies were at their desks, seemingly busy about tasks, but she could feel their sideways glances as she marched through and into the inner office of the sheriff, not pausing or even glancing at his secretary for permission.

Mindful of the listening ears outside, she closed the door behind her. She didn’t want the sheriff’s employees to hear what she had to say to him—not out of any concern about embarrassing the sheriff, but because she was well aware that the knowledge that his people were listening would make it harder for the sheriff to back down and might result in his refusing to release Benny simply because of the loss of face.

Quinn Sutton rose from his seat behind the desk. Lisa was reminded all over again of how tall and overwhelmingly masculine the sheriff was. She quelled the involuntary response of her own body to that masculinity.

“Ms. Mendoza.” Sutton smiled in that cocky way that she found both profoundly irritating and annoyingly charming. “Have a seat.” He gestured toward the chair in front of his desk.

“This won’t take long.” Lisa was not about to let her guard down around this man, even to the extent of relaxing enough to sit. “I just came here to tell you that I want my client released immediately. You know, and I know, that you arrested him on the flimsiest of pretexts and brought him down here, where you have been holding him without arraignment for two days now.”

“Well, yesterday was Sunday,” he pointed out, and amusement lit his mahogany-brown eyes.

Lisa’s hand clenched tighter around the handle of her briefcase. “Yes, and today was Monday, and you still didn’t arraign him. You may find it amusing to hold a young man without reason for the weekend in the county jail, but I can assure you that I do not. First you stop him, no doubt doing a little racial profiling…then—”

Quinn grimaced. “Oh, come on, don’t go throwing around your big-city buzzwords in here. There was no racial profiling going on.”

“Then,” Lisa plowed ahead, ignoring his words, “you harass him, even though he had done nothing except have a broken taillight, making him get out of the car. You find an empty beer can in his car, which you had no right to search—”

“I didn’t search,” Quinn responded tightly. “It was in plain view on the floor. And it wasn’t empty.”

“Oh, right,” Lisa replied sarcastically. “It had, what, maybe a teaspoon of liquid in it? On the basis of that, you hauled him down to the jail. When was the last time you took a kid to jail for an MIP instead of just writing him a citation?”

“Last weekend,” he responded, crossing his arms across his chest. “This isn’t the big city, Miss Mendoza, and I take underage drinking seriously. My deputies and I don’t write a drunken teenager a citation and turn him loose on the road. I find it’s pretty effective with an MIP or DUI to have them come down to the jail and spend a while waiting for their parents to pick them up.”

Lisa hesitated, momentarily nonplussed by his response, then picked up on his last statement. “Benny Hernandez has been here quite a bit longer than a ‘while.’ Why weren’t his parents called to come pick him up?”

“Because his father skipped out before Benny was born, his mother’s in San Antonio living with her new boyfriend and his stepfather’s in prison in Huntsville.”

“Oh, I see. That makes Benny automatically a criminal, right? He’s got a crummy homelife, so the place for him is jail? His family is bad, so he is, too?” Lisa’s eyes snapped, and her body was stiff with anger.

Quinn Sutton’s eyes lit with an answering anger. He was also aware that the emotion in Lisa Mendoza’s face had stirred a primitive desire in him that was as strong as his anger. That fact irritated him even more.

“No, Ms. Mendoza,” he said, his voice clipped and precise. “As a matter of fact, most of the people in Benny’s family aren’t bad at all. His mother just has the world’s worst choice in men. One of her brothers, his uncle Pablo, has been in and out of jail most of his life, but the other two uncles are as honest and hardworking as anybody in Angel Eye. His grandmother raised Benny most of his life, on and off, and they don’t come any better than Lydia Fuentes. She’s the one who wanted me to haul him in!”

Lisa looked at him with great scorn. “So you’re saying that you arrested Benny and stuck him in jail for two days as a favor to his grandmother?”

“Well…sort of.”

Lisa simply gazed at him, eyebrows raised in disbelief. Quinn could feel a flush rising in his cheeks. He went on hastily. “This is a small town, Ms. Mendoza. We do things differently here.”

“I should say so if you arrest people and stick them in jail because their grandmother’s mad at them!”

“That’s not the way—”

“Look! I don’t care what way you do things here! And don’t try to con me with some lame story about his grandmother wanting you to arrest him. The fact is that you arrested Benny Hernandez without just cause, and you’ve been holding him without due process. If you persist in detaining him, I will obtain a writ of habeas corpus tomorrow to get him out, and then you and this county are going to be slapped with a big lawsuit for false imprisonment!”

Lisa stabbed the air with her forefinger as she talked, the force of her fury carrying her closer and closer to the sheriff until she was almost touching him with her punctuating finger. Quinn thought about wrapping his hand around her far smaller one and jerking her up against him, then silencing that berating voice with his own mouth.

That would be, he reminded himself, a good way to get his face slapped. Of course, it might be worth it….

They stared into each other’s face for a moment, poised on the edge. Lisa could see the red light burning in Quinn’s brown eyes, feel the heat of his body only inches away from her, and something in her wanted to lean forward that last little bit, to precipitate some final explosion between them.

His jaw tightened, and he stepped carefully around her, going to the door and opening. “Padilla!” he barked. “Go down and release Hernandez. His attorney is taking him home.”

Chapter 2

It was Deputy Padilla this time who escorted Lisa back to the locked double doors leading into the county jail. He spoke with the deputy inside, and a few minutes later, Jerry brought Benny Hernandez through the double doors, dressed this time in the usual jeans and T-shirt of a teenaged boy.

“Hey, you did it.” He smiled, looking a little surprised.

“Can I give you a ride home?” Lisa didn’t know whether the sheriff had literally meant that she would take him home. But in any case, she was a little curious to meet the young man’s grandmother—could the sheriff had been serious when he said the woman had asked him to lock up her grandson?—and she couldn’t imagine any place in this little town that would take her too far out of her way.

She drove through Angel Eye, following Benny’s direction. The courthouse sat in the courthouse square typical of little Texas towns. A few stores lined the other sides of the street around it. It was not thriving, but neither did it look as abandoned as some little towns she had driven through. Past the stores, the streets were lined with trees, obviously planted and nurtured by the people who had lived there in the past, for outside of town, the landscape boasted little more than bushes of varying heights, yucca, and prickly pear cactus.

It was actually a rather pleasant-looking little town, Lisa thought, though she could not imagine what it must be like to grow up here. She had noticed when she drove into town that the population was just over sixteen hundred people, a mind-boggling concept to someone who had grown up in Dallas. The number of students attending her high school had been more than lived in this entire town. She had thought Hammond was small, but Angel Eye made it seem a positive metropolis.

She had never dreamed that she would wind up here. A scholarship she had applied for and received in law school had stipulated that she must spend the first year after she graduated doing legal aid work at one of the Hispanic organization’s legal aid clinics. She had agreed readily to the terms, for she had already intended to use her law degree to help needy Hispanics. However, she had simply assumed that the work would be done in some large city, such as Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. It had never occurred to her that the position she would fill would be in Hammond, Texas, a town of little more than ten thousand people about an hour’s drive from San Antonio. She had been certain she had landed in an alien place when she drove down main street and saw that the only two national fast-food chains in town were lodged in the same building, sharing a kitchen and eating space.

The first month she had lived in Hammond, she had found herself making the six-hour drive back to her parents’ home in Dallas every weekend. Finally that had grown too tiring, and now, after two months, she was more or less resigned to remaining the rest of her year there.

“What do people do around here?” she blurted out, then realized a little guiltily that her words were rather tactless.

Benny glanced at her, then chuckled. “Talk about everybody else, mostly. Turn right at the next street.”

He straightened a little, and Lisa could see him tense as they drove down the street. He pointed to a small blue frame house, and Lisa pulled up to the curb in front of it. The front door opened, and a short Hispanic woman bustled out of the front door. Lisa had been picturing Benny’s grandmother as a traditional-looking abuelita, with graying hair in a bun and wearing a cotton housedress, so she was a little surprised to see that while his grandmother’s thick black hair was streaked with gray, it was cropped short, and her rather squat body was encased in blue pants and a flowered top.

Benny groaned and cast a glance at Lisa. “You’ll have to meet her. I’m sorry.”

“I would like to meet your grandmother,” Lisa assured him and stepped out of the car.

Señora Fuentes was crying and talking at great length in Spanish, and she did not pause in either activity when she threw her arms around her grandson and squeezed him to her. Finally she released him and stepped back, looking up at him.

“What are you doing home so quick?” she asked, planting her hands on her hips and gazing at him sternly. Lisa, listening, had the feeling that maybe Sheriff Sutton had been telling the truth, after all. Benny’s grandmother, after her initial greeting, did not seem to be too pleased at having him home.

Benny, who had been grinning and looking faintly embarrassed a moment earlier, adopted his former blank expression. He shrugged. “He didn’t have anything on me. He was messing with me.”

“Messing with you?” the old woman repeated, contempt tinging her voice. “I think it’s the other way, you messin’ with the law.” She launched forth into another spate of Spanish, this one by the look and sound of it, a stern lecture on Benny’s troublesome ways.

Benny crossed his arms and gazed down at the ground as the old woman went on and on, and with every sentence, Lisa could see his jaw tighten. Finally, flinging his arms up, he shot back a short sentence in the same language and turned away, striding off down the sidewalk away from the house.

His grandmother looked after him for a moment, then swung around to face Lisa. She started to speak in Spanish again, and Lisa held up her hands to stop the rapid flow of words.

“Señora, no, please, no comprendo. Yo no hablo español.”

Señora Fuentes stopped, a puzzled frown settling on her face. “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought—you are not Latina?”

“Yes, I am,” Lisa protested quickly, feeling the familiar embarrassment and faint sense of being different. “At least on my father’s side. It’s just—I’m afraid I don’t speak Spanish.” The old woman continued to look at her, as though trying to understand how this could be. Lisa hurried on, “My name is Lisa Mendoza, Señora Fuentes. I am your grandson Benny’s attorney. I got him released from jail.”

“You did?” Señora Fuentes looked her up and down. “But you are a girl.”

Lisa struggled to suppress her irritation, reminding herself that this woman was old and unused to seeing women, especially Hispanic women, in positions of strength. Patiently, she said, “Yes, I am a woman. I am also an attorney.”

Señora shook her head, disappointment stamping her face. “I never thought the sheriff would give in to a bit of a girl.”

Lisa straightened, her eyes flashing. “Señora Fuentes, I am not ‘a bit of a girl.’ I am a grown woman and a lawyer, and Sheriff Sutton did not ‘give in’ to me. He had no reason to hold your grandson. He knew he could not continue to keep him in jail once an attorney was representing him. I would think you would be glad to know that Benny’s cousin went to the trouble and expense of getting him an attorney instead of letting him rot in jail!”

“Cousin?” Señora Fuentes’s brows drew together darkly. “He doesn’t have any cousins old enough to—you don’t mean Julio!”

“No. His name was Enrique Garza.”

“I don’t know this man,” Señora Fuentes said pugnaciously. “Who is this Garza? There is no cousin named Garza.”

“I beg your pardon?” Lisa looked at her blankly.

“Benny has no cousin named Enrique Garza.” Señora Fuentes looked at her suspiciously.

Lisa simply gazed back at her, nonplussed. “But I—he came into my office and said he was Benny’s cousin. He explained Benny’s situation to me and said he wanted to help him.”

“He is one of them,” Benny’s grandmother said flatly, her lips drawing into a thin line.

“Who?”

“The bad men. The ones he goes to see. Cholos. Vatos.” Her lips twisted bitterly, and tears sprang into her black eyes. “I will lose him. Like I lost Pablo.”

“Señora Fuentes…” Lisa reached out to touch the woman’s arm, sympathy springing up in her at the woman’s evident sorrow. “Can I help you?”

But the other woman twisted away. “No.” She cast Lisa a dark glance. “Go away from here. You have done enough.”

She turned and walked back into the house. Lisa watched her go, feeling vaguely guilty. Finally, with a sigh, she turned and went back to her car. She got in and turned the car around, driving back the way she had come. There was no reason for her to feel guilty, she told herself. She had gotten her client out of jail; she had protected his rights. The sheriff had had no business taking him in in the first place.

But logic had a hard time standing up against the look of suffering in the old woman’s eyes. Lisa kept thinking about it, wishing that she could have made Benny’s grandmother understand that she had helped Benny.

A few blocks down the street, she saw Benny walking along, hands jammed in his pockets, head down. She pulled her car to a stop beside him and pushed the button to roll down the window. “Benny? Do you need a ride?”

He looked over at her and started to shake his head, but in the next instant, he stopped, then said, “Hey, yeah.” He walked over to the car and leaned down, looking into the window. “You could drop me off at the café, if you don’t mind.”

“No, it’s okay. Where is it?”

It didn’t take long to reach the café. It was on the same main street of Angel Eye that they had driven along when they’d left the courthouse, but farther out, almost on the edge of town. It was a small, plain building set back from the road, with a modest sign at the front of the parking lot proclaiming it to be Moonstone Café.

“Moonstone Café? That’s an odd name.” Lisa said as she turned into the parking lot. She had thought that an eating place in this little town would be named something like Earl’s Diner or Martha’s.

“Yeah. Lady owns it is from Dallas,” Benny said, as if that fact would explain all peculiarity. “It’s good. You should try it.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Well…thanks.” Benny got out of the car and gave her an awkward wave, then walked into the restaurant.

Lisa watched him go. It occurred to her that she was hungry. And it was the end of the day; everyone would have left the office by the time she got there. Perhaps she should give this oddly named restaurant a try. The mere fact that its owner was from Dallas gave it some appeal to her.

She parked her car and followed her client through the front door of the restaurant. A slim woman with thick curling dark hair turned from the cash register and smiled at her.

“One for dinner?” she asked. Lisa nodded, and the woman led her toward a booth in front of one of the windows.

Lisa glanced around the restaurant as she followed the woman. It was a neat, clean place, nothing fancy, just wooden tables and comfortable chairs and booths, but it was obviously popular. Even as early as it was, several of the tables were occupied. There was a smell of fresh-baked bread in the air, mingling enticingly with garlic and spices.

She noticed that her client was standing near the kitchen door, talking with a pretty, slender Hispanic girl. Benny’s face was more animated than it had been the entire time she had been around him, and the way he stood before the girl, bending down toward her in a tender, even protective way, spoke volumes about what he felt for her. And, given the glow on the young girl’s face as she looked back at him, it appeared that she returned the feeling.

The woman who had seated her followed her gaze, and she smiled. “Ah, young love.” She handed a menu to Lisa. “Don’t worry. Teresa will be over here in a minute. She’s a good waitress. You new around here?”

“I live in Hammond,” Lisa replied. “But I’m new there. I’m from Dallas.”

“Yeah?” The other woman smiled. “Me, too. I’m Elizabeth Morgan. I own the Moonstone.”

“Lisa Mendoza. Nice to meet you. So you moved here from Dallas?”

Elizabeth Morgan laughed at the tone of amazement that crept into Lisa’s voice as she asked the question. “I wanted to get far away from Dallas.”

“Well, you certainly achieved that.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty different. But I like a little town. It’s…cozy, I guess. I was starting over, and it wasn’t as expensive to start a restaurant in a small town.”

“Don’t you miss Dallas?”

“Sometimes.” Elizabeth shrugged. “I mean, it’s nice to have a big choice of movies to go see, malls to go shopping at, other restaurants to eat in. But you know, frankly, when you run a restaurant, you’re tied to it. Twenty-four seven. You don’t get out that much to do any of those things, and if I want to, well, San Antonio’s not that far away. The rest of the time, there’s the fact that it takes me five minutes to get to work; there’s very little turnover in employees; and I know most of my customers by name. I like that.”

They were interrupted at that point by the arrival of the young girl who had been talking to Benny earlier. “I’m sorry,” she said a little breathlessly. “Sorry, Ms. Morgan.”

Elizabeth smiled and nodded to Lisa. “I’ll get back to my job and let you order now. It was nice chatting with you.”

She moved away, and the girl went into her spiel. “My name is Teresa, and I’ll be waiting on you this evening. Could I get you a drink while you look over the menu?”

Lisa ordered and settled back into the booth to relax. Benny, she noticed, had disappeared. She found her thoughts turning to Sheriff Sutton. The man was damnably attractive. She remembered that moment in his office when they had been only inches apart, white-hot anger coursing through her, and mingled with it, feeding off it, had been a pulsing, primitive desire. She had felt it coming off him, too, humming and magnetic.

It was absurd, of course, Lisa reminded herself. They were, literally, on opposites sides. And she felt certain that they had nothing in common, no real attraction except for that strange, momentary response. A chemical reaction, that’s all. Some animal impulse, spurred by a signal too primal for her to even notice—a scent or a visual stimulus—the line of his leg against his uniform, perhaps, or his long, mobile fingers, thumb hooked into the belt of his uniform, or the well-cut lips…

Lisa realized with a start that she was sitting staring at the table dreamily, a faint smile curving her mouth. She had started out analyzing her bizarre response to the man, and she had wound up daydreaming about him like a teenager in class!

She was glad when Teresa brought her salad, giving her something to concentrate on besides the sheriff. The meal, she discovered to her delight, was delicious—the salad crisp and dark green, the barest of balsamic vinaigrette on it, just as she liked it, and the pasta dish light and subtly seasoned.

“How was your dinner?” Elizabeth Morgan stopped by her table on the way back from seating some more customers.

“Wonderful,” Lisa replied truthfully. “As good as in Dallas.”

Elizabeth smiled at the phrasing of her praise. “I take it that you miss Dallas?”

“Yeah.” Lisa let out a regretful sigh. “Although, I have to admit, not as much after a dinner like this one.”

Elizabeth lingered by her table for a few minutes, chatting with her about Dallas, and Teresa came to clear the dishes from her table and bring her bill. She had just paid her bill when the door of the café opened and Sheriff Sutton strode in.

He glanced around, then walked purposefully toward Lisa’s table. What was it, Lisa wondered, that was so utterly sexy about the way a man walked in cowboy boots?

Beside her, echoing her thoughts, Elizabeth Morgan let out an exaggerated sigh and said, “Sheriffs have got it all over cops, don’t they? There’s just something about boots and a cowboy hat.” She smiled at Sutton as he drew near. “Good evening, Sheriff. You want to see a menu?”