By Request Collection April-June 2016. Оливия Гейтс
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couldn’t argue with either point. And she figured she needed to save up her energy. If she was going to argue with Duncan about anything, it was going to be about what she was sure he wanted to “talk” about.
The mind-blowing kiss they’d indulged in.
In an alley. A very public place.
She’d made the move, but at least they knew what they were up against. And she hadn’t been the one to call a halt to it. She’d always been able to before. That aside, they had to find a solution. They both worked in D.C. They were adults. And they wanted each other like gangbusters. No way they could ignore the elephant in the room.
She made her living arguing cases, negotiating solutions, and if she’d learned anything from law school and from working for Abe, it was the value of a preemptive strike.
So while they’d driven home, she’d tried to review her options. But it was damn hard to weigh them objectively while they’d sat so close in that tiny car. Every time he’d shifted gears, his arm had brushed against hers, and each time it had, “here” and “now” had blinked on and off, little neon letters in her mind.
Now he filled all the spare space in her kitchen. She could even smell him above the spicy aroma of the food.
He’d given her no chance to send him away as he’d cut a path through the little throng of reporters that had been waiting at the mouth of the alley. And she had to admit that she was happy not to have had to enter her apartment alone tonight.
He poured the dark red wine into two glasses and handed her one. “I have a proposition for you.”
“Ditto,” she said. She just had to figure out what it was. Exactly.
“Mind if I go first?”
“Go ahead.” The only thing better than making a preemptive strike was learning what your opponent had in mind and then adjusting your strategy.
“Cam has been bugging me to take a few days off and go up to the castle to see what I can figure out about the rest of Eleanor Campbell MacPherson’s missing dowry and about that intruder he believes was breaking into the library. I want you to come with me.”
Surprised, Piper stared at him, her mind racing. Duncan Sutherland knew a bit about making preemptive strikes himself, it seemed. “Why would I want to do that?”
He sipped his wine, and then smiled at her. “Because your sister Adair already found one of the earrings. Don’t you want to see what you can do if you set your mind to it?”
She tilted her head to one side to study him. “My sisters and I aren’t much motivated by sibling rivalry. And I have a lot on my plate right now.”
“Agreed.” He finessed two slices of pizza out of the steaming box and handed her one on a plate. When they were both seated at the small table, he continued. “Look, I know that Monticello wants you to keep a low profile for a while. Part of that is because he is what he is. He doesn’t want the spotlight focused on anyone else but him. But part of that is motivated by genuine concern for your safety. He’s worried about you. And what happened today—you can’t take that lightly. My boss isn’t taking it lightly. What argument could I make that would convince you to come up to the castle with me for a while?”
Piper lifted her glass and swirled the contents. She took a careful sip before meeting his eyes. “Not a one. I don’t believe in running away from problems.”
Okay, Duncan thought. He’d struck out on his first and second strategies. The missing sapphires and the safety factor. It struck him quite forcibly that he didn’t know as much as he needed to know about Piper MacPherson. Therefore, he’d used the wrong approaches so far. A first for him and totally due to the fact that for the last seven years he’d tried to avoid thinking about her, period.
So he did what he’d avoided doing for seven years. Biting into a slice of pizza, he put himself in her shoes, the same technique he used on the cases he profiled. She was tired. There were dark circles under her eyes and a little worry line on her forehead. The worry line struck a chord in his memory. When they’d played together as children, she’d always been the worrier about one or the other of her sisters. Protective, too.
And today of all days, why wouldn’t she be tired? She’d been instrumental in writing a brief that had let a convicted murderer go free. Monticello’s personal hunger for media attention had protected her so far, but now she was suddenly being credited with putting Patrick Lightman on the streets. And someone didn’t like that at all.
She didn’t like it, either. He’d seen both guilt and regret in her eyes that morning when Abe had been bragging about her brilliant brief. He’d recognized it at the time, but there’d been other things on his mind, including handling his response to her.
He took another sip of his wine. There had to be a better way to convince her.
As silence stretched between them, Piper picked a piece of pepperoni off of her slice and ate it. “Abe is so concerned about my safety that he replaced me as second chair on the Bronwell trial.”
“That sucks.” The case had made all the papers and hit the national news nearly a year ago. Alicia Bronwell, the trophy wife of one of D.C.’s most highly paid lobbyists, had been accused of slowly killing her much older husband with arsenic. When Abe snatched away Piper’s opportunity to participate in the trial, that had to have been a blow. On a day when she’d already sustained a pretty good one.
But it didn’t escape him that the loss of the Bronwell trial was foremost in Piper’s mind—not the fact that someone might be intending to harm her. The woman had courage. He’d noticed it when they’d been children. There’d been one day in particular when they’d been playing a pirate game on the cliffs. Duncan recalled finding her clinging to the rocks, frozen with fear. She’d climbed down to the beach with him—in spite of the fact that she’d been scared stiff.
She selected a slice of green pepper.
“Monticello offered you second chair as your reward for the work you did on the Lightman case.”
When she met his eyes, he saw the anger. “Yes. Then he took it away and gave it to Richard.”
Duncan’s eyes narrowed. “The guy who barged in here this morning.”
“Yes. And he’ll take full advantage of the opportunity. Richard’s good at that.”
“You’ve had a hell of a day. First a nutcase who wants to annoy and scare you at the very least and, worst case scenario, wants you dead. Then your boss reneges on his offer.”
“If you’re trying to cheer me up, you’re failing.”
“I’m not here to cheer you up. I’m just laying a foundation for the case I’m going to make. Isn’t that what you’d do with a jury?”
She lifted her glass and studied him over the rim. There was a challenge in her eyes, and they didn’t appear as tired anymore. “Go for it, Sutherland.”
“Seems to me you have two choices.” Holding up a finger, he talked around another bite of pizza. “You can stay here in D.C., deal with the press and hide away in your boss’s office while you wait for the guy who staged the scene this morning to make his next move.”
She sipped her wine and waited for him to continue.
“That is your current plan, right?”
“Close enough.”
His eyes narrowed suddenly. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try to find out who set up the little scene this morning.”
Her eyes widened full of innocence. “Okay, I won’t tell you that.”
He grinned at her and had the pleasure of seeing surprise flicker over her features. “It’s exactly what I would do. But I have a better proposition for you.”
The second he saw the pulse