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“Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Which is a creepy thought, considering some of the fiction being written these days.”
“I assume that’s another potshot at my writing career?” drawled Luke. “Nobody can accuse you of being subtle.”
She and Luke faced each other.
“Since we’re fellow jurors, we might as well introduce ourselves. I’m Luke Minteer.” He offered his hand to her.
“Brenna Morgan.” She shook his hand but withdrew her own quickly.
“You look like you want to wipe your palm on something. Don’t worry, I’m not infectious,” Luke said drolly. “I’m merely the bad-guy brother of your good and honorable congressman, and that is not contagious.”
She looked ready to debate the point. “You switched to a career writing crime novels about serial killers.”
“And you don’t know which is worse. My political chicanery was disgusting, but my writing is morbid and sick.” He smiled slightly at her startled look. “No, I’m not a mind reader, Mrs. Morgan. I’m just quoting my mom and my sisters, my grandmother and my aunts, except for Helen. You’d get along famously with them. They never miss a chance to lecture me on the perils of writing about evil.”
“But you enjoy writing about evil?”
She was looking at him as if he were Satan incarnate on a book tour. Luke felt compelled to offer some sort of defense.
“Look, I’ll try to explain to you the way I’ve tried to explain it to the family. Inventing a crime and a case and solving it is fascinating. You can enter the mind of your characters and set up the cat-and-mouse game between the criminal and the police. Plus, on the practical side, it’s been a very good career move.”
Okay, he wanted to brag a little about his writing success, Luke acknowledged to himself. Was that so bad, in light of the fact he’d been viewed as a disgrace to the Minteer clan, as the district pariah? His writing had elevated him to something akin to celebrity status.
Celebrity or pariah? That choice was a no-brainer.
“A person’s got to make a living, you know,” he added, with a practiced touch of boyish charm.
Brenna Morgan stared impassively at him, uncharmed. “And since you’d already been kicked out of dirty-tricks politics, creating serial killers was the logical next step? There’s nothing in between? Not anything in the retail industry or in the business world or the—”
“Aha! Now you’re joking. I see the glint of humor in your eyes, despite your best efforts to hide it behind that deadpan facade.”
This time Luke flashed his most winning smile, the one on the back cover of his book’s dust jacket. He’d gotten fan mail based on that picture, from women who hadn’t bothered to read the book.
Brenna slowly, almost reluctantly smiled back.
Luke knew she would. No woman was immune to his special smile, not even pregnant ones who thoroughly disapproved of him and his profession. That is, unless she happened to be related to him. To his female relatives, his smile and his charm were distinctly underwhelming.
“I really wasn’t joking,” Brenna insisted.
“Sure you were. Those big gray eyes of yours are still shining with amusement.”
“No, they aren’t.”
“Are you one of those types who always has to have the last word? Your poor husband—and those hapless lawyers who have no idea that they’ve chosen an intractable force of nature to be on their jury.” Luke laughed. “Yeah, it’ll be a hung jury, all right.”
The two of them started walking toward the door, toward freedom. They fell into step, side-by-side. Luke cast a swift glance over at her.
He always noted a woman’s height, and he made no exception this time. She was wearing flat shoes, which allowed him to correctly estimate that Brenna Morgan was not quite five-four. At five feet ten inches, he seemed to be towering over her. Luke enjoyed the sensation in spite of himself.
After all, he’d made peace with his less-than-six-foot height years ago. He didn’t mind being the shortest of the four Minteer brothers, he didn’t care that his three sisters were nearly his height. That two of his teen nephews already were as tall as he was and were still growing.
It wouldn’t be long until he was surpassed in height by another generation of Minteer brothers. Not that Luke minded, of course.
And to prove it to himself and everybody else in the world, he deliberately dated tall women, women close to his own height or even taller, especially in very high heels. He liked the elegance, the challenge of height. He was completely comfortable being one of the less-tall Minteers and didn’t need short women to make him feel—well, six-feet tall.
In fact, he assiduously avoided pairing up with a petite woman. To prove his point to himself and everybody else.
He cast another surreptitious glance at Brenna Morgan.
She was pretty. That renegade thought fleetingly crossed Luke’s mind, surprising him. He did not, as a rule, take note of a pregnant woman’s looks. A pregnant woman obviously belonged to another guy, and he wasn’t the type who poached on his brother man’s territory.
He might be viewed as a snake by some—okay, by many—but he did have a certain code of ethics that he followed. Cheating with another man’s woman was strictly taboo.
Besides, a pregnant woman was a mother-to-be, and mothers deserved the utmost respect. The Minteer brothers had that canon drilled into them by their own mother and grandmothers, by their aunts and great-aunts and older cousins, too.
He certainly respected mothers too much to think of them as pretty, Luke reminded himself. Because thoughts of prettiness too easily led to thoughts of desirability, which logically progressed to thoughts of sex.
Mothers, those paragons of maternal virtue, were not sexy! At least, they weren’t to Luke Minteer.
But Brenna Morgan, with her long black hair curving just over her shoulders, her thick bangs accentuating high cheekbones and big, clear gray eyes fringed with dark lashes, with her firm little chin and full, sensual lips… No, not sensual, he quickly amended. Sensual and pregnant just didn’t go together.
Still, Brenna Morgan was definitely a pretty woman.
To cleanse himself of the disturbing thought, Luke allowed his gaze to drift over her totally nonexistent figure. She looked like a balloon overinflated with helium, the skirt of her blue maternity dress swirling around her swollen feet and ankles.
Luke expelled what might have been a sigh of relief. He admired long, shapely legs on a woman. Though he couldn’t see Brenna’s legs under the long blue skirt, her puffy ankles certainly failed his desirability test.
As well they should. She was pregnant, some kid’s mother-to-be.
She was some guy’s wife. She was of no interest to him whatsoever.
“Is your husband going to be ticked off that you’re stuck with jury duty and that your poor unborn child is going to be exposed to lawyers and their sleazy clients for days on end?” Luke asked jovially, purposefully, as they reached the main entrance of the building.
Brenna, in the midst of pulling on her oversize light-brown parka, looked up at him, in that serious, earnest way of hers. “I don’t have a husband. This baby is mine and mine alone.”
She pushed the double doors open and walked off, leaving him staring after her, his jaw agape.
“You were picked for jury duty in your condition? Are they nuts? Did you tell them the baby is due in six weeks?” Cassie Walsh, Brenna’s next-door neighbor, was outraged on her behalf.
Cassie’s three-year-old daughter, Abigail, sat on the floor, transfixed by a video of Winnie the Pooh, and didn’t look up as Cassie rolled an ottoman toward Brenna, who was resting in the armchair.
“I told them.” Brenna wearily propped her swollen feet up on the ottoman. “It didn’t matter. The judge told us at the beginning of the day that they were cracking down on people getting out of jury duty.”
“How can you be expected to sit for hours when you’re so far along in your pregnancy?” Cassie demanded. “Can’t you get an excuse from your doctor?”
“But then my name would go back in the jury pool and I might be chosen after I have the baby. I’d rather get it over with now. Anyway, sitting in the courtroom isn’t any different from sitting in an office all day—or me sitting in my studio drawing for hours, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Uh, one of the jurors is the brother of our congressman, Matt Minteer,” Brenna added, keeping her voice carefully casual.
It bothered her that she had to make an effort to sound uninterested. She should be naturally uninterested! Even worse was the realization of how much she wanted to talk about Luke Minteer to Cassie, because she knew that Cassie’s brother, Steve, was a lobbyist in Harrisburg and a reliable source of information about Pennsylvania politicians. And maybe about the brothers of politicians, too?
Brenna blushed. She was attempting to pump her friend for information about a guy—like some infatuated thirteen-year-old! A wave of hot embarrassment swamped her.
“Which brother?” asked Cassie. “Matthew Minteer has three brothers, Mark, Luke and John.”
“Luke,” mumbled Brenna. She still couldn’t believe she was playing this game. It was so very unlike her!
“Ah, Cambria County’s most notorious bachelor.” Cassie chuckled. “He’ll sure bring a wealth of experience to any jury!”
Brenna stared silently into space. She was too preoccupied with Luke Minteer, and that was not a good thing, she warned herself. She could visualize him so clearly in her mind’s eye, it was as if he were standing right in the room with her….
Brenna gulped. Luke Minteer was one of those too-handsome, too-charismatic, too-masculine-for-his-own-good men. Certainly, for her own good.
She saw his thick, dark hair, cut slightly long, which gave him a certain rakish air. And then there were those blue eyes, such a brilliant and distinct shade of blue. The strong line of his jaw, his well-shaped mouth. Oh, that mouth!
Brenna laid her palms against her flushed cheeks to cool them. But those visuals of Luke Minteer in the courtroom kept coming.
His long-sleeved blue chambray shirt seemed to accentuate, not conceal, the breadth of his shoulders and chest and the rippling muscles in his arms. And he’d boldly worn jeans, in spite of the dress code printed on the jury summons that said “no jeans or shorts allowed.”
Never mind that half the people who’d shown up were wearing jeans, too, Luke Minteer wore his jeans too well, like a sexy cowboy in a magazine ad. Brenna gave her head a quick shake to dislodge that uncensored thought.
By wearing jeans Luke Minteer had deliberately flaunted the rules, that’s what she intended to think. And what else could you expect from a political dirty trickster who’d been fired by his own brother? Brenna tried hard to summon up some hearty disdain for the man.
Instead, she found herself picturing his hands.
They were large and strong, with long, well-shaped fingers and short, clean nails. That she had been aware of such minute details, had seemingly committed them to memory, appalled her. And then additional mental pictures flashed before her, scenes that dropped below his chest to his flat stomach and—
Brenna sat bolt upright in the chair.
“Brenna, are you all right?” Cassie was immediately concerned.
Brenna nodded weakly. “A…little twinge. A cramp, I think.”
“That’ll keep happening the farther along you get,” Cassie, a mother of three, said sympathetically. “Braxton-Hicks contractions. Try not to let it worry you.”
Brenna gulped. She wasn’t worried about twinges and cramps; she’d read all about them, she even expected them. But this alarming awareness of Luke Minteer…
That was totally unexpected. What was the matter with her? Was she losing her mind? She was heading into her ninth month of pregnancy, and the last thing she should be thinking about was—
And suddenly a blanket of calm descended over her. Of course. She was heading into her ninth month of pregnancy…. That explained it all.
Hormones!
Every pregnancy book she’d read—and there were plenty—had claimed that her hormones would go into over-drive and could cause wildly irrational thinking, emotions and even behavior. So far she had remained remarkably immune from all that, but now it appeared she had succumbed at last.
“You had a long, tiring day, Brenna,” Cassie continued, her tone soothing. “Why don’t you stay for dinner tonight? Ray has a meeting at the high school and will be home late, and Brandon and Tim are eating at their friend Josh’s house. I made macaroni and cheese for Abigail and me, and there’s plenty of it. And we have chocolate cake for dessert, my grandma’s recipe.”
“Thanks, Cassie, but I…I really should go home,” Brenna said weakly. “I ought to work on my—”
“Stay!” Cassie insisted. “I’ll fill you in on your fellow juror, Luke Minteer. According to my brother, Steve, Luke was kind of a legend around Harrisburg when Matt was in state government there, but he managed to contain himself back then.”
“What kind of legend?” murmured Brenna, in spite of herself.
Her unborn baby kicked so hard, the movements caused the material of her blue dress to bob and weave.
“Oh, the kind who played mind games to psych out opponents—and who played lots of games with lots of different women, if you know what I mean.” Cassie cast a quick glance toward little Abigail, but the child was engrossed in the video and paying no attention to the adult conversation.
“Luke was a player, and I’m sorry to say that in those bad old days, my brother used to be one, too,” Cassie said, lowering her voice a bit. “Steve and Luke moved in the same circles. But at least Steve matured and reformed and is a good family man now,” she added, clearly relieved by the transformation.
“Not Luke Minteer, though,” guessed Brenna.
Not that she cared, she assured herself. She was simply passing the time, chatting with Cassie until dinnertime. She’d decided to stay; the macaroni and cheese and chocolate cake were too tempting to pass up. She could work later this evening.
“No, not Luke,” Cassie agreed. “Matt Minteer was elected to Congress and Luke went along to D.C. as his administrative aide, the same position he’d had in Harrisburg. But in D.C., Luke was unleashed. He ran wild down there.”
“How?” Brenna prompted. “Uh, not that I want a detailed account,” she added hastily, her face flushing again.
“I’ll give you the abridged version. Luke got in with a very fast social crowd plus a very nasty political crowd. Maybe he could’ve stayed unnoticed in one, but not both. Steve said rumors about him were constantly flying from D.C. to Harrisburg and, of course, back here to the district. Matt ended up firing Luke. Boy, were the Minteers mad!”
“At Luke or at Matt for firing his brother—or both?”
“At Luke, only at Luke. They let it be known how much they disapproved of him and encouraged everybody else to tell Luke their own unfavorable opinions of him, too.”
“I wonder why he came back here?” Brenna mused. “It seems like a strange choice for someone like him, to come back to a small town and be ostracized and criticized by his own family.”
“Maybe he was trying to get back on their good side. But if he was, it didn’t work. And then he wrote this really successful novel. I heard it’s going to be made into a movie, which would mean even more money, but his family still disapproves of him.” Cassie shrugged. “They’re a tough crowd, the Minteers.”
“He has a favorite aunt who likes his book. He, um, mentioned her.”
“I don’t know which one she is. There are so many Minteers in the area, especially when you count the aunts, uncles and cousins. Abigail goes to preschool with Luke’s brother John’s little boy, David. Sounds like some sort of six-degrees-of-separation chain, doesn’t it?” Cassie smiled. “Or maybe fate?”
Brenna swallowed hard. “What do you mean?”
“Well, who knows what could happen between you and Luke when—”
“Nothing,” Brenna said firmly. “Cassie, I’m having a baby, for heaven’s sakes.”
“Who needs a father. Because there isn’t one in the picture.”
“And from what you’ve told me, Luke Minteer sounds just like the kind of man who would love to step in and play daddy to someone else’s child.” Brenna’s voice dripped sarcasm. “As if he would ever find a pregnant woman attractive in the first place!”
“Okay, I concede your point.” Cassie gave up. “The only thing that will happen involving you and Luke Minteer and jury duty is a verdict.”
Brenna ran her hand through her hair. “And maybe not even that. What if it’s a hung jury?”
She thought of Luke’s amused prediction that she would be the one to hang the jury, but didn’t share the remark with Cassie. She didn’t want her friend to know how long she and Luke had talked, especially after Cassie’s outlandish speculations.
