The Rancher's Christmas Promise. Allison Leigh
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have kittens if I say I want to reschedule it.”
“Everything okay?” she asked, alarm in her voice.
“Everything’s fine, except I’m as big as a house and due in two weeks. And don’t you start acting as bad as my husband. He’s turned into a nervous Nellie these last few weeks. Driving me positively nuts.”
“He’s concerned. You’re having your first baby.”
“And I’m already thirty and yada yada. I know.”
Keith stuck his head in her doorway. “Got the latest litter?”
She nodded at him and glanced at the round, schoolroom-style clock hanging above the door. It had a loud tick and tended to lose about five minutes every few days, but it had been a gift from one of her favorite law professors what felt like a hundred years ago. “Listen, Maddie, I’ve got a consult, so I need to go. But I want to know more about the ultrasound. We’ll talk—”
“—later,” her sister finished and hung up. At least Greer and Maddie were almost always on the same wavelength. It was too bad that Greer couldn’t say the same about Ali.
She made a note on her calendar to call her. Maybe if Greer were the one to plan dinner next Monday, she’d get herself back in Ali’s good graces. The three of them usually tried to get together for dinner on the first Monday of each month, but their schedules made it difficult. And when it came to canceling, Greer had been the worst offender. The fact that next Monday wasn’t the first Monday of the month was immaterial. With Maddie ready to pop with the baby, this might be their only chance for a while.
Keith tossed himself down on the hard chair wedged into Greer’s crowded office. “How many assignments this week?”
She closed Anthony’s file and plucked a stack from the box on the floor behind her desk. “Too many. Take a look.”
“I won’t be able to take on as many as usual,” he warned as he began flipping through the files. “Lydia and I have set the wedding date next month.”
Even though she’d half expected the news, Greer was still surprised. It hadn’t been that long since the lawyer was moping around from the supposedly broken heart Ali had caused him when they broke up, before she met Grant. Then he’d met Lydia when he’d taken on the defense case involving her son. “Congratulations. You’re really doing it, huh?”
“I’d have married her six months ago, but she wanted to wait until Trevor’s case was settled. Now it is and we can get on with our lives.” He glanced up for a moment. “How’s the Santiago case coming?”
“Pretrial motions after Labor Day. Michael has the investigator working overtime.”
“I’ll bet he does. Because your boss wants the case dismissed in the worst way.”
“We’ll see.” Stormy Santiago would be the jewel in the prosecutor’s reelection crown. She was beautiful. Manipulative. And charged with solicitation of murder. “Don’s already prepping to go to trial on it.”
“I’ll bet he is. He gets her off and he’ll be onto bigger pastures, whether he’s best buddies with your boss or not. Mark my words.”
Greer couldn’t imagine Don wanting to leave their department, where he was a big fish in a small pond. “You think?”
Keith shrugged. He slid several folders from the stack toward her. “I can take these.”
It was up to her to ensure the assignments were correctly recorded and submitted to the appropriate court clerk. Between municipal, circuit and district courts, it meant even more paperwork for her. “Great. See you in court.”
Morning and afternoon sessions were held daily every Monday through Thursday, with Greer running between courtrooms as she handled arraignments and motions and pleadings and the myriad details involved when an individual was charged with a criminal offense. Occasionally, there was a reason for a Friday docket, which was a pain because they all had plenty of non-court details to take care of on Fridays. And increasingly on Saturdays and Sundays, too. Most of those days, Greer was meeting clients—quite often at the various municipal jails scattered around their region.
Such was the life of a public defender. Or in her case, the life of a public defender who got to do all the prep but rarely actually got to defend. It was up to Greer to prepare briefs, schedule conferences, take depositions and hunt down reluctant witnesses when she had to. She was the one who negotiated the plea deals that meant Don typically only had to show up in the office on Thursdays, when most of the trials were scheduled. She’d gotten a few bench trials, but thanks to Don and his buddy-buddy relationship with Michael Towers, their boss and the supervising attorney for the region, her experience in front of a jury was limited.
She also photocopied the case files and made the coffee.
But if Don were to ever leave...
She exhaled, pushing the unlikely possibility out of her mind, and sent off her message to the prosecutor. The rest of her email would have to wait. She shoved everything she would likely need into her bulging briefcase, grabbed the blazer that went with her skirt and hurried out of her office.
Michael was sitting behind his desk when she stuck her head in his office. “Any news yet on a new intern?” Their office hadn’t had one for three months. Which was one of the reasons Greer had been on coffee and photocopy duty.
He shook his head, looking annoyed. Which for Michael was pretty much the status quo. “I have three other jurisdictions needing interns, too. When there’s something you need to know, I’ll tell you. Until then, do your job.”
She managed not to bare her teeth at him and continued on her way. She didn’t stop as she waved at Michael’s wife, Bernice, who’d been filling in for the secretary they couldn’t afford to hire, even though she hopped up and scurried after her long enough to push a stack of pink message slips into the outer pocket of Greer’s briefcase.
“Thanks, Bunny.”
Greer left the civic plaza for the short walk to the courthouse. It was handy that the buildings were located within a few blocks of each other. It meant that she could leave her car in the capable hands of her dad for the day. Carter Templeton was retired with too much time on his hands and he’d offered to look at it. He might have spent most of his life in an office as an insurance broker, but there wasn’t much that Carter couldn’t fix when he wanted to. Which was a good thing for Greer, because she was presently pretty broke.
She was pretty broke almost all of the time.
It was something she’d expected when she’d taken the job with the public defender’s office. And money had gotten even tighter when she’d thrown in with her two sisters to buy the fixer-upper Victorian—in which she was the only one still living. She couldn’t very well start complaining about it now, though.
The irony was that both Maddie and Ali could now put whatever money they wanted into the house since they’d both married men who could afford to indulge their every little wish.
Now it was just Greer who was holding up the works.
She’d already remodeled her bedroom and bathroom when they’d first moved in. The rest of the house was in a terrible state of disrepair, though. But if she couldn’t afford her fair third of the cost, then the work had to wait until she could.
She sidestepped a woman pushing a baby stroller on the sidewalk and jogged up the steps to the courthouse. There were thirty-two of them, in sets of eight. When she’d first started out, running up the steps had left her breathless. Six years later, she barely noticed them.
Inside, she joined the line at security and slid her bare arms into her navy blue blazer. Once through, she jogged up two more full flights of gleaming marble stairs to the third floor.
She slipped into Judge Waters’s courtroom with two minutes to spare and was standing at the defendant’s table with her files stacked in front of