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  After graduating from high school, he hadn’t been able to escape to Gainesville fast enough. And he’d jumped at the chance of transferring to the firm’s Miami office two years after coming back here, law degree in hand.

  Now, he’d come full circle. Back to Tampa, successful beyond his wildest adolescent dreams. Tony was home, this time to stay.

  * * * * *

  When Tony got to his condo, he stripped down to skin, stretched, put on some faded shorts, and headed for the beach.

  He ran. An easy jog at first, then harder until the hot sand burned his feet and the calm salt air made his lungs burn. Still the idea of defending Manny Garcia stuck in his throat. He jogged by the dock, thought about taking out his boat, but changed his mind. Breathing hard now, he headed home, anticipating a warm shower and a cold brew.

  Later Tony stood on the balcony outside his bedroom and watched the lights play on the water, reflecting reds, golds and greens from buildings on nearby Davis Island. He brought an icy, sweating bottle of Beck’s to his lips, tried again to banish the Garcia case from his mind.

  Tiny bubbles tickled his throat as they burst, reminding him of occasions not too many years ago when he’d scrounged for change to buy a can of whatever had been on sale at the corner store. Many times he’d fallen short and done without even one cold brew, much less the cases of designer lager the liquor store had delivered along with booze to stock his bar.

  He hadn’t liked not having things. Not at all. Tony would never be poor again if he could help it.

  Suddenly he felt guilty for not wanting to defend Manny Garcia. After all, clients like Manny, no matter how despicable, paid and paid well for the services that let Tony enjoy his German beer, his Ferrari, and his waterfront condo. Not to mention Miss Trial and the portfolio of blue-chip investments that should keep him forever free from the threat of losing it all.

  Tony was a defender, a good one. He reminded himself he truly believed that, guilty as sin or not, every defendant deserved a good defense. The best that money could buy.

  Even Manny Garcia.

  Chapter Two

  Tony tried to keep that thought firmly in mind the following week while he prepared Manny Garcia’s defense, and on Friday when he and Hank went into circuit court to pick a jury.

  Every prosecutor should look like her.

  Never before had Tony let a thought like that intrude on the crucial task of finding jurors favorably disposed to setting his client free. He couldn’t imagine why his mind wandered now. Kristine Granger looked young, even more conventional than was common for a prosecutor. From the occasional dirty looks she threw his client’s way, he surmised she thought him no better than the palmetto bugs that invaded even the cleanest of Florida homes.

  She questioned each prospective juror as though she thought the fate of the world rested on her choosing a jury that would convict Garcia. A sure sign of youth and inexperience. Tony tried to remember how long he’d been at it before realizing he could tell more from observing jurors’ facial expressions than he could by pummeling them with questions.

  Certain he already had seated enough sympathetic jurors to ensure his client’s acquittal, he indulged his curiosity and focused his attention on his opponent. Kristine Granger fascinated him, and Tony had no idea why. On the surface, she was not anything he usually looked for in a woman.

  She was about five-six. Slender. Pretty. Sexy in an innocent sort of way, even though the drab blue suit she wore would have looked prissy on a nun. Tony scrutinized her from the top of her shining blonde chignon to the scuffed soles of low-heeled navy pumps. Gorgeous deep blue eyes. Good body, curved in all the right proportions, in all the right places. Great legs.

  Legs he’d love to feel wrapped around his hips while he pounded his cock into her warm, wet cunt. He got hard, visualizing them going at it on the scarred oak table after he’d swept away the papers strewn in front of him.

  He listened, not to the questions she was asking the woman in the jury box, but to the soft, melodious tone of her voice—a soothing sound with none of the strident overtones he’d found indigenous to the species, prosecutor.

  Mentally erasing the overriding odors he figured had built up in the courtroom over decades of trials and pleadings, Tony tried to discern her scent. He couldn’t. He repressed the urge to get up and move closer, satisfied himself for the moment by imagining she’d smell as sweet as those waxy-looking white flowers that used to bloom in spring outside one of the foster homes where he had lived as a teenager.

  She looked soft—as soft as her tone of voice—quite the opposite from the earnest nature of her words. Satiny. Smooth. Touchable in a way the showcase women he favored never were. Yet he imagined she’d be able to match him word for word in conversations that went deeper than gossip and the merits of one wine over another.

  Damn it, what had come over him? He willed his untimely erection to subside before he had to stand and question another prospective juror.

  “Mr. Landry?”

  Tony glanced at the judge, then nodded toward Hank. “Mr. Ehlers will interview this prospective juror, your honor.”

  Hank got the elderly man dismissed for cause. In spite of Kristine Granger and the way she distracted him, Tony took over from Hank and interviewed the next prospect on the list, a young Hispanic dockworker who gave him a good feeling. They had their jury.

  The fact Ms. Granger had used two of her peremptory challenges to dismiss jurors he himself would have eliminated should have made him chuckle. All it made him do, though, was obsess about this young woman who should not attract him but did.

  He couldn’t get her out of his mind. At the boat dock the following day, Kristine Granger kept popping into his head. None of the attractive and attentive young women who flirted and offered to help him swab down Miss Trial managed to banish the very conventional-looking young prosecutor from his mind.

  And that night when he lay in bed alone and resorted to self-gratification, it was Kristine’s small hands he imagined stroking his aching cock…her soft, pink lips surrounding its head. Her sharp-speaking little tongue licking a drop of lubrication from his slit and begging him to fuck her.

  He’d sample every inch of her hot little body, make her come so hard she’d scream. Drizzle honey over her pussy and lick it off drop by drop. Then he’d sink his cock in her hot, sweet cunt, deep and hard. He’d pound into her over and over until he exploded.

  Just thinking about fucking her was making the pressure build… “Oh, shit,” he muttered as he grabbed for a handful of tissues just in time to catch his ejaculate and avoid having to change the bed.

  Damn it, he didn’t obsess about women. Ever. And coming was coming, whether by his own hand or with a partner. So why was it, Tony wondered on Monday while he showered and got ready to go to court, that he felt cheated for having fucked Ms. Granger only in his mind?

  He couldn’t figure the answer to that, or say what exactly it was about her that had his cock at constant attention and his brain obsessed. When he strode into the courtroom, he reminded himself for what seemed like the thousandth time of all the reasons Ms. Granger most likely was not his kind of woman.

  * * * * *

  Kristine glanced toward the defense table. Even before she met his gaze, she felt Manny Garcia’s malevolent glare. A small man with a well-groomed mustache, he wore a pinstriped suit even more conservative than the ones his high-priced lawyers had on. Garcia would have appeared benign but for flat black eyes devoid of any emotion. He appeared totally comfortable in his surroundings—as well he might be. She calculated how much time Garcia had spent in places like this, how many times he’d been charged only to be freed.

  She doubted there were any mysteries left for him in this courtroom, ripe with the smell of sweaty bodies, industrial-strength disinfectant, and the lemon oil polish that permeated wooden benches worn by nearly a century’s use. From all the times he had been here before, Garcia should recognize the smell of justice.
/>   The man made Kristine’s skin crawl, made her think of dead kids and ruined lives. He made her think about Helen. She had to see him put away so he couldn’t go on contaminating people with coke and heroin.

  Kristine didn’t delude herself. The supply of dope wouldn’t dry up with Manny Garcia gone. Tampa had plenty of thugs who liked quick, easy drug money and weren’t afraid of doing time if they got caught.

  But locking Manny Garcia away would strike a serious blow at Tampa’s drug business. Garcia was worse than most. He had dealers everywhere. They peddled their wares on street corners in the projects, in the pristine mansions of South Tampa and Avila, and everywhere in between. To children. To officials. To anyone with the price of a fix.

  Allegedly. Kristine recalled Andi’s admonition. Her case had holes. Big ones. For a moment she regretted the state attorney’s decision to reject the plea bargain Garcia’s lawyers had offered.

  No. Garcia deserved to go to jail, not just pay a hefty fine and visit a probation officer once a week. She would put him away on sheer guts if she had to.

  Kristine straightened the skirt of her new, hot-pink suit and arranged her notes in front of her, snapping her briefcase shut in time to watch the members of the jury file into the box. Except for the scruffy-looking Hispanic male she hadn’t been able to get dismissed for cause after using all her peremptory challenges, she felt good about them.

  Garcia’s lawyers had seemed pleased, too. Another pang of insecurity hit her. Perhaps she should worry about the jurors. Certainly Garcia’s expensive defense team had more knowledge and experience than she in guessing how people would react to the evidence.

  “All rise.”

  Kristine glanced again toward the defense table when the bailiff announced the arrival of Judge Harrison. A spark of interest ignited when she met the gaze of the lead defense attorney, Tony Landry. Landry, if gossip could be believed, had been tapped to head up Winston Roe’s local criminal defense department precisely because he had proven his skill at getting scumbags like Manny Garcia acquitted of their crimes.

  God, but the man had charisma. Big time. And dark good looks to boot. Too bad he’d positioned himself on the wrong side of the legal profession.

  His gaze burned at her back while she made her opening statement to the jury, making her wonder how he’d counter what she said. As far as Kristine was concerned, his client was guilty, not only of the possession with intent to deliver cocaine charge for which he was on trial, but of many other crimes, the extent of which she could only surmise. The thoughtful looks on the jurors’ faces when she concluded her remarks gave her a fresh burst of confidence.

  Then she sat down and listened to him. Damn. Landry talked to the jurors as if they were his friends. His voice was deep, mellow, like orange blossom honey spilling slowly from its jar. She detected just a trace of back-country southern accent that could peg him as having grown up anywhere from rural Hillsborough County to the northernmost reaches of Georgia or Alabama.

  While his tone made Kristine think of darkened rooms and intimacies inappropriate to contemplate in a court of law, his words cut straight to the jugular. He zeroed in on the lack of hard evidence against Garcia that had cost her hours of sleep while she prepared the People’s case. Conceding that his client fit no one’s definition of a model citizen, Landry insisted all the while that this time the police had arrested Garcia for a crime he had not committed.

  Good strategy. Kristine couldn’t help admiring Landry’s skill, though she censured him for using it to benefit a despicable bastard like Garcia.

  “Be my guest,” he told the jury, his gaze steady as he motioned toward his client and curled his lips as if the sight filled him with disgust. “Hate Manny Garcia. I don’t like him a whole lot myself. Just remember while you’re hating him that he’s not on trial for the crimes he’s been accused of in the papers and on TV. He’s not on trial for anything except hiding a bag of cocaine in a crate of lettuce at his warehouse.

  “Unless Ms. Granger can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Manny Garcia was personally responsible for that coke being where it was when the police found it, you will have no choice but to vote for his acquittal.”

  Holding out both hands in a manner that made Kristine almost believe he hated having to adhere to the letter of the law and set a bad man free, Landry concluded his statement with a shrug and a smile that oozed sincerity.

  Kristine suppressed a groan. Each juror’s nod, every thoughtful look on a solemn face, sent her confidence plummeting.

  She should have told Andi she wasn’t ready to handle a case on her own. She should have ignored the state attorney’s wishes and let Garcia cop a plea. How could she survive this and come out looking like anything but the prize fool she felt like now?

  “Ms. Granger, you may call your first witness.”

  Shelving her momentary terror in the back of her mind, Kristine did what she had to do. She called Sergeant Gray, the vice detective who had found the drugs. Very carefully, she established what had happened May third, when the police had acted on an anonymous tip and found nearly two pounds of pure cocaine bagged up and stashed in a specially marked carton of lettuce said to have been grown in Texas.

  Landry shot her down on cross-examination, when he forced Gray to admit Manny Garcia hadn’t been on the premises when the coke was found.

  That didn’t daunt Kristine. She called her next witness, one of Garcia’s employees who had gotten immunity from prosecution for his testimony. “How did the cocaine get into that crate of lettuce?” she asked after asking a few questions to establish his identity.

  The witness shot Garcia a troubled look. “I don’t know how it got there, but I saw Mr. Garcia and the man who brought the crate to the warehouse check out what was inside and close it up again before they put it on the shelf with the other crates.”

  She gave the witness an encouraging smile. “Did you see what was inside?”

  “No, ma’am. I just saw them—Mr. Garcia and that other guy—open the crate and look inside. Like I said.”

  Kristine smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Smith. That will be all for now.”

  Slowly, as if he hadn’t a care, Landry unfolded his long, lean body from his chair behind the defense table and sauntered toward the witness box. “Mr. Smith,” he said, “you say you did not see the contents of this crate Mr. Garcia and a man you cannot identify opened and looked into on the day before Sergeant Gray raided the warehouse?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Thank you. I have no more questions.” The attorney headed back to the defense table.

  The testimony went on. Kristine called witnesses, introduced evidence, and Landry kept hammering politely on the fact no one had actually seen his client look at or touch the drug.

  It didn’t help that Landry had a dimple that deepened on his left cheek when he smiled, or that he had a casual way of running his fingers through stylishly cut dark brown hair she imagined would feel smooth as silk. Kristine could almost feel the women on the jury latching onto every word he said.

  Damn it anyway, she was latching on the bastard’s every word while she imagined him stroking her hair, whispering sexy suggestions in her ear…dragging him beneath her so she could feel him skin to skin, up close and very personal.

  She was losing. Desperate, Kristine abandoned her quest to present the evidence logically and tried to sway the jury with emotion. When she finished presenting her case and the court recessed for the day, she hurried to her office, intent on finding some detail she might have missed before, a detail that might yet put Manny Garcia behind bars.

  “Kristine?”

  When she looked up from the papers strewn across her desk, Andi was there. Suddenly Kristine felt every drop of sweat she’d accumulated on the short but miserable walk from the courthouse. “Landry’s going to get Garcia off,” she muttered, her blood suddenly pounding at her temples.

  Chapter Three

  Andi sat down on the rickety cha
ir beside Kristine’s desk and met her gaze. “You’re helping him do it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I finished up in court early and came to see how your case was going. I heard it all. The emotional outbursts. The references to unrelated crimes linked to Garcia in the past, some so blatant Judge Harrison didn’t wait for Landry to object before warning you. What are you trying to do, Kristine? Have Judge Harrison declare a mistrial? Land in jail for contempt or get yourself disbarred?”

  “No! I’m trying to put Manny Garcia in prison where he belongs.”

  “It’s not going to happen. Harper should have let you let him plead to a lesser charge, but this is an election year. Anything about Garcia makes news, and he probably thought he’d come off as being soft on crime if we didn’t take the case to trial.”

  “But I want to get him convicted.”

  Andi shook her head. “You’re a good lawyer. Smart. Intuitive. If you’d been thinking rationally, you never would have counted on convicting Garcia in this case. The evidence just isn’t strong enough, and you would have seen that. Don’t let this obsession of yours destroy your career.” Her expression softened, then she smiled. “By the way, I like your suit.”

  Kristine suddenly wanted to tear off her hot-pink skirt and jacket and toss them in the trash. Fat lot of good the new outfit had done her in court today. She started to protest. “I’m not—”

  “Yes, you’re obsessed. Kristine, get over it. If you can’t, I can’t let you try cases like this.” As if to emphasize her words, Andi stood.

  “But Andi—”

  “Your job’s not in jeopardy, yet. I’d hate to lose you. It’s not often we get a young attorney with credentials as good as yours. But I will make certain you don’t get drug-related cases if you can’t be objective about them.” Andi rested one hip against the corner of Kristine’s desk and shot her what appeared to be a sympathetic smile.