mere thought of being between her thighs made him hard. And the feel of the mattress beneath him wasn’t helping matters much.
He roughly turned back over, determined to ignore his physical reaction, though his mind kept rushing down the same path, a steam locomotive that wouldn’t stop until it reached an unknown destination.
He supposed part of the reason for his different attraction to Bronte was that she’d been a secret fantasy of his for so long. For whatever reason, from the start, he’d put her aside, above other women he dated. Purposely made her unobtainable, out of bounds. He’d immediately sensed in her a…sameness. Glimpsed in her eyes a shared understanding that had nearly knocked him straight out of his shoes the instant he saw it.
Outside he heard distant sounds. Probably Mitch in the later stages of breaking one of his new fillies. He fought to concentrate on the normal sound, to stop thinking about the woman he shouldn’t be thinking of, get some sleep, then get up to figure out exactly who was trying to set him up for Robbins’s murder and why. His sandpapery eyelids blessedly began drifting closed.
Still, the nameless something that existed between him and Bronte tempted his attention. He’d never experienced the same thing with another woman before or since.
And that’s exactly the reason he’d kept his distance—and should continue to keep his distance.
But when he finally fell into a deep, exhausted slumber, there existed absolutely no distance whatsoever between him and Bronte O’Brien.
BRONTE FIGURED SHE REALLY needed to find something more interesting to do with her down time—like defrosting the freezer.
After ten grueling hours of chaos spent juggling ongoing cases while trying to get a handle on the Pryka/Robbins development, she needed something that would take her mind off the office, allow her to take an all-important step back and look at the details with a fresh perspective.
Sitting alone at her kitchen table, Bronte finished pushing the remains of her gourmet microwave dinner around in its plastic container, then leaned back in her chair. Gourmet. Right. More like airplane food for the patently time-impaired single person. She looked around the too-quiet kitchen. The television was turned low in the corner of the counter behind her, but talking heads didn’t quite do it for her tonight.
Neither did the array of interior design magazines and fabric swatches lying on the corner of the table. She reached out and leafed through the top magazine, stopping when she came to a photo of a high-tech nursery, complete with a three-camera-angle monitoring system and automatic diaper dispenser. Absently, she bent the corner of the page back and forth. There was a point when she’d believed motherhood wasn’t a part of her future. A time when she’d seen herself as a lifelong career woman, being completely content, deliriously happy even, building a name for herself in the U.S. attorney’s office. Then came Thomas. She not only began hearing wedding bells, she found herself slowing her step near the children’s section of Saks. Began reading articles on the future cost of higher education in magazines that she usually skipped. Had idly debated cloth versus disposable and began wondering if day care was tax deductible.
Of course all those thoughts went right out the door along with Thomas.
Then why was she wondering what the nursery in the magazine would look like with a different color scheme?
She sighed and pushed the periodical aside. Maybe she should get an animal that wasn’t of the human male variety. Now that would be a switch. Kelli’s criminally ugly dog Kojak seemed to supply her with constant companionship. She twisted her lips. Then again, she’d balked so badly—obsessed with all the possible stains that could show up on her Persian rug—when Kelli had asked her to watch her prized pet, her best friend had finally taken the pooch out to the McCoy ranch in Virginia while she was on her honeymoon.
No, a dog was definitely out. And the thought of being single with a cat…well, she wasn’t even going to go there.
She heard herself sigh again, then pushed her tray aside and pulled the first of the evening edition newspapers in front of her.
Today, especially, had been grueling. The buzz around the U.S. attorney’s office was that there was little question as to Connor McCoy’s guilt in the Melissa Robbins case. A case that rightly should have been hers as head of the Pryka case, but notably wasn’t. Word even had it that Bernie Leighton himself, the senior attorney, her superior, was working up a case against him. While running back and forth to district court juggling two other cases, one an appearance for an evidentiary hearing, the other to sit co-counsel for a rotating attorney during his first preliminary hearing, Bronte had left at least five messages for Bernie. On last check, he’d returned none of them.
Bronte fingered the grainy black-and-white photo of Connor on the front page of the Washington Times-Herald. He was wearing a dark bulletproof vest with U.S. Marshal printed across the chest, holding a sniper’s rifle at attention. Given the handcuffed and shackled men in institution dress behind him, the picture had likely been shot while transporting federal prisoners. The expression on his face… She caught herself almost caressing that inanimate face and snatched her hand back. The expression on his face was nothing if not arrogant.
“Oh, yes? Then why did you piss off Dennis Burns today by defending McCoy? Why don’t you just hand dimwit Dennis your job and be done with it?” she asked herself aloud.
She opened the paper to page four, where the meat of the story lay, and folded it back to the piece. Okay, so maybe she took a little too much pleasure in honking off a certain rotating junior attorney, aka pissant Dennis Burns, whenever the opportunity arose—which was often, given his interest in her permanent position in the Transnational/Major Crimes Section. It was an interest he’d made no secret of when he requested to assist her on the Pryka case—a request Bernie had immediately granted, putting her in nearly daily contact with the guy. Dennis had been with the section for four months and she’d caught him practically salivating outside her office no fewer than five times. And that wasn’t saying anything about his overt attempts to win the senior U.S. attorney’s affection by eavesdropping on her conversations and—she suspected but had yet to prove—going through her mail and beating her to the punch at status meetings whenever she got a snippet of interesting information.
If she were a man, she probably would have taken him out back and settled things with him months ago.
But she wasn’t a man, and her only effective means of ammo was working her butt off to prove herself the better person for her job. The key word being “her.”
She skimmed the news story. These guys really should get themselves some new sources. Most of the time they were so far off the mark—
Her eye caught on something and she traced her finger back up to the top of the section.
“This afternoon Senior U.S. Attorney Bernard Leighton has named junior attorney D.C. Dennis Burns to head up the investigation…”
Bronte leapt up so quickly, she nearly knocked over her chair.
No…it couldn’t be. Pryka was her case. She’d been the one Robbins had come to wanting to testify against her Serbian-by-birth ex-boyfriend for myriad criminal activities, not limited to but including the smuggling of illegal explosives into the country, purportedly for a third-party terrorist organization. She’d been the one who had nervously made her case before the attorney general to get Robbins accepted into the witness protection program. She had even begun doing some fancy footwork on how best to shore up the hole left by Melissa Robbins’s death—first and foremost, by putting a call into the FBI
