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“Shit happens, man.”
“Shit only happens to those who let it happen.”
“We can’t all be the golden boy.” Dev was angry. But he had been for the last fifteen years.
“Is that what this is all about?” Mitch asked.
“Hell, no. It’s never been about you.”
“Hold on. I’m driving.”
Mitch pulled onto the shoulder. Dev’s timing as usual sucked. He wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on manipulating Sophia while worrying about his friend.
Revenge would have to wait. Taking care of his friend was more important. But maybe that was the problem. Mitch was always bailing Dev out. Maybe it was time for some tough love. But Mitch didn’t know if he could leave Dev in a cell. Even if that were the best thing for him.
“Give me the details. I’ll handle what I can from here. I’m going to have to get someone from my office over there.”
He turned off the car and rolled down his window. It was a hot day, reminding Mitch of the summer before junior high school when he and Dev had ruled the neighborhood. They’d been an unstoppable team that year. College had changed them. Mitch had learned that looks and charm weren’t enough to make it in the world, but Dev had never made that adjustment.
Taking a notepad he started asking questions. Dev answered them all with the same honesty he’d always had toward his addiction. “I don’t think detox is going to work this time.”
“You broke your probation.”
“Am I going to jail this time?”
“Let me see what I can do. I’ll have to call the judge and get bail set. Do you have anyone who can post it?”
“No.”
“What about Julie?” Dev was a professional horse breeder and had been working for the last six months with Julie Cavanaugh. And spending most of his nights at her home.
“Don’t send Julie.”
“Why not?” Mitch wished he were in L.A. so he could check out Dev himself. He didn’t know Julie, other than through Dev’s stories. But if the woman was half as crazy about Dev as Dev was about her, then she’d want to know.
“She doesn’t know I’m an addict.”
“Why the hell not?”
“She’s kind of classy.”
“So?”
“She thinks I’m one of the good guys, man. I don’t want her to know I’m not.”
Mitch sighed. He, more than anyone else, understood how a woman could mess with a guy’s head. “I’ll do my best.”
He glanced at his watch. He couldn’t drive and make the kind of calls he needed to make to take care of Dev’s problems.
He called Sophia’s office. Her secretary answered on the third ring and put him through.
“Deltonio.” Sophia’s voice had been hard and very confident in the courtroom. In her office though she sounded like the woman he remembered—sweet, tender and very ladylike. He warned himself not to get drawn into the same trap he had before.
“Hey, babe, its Mitch.”
“Mitch, it’s the twenty-first century. Most women don’t like to be called babe.”
“That’s not what they tell me,” he said.
She sighed and he heard her office chair creak. What was her office like? His corner office in L.A. overlooked the city, and on a smog-free day you could see all the way to the mountains. Did she still have that Monet print of Argenteuil?
“Where are you?”
“In my car. Listen, something’s come up in L.A. Can we meet for drinks instead?”
“I don’t know,” she hedged.
“You’re the one who wanted to meet.” He thought he heard the Stevie Ray Vaughan playing in the background. He hadn’t had a chance to ask her about the gift. Really ask her about it and watch her reactions when she talked about the CD and Coronas. His plan, which was rough, had been to simply torment her with pImages** from their past. Unfortunately that was backfiring on him. The pImages** that he knew would ignite passion within her were having the same result on him.
He heard her shuffling something in the background. “Fine. Where are you staying?”
“At the Westin Grand Bohemian Hotel.”
“I’ll meet you in the Bösendorfer Lounge. What time?” She was all business now.
“In about an hour or so.”
“Good, well, ’bye.”
“Sophia?” he asked, pitching his voice lower. He watched for a break in traffic and pulled back onto the highway.
“Yeah.”
“Have you been listening to ‘Shake For Me’?” he asked.
The music in the background was abruptly silenced. And he knew she had been. “Why would I be?”
“I thought I heard it in the background,” he said. That song had been playing when he’d picked her up for their first date. The music had marked a number of firsts for them. They’d blared it from the speakers when they’d moved in together. And it had played in the background when Sophia had done that striptease for him that had made him ravenous for her.
Even now when he heard it on the radio the song had the power to make him hard with the pImages** of Sophia’s full curves gyrating around him.
“I…I’m not that woman anymore, Mitch.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. We’ll talk later. I’ve got to go.”
She hung up and he drove to his hotel. He didn’t like the way Sophia had sounded before she hung up the phone. He’d always been a protector. That’s why he’d chosen law as a profession. He knew weak people made stupid choices and they deserved competent representation.
He was justified in his revenge but hadn’t expected tearing her carefully ordered world apart to affect him.
SOPHIA TOOK the opportunity to meet with Joan and reassure her boss that she had everything under control. She knew that she had not been at her best in their meeting earlier this afternoon. Being in court though had reminded her of the importance of her career. And she wasn’t going to let Mitch Hollaran derail that.
She set up appointments to speak to Holly McBride and the two girls who’d been in the bar with her when she met Jason Spinder. The alleged sexual act had taken place at a party thrown for the cast and crew of the production. Sophia wanted to interview as many people involved with the case as she could.
But not tonight. Tonight she had to meet with Mitch. Meet with him, talk to him and hopefully put the past to rest so they could both move on. She had to be in court at nine the next morning. Normally she’d be home preparing for the next day. Instead she was in the lobby bar about to meet the one man who was shaking up her life. As much as she resented the time away from work, she had to figure out what Mitch wanted and deal with that.
She took a seat in the piano bar and ordered a glass of wine. She checked her watch. He was already ten minutes late. She’d give him another five and then she was leaving.
She needed to reach some sort of truce with Mitch. If it were only their shared past she’d be able to deal with it. She saw her last lover, Robert, fairly frequently. He was a lower circuit court judge. And they’d become friends of a sort.
But Mitch wasn’t a friend. Even if things had ended well between them she knew they’d never be friends because just looking at him made everything womanly in her stand at attention.
The waitress brought her drink. She’d better control this attraction before it destroyed her. If only there were a way to get Mitch out of her system once and for all. The way they’d parted hadn’t been satisfying for either of them, and she wondered if this time they both could achieve at least some kind of closure.
“Hey, babe,” Mitch said, as he approached her table.
She should have ordered soda water. She needed all of her faculties about her when dealing with Mitch. It wasn’t just that he was the embodiment of everything she found sexy in a man. It was that he knew it. His smile said as much and she shivered in reaction.
He still wore the Armani suit he’d had on in court. His tie was neatly tied and he looked as if he’d stepped from the pages of GQ. It would have been nice if time had been cruel to him, maybe thinned his hair, given him a beer belly, but if anything he was leaner and harder now than he had been in college.
In comparison she felt unkempt. The air-conditioning in her Mazda was on the fritz and she’d sweated buckets the entire way over. She’d touched up her makeup and hair but she’d been in her suit all day and she wished she was at home wearing a sundress and drinking iced tea on her patio instead of sitting in the crowded lobby of the Westin hotel.
“Mitch,” she said, standing to greet him.
He waved her back into her seat and sat down next to her on the padded bench seat instead of in the wing back chair she’d hoped he would take. The cocktail table was close and the lounge made the most of their space, so Mitch was right next to her.
Barely five inches of space separated them. She was painfully aware of her personal space and how close he was to invading it.
He signaled the waitress. “What are you drinking?”
“White wine.”
He raised one eyebrow and ordered a Dos Equis. He settled back against the seat and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked tired and not at all threatening right now. He didn’t seem inclined to talk so she got to the matter at hand.
No matter how vulnerable Mitch Hollaran might seem, his opening move told her he was here for blood. Yet he did look as though he needed a friend. She wasn’t going to ask him what was wrong. She took a sip of her wine.
His beer arrived and he drained half the bottle in one long pull. He stretched his arm along the back of the couch behind her head. His hand rested on her shoulder. He toyed with a strand of her hair.
“Please don’t.”
“Why not? You used to like it.”
She knew she’d been right not to let her guard down around him. “We’re not lovers any more.”
“That’s right. We aren’t.”
She was surrounded by him. The spicy scent of his cologne, the heat of his body, the weight of his arm. She closed her eyes, but that only intensified her other senses. She opened them and looked straight at the man who was back in her life, and not just because of work.
“What do you want from me, Mitch?” she asked. The sooner she figured it out, the sooner she could escape to her home and rebuild the defenses he’d so easily ripped through.
He tilted her face toward his and the intensity in his eyes set every nerve in her body on fire. Perhaps she should just take him upstairs and have sex with him. Let him be in control of her body, and assuage the ache that was growing as she sat here.
“Everything you have to give,” he said.
She clenched her thighs together. She wanted him. Wanted those big hot hands on her naked body. She wanted to take the Coronas and limes up to his room, put on Stevie Ray and make love to him all night long.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why not?”
“Are we playing a schoolyard game?”
“We’re both a little too old for that.”
“Then why the word fencing?”
“Honestly, Sophia, you make me feel fourteen again.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“You can’t control it. And neither can I. That’s why I sent you the basket.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m here for more than my client, babe.”
He leaned back, drained the rest of his beer. Drawing the tip of one finger down the side of her face, he said, “I’m here to exorcise you from my dreams.”
3
MITCH SIGNALED the waitress to bring another beer. Leaning back against the padded seat he observed Sophia. It had taken a lot to fluster her and even now he wasn’t quite sure he’d actually done it. Only her tight grip on the stem of her wineglass and the flush on her cheeks gave her true emotions away.
“Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” she said.
“What did you expect?” he asked.
“I don’t know, maybe that you wanted to express some anger.”
“Express some anger? If I get pissed off I’m not going to invite you for a drink to ‘express myself.’”
“This is the first time we’ve been alone since college,” she said.
“Did that basket lead you to believe I was angry?”
“Not exactly.”
He wanted to crack her shell of confidence and lay waste to her dreams the same way she’d shattered his illusions ten years ago. He reached into his pocket and touched the black velvet ribbon he’d kept since they’d parted. The one she’d used to wear at her neck with a little heart pendant he’d given her.
