would take a hard blow. But she felt strongly enough to take the risk.
“I don’t believe you,” Griffin said, startling her. “Do you want to know why?”
“I feel certain you’re going to enlighten me,” she said with a smugness she didn’t truly feel. Suddenly Griffin Benedict seemed dangerous.
She took a sip of her tea, despite her earlier decision not to drink it. It was easier to hide her emotions behind a paper cup and her steamed-up glasses.
“I have reliable information that you, personally, received incentives to convince the Project Justice decision makers to take on Anthony’s case. Specifically, that you accepted a bribe.”
Raleigh set her cup down with a thud, splashing tea everywhere. “What? Are you crazy?” Who would tell a reporter such a thing about her? Or had he made it up, trying to shake her composure?
Damn it, he’d succeeded. A few nearby coffee-shop patrons looked over curiously.
Don’t make a scene, Raleigh. She could hear her mother-in-law’s voice in her ear, trying to hush Raleigh when she’d been out of her mind with grief. Back then, she had let her big, sloppy emotions spill out onto everyone in her path—cops, doctors, reporters, many of whom blamed her for her husband’s death.
She had learned self-control since then.
“I’m just telling you what I heard.” Griffin took another sip of his coffee.
Raleigh scooted her chair back. “I hadn’t realized this was going to be a character assassination instead of an interview. Please don’t call me again.” She reached for her briefcase on the floor by her chair, intending to make a dramatic exit.
“Wait.”
His single word froze her to her seat. She wished she could have ignored him. But he was so damn compelling.
“I didn’t just take someone’s word for it. I demanded proof—and I got this.” He extended a piece of paper across the table toward her. “Does this look familiar?”
Raleigh grew dizzy as every drop of blood in her body fell to her feet. Yes, the paper did look familiar. It was a copy of her bank statement. The one that showed a twenty-thousand-dollar deposit made to her account from a numbered Swiss bank account.
She should have known. She had tried to tell the bank that the deposit was in error, but they’d insisted it wasn’t. Then she had become frantically busy. She had pushed all thoughts of the aberrant deposit out of her mind, figured someone, somewhere, would miss their money, and the error would be corrected.
“Care to explain the rather large chunk of change that landed in your account?”
“No, I would not,” Raleigh said succinctly, trying not to panic. “Would you care to explain how you came to be in possession of my private financial information? Because I’m pretty sure there’s an invasion-of-privacy issue here. I could sue you up one side and down the other.”
“But you won’t. Because you wouldn’t want this little piece of paper to become a matter of public record, would you?”
He was right about that.
“Don’t worry, Raleigh—may I call you Raleigh?”
She refused to answer.
“I’m not going to publish the specifics of your bank account. But I do intend to find out what’s going on with you. If there is an innocent explanation for the deposit, set me straight.”
“There is, but it’s none of your business. If you want to investigate me, knock yourself out. I have never accepted payment beyond my salary for the work I do at Project Justice, and I never will.”
On that note, she made her exit. She could have sworn she felt Griffin Benedict’s eyes burning into her back as she walked out the door.
GRIFFIN CLICKED off his recorder, watching as the auburn-haired ice queen glided out the door.
That had gone about as expected. Someone with Raleigh Shinn’s experience in high-pressure legal situations wouldn’t cave in and confess with his first salvo.
She wasn’t what he expected, though. Of course he’d seen pictures and video of her. He’d thought she was plain, even somewhat unattractive in her clunky glasses, boxy man suits and hair slicked back into a matronly bun.
But in person, she was something entirely different. For one thing, she had a figure underneath those suits. He’d seen the hint of generous breasts beneath her jacket when she had reached for her tea, the barest shadow of cleavage above the top button of her cream silk shirt.
Her hair wasn’t a boring brown, as he’d believed, but had threads of fiery red and gold mixed in. Her real color, too. If she’d had even a day’s worth of roots, he’d have spotted it.
She apparently wore no makeup, but her skin was a translucent ivory, smooth and soft-looking. And she had a dusting of freckles across her nose.
Nice mouth. Kissable.
But her eyes had intrigued him the most. Those scholarly horn-rim glasses hid eyes of a deep, emerald green with gold flecks. In them he saw flashes of fire, especially when she talked about her work.
She wore a wedding ring, he’d noted, but she wasn’t married. Her husband had died six years ago. Maybe she wore the ring as yet more protection. Practically everything about her screamed that she was unavailable, not an object to be desired or lusted after by men.
Her strategy had the opposite effect on him. He had always been intrigued by the librarian types. Uptight clothes, glasses, frosty demeanor—those were traits that gave his libido a wake-up call. He was curious to learn more about what was beneath the shapeless clothes, and he fantasized about pulling off the glasses, mussing the neat hair….
Hell, what was he doing? Raleigh Shinn wasn’t a potential lover. She was a sanctimonious lawyer who might or might not be guilty of accepting a bribe to use her influence unfairly.
Many convicts pleaded their cases to Project Justice. From what Griffin had heard, the foundation considered all of them, but took on only a very few.
Had Anthony Simonetti—or his wealthy, criminal father—leapfrogged over other, more worthy cases with the help of some green incentive?
The jury was still out. Griffin had received only an anonymous tip about Raleigh, plus the copy of her bank statement left under the windshield wiper of his car. He did not yet have enough solid information to go to print, nor even enough to form his own opinion. The current facts as he knew them would not impress the network that was considering him for an anchor position on a national TV news magazine.
But the potential for an exciting story was there. Project Justice was hot news right now, and Raleigh’s possible criminal actions could explode in the foundation’s face, making for a splashy, TV-worthy, journalistic tour de force.
But first, he had to learn more. He wanted to know everything there was to know about Raleigh Shinn. Mostly, he wanted to know why she hid a hot body and a beautiful face behind that dumpy facade.
CHAPTER TWO
“BUT IT HAS to be a mistake.” Raleigh had been on the phone for twenty-two minutes, first on hold, then working her way up the corporate ladder of Houston Federal Bank. She was now talking to a vice president.
“If it was a mistake,” the condescending man said, “it wasn’t on our end. Now, it’s possible whoever made the deposit mistyped a number.”
“Exactly! So can’t you just contact them and ask?”
“I’m afraid not. Numbered bank accounts are numbered for a reason. We’ve sent a query to the transmitting institution, but we haven’t yet received a reply.”
“So maybe you could just—send the money back.”
“That’s