Outside the Law

But the stubborn expression on her pretty, feminine face told him this was not the time for games. He knew that expression. He was in for a fight.

Mitch smiled his best good-ol’-boy smile. “Ladies, I have a dentist appointment—”

“So you’ll be five minutes late,” Raleigh said. “As chief legal counsel for Project Justice, I have something to say. Now, you might not care if a posse of Louisiana cops shows up tomorrow with sirens and bullhorns and guns flashing, but I do. If you get arrested for so much as littering, it reflects badly on the foundation, and I can’t let that happen.”

“That won’t happen,” he assured her. At least, he didn’t think so. “My brother was just trying to piss me off. They don’t have any evidence.”

“They do have evidence,” Beth nearly exploded. “If you were the last person known to see the victim alive, that’s plenty of evidence to bring you in for questioning. You’re only making things worse. If you keep sticking your head in the sand—”

He held up one hand to stop the tirade. “I’ve got this under control, okay? I know how the local cops operate in Coot’s Bayou. I worked for them for a few years. They’re just shaking the bushes, hoping something will fall out.

“I’m not falling out. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned his back on them, daring them to try and stop him from exiting his own office. If he didn’t find a punching bag soon, he was going to lose it. But he heard no steps behind him, no clatter of high heels on the polished wood floor.

It was a fine spring day, cool and crisp in a way perpetually muggy Houston seldom saw. He’d ridden the Harley to work, and as he settled into his eight-mile commute home, he hoped the wind in his face would clear his mind. But when he pulled into his driveway, he was every bit as tense and angry as when he’d left work.

He didn’t bother putting his bike in the garage. He stepped inside his small ranch house long enough to shed his jeans and golf shirt and throw on shorts and a T-shirt with the arms ripped out. Barefoot, he headed outside again, straight through the backyard to the gate that led to the adjacent property.

Mitch lived next to a played-out oil field. He’d bought the little house out near Hobby Airport for a song because most people didn’t care for the sound of pumps and the occasional smell of raw petroleum. That was three years ago, and now the pumps were silent and still. The oil reserves were empty.

The quiet wouldn’t last forever. Even now, the oil company that owned the mineral rights to this two-hundred-acre chunk of land was in the process of acquiring more sophisticated drills and pumps that could go deeper into the ground. But for now the field was still and peaceful except for the breeze rustling through weeds that had reclaimed the ground and the occasional bird chirp.

Most of the old machinery had been removed, but one rusted grasshopper pump was left, abandoned, and Mitch had turned it into his private gym. It had just the ambiance he needed to train for a cage fight.

Mitch normally started his workout with some general fitness training—push-ups, jumping rope or agility drills with resistance bands wrapped around his thighs. But today he skipped all that. He tugged on a pair of four-ounce gloves, which offered minimal protection for his hand but left his fingers free, then went to work on the heavy punching bag he’d suspended from the pump.

Jab. Jab. Left hook. Right uppercut. Knee to the solar plexus. Head shot. Body shot. Like always, he imagined an opponent. Usually, he visualized the guy he was scheduled to fight. He would study any videos he could find of the guy, imprint his fighting style into his brain, then picture all the various ways he could beat him.

Today, his opponent was not Ricky “Quick Death” Marquita. Today, the face he saw was his brother’s.

Dwayne was the one who’d motivated him to learn to fight—not by encouraging him, but by beating him up a few times when they were kids. Bigger, older, Dwayne had had no trouble besting his little brother.

Mitch continued to rain punches and kicks onto the hapless bag filled with sand and gel, pausing only long enough to whip off his T-shirt after he’d gotten good and warmed up. Roundhouse kick to the head. Elbow to the chin. Inside crescent kick to the knee. He kept going long past exhaustion. Sometimes, the winner of a cage fight was simply the one who could stay upright the longest. Fighting through exhaustion was a key skill.

If he and Dwayne fought today, things would be different. Dwayne still outweighed Mitch by a good thirty pounds. But Mitch was sure that if they ever met in a chain-link cage—or in a back alley—he could smear the mat with his brother.

CHAPTER TWO

BETHTRIEDTOTELLHERSELF she’d done what she could. If Mitch was determined to be an idiot about this situation, how could she talk him out of it? Arguing wasn’t her best skill; she left that for the lawyers.

Turned out Daniel didn’t agree. He shared Raleigh’s concern about a scandal being detrimental to Project Justice, and he didn’t allow anything to get in the way of the foundation’s efforts to free wrongly convicted men and women from prison. But he also cared about Mitch, who had been one of the first people Daniel had hired when he and his father had started the foundation.

After Mitch had stormed down the hall toward the elevator, Beth had returned to her little laboratory, the place where she felt most comfortable. Fingerprints, fibers and blood didn’t argue. They spoke only the truth. They weren’t all that complicated.

Men—Mitch, in particular—were.

But she hadn’t been in the lab ten minutes before Daniel called her.

“You want me to try again to convince Mitch to cooperate?” Beth asked, almost before Daniel had said two words.

“You’re the one who knows him the best, Beth,” Daniel said. “I’m in the middle of a Logan Oil board meeting, or I would track him down myself and talk some sense into him.”

Those were pretty strong words, coming from Daniel, who seldom left his estate unless it was for something really important. His new wife, Jamie, was in the process of pulling him out of his shell, but old habits died hard.

“Apparently I don’t know him as well as I thought,” Beth huffed. “Coot’s Bayou? He’s never said a word to me about his hometown. Or his half brother. Or his arrest record.”

“He had good reasons for wanting to put that part of his life behind him, Beth. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. He grew up under pretty harsh conditions and it’s not something he wants to think about.”

“He’s sure trying to run from it now.”

“He can be convinced to do the right thing, I know he can. He’s smart, just bullheaded sometimes. Mitch cares about you and respects you. He’ll listen to you if you try one more time.”

Beth wasn’t so sure. But despite his reclusive ways, her billionaire boss understood human nature better than most anyone Beth knew.

“If you really think it will help, I’ll try.” She would simply have to put her disastrous attempt at dating Mitch out of her mind. He was, first and foremost, her friend. He needed her, even if he didn’t know it.

“Do it now. Because frankly, if you don’t convince him, I’m going to have to tell him to take a leave of absence from work.”

Beth stifled a gasp. “Daniel, he didn’t—”

“I know he didn’t kill anyone,” Daniel said impatiently. “But we have lots of innocent people depending on us. Having one of our key employees accused of murder, no matter how ridiculous the charge, could damage us beyond repair. I will stand behind Mitch a hundred percent. But I won’t have him dragged off in cuffs from our offices, in front of TV cameras. Which is exactly what could happen if Mitch doesn’t cooperate.”

Beth swallowed, her mouth going dry. She’d known things could get bad for Mitch, and for everyone who worked at Project Justice as well as their clients. Why didn’t Mitch see it?

“I’ll go right now, Daniel. I’ll find him. I’ll convince him.”

She tried calling Mitch’s cell, then his home, but got voice mail both times. He was very good at ignoring a ringing phone when he didn’t want to talk. “You can run, but you can’t hide,” Beth murmured as she grabbed her purse and headed out the door, putting her assistant, Cassie, in charge for the rest of the afternoon.

Mitch’s house was less than ten miles from downtown and close to the I-610 loop, but it had kind of a rural feel, with a cow pasture across the street and an oil field next door.

Rush hour hadn’t gotten a good grip on the city at three in the afternoon, so the trip to his home only took a few minutes. She pulled into the driveway and saw that his Harley was there. Good. But she didn’t get out right away. She sat in the car, composing in her mind exactly what she would say to him.

By following him home, she was pushing the bounds of their friendship. But she couldn’t sit back and allow him to be railroaded right into prison. Her job had presented her with too many examples of innocent men and women, accused of crimes, who had made their situations so much worse by going into denial.

Mitch’s house was cute, Beth had to admit, even if the locale wasn’t ideal. The white brick house had red shutters and a trellis shading the front porch, on which grew trumpet vine and morning glories poised to burst into bloom. Mitch kept everything in good repair, but Beth couldn’t help thinking, as she mounted the front steps, that the place could use a woman’s touch.

She rang the bell. When he didn’t answer after a few moments, she rang again and knocked. “Mitch? I know you’re in there. You better just come to the door, because I’m not leaving. We have to talk.”

Still nothing. No sound.

Determined, she walked around the house and let herself into the backyard through the gate in the honeysuckle-choked chain-link fence. The patio and yard were empty, but she found the sliding glass door unlocked.

Nervous sweat broke out on her upper lip as she opened it. “Mitch?”

She was about to go inside when she heard something, a strange noise punctuating the silence.

Smack, smack, smack. And the unmistakable sound of a human male exerting himself. The noise was not coming from inside the house, but behind her. From the yard…no, beyond the yard. Beyond the fence, into the otherwise still oil field.

What the hell?

Curiosity killed the cat, she reminded herself as she abandoned the sliding glass door and went in search of the source of the sound.

The back gate had been left ajar. As a trained crime scene investigator, she should have noticed that before. Mindful of her heels on the uneven ground, she crept through the gate and followed the strange sounds to another fence, a beat-up chain-link enclosure surrounding an old grasshopper pump.

She could see no way in, so she cleared away some of the tall weeds and peered through the gap she’d created.

Her breath caught in her throat. Finally she’d found Mitch, and he appeared to be beating the crap out of a punching bag, pounding it with his fists, bare feet, elbows and knees.

She was at once fascinated and horrified. Here was a male in the prime of his health and vitality, shirtless, muscles rippling and sheened with sweat. He was beautiful…and terrifying.

Her jaw throbbed and she rubbed it, trying hard not to think about the damage Mitch’s fists could do to a human being.

Suddenly he growled like a wild animal and rushed at the punching bag headfirst, hitting it so hard that it disconnected from the chain and crashed to the broken concrete at the base of the pump. The chain that had held it suspended whipped around and struck Mitch in the shoulder, but he seemed to not notice. He was intent on doing more damage to the bag, kicking it savagely with his heel. Then he jumped on top of it and beat it a few more times with his fists.

She must have made some kind of noise, because he slowly stilled his fists, then turned his head and looked right at her.

Embarrassed to have been caught staring at what should have been a private moment for Mitch, she wanted to shrink back behind the weeds and creep away. But it was too late.

“Beth?” He looked both surprised and…yes, apprehensive.

“I c-couldn’t find you and I heard something strange,” she stammered out. “I didn’t mean to spy but, Mitch…” She gained a bit of confidence when he didn’t aim his obvious anger at her. “What the hell is all this?”

Gasping for air, he slowly rose from straddling the bag and regained his feet. “This is where I work out.”

“Here?”

“Why not here? There’s plenty of space for my gear, and no one else is using it. And it’s private. Or it’s supposed to be,” he said pointedly. He grabbed a towel to wipe the sweat off his face, neck and shoulders, then picked up a water bottle, tipped back his head and took a long draw.

Beth watched, fascinated, as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down and the cords of his neck flexed and relaxed.

She shook her head to clear it, ordering her runaway libido into line. Mitch’s body wasn’t hers to ogle. She was here on a mission.

“What kind of workout is this?” she asked, stalling. “Are you some kind of black belt killing machine?” She said it with a nervous laugh. She’d known Mitch was fit. No one who filled out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt like he did sat in front of a computer all the time.

“I’m not a black belt anything.” He sounded defensive. “It’s just a good way to stay in shape and work off stress.”

“Is it working?”

He peeled off his gloves, which were not like any boxing gloves Beth had ever seen, not that she ever paid much attention. They were small, and didn’t cover his fingers. She’d seen bruises and cuts on Mitch’s hands before, but he claimed to have gotten them doing yard work or fixing his bike.

“I’m not bouncing off the walls anymore, so, yeah, I guess it helps. Beth, what are you doing here?”

“Come out of that cage and let’s talk. Please,” she added, since he was under no obligation to speak to her after she’d followed him uninvited and spied on his workout.

He scooped up his discarded T-shirt and threw it on. Beth mourned the loss as he covered up those beautiful pecs and the washboard abs, but it was better this way. Mitch was distracting enough even when he wasn’t the next closest thing to completely naked.

Mitch gathered up his gloves, towel and water bottle. But rather than exiting through a gate, he peeled back a section of fencing that had been snipped open with bolt cutters and levered himself through, managing not to catch anything on the raggedly cut chain links.

But he was bleeding, where that punching bag chain had caught him on the shoulder. “You’re injured.”

“Hmm?”

She pointed to his shoulder and he looked, disinterested. “Oh.” He swiped at the blood with his towel, then seemed to forget about it.

“Doesn’t it hurt? And look at your knuckles.” They were red and swollen, and one of them had a small cut. More blood. Beth was torn between the desire to nurse him with antiseptic and bandages and an even stronger need to turn away in revulsion.

Revulsion won. Blood in a lab she could deal with—nice, clean blood in a test tube or on a cotton swab. But live, bleeding flesh and blood was not her thing. She’d discovered that at the police academy before she’d been booted out.

He shrugged, then stopped to hold the back gate open for her. No matter what, Mitch had the manners of a Southern gentleman, one of the things that drew her to him. Along with his calm, easygoing personality.

Which apparently had been nothing but a facade.

THATWASCLOSE. Panic had coursed through Mitch’s veins right along with the rush of his blood when he’d spotted Beth peering at him through the fence, a colorful tropical flower completely out of context in his personal gym of rust, metal, leather, concrete and sweat.

He’d thought for sure she would recognize the discipline suggested by his workout. The abbreviated gloves, the combination of punching, kicking and wrestling on the ground screamed mixed martial arts. But though the sport had gained popularity and respectability in recent years, not everyone was into it.

Sweet Beth apparently had no knowledge or interest in his particular fighting style, because she let his weak explanation ride. That was a good thing; he’d gone to a lot of trouble to keep his sporting life separate from his professional work because neither would enhance the other. What fighter would be intimidated by a computer geek who worked for a charitable foundation? And he didn’t even want to think about the negative fallout should the press get hold of the connection. What if it came out while he was testifying in court?

Not even Daniel knew about the UFC matches he’d been fighting over the past few years, and it looked as if he could keep it that way awhile longer.

But that didn’t mean he was home free. He knew why Beth was here, what she wanted him to do.

He tromped through his backyard and across the brick patio, wishing she was here for some other reason. Like maybe she’d decided his brush with the law turned her on and she wanted some hot, sweaty sex.

Yeah, he’d thought about it. Plenty of times. Every time he saw her, in fact. But she’d been giving him Do Not Touch signals for so long, he’d given up on that idea.

He entered his stuffy house through the sliding glass door, knowing she would follow.

“Mitch, are you going to sit down and listen to me?” she asked as he cruised into the kitchen, ignoring her presence, and grabbed himself the remains of a high-protein energy shake he’d mixed up that morning. What he really wanted was a cold beer, but he never drank the week before a match.

“I already know what you’re going to say,” he replied wearily. “You want something to drink?”

“No, thank you,” she said primly. “If you’re so smart, what do you think I’m going to say?”

He turned to face her in the small galley kitchen, still decorated in all its 1970s glory of red and harvest-gold. Beth’s hot-pink flowered dress made the decor look old and tired. “The same thing you already said. That I should indulge those backwoods cops from back home to answer stupid questions about a crime I know nothing about. Only you’ll probably throw in something about how I should patch things up with my brother. Because he’s family, and family is important.” Beth enjoyed a warm, loving relationship with her parents, two sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews. “Does that about sum things up?”

She seemed to shrink a little in the face of his displeasure, and he made a mental note to dial it down a notch. This was Beth, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and she was here only because she thought she was being helpful. She was his friend. Still, that didn’t mean he wanted her meddling in his überdysfunctional family.

Usually it took very little to deflect Beth from any line of conversation he didn’t want to pursue. That was one of the reasons he liked hanging with her; she could take a hint when he didn’t want to talk about personal stuff.

Now, apparently, she wasn’t going to cooperate. She didn’t look as though she was about to back down from this fight. He tried to think of some way to change the stubborn thrust of her chin. His gaze focused briefly on her plump, pink lips.

A kiss would give her something else to think about.

“Yes, of course I’m here about your brother’s visit,” she said, bumping his attention back to the matter at hand. “Can we sit down? Will you at least hear me out?”

“Fine,” he mumbled. He suddenly became aware of his sweaty, bedraggled state. Beth was her usual fresh-as-a-daisy self in her sleeveless, summery dress, and he probably looked awful and smelled worse. “Can I take a shower first?”

“If you want, but I don’t mind you this way.”

For half an instant, Mitch read innuendo into her words. His traitorous mind visualized her leaning in and licking the sweat off his neck, like the fight groupies, who hung out at the gym, sometimes offered.

Then he gave himself a mental smack to the head. This was Beth, his friend, his work buddy, who liked sharing a pizza and watching true crime shows with him so they could make bets on who the real culprit would turn out to be. She was just being considerate. How many times did he have to remind himself she was Off-Limits, in capital letters?

“I’ll be out in five minutes. Go sit down.” He grabbed himself a protein bar on his way out of the kitchen. He was famished. Burning five hundred calories in one forty-five-minute workout could do that to a guy, and he didn’t want to drop any more weight. He was already lighter than most of his light-heavyweight-class opponents.

When he returned to the living room a few minutes later in jeans and a clean T-shirt, he found Beth sitting stiff-backed on the edge of a chair, looking anything but comfortable.

Man, this thing with Dwayne and Robby had gotten her all tied into knots. She must be convinced it was some kind of big deal. His heart felt a small twinge for causing her to worry. She didn’t deserve that.

Mitch sprawled onto the sofa, feeling a little better after his brutal workout, a stinging shower and ingesting a few calories. “All right, Bethy, lay it on me. Say what you have to say.”

“First, Mitch, Daniel wants you to know that he doesn’t—that no one at work thinks you killed anyone. The notion is preposterous.”

As hard as he was trying to remain detached, his coworkers’ faith in him touched something soft inside him. “Thank you. That means a lot.”

“That said, are you out of your mind?”

Mitch sat up, startled by her vehemence. “Excuse me?” He’d been expecting a much gentler approach from Beth. Some sympathy, maybe.

“You practically told a law enforcement officer to go to hell. I don’t care if he’s related to you. He was acting in his official capacity.”

Mitch shook his head. “It might have looked that way to you, but it was personal. He was doing his level best to embarrass me.”

“Why?” Beth asked. “Why would he do that?”

He looked at her, an angry retort on the tip of his tongue, then squelched whatever he’d been about to say. She was asking out of genuine concern, not prurient interest.

“A long and ugly family history,” he finally said. “Dwayne doesn’t have my best interest at heart.”

“So why don’t you stand up to him? Accept his challenge, prove him wrong.”

“Look, I appreciate your concern. But the police couldn’t possibly have any evidence against me. I didn’t kill Robby, and I don’t know anything about how he died. He was my buddy.”

“Mitch.” Beth stood and began pacing. “Who do you work for?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“You work for Project Justice,” she said, in a hurry to make her point. “And what is Project Justice’s mission statement?”

His gaze lingered on her trim calves and thighs. “To free those unjustly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.” Every employee was required to memorize that statement and be able to quote it backward and forward.

“And how many people in this country are sitting in prison, right now, for crimes they didn’t commit?”

“You’re sounding a lot like Raleigh.” And he didn’t mean that as a compliment.

“Just answer.”

“The answer is unknown.”

“True. But it’s in the hundreds, possibly the thousands. How many people has Project Justice exonerated?”

The total was always posted in the lobby, but he hadn’t looked at it lately. “Sixty-three?”

“Seventy-two,” she corrected him.

“Look,” he said sensibly. “The police are on a fishing expedition. They couldn’t possibly have any evidence against me.”

Suddenly Beth sat down next to him, her face inches from his. “Mitch, listen to yourself. Do you have any idea how many of our clients were convicted on really bad evidence? Circumstantial evidence? Or no evidence? I’ll answer for you. A lot. And do you know what a lot of them say?”