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“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.”
Counselor. She could live with that, Grace decided.
“I never did anything to rat on,” he continued.
“So she made it up. We’ll know once we get to the prelim—to the preliminary hearing. But first we have to get through bail tomorrow.”
“There’s not a ‘we’ involved here yet, lady-honey-Violet Eyes.”
“Now you’re trying to provoke me.”
“Is it working?”
And like that, just like that, he was the devil again. Grinning, relaxed, irreverent, unperturbed, as though his temper moments ago hadn’t happened. The room wanted to tilt around her.
Grace turned carefully in her chair and started typing again. “Give me some character witnesses. What about Rafe Montiel? And that other guy you mentioned earlier at the restaurant?”
“Fox Whittington. He’s Rafe’s partner. Yeah, they’ll both come through for me. Note that I say ‘me,’ not ‘us.’”
“Stop holding my job over my head.”
“That’s tough to do when you’re virtually handing it to me.”
Suddenly she was on her feet as well. And she was vibrating.
“What do you want from me?”
“A little faith.”
She’d been dealing with criminals for over a year now, and she’d never met one who cared so much about the opinions of others. “Ninety-two percent of people accused of a crime actually commit them.”
He frowned. “I never heard that statistic. Where did you get it?”
“From my own experience.”
“A month’s worth?”
“Thirteen months’ worth. I clerked for a year before I went to Russell and Lutz. The odds are against you.”
“I’m supposed to be impressed with this?”
Grace folded her arms across her breasts. “I have an analytical mind. I can assure you, my results are accurate.”
“Law clerks work their—”
“Leave my body parts out of this, please,” she said quickly.
“Why? Mine seem to be up for grabs.”
Grace looked away as she felt her face heat again. “Trust me, I have no desire to grab any part of you.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get back to what parts you didn’t work off while you were clerking. How the hell did you find time to do a study?”
“The results were something I felt I needed to learn. I worked on it in law school, too. If you add those results in, you come up with something closer to four years’ worth of data.” She finally glanced over her shoulder. He was staring at her. For the first time since she had met him, he actually looked flummoxed.
“What?” she demanded.
“Why would a woman who looks like you spend her spare time poring over insignificant data?”
Her spine hardened and it hurt. “It’s not insignificant.”
“It’s erroneous.”
“It’s not that either.”
