swim into his mind’s eye. Hell, if they got into the mix, he’d end up comatose with shame and bitterness and regret. Best to keep focused, he decided. Aidan sat down on a cold concrete bench to wait.
Grace Simkanian felt her blood trying to boil as she watched her client smirk at her over his shoulder. “Told you. No sweat,” the kid said as he crossed the courthouse lobby. He was nineteen years old and he still lived at home, had never gone to college or bothered to find gainful employment. His daddy was loaded. He spent his time getting drunk and ramming his Dodge Viper into various city fixtures. The last altercation had been with a fire hydrant.
Grace could not let herself despise him. She was a criminal defense attorney employed by the most prestigious firm in the city. She’d spent a long, arduous and destitute year clerking for the Honorable Lorenzo Castello after she’d finished law school, delaying a decent income by a full twelve months to add that ultrarespectable notch to her belt. She was going to be a judge herself one day. Then she could express her opinion of people who stepped outside the law because it was the easy way. But for now she was stuck with getting them off the hook.
“This latest incident will cost you over three thousand dollars,” Grace said to her client, pushing past him through the lobby doors. “No, wait. Forgive me. I’m wrong. It will be closer to four thousand with the hike in your car insurance.”
“It’ll take the insurance people a year to catch up.” He jogged down the steps.
Let it go, Grace told herself, but a hot little fist punched at her forehead from the inside out. There were days when she really hated her job.
Grace watched the kid cross the street to his car in the municipal lot—a new lemon-yellow Lotus that would probably be wrapped around the Liberty Bell in another two weeks. Then she turned up the street toward the bus stop.
She was almost there when her cell phone started chirping inside her briefcase. She leaned back against a building to fish it out.
“No,” she said into it without greeting. She was so tired parts of her throbbed.
“I beg your pardon?”
Grace swore mildly under her breath. It wasn’t Mandy or Jenny, her confidantes, her pals. It was Dan Lutz, one of the senior partners of her law firm.
“Where are you?” he asked. “I need you to head over to County prison.”
Instinctively Grace looked across the street for the kid who had just left her. He couldn’t possibly have gotten himself into trouble again so fast. Ergo, another of Lutz’s rich college chums had offspring in trouble. Those were the only cases she caught just now. She’d been with Russell and Lutz less than a month.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“His name is Aidan McKenna. Detective Third Grade, Vice, Philadelphia P.D.”
“Who am I supposed to be seeing him about?”
“Himself. They’re holding him in a temp cell over there.”
Her pulse kicked, not just at the usual places but in a chain reaction of little hitches all through her blood. Grace came off the building she was leaning against.
This was big. This was huge.
“And you’re giving it to me?” she asked bluntly.
“Everyone else is tied up with something.”
Either that, she decided, or Lutz thought this McKenna was a no-win case. “Details?” She curled her voice up at the end to turn the single-word demand into a polite question and started to look for a cab.
“They’ve got him up on morality charges, but that’s a departmental mess. His union liaison can deal with it. Our problem is an extortion charge, mob-related.”
Grace waved down a taxi. It hurt to spend the money on one, but there was no help for it. She had to get over to County fast. Her chest was starting to hurt. A cop on the take. This was the lowest of the low in her estimation.
She opened the cab door and dropped down onto the cracked pseudo-leather seat. “I guess he still has plenty of that cash stashed aside if he can afford us.”
“Captain Plattsmier called me and asked me to take him on,” Lutz said without actually answering.
Ah, she thought. Pro bono then, a freebie in the interest of firm-city relations. Now she understood why Lutz was giving it to her. “I’ll handle it.”
She disconnected and sat forward to direct the driver. It was time to go wrestle another loser free of the jaws of justice. But this particular loser would be her ticket out, she decided. When she got this guy off, her earn-her-stripes days of DUI cases and the other minor riffraff at the bottom of the firm’s barrel would be behind her.
Aidan McKenna didn’t know it yet, but she was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
“Your lawyer’s here,” the guard said.
Aidan jerked off the concrete bench and stood to approach the bars.
“She’s in one of the interrogation rooms now.”
She? There was just enough old-world Irish in him that he frowned briefly at that. He thought of his mother again, born in Killarney, a tough no-nonsense woman who was happiest at a stove.
The guard pulled open the cage door and Aidan stepped through, leaving thoughts of his mother’s face behind in the cell.
“Guess you did something,” the guard said with a little grunt.
“Even if it ain’t murder two. Plattsmier didn’t say to shove you out the door. He got you a mouthpiece instead.”
All that told Aidan was that Plattsmier knew something was going on. He knew that Aidan was being charged with a crime, but he wasn’t going to let him spend a night on Nine for a murder he hadn’t committed. So which side did that put him on?
Aidan didn’t know. It occurred to him that at the moment he didn’t know much at all.
He followed the guard up the hall to an interrogation room. Then the guy removed his cuffs and stepped aside. Aidan went through the door alone—and stopped cold.
She was seated at the head of the table and she was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her jet-black hair was a little wild, long, curling here and there in waves that just wouldn’t lie flat—the kind of hair that made a man think of sex, made him want to believe he’d been the one to take handfuls of it and tangle it. She was frowning down at some paperwork in front of her. A tiny crease dug into her smooth brow. Her nose was exquisitely straight, her mouth lush and, as he watched— God bless him, the tip of her tongue poked out to lick her bottom lip.
Everything inside him went painfully rigid. Not only a her, he thought. That kind of her. A knockout.
She looked up at him. “Who’s Bran Downey?”
Aidan found his voice. “That’s the question of the hour.”
“Sit down.” She motioned abruptly at one of the other chairs.
“Ask me nicely first.” Aidan leaned one shoulder against the wall.
Her nostrils flared delicately. She stared at him as though she needed a moment to digest his words. Then she frowned. “Are you antagonizing me?”
“Maybe.”
“Why?”
Aidan approved of the response. She was direct. And it was a good question. Maybe it was the bedroom hair that made him feel cantankerous. He’d had enough of gorgeous women for a lifetime.
“I wasn’t the one who started this off by giving orders,” he pointed out.
Her jaw hardened. “Please, Mr. McKenna, won’t you have a seat?”
She rebounded well, too. “Thanks, I think I will.”