Smooth-Talking Texan

Smooth-Talking Texan
Candace Camp

For temporarily-relocated-from-Dallas hotshot defense attorney Lisa Mendoza, a year working for the public defender's office in tiny Angel Eye, Texas, was just a slight detour off the path she'd mapped out for her life. Then she ran smack-dab into handsome Quinn Sutton–and the map started looking more and more muddy.For despite her misgivings about getting involved with the town sheriff, she found him infuriatingly irresistible….And what of said Sheriff Quinn? He, too, felt the pull of attraction–and the strings of hesitation. Because once before, he'd known the pain of falling fast for a woman who had made it clear she'd follow her head and not her heart. Only this time, with Lisa, he wondered if his heart might follow, as well….

It was crazy.

Wonderful, but definitely crazy, Lisa thought. She did not even like the man, for God’s sake. Quinn was arrogant, cocky and bullheaded. He obviously cared only about getting what he wanted when it came to his job, and it was clear from the grin that he was used to getting what he wanted from women, as well. He was precisely the sort of man she disliked.

So how could one kiss from Quinn Sutton have affected her like that?

How could he have made her feel as if she were about to fall into an old-fashioned swoon?

Smooth-Talking Texan

Candace Camp

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CANDACE CAMP,

a USA TODAY bestselling author and former attorney, is married to a Texan, and they have a daughter who has been bitten by the acting bug. Her family and her writing keep Candace busy, but when she does have free time, she loves to read. In addition to her contemporary romances, she has written a number of historicals, which are currently being published by MIRA Books.

For Pete,

My smooth-talking Texan

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 1

Lisa Mendoza drove to the county courthouse in Angel Eye, ready to do battle. This was the sort of case that she had gone to law school for, a clear miscarriage of justice, an example of prejudice and abuse of power. She felt none of the ambivalence that she often did in the criminal cases she had been assigned so far, where her client was usually clearly guilty and her only hope was of plea-bargaining down to a lesser sentence. Nor was it the small consumer grievance or landlord/tenant dispute that had come to her at the legal aid office since she had moved to the small town of Hammond, Texas. This was an Hispanic teenaged boy held without due cause in a small-town county jail.

She narrowed her eyes and her foot pressed down a little harder on the accelerator as she thought about it. Less than an hour ago Benny Hernandez’s cousin had sat in her office in Hammond and described to her how his seventeen-year-old relative had been stopped the day before by the sheriff and hauled off to jail even though he had committed nothing more serious than a traffic violation. The sheriff had not released him, not even charged him with any crime. There had been no arraignment, no hearing, and his large and loving family was understandably worried, though most of them were too in awe of the Law—with a capital L—to do anything about it. Therefore, Enrique Garza, the man in her office, had decided to take it upon himself to hire an attorney for the boy.

“Sometimes Benny can be a little wild,” he had admitted with a deprecating smile, “but he’s not a bad kid. I don’t want to see him get hurt.”

Lisa could imagine the sheriff she was driving to see: a middle-aged, potbellied Anglo “good ol’ boy,” no doubt, who had judged Benny Hernandez guilty of some crime simply because his skin was too dark. Wasn’t Bertram County, of which the little town of Angel Eye was the county seat, one of those south Texas counties famous for their politically powerful and corrupt sheriffs? The kind of county where the sheriff ruled with an iron fist and took bribes and routinely brought in the graveyard vote for the right politicians? She was almost sure she remembered reading an article in a Texas magazine a few years ago about these sheriffs that had ruled as they pleased earlier in this century. Bertram County had been one of the counties examined. That sheriff had died in some sort of scandal some years back, if she remembered correctly, but it would not be unusual for the political machine to continue with another man of the same ilk at the head of it.

The sheriff would be contemptuous of her, she was sure. He would probably take one look at her and write her off as negligible: young, a woman and Hispanic, as well. It would not be the first time someone had done so. But Lisa had learned that being underestimated often worked to her advantage, and she had made certain that a number of men who had done so had soon regretted it. Her lips curved up in a smile as she thought of the coming confrontation. She intended to make sure that Sheriff Sutton would rue the day that he had tangled with her.

Quinn Sutton leaned back in his chair, legs crossed negligently at the ankles and feet propped up on his desk, and sighed. He was bored, and he was frustrated, and for one of the few times since he had moved back to Angel Eye, he wondered if doing so had been the right thing.

One simple investigation…and it had been dragging on for two months now. The guys he had worked with in San Antonio would probably bust a gut laughing if they knew how he was floundering around on this country case.

He had thought he’d caught a break with Benny Hernandez. The kid knew something, he was sure of that, but so far, he had been determinedly silent, and there was only so long he could hold him here, given the flimsy charge he had run him in on.

The sound of voices raised in an outer room stirred him from his reverie. He paused, listening to the heated rise and fall of women’s voices, but he could not make out the words. One of the voices was Betty Murdock, his secretary, but he did not recognize the other one. He frowned and started to rise from his seat.

At that moment, Deputy Hargrove stuck his head in the door, his face alight with interest and amusement. “Hey, Sheriff, come out here. You gotta see this. It’s that new attorney I told you about.”

“Who? What attorney?” Quinn rose to his feet and started toward the door. “Oh, you mean the woman?”

Hargrove nodded. “Yeah. The looker. Remember, I told you about seeing her over at the district courthouse in Hammond last month?”

“Yeah, I remember.” The truth was, the memory was faint. Hargrove was usually raving about some girl or the other.

“Well, she’s out there giving Betty hell about seeing you.”

“Maybe I ought to oblige her then,” Quinn said lazily and slid past the deputy into the outer office.

His eyes went across the office to his secretary’s desk, where Betty now stood, her face flushed and hands on her hips combatively, facing another woman. He looked past the ample form of his secretary to the other woman, and everything in him went still. Later, he could only describe the feeling, a trifle embarrassedly, as something akin to being hit by a stun gun.

She was not the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was not as polished and sleek as Jennifer had been, nor did she possess the icy blond society-princess beauty of his future sister-in-law, Antonia, or the stunning Hollywood good looks of that actress that Jackson had brought to the Fourth of July picnic. But there was something about her that hit him like a fist in the stomach.

She was dressed in a lawyerlike tailored suit, brown with a cream-colored blouse beneath the buttoned jacket, and low-heeled brown pumps. Her makeup and shoulder-length bobbed hair were equally low-key. But the plainness of her clothes could not disguise the fact that her figure was enticingly curved, and the expanse of leg that showed beneath her knee-length skirt was shapely. Her hair, smoothly curved under, was thick, black and lustrous, and her light olive skin and huge brown eyes, ringed by thick black lashes, had little need of makeup. She was vivid, warm, passionate…and in an utter fury about something.

“I insist on seeing Sheriff Sutton!” she snapped, leaning forward pugnaciously toward his secretary. “Whatever wonderfully important thing he’s doing, I suggest you go in there and tell him—”

“Why don’t you just tell me yourself?” Quinn suggested lightly.

Both women, startled, swiveled to face him.

Lisa was, for the moment, bereft of speech. Sheriff Sutton was, indeed, a prototypical sheriff, but not the middle-aged redneck image she had envisioned. He was, rather, what the State Association of Sheriffs might use as a poster boy. In his early thirties, he was tall, even without the added inches of the cowboy boots on his feet, and his long, lean body and wide shoulders filled out the tan shirt and slacks of the sheriff’s uniform to perfection. Lisa was aware, with some surprise—and chagrin—of a deep, primitive thrill of response that snaked down through her abdomen at the sight of him. Nor was it just the muscular set of his body encased in the Western and decidedly masculine uniform that could make a woman’s heart beat a little faster. His face was something that drew one’s eye.

He was not exactly handsome, though he had even features and a well-cut mouth that stirred another primeval response in Lisa. A scar beside that mouth and the determined set of his jaw gave his face a certain toughness in repose. And when he smiled, as he did now, his mahogany-brown eyes twinkled with an impishness, his mouth quirking in a way that was far too boyish to be termed handsome. What he was, Lisa thought, as he walked toward her now, eyes alight and focused solely on her, was a charmer. She had met other men like him—not many, admittedly, but a few—and though they might not be the best-looking man around or the smartest or the wealthiest, they were invariably devastating to the female sex.