Kitabı oku: «Risking It All», sayfa 4

“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.”

“I’m a cop. I know.”

“You were a cop, Mr. McKenna. Unless you let me do my job, your days of said employment might be a little numbered.” Grace moved back to the table to get her laptop. “I think I’m done here.”

“By the way, I’d put it at ninety-five percent.”

Her gaze jumped to him. “You’ve made a study, too?”

He had, but Aidan decided not to admit it. At the moment, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to have anything in common with her or not.

She should have been out partying, kicking up those pretty legs, bringing men to their knees, while she was in school. Instead, she’d been accumulating data.

“Either way,” he said instead, “I guess I’m in the minority. Work on your attitude overnight, Counselor. We’ll decide your fate in the morning.”

He was playing with her. Enjoying his upper hand to the hilt. And he was doing it on purpose. It made her crazy. That was the only excuse Grace could think of to explain why she rushed at him when the last thing in the world she ever wanted was to be in close proximity to him again and have her pulse shoot around inside her like a Ping-Pong ball.

She grabbed his arm. “Now. We’ll decide it now.”

“Says who?”

“Says me.”

“I don’t think it works that way.” He closed his hand over hers where she held on to him.

Grace tried to tug away. He wouldn’t let her go.

He used his other hand to point a finger at her. “You—lady-honey-Counselor-Violet Eyes—are the attorney. You are the one selling services. I am the client. I am the one buying those services. Therefore, I get to decide whether I want to pay for them or not.”

“I hate you.” Oh, God, had she actually just said that to a client? But maybe he wasn’t a client, she reminded herself. Maybe he was the devil incarnate.

He let her go. Grace stepped back quickly. She fought the need to rub her hand where he had been touching her.

It wouldn’t wash up her career if he fired her…not quite. The D.A. would be thrilled to welcome her as a prosecutor, but the Commonwealth wasn’t renowned for paying their employees well. And, if she got dumped from her first major case, she’d never again hope to find a job as well paying as what Russell and Lutz dished out to their associates.

She’d opened a savings account this past month. She’d stashed aside almost a thousand dollars. She needed that money. She needed it desperately.

She collected her computer. “Enjoy your skin flick. I’ll be in touch as soon as Dan talks to Chief Baines in the morning.”

This time, he let her go when she made a beeline for the door. Grace wasn’t sure if she had ever been so grateful for anything in her life.

Chapter 4

An almost tomblike silence fell over the room in her wake. Aidan wondered about that and any implications it might have as he finally—really—looked around the room.

He cleaned up the table—his mother had taught him well—and tossed the lady lawyer’s drink down the sink behind the bar. He wiped up the little dewy rings it had left on the table and threw out the empty bottle of Jameson’s. Then he decided to help himself to another bottle of whiskey. It was paid for, after all. And sometimes a man had just cause.

He eschewed the cola this time because even though the Jameson’s was gone, the other brand the hotel stocked was a really good bottle. He carried it with him to the door on the right side of the room and looked inside. The bedroom was pretty much everything he had expected. There was a king-size bed done up in hunter-green satin and more pillows than a guy alone would ever need. Hell, Aidan thought, he could bring a whole harem in here and there would be room and pillows to spare.

The thought barely made him crack a grin and he was generally pretty amused by his own humor. That disturbed him, so he opened the bottle of whiskey and swigged from it as he crossed to the bathroom.

“My, my, my.” He touched the white terry-cloth robes hung in a small closet. “I’ve got Dan Lutz’s bathrobe, the philandering old goat.” But Dan probably had one thing tonight that he didn’t have, Aidan realized—a warm body to wear the smaller robe.

Where the hell was his mind going? He hadn’t thought in terms like this in six long months.

He glanced at the sunken whirlpool tub and that brought more clever female images to mind, not a one of them involving a blonde like Kat, and that made him knock back more whiskey. There was a bidet. The contraptions had always made him seriously wonder about Frenchmen. But the room also had a real honest-to-God American toilet and a shower, in case one didn’t feel like going buoyant in a tub full of hot bubbles. Or, he thought, in the event that a man was staying here alone.

“Okay, that’s enough of that,” he said aloud.

Aidan left the bathroom. He crossed the bedroom quickly as though images of a woman who wasn’t blond by a long shot were chasing him. He went back to the big center room and stared at the telephone on an end table by one of the sofas. And that was when he admitted to himself why he was swilling still more whiskey, why he was touring his accommodations as if he actually gave a damn about them, why he was amusing himself with tantalizing thoughts of a brunette barracuda, though admittedly, she did rattle nicely. But all of that, he knew, was his way of putting off the inevitable.

Calling Ma.

Aidan capped the whiskey bottle again and put it down solidly on the table. He sat on the sofa, sprawling his legs out in front of him, and reached for the telephone, pulling it onto his lap. Then he bought more time trying to figure out what number he ought to push first to get an outside line.

He stalled by calling his own answering machine to retrieve messages. There were nine of them. That was bad. He hadn’t had nine messages waiting for him at any one time since he was seventeen and the darling of Bishop Eustace High School.

The first was from Shanna, his sister and the mother of Joe and Mickey who had been with him at the basketball court when this nightmare had started. “Oh, my God!” she cried. Then again, for good measure, “Oh, my God! What happened? Where are you?”

A click, and the machine rolled on to message number two. Shanna again.

“Duh. I just answered my own question. You’re probably still at the police station. I’d better call Ma.”

“No, no,” Aidan said aloud, as though she could hear him, as though he could stop it. “Don’t do that.”

Too late. Message number three. Ma.

“Aidan Jack.”

Aidan winced.

“Aidan Jack, your sister just called me with the most horrible tale. Please call home.”

Click. Message Four. His dad.

“Hey, buddy, call in. Ma’s upset.”

With due cause, Aidan thought, and he grimaced again.

Another four messages came in, one more from Ma, one from Shea, his youngest sister, one from Fox Whittington wondering if everything had turned out okay and asking if there was anything more he could do to help. And one from Jack Aidan, his older brother. Ma hadn’t been real amused when she’d had two kids within twelve months of each other. She said she’d been too worn out to be creative with names. Aidan believed that because, several kids later, she had come up with Shea.

Aidan got up from the sofa. He grabbed the whiskey bottle again and uncapped it.

“I’m thirty-four years old,” he said aloud. All the same, he was a good Irish boy. And he needed to call his mother. Because, unless he badly missed his guess, she was either throwing up from worry by now or she was making his dad’s life a duck-now-or-go-to-hell experience by throwing things. Finola threw things. Rarely, but when she was really, really stoked, it happened.

Aidan had always figured she had a right to that idiosyncrasy. She’d come to this country at sixteen, pregnant and alone except for a man she’d been married to for a mere seven months. She’d dug in, she’d survived, and she’d raised seven kids on a very short shoestring. She’d stayed married to the best, most honest man Aidan knew in a society that took marriage lightly. So if she got pissed off occasionally when life conspired against her and a pan or an iron took flight, well, so be it.

He was all out of procrastinating excuses, Aidan realized. He punched his parents’ number into the phone.

Finola answered on the first ring, which told him something. She hadn’t been throwing up. She’d been throwing—period. “Aidan? Aidan Jack? Where are you?”

“Enjoying nicer accommodations than one might expect under the circumstances,” he replied blithely.

“You’re not home.”

His heart cramped. “No.”

“What happened? It’s that woman, isn’t it?”

“Which one?”

His father had picked up the extension. Aidan heard Daniel McKenna choke on a laugh. Finola, however, was not amused.

“The blonde,” his mother said flatly.

“Many good women are blond.” And some scary ones were brunette, Aidan thought.

“I will not play games with you, Aidan Jack. Tell me what you need me to do.”

And that simply, that suddenly, the world yanked out from beneath him. First he was breathing and then a weight with the heft of Gibraltar came down on his chest. First he was trying to dodge…and then he was undone. Because no matter what, that was Finola with her brood. Not what did you do? But what do you need me to do?

Aidan found his voice. “I have it under control.”

“Control would be home in your own bed,” Ma said.

“Okay. Semi-control.” Then the words came, helpless and emasculating, and he couldn’t help them. “I didn’t do it, Ma.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Tell me what ‘it’ is.”

“Extortion. Apparently. Twisting money out of folks.”

“My boy? I’d kick his—”

“I’ve already explained that to someone, Ma,” he interrupted.

“Good. Come home then.”

“It’s not that easy. For one thing, my home hasn’t been there with you for a lot of years. And for another, in this country, I need a lawyer to prove it first before I can just go where I like.”

“Who is he? The lawyer?”

“She’s…ah, one of the best.”

He got the long silence he expected. “What kind of woman needs a highfalutin job like being a lawyer?”

“A smart one.” That came to him easily enough. On the tail end of that were words he didn’t say. A beautiful woman. A skittish woman with secrets. He wasn’t sure where that had come from, but it was there, in his gut. “She got me out of jail,” he added.

Ma gave a good, long sniff to that. Then, reluctantly, “Bless her heart.”

“Yeah. It was clever of her.”

“What now?” Finola asked.

“I’m not precisely sure, but there’s a paperwork glitch and if I know the people behind this, it will be worked out by morning. So tonight I’m in a safe place.”

“How safe?” she demanded.

Aidan looked around at the suite. “Safe. And spiffy.”

“Then what?”

“Tomorrow there will probably be a bail hearing.”

“Even though you didn’t do it?”

“It’s the American way, Ma,” he said again. “I’ve got to prove it.”

“Then what?”

“Then I either go to jail until trial, or I go home. It sort of depends on the lady lawyer.”

“She did it once, right? Kept you out of jail?”

Aidan nodded at the too-silent room. “She did it once.”

“I guess a lady lawyer like that is real expensive.”

Dear God, Aidan thought, he didn’t even want to think about that yet. How much did he have in savings right now? Six, seven thousand? Lutz had been talking in six figures. “I’ll be okay.” Somehow. He figured he could remortgage the town house and squeak out another thirty, forty thousand. But in all honesty, he’d known this was coming when he’d told Lutz he could raise the money. And he knew he was going to have to accept their help.

His father broke in. Aidan had forgotten he was still on the extension. “We have money saved,” he said.

His heart squeezed and his throat closed. “It’s your retirement.”

“We have equity in the house. The boys do, too. We’ll leave the girls out of this—we can’t expect their husbands to chip in—”

“We most certainly can,” Finola interrupted her husband.

“Daniel, when we’re done here, call Shea and Shanna.”

“Let’s tap the boys first,” Daniel said.

Aidan’s heart was clubbing. For the first time in a lot of years—maybe since Bishop Eustace High School when Pattie Ann O’Brien had dumped him—he wanted to cry. “Leave them all out of this,” he said. Patrick was in college. Declan was an artist, a starving one. Neither of them had a dime. Jack Aidan was more or less in the same financial boat that he was, and Danny Jr. had four kids.

“You need help, son,” Daniel said.

Yeah, Aidan thought, yeah, I do. And it was overwhelming.

“Listen to me,” he said hoarsely. “You remember when I took down Kat—Katherine? When I testified?”

“She was not a good girl,” Finola fretted.

Aidan moved past that. There had been no love lost between Finola and Katherine. “This is payback for that. I’m being framed.”

“Well, then, they will just have to unframe you, won’t they?” Finola asked.

“That’s where the lawyer comes in,” Daniel said. “We need to raise some money. What about your job, son? Do you still have that?”

“Too soon to tell,” Aidan admitted.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Finola decided. “We’ll fix this.”

Aidan couldn’t answer that. He was starting to understand Grace a little better, with all her bated breaths. Having everything in your heart torn open and exposed could definitely stop inhalation and exhalation, though he still wasn’t sure why it happened to her so frequently.

“Aidan Jack, where can we reach you?” Finola asked.

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” He hung up the phone before she could ask anything more. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold himself together.

His life was in Grace Simkanian’s hands. His family’s life was going to be in her hands if he allowed them to help financially—and a McKenna had never accepted a handout like Lutz’s offer in their lives. McKennas paid their way. So for the first time in a very, very long time, Aidan stared at the wall and wondered what a certain woman was doing now. And that woman definitely wasn’t blond.

Grace was shaken down to her toes.

She was addled enough that she didn’t remember that she had spent every dime for the last fare she’d paid tonight. She didn’t remember until her cab pulled to the curb in front of her brownstone. She’d been sitting, frozen, in the same position since she’d gotten into the car, concentrating on inhaling and exhaling. When the taxi stopped, she started dazedly out the window at her lobby doors.

“That’s $8.60,” the driver said.

Grace finally got enough air into her lungs to groan. “Could you hold on a moment? I’ve got it inside.”

Something, maybe the look on her face, kept this man from arguing with her the way the first had done. Grace slid from the car and onto unsteady feet. Why had she taken a cab anyway? She always rode buses. Another twenty dollars down the drain, she thought helplessly. And this wasn’t something she could put to the firm with any amount of conscience. She wasn’t toting a client around this time.

She went inside and tried to jog to the second floor but found that she didn’t have the energy. She found her key in her briefcase and let herself inside, dumping everything to the floor there and creeping soundlessly to her room so as not to wake Jenny.

“Wow. You really did stay out with him most of the night.”

Grace shrieked in surprise and whirled back to face the living room. Jenny was sitting on the sofa in the dark. “Why are you sitting on the sofa in the dark?”

“I’m thinking.”

“You can’t do that in bed?”

“I was also kind of waiting up for you.”

Something inside Grace twisted. She hated to put people out. It always made her feel guilty. Jenny was an early riser. She shouldn’t have to sit up all night over an unprecedented Irishman. “I’m okay.”

“You were a little shook-up when you left here.”

She was still shaken up, Grace thought, probably even more so than when she had gone to the Hyatt.

“That was the first date I’ve seen you go out on in the entire time I’ve lived with you,” Jenny went on. “So what gives? Spill all.”

“He wasn’t a date! He was a client.”

“A yummy client.”

“You can have him if you want him. Assuming I can keep him out of jail. He’s not going to be able to make many babies in jail.” Jenny’s greatest aspiration was a passel of kids and she made no apologies for it. “I’ve got to get some money and pay the cab I left waiting downstairs.”

“You took a cab home? Grace, you’re scaring me.”

Grace escaped into her room and went to her desk, yanking out the center drawer. She found her checkbook and stuck a finger into the little fold at the back for the emergency stash she always kept there, peeling off a twenty. She’d made this guy wait, too. She had to tip him decently. Why had she bothered to go to law school? With women like her running around the city in taxis, she should have been a cab driver.

Grace hurried back downstairs and paid the driver. When she returned to the apartment, Jenny was in the kitchen making tea.

“Go to bed,” Grace said from the doorway, digging the heels of her hands into her own tired eyes.

“The night is young.”

“Jenny, your nights are ready for Social Security by ten o’clock.”

“It’s barely midnight.”

Startled, Grace looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. She felt as if dawn was rapidly approaching. How could her life have gotten so chaotic in such a short period of time?

The tea smelled delicious. It hinted of cinnamon. Jenny brought her a cup and moved it encouragingly back and forth under her nose. “It’s decaf,” she cooed.

“Doesn’t matter. A marching band couldn’t keep me awake tonight.” Grace took the cup and sipped gratefully. It was delicious. She closed her eyes and shuddered a little as the heat of it hit her stomach and forced her to relax. “Why are you waiting tables? You ought to be cooking somewhere.”

“I’ll cook for my babies when I get them.”

For some reason, the simple comment almost brought tears to Grace’s eyes. If she started bawling, Grace thought, Jenny would go for the nearest straightjacket. Probably with good cause. Grace never spent money on cabs and she didn’t date and she didn’t cry.

She hadn’t dated anyone tonight, Grace reminded herself. She’d just had a man blast into her neat, orderly world and turn it on end. He was a client.

She moved to the kitchen table and sat. “He accepted money from the mob, Jenny. My guess is that his job was to protect them from the more upstanding elements of the Philadelphia Police Department. That’s what he’s alleging that someone else did anyway. The best liars tend to keep their stories as close to the truth as possible.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “He’s an extortionist? But he seemed so…so funny and nice.”

“Extortionists can be funny and nice, I suppose. When they’re not extorting. I’ve read about serial killers whose neighbors swore they were the nicest guy they’d ever met.”

“And he admitted it? He just said, yup, I did it, now get me off?”

The tea needed cookies. Grace toed her high heels off and went for the tin on top of the refrigerator. “Of course not. He says he’s innocent.”

“Then how do you know he’s not?”

“Because the D.A. never presses charges without an ironclad case. It’s an elected position. If they lose too often, the voters won’t be so inclined to give them their jobs back come the next election. So if someone is charged with something, it’s a pretty good guess that the Commonwealth has a bunch of solid evidence against him. They wouldn’t take the chance otherwise.” Grace bit into a cookie and passed the tin to her roommate. These were Jenny’s creation, too, and they were also delicious. She really was going to make a fine mother one day.

“So the D.A. charged him?” Jenny said. She might not have had any career aspirations herself, but she was always interested in Grace’s job and in Mandy’s. Mandy was an attorney, as well, but she practiced family law.

Grace registered her question. “I…no. Actually, they haven’t yet.”

“So maybe he really is innocent.”

“He’s not! They’re going to charge him!” Her stomach was tightening up again. Grace went back to the table and realized that somehow her fingers had ended up thrust into her hair as she gripped her head against one more ache. “Trust me, Jenny, he did it. They always do it.”

“But you haven’t actually seen the evidence yet, so you can’t be sure.”

“Who are you?” Grace demanded. “The Civil Liberties Union?”

“I’m just saying, maybe they won’t even charge him. Maybe they’ll realize that they made a mistake and…” Jenny trailed off at Grace’s expression. “I’m being naive again, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

Jenny sighed. “That’s a shame. He’s gorgeous.”

“No, he’s not. He’s an arrogant, outrageous, obnoxious ass.” She finished her tea and stood again. She wanted nothing more in life than to slide between cool, clean sheets and close her eyes. Besides, she had to get up early to turn her quick notes into some semblance of a report for Dan. “Thanks for the tea. And for waiting up. You didn’t have to.”

“I needed to get the scoop to give Mandy tomorrow.”

That alarmed her. Grace stopped at the kitchen door and looked back. “Don’t.”

“Don’t tell Mandy about the hunk?”

The three of them had been best friends for years. They held each other up and sometimes—when it was in someone’s best interest—they pressed each other down. There was little they didn’t share. So if Jenny told Mandy about McKenna, that would make McKenna important. Not just another scumbag client, but a man.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Grace said finally, feebly.

“Except that you stayed out with him until nearly midnight—”