is already completely wasted. Why did they take so darn long to pick us? All those foolish questions they asked us…”
“I had to take two buses to get here,” complained an elderly woman. “Now I have to take two to get home—and do it for heaven only knows how many more days, until this is all over.”
“I’m bringing my knitting with me every day,” said another woman defiantly. “I have to finish an afghan for my great-niece’s new baby in time for Christmas. That’s little more than a month away.”
The two pierced, tattooed young men slunk off. Luke stared after them, bemused. He noticed that the pregnant woman was looking at them, too.
“What are the odds of two jurors sporting identical dragon tattoos that stretch the length of their arms?” he murmured. “I’d never put that in a book. My editor would say, ‘Come on, Luke, that’s too over the top.”’
“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
