Chapter Thirteen
Mitigating Circumstances
Dane was proud of himself. For the first time in his life he hadn’t hauled off and punched a guy who really, really deserved it.
Did they give medals for physical restraint? He deserved one for not chasing LaBarge down after he headed for his waiting car in front of Left Field, for not beating the drunk even more senseless.
What kind of a dirt-faced loser goes to the house of a sweet young girl, at night, and threatens her? Maybe they should call the police.
“Look.” Brooke caught his attention with a tug at his sleeve.
Dane decided to let LaBarge go. Karma would catch up with him, and when it did, it would kick his rear.
Brooke’s voice pulled him back to the now. “Is he really taking me to court? How can it be so soon?”
Dane scanned the paperwork. “Looks like it. He’s challenging the will’s authenticity.” Sure enough, the court date was only a couple of weeks away, on a Tuesday. Whoa. “Expedited schedule.” Suspicions twinged in him. What exactly had LaBarge meant by close personal friend of Judge Vandalay? His initial reaction had been, yeah, sure. But this sped-up court schedule had Dane concerned. Would the judge even be fair, or was he already in LaBarge’s pocket?
Maybe the judge owed LaBarge. LaBarge did seem the type to wrangle people into compromised situations.
“I’m so glad you’re going to be there to help me.” Brooke looked up at him. In the dimness of the front stoop of Left Field, her already large eyes had dilated, and they were the deep pools of chocolate he couldn’t resist. “You will, won’t you?”
Uh. Tweed’s warning from a couple of hours ago came slamming back at him. No female clients. Did that include Brooke?
“I brought your Honda back tonight.” Dane evaded.
“You did? Thank you. But now how will you get back to Naughton?”
Dane hadn’t thought that through very well. He’d been too blindsided by Tweed’s edict. And by getting suspended. Er, fired.
“I have a place I think I can stay.” His Uncle George’s boat was moored at the docks not too far from here. He might have a key somewhere. From his pocket he tugged his keychain and started to flip through the eight or ten options. The right one might have been there.
“Why do men always have so many keys? I don’t get it.” Brooke leaned closer to him. “Come on, I’ll drive you back to Naughton. I’ve got too much adrenaline surging through me right now to sleep, anyway.”
“Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”
“Don’t you?”
Of course, they both did. Sorta. “Thanks,” Dane said.
In the passenger seat of her car, he glanced down at the paperwork.
If I read it, I’m acting as an attorney. And as of tonight, that was verboten. If I don’t read it, I’m no friend of Brooke’s. She has no one else. And he’d never be the hero she needed. I’ll never have her. She’ll never trust me.
And if he read them, he’d jeopardize his entire career.
And if he told her why he couldn’t act as her attorney, she’d really never trust him. She’d assume he was a lying, womanizing lecher. Who’d been caught. And fired.
Defeated, he glanced at the clock. It was after eleven. He was running on fumes.
He looked over at Brooke. Her hands gripped the wheel hard.
“You okay?” he asked. “He didn’t upset you, did he? Because he’s all bluster.” Dane didn’t technically know that was true, but he wanted to reassure her. Besides, he’d protect her from that guy.
Brooke pounded the heel of her palm on her steering wheel. “He’s like a bad penny. Or, no. A canker sore. Keeps popping up at what might otherwise be the happiest days of my life, just to tingle and blister all over them.”
Dane reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. She exhaled and glanced over at him, taking her eyes off the road for a second then looking back. He didn’t know much about women, no man did, but he knew she needed to talk, so he waited until she vented the pressure building in her.
“First, the pageant. Then last year’s ordeal, which I’m trying to forget, and now this with the ball.” Brooke spoke with her hands a lot, and she drove with her knee, which was just peeking out from the hiked-up hem of her skirt, attracting Dane’s eyes. “What’s he got against me, exactly? Or am I just one of a thousand targets he’s constantly trying to take out?”
The reference to what happened last year got to Dane, and he shook himself away from the glimpse of her bare knee. Something had to be said. “Sarge LaBarge didn’t make Ames Crosby into the jerk he is.” There. It was out, on the table— for both of them to see. “Ames did that all by himself.”
Brooke pressed the brake hard and pulled to the side of the tree-lined road. She whirled on him. “You don’t know anything about that.”
Oh, yes, he did. “I do know that there are people you can count on in this life, and people you can’t.”
Brooke turned and stared out the front windshield a long time. Finally she said, “It seems like I can count on you.”
That stabbed him square in the chest. “Hardly.” He gave a mirthless laugh at the irony of this moment. “Don’t forget— I’m a Rockwell.”
With his stomach swirling in regret, Dane looked down at the paperwork in his lap, the legalese that he couldn’t represent her on, due to his own Rockwell-esque situation, guilty or not.
Brooke’s voice softened. “You’re more than your name, Dane.”
Though the words salved the wound she’d made a year ago, they didn’t alter the truth. “If only that were true today.”
“What are you talking about?”
It took him a minute to marshal the forces from inside him to unload the truth, but finally he looked at the ceiling and said, “I can’t be your lawyer.” There. The upshot. He looked over at her dropped jaw, every atom in him jangling with lament.
“I’m sorry?” she coughed, her words a little bit like she’d breathed helium.
“You’re going to have to find someone else.” The admission was a slice from a razor dipped in lemon.
Brooke pressed on the Honda’s brake and pulled to the side of the road, where stared over at him, her eyes dilating in the dim glow of her dashboard, her brows pulled together in a confused look.
“What are you talking about? Does this have something to do with the funk you were in when you got to Aunt Ruth’s? Something is wrong, I know it.”
Now it was Dane’s turn to stare.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said. “We’ve been friends since I used to throw mushy apples up at you and Quirt for not letting me into your tree house.”
“You had surprisingly good aim. I took a few apples to the old bean.” He tapped his temple. Nothing of that gangly giraffe girl remained, except the enormous brown eyes. And they had him in their spell tonight, weakening his resolve to keep the reason for his awful news a secret to protect her from that pain of finding out just what kind of a Rockwell the world thought he was.
“What’s wrong?”
No. He couldn’t tell her. Just moments ago she’d said she could count on him, always. Telling her about his suspension jeopardized every iota of trust she had in him.
“Tell me, Rock.” When she called him Rock, the chasm of age and distance and past hurts collapsed between them, and he was just himself.
“There’s a situation at Tweed.” Tremors of shame and fear shook him. He couldn’t tell her. There was no way she’d be understanding about this.
“Work trouble?”
“You could say that. But I—”
Brooke reached over and rested a hand on his knee. Something about her touch sent a comforting through him so powerful that before he knew it, he was saying it. “I’ve been suspended from Tweed Law.”
“Suspended.” She cocked her head to the side like she didn’t believe it, but not like she was ashamed of him.
Agony racked him. How was he supposed to tell her about Mrs. Jackson’s nastiness? It was so tawdry. Brooke would look at him not like a hero, but like some mangy dog. Still, no way could he keep it from her, not something so crucial to his career or to his ability to be there for her, like she mistakenly assumed he would be.
“A few nights ago,” he began. Or was it less time? In actuality, though it felt a lifetime ago, it was only last night. “I got put in a compromising position— by a woman of high standing in the Tweed Law organization.” He laid out every detail, each word burning acid on his soul.
A little bit of him died inside as he finished with, “And so Tweed insists I refrain from acting as attorney to any female client, until further notice. Or at least until after an ethics panel gives me a hearing— at which they will find me guilty, I can almost guarantee it—”
“But you’re innocent.” Brooke’s desperation caught him off guard and sent a wave of hope through him for a second— until reality gripped him again.
“Guilty until proven innocent.”
“This is America.”
“Not when it comes to claims of sexual harassment.”
“This whole thing reminds me of that story in the Bible.”
“‘Jonah and the Whale?’” Ever since Tweed had chewed him up and spit him out this afternoon, he could relate.
“‘Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife.’” Brooke clearly had a stronger working knowledge of the Bible than Dane did, but he did remember that one— simply because it was so imagery-laden. Every boy who ever went to Sunday school knew not to mess around with the boss’s wife or he’d end up in some dungeon; and unless he suddenly got dream-interpretation powers, he’d rot there.
“In my case, the garment I left behind in her hand was a security video feed.”
“Oh.”
Dane stared at Brooke, expecting to see condemnation in her eyes, despite the comforting words she’d given him. However, to his shock, he saw nothing but sympathy. And then, to his even greater surprise, she reached over and rested her hand on his. He looked down at their hands, together, at rest. Her touch quelled the trembling inside him, and he turned his hand over, lacing his fingers between hers.
“So…you believe me?” He looked over at her again.
“I said you were innocent, didn’t I?”
She had, earlier. It’d escaped him in the moment. “I just…I assumed you’d assume—”
“The worst?” She scooted across the emergency brake and leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder. She smelled like vanilla tonight. “Actually, Dane, for some reason when it comes to you, I always assume the best.”
She did?
Dane’s breath caught in his throat. He ached for her, and the touch of her hand wasn’t enough. Before, he’d ambushed her with a kiss, there in the chapel, and now he burned with shame that his first kiss with this incomparable woman had been so one-sided, despite the fact he’d convinced himself at the time that she’d kissed back.
Now, he could tell the difference. The contrast was a blazing gleam.
With his free hand, he took her chin and tilted it so they were facing each other, and he rested his forehead against hers.
“Brooke, may I kiss you?” he whispered, hope tingling in his toes.
“You didn’t ask permission before.”
“I’d like to change that now.” Despite his asking, he didn’t wait for a verbal answer. A gentle uptilt of her chin was positive response enough, and he took her mouth with his. Vanilla sweetness poured into him, a satiation of a thirst so long-endured he hadn’t let himself acknowledge it for far too many years. A quenching only Brooke’s kiss could provide.
Her words echoed inside him: You’re more than your name.
And more than anything, Dane wanted to believe them.
His hands threaded in her long hair. The skin on her neck slid like satin beneath his fingertips. Her lips and tongue were what heaven must taste like.
Her chest rose, and she slid into his lap, her arms around his neck, and he pulled her tight against his torso, longing to be closer and closer. He had to stop to catch his breath, but then he dove into the depths of Brooke once again, places inside him healing he’d never known were broken.
“Rock,” she said with a soft moan. “Oh, I’ve wanted this.” She placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed his cheek, his eyelid, his earlobe, making his stomach do Olympics-worthy gymnastics. He wanted this woman— every aspect of her.
When she pulled away at last, her eyes were vulnerable and love-lit. Then, when she bit her lower lip and glanced down at their entwined fingers, the final bastions of his resolve crumbled.
“I’ll help you with this case.”
__________
Kisses changed things. Brooke knew that. At least real kisses did. Not like the fake, gossip-feeding kiss Dane had planted on her during church last year— that didn’t count, at least not as an engine of change.
But the kiss, tonight, in her hand-me-down Honda from before her parents’ accident, differed. With every gentle press of Dane’s mouth to hers, she’d felt it. All her nursing school prerequisites focused on science as the study of change, and the chemical reaction between the two of them definitely catalyzed something in Brooke.
A desire to never stop kissing this man, above all.
The tenderness of his touch threatened to turn her into a beggar, panting at his feet for more— especially when compounded by the years of longing built up in her for him, for his touch, for this moment where he showed her he saw her as more than just Quirt’s kid-sister, but as someone he cared for— desired.
But then he pulled away from her, and the pain of their severance left her gasping for breath, and for more of his affections.
No, no, no. Don’t stop, she thought. But his words interrupted her unspoken pleadings.
“I’ll do it. I’ll help you with this case.”
Buckets of cold water couldn’t have jarred her awake more quickly.
“Rock,” she gasped. “No. I mean, your career.” She knew she’d flip-flopped wildly on this topic, but after his explanation she had to protect him from this decision. “That’s not why I kissed you. It wasn’t some kind of manipulation.” Blazing heat rose to her cheeks and neck unassociated with the passion that lit her a moment ago.
“No, no. That’s not why—”
But she knew that kisses changed things. And they might have done so for him, as well.
“I can’t let you, Rock. You’ve worked too hard to get where you are. All that study, the effort. Don’t throw it away on this.” It was everything to her and to Aunt Ruth, and she knew it, but she said, “It’s just a ball.”
Dane took her hand and held it to his lips, kissing each knuckle softly, and sending currents of excitement through her whole system.
“We both know it’s more than that.” He took her other hand and did the same thing, sending new showers of tingles up her arms and through her stomach, the fireworks of yesterday relighting. “And we both know you’ve got no other lawyer. If you did, you would’ve taken him or her with you to the reading this morning.”
Had it only been one day? It felt like a thousand. The kiss itself felt like it had lasted a thousand days alone.
She had to think. But his mouth was so near. Now that she’d experienced that soul-spinning kiss, she couldn’t just leave it sitting there unclaimed, so she went in for a long drink of it again.
After some time, an important question surfaced through her haze of desire, and she pulled back to ask it. “What about Earnshaw? I bet he’s got a lawyer.”
Dane, his breaths heavy, paused a moment and then shook his head. “Unless you’ve signed an agreement with him already, you’re not in business together yet. And I know him a little. He’s skittish.” That was true. Brooke had seen it herself, Trae’s caution. “He gets wind of the ball being tied up in court and he’ll bolt.”
Yeah, that was a good point. She’d have to keep this legal trouble under wraps as much as possible, actually.
“It’s my way or the highway, Brookie Baby.”
Her dad used to call her Brookie Baby. It plucked a string inside her, and she relented— but only for a second, until an idea hit her.
“I have a terrible idea.”
“Hit me with it.” Dane seemed game for terrible ideas, which made her want to kiss him even more, so she did, and he returned the favor for a bit.
“It’s really awful. For you, I mean.”
“The awfuller the better.” He pressed his mouth on hers again.
She caught her breath after a moment and said, “You help me with the hearing, but you’re not my lawyer. You’re my friend.”
“Friend, huh?” He trailed a line of kisses over her jaw. “The kind of friend who lets you sit on his lap in the car at night? Oh. Like at the reading of the will. I see.” He held the see, like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
She dropped it, cringing inwardly. “And I, uh, don’t pay you.”
“I could have been getting paid?” His eyes twinkled, and the dimple in his cheek sank for the first time in hours, the way she knew it only did when he was soul-happy. Brooke lifted a finger and tested the dimple’s depth, satisfying the urge that had gripped her for years. Perfect depth for her fingertip. As she touched him, his eyes closed. Instinctively, she placed another round of kisses on Dane’s lips, and he found her neck with his mouth, and…
Man, it was getting late. Soon she’d be guilty of spending the night in her car with a man. And she had her seven a.m. hospital shift to consider. She’d still be flying through the whole twelve hours, soaring on the wings of Dane’s kiss. She might never need sleep again.
Dane shook himself. “Hey, uh, I respect you— and your dad’s memory— too much to keep you overnight in a car.”
She nodded, grateful that he had more self-control than she did tonight. Who’d have expected?
Brooke started the Honda and they finished the trip to Naughton holding hands, the caress of his thumb across her palm sending waves of happiness to her heart.
“It’s just up here.” He pointed to a brick house with grand old maples and oaks just visible in the predawn light. “And okay. I’m game.”
“For?”
“For being not your attorney but just your friend.” He winked, and it shot like Cupid’s arrow.
“Deal,” she replied, although she’d never want to just be Dane’s friend. Not after kisses like that.
Kisses changed things.
But if she was going to act as her own attorney with only a friend to help her, and go up against the most powerful man in Naughton who had “close, personal friends” in the court system, Brooke had a cliff to climb— and no safety net.
“I’m scared.”
“It’s going to be fine, Brooke. I promise.” His promise sounded like truth. “We just need to go find Harvey Jarman.” He kissed her one last time through her rolled-down window before she could formulate the obvious retort—
Harvey Jarman’s dead.