Smooth-Talking Texan

Quinn groaned. “I thought Dad was going to bust a blood vessel that time.”

“It was your getting in trouble with Sheriff Woods,” Cater said. “He didn’t want to have to be beholden to the man.”

“Yeah, I know. Woods was a dangerous guy, whether he was a friend or an enemy.”

“What do you know about him?” Cater asked casually.

“Not much. Mostly what everybody else knew, I guess. You didn’t cross the man, not in this county. Other than that…well, he was a political power, the kind that swung elections, even if he had to vote all the residents of the cemetery to do it. It would be my guess that there were a few skeletons in his closet.”

“You know anything about his death?”

Quinn shook his head. “No. Nothing but the facts of it. I was in college when it happened. Long time, probably ten years, before I came back here. Why?”

“I’m looking into it a little. I’ve been thinking about writing a book about it.”

“Oh, great!” Quinn groaned. “As if I didn’t have enough problems…. First I got some crime ring operating here, only I can’t figure out what the hell is going on or who’s behind it—all I know is that a suspicious number of young men are going in and out of old man Rodriquez’s house at all hours, some of them complete strangers to this town. Lots of different cars parked there, some of them nice. Then I have to be insanely attracted to this defense attorney who’s threatened to sue me, and now my own brother is going to stir up some ancient scandal in the sheriff’s office!”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not even certain about doing it yet. I have another book to write first. I’m only toying with the idea. Murdered sheriff…scandal…pretty intriguing stuff. But it’ll be fiction. I’ve never written true crime. I’ll use it as a starting place.”

“That’s faint comfort,” Quinn retorted. “Everybody will know it was a true story, so they’ll believe whatever you write is true, even the stuff you make up.” He pointed his index finger at his brother warningly. “Just don’t involve the guy who becomes sheriff a decade later.” He paused, then added with a grin, “’Course, I guess if you wanted to make him the hero who solves everything, you could.”

Cater’s snort promised little hope of that happening. “Yeah, right. But what I want to know is—what’s this about a defense lawyer? Male or female?”

“Female, you idiot. Her name’s Lisa Mendoza, and she’s about as pretty as they come. And she thinks I’m a redneck good ol’ boy who’s harassing her client and miscarrying justice whenever I get the opportunity.”

“I see. Doesn’t sound too hopeful.”

Quinn grinned in his familiar cocky way. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring her around.”

Cater couldn’t resist smiling at his brother’s attitude, but he shook his head. “One day, brother, you are going to take a hard fall at the hands of some woman, and then you’ll find out what it’s like.”

Quinn offered him a faint smile, saying, “Who knows? Maybe I already have.”

Lisa blasted down the farm-to-market road toward Hammond, scarcely noticing anything she passed. Afterward, she was grateful for the rural lack of traffic on the road, as well as the absence of police. Her mind was not on her driving.

She had never experienced a kiss like that before. It was like something out of a book, a movie. She had enjoyed the kisses she had shared with other men, had felt passion and desire. But this! This was different. Never before had she felt as if every nerve in her body was standing on end, or as if she burned from the inside out. When Quinn had kissed her, she had melted. Electricity had shot through her. Every romantic cliché she could think of had happened to her—only it had not been clichéd at all, but real and thrilling.

It was crazy, she thought. Wonderful, too, but definitely crazy. She did not even like the man. He was arrogant, cocky, and bullheaded. He obviously didn’t care about following the dictates of the law, only about getting what he wanted, and it was clear from that grin that he was used to getting what he wanted from women, as well. He was precisely the sort of man whom she most disliked.

So how could a kiss from that man have affected her like that? How could he have made her feel as if she were about to fall into an old-fashioned swoon?

Lisa had always been someone in control of herself and her life. Even her teenage years had contained only a minimum number of tantrums and crushes. Mostly she had maintained an even keel: dating, studying, working—keeping everything in proportion. She was an intelligent girl, accustomed to being ruled by her head, and she had always hated the classic stereotype of the tempestuous, passionate Latina.

Somehow Quinn Sutton had shattered all that with one kiss.

She turned into the parking lot of her apartment, faintly surprised to find that she had already made it home. She parked and turned off the engine, then sat for a moment, her hands still gripping the steering wheel. Her head dropped to her hands.

It was vital that she get a grip on this, she told herself. She was not about to start letting her passions rule her life at this late date. What had really happened this afternoon, anyway? It was not as if she had fallen in love with the man or fallen into bed with him, she pointed out reasonably. They had shared a kiss, that was all, and Quinn Sutton had proved to be a superior kisser to anyone she had ever met. That was all.

It was what she made of it that was important, and the worst thing would be to attach a significance to the moment that it did not have. The thing for her to do, she knew, was to get on with her life. The things that were important to her were her work and her family; Quinn Sutton did not matter to either of those things, except as a possible adversary. The odds were that she would not even see him again.

Firmly she ignored the deflation that went through her at that thought. The thing to do, she decided, was to put the kiss out of her mind, to reject it as the aberration that it was. With that resolve, she got out of her car, locked it, and went inside her apartment, doing her best to ignore the weakness that remained in her legs.

An evening of cleaning up her apartment helped to quell thoughts of her encounter with the sheriff—although she found herself all too often simply standing and staring sightlessly at the wall, work forgotten, and she had to shake herself and return to the job at hand. The evening crept by, and it was something of a relief when it grew late enough for her to go to bed. But she found once she lay down that sleep would not come. Instead, her mind returned to her encounter with Quinn Sutton. She went over their arguments, coming up with clever retorts that she had not had the presence of mind to think of at the time and remembering, too, the tilt of his head, the way his shoulders filled out his uniform, his walk as he strode across the restaurant toward her. The eyes of every woman in the place had been on him, she was sure of that.

Most of all, she relived that moment in the parking lot when he had kissed her, feeling all over again—though never, disappointingly, with quite the same intensity—the sensations that had flooded her when his lips touched hers. No matter how she tried, she could not banish the thought from her mind, and as a result, half the night had gone by before she at last fell asleep.

The next morning she awoke heavy-lidded and tired, but she pushed through the day determinedly. She drove to her office in a plain brick building a few blocks from the center of Hammond. It was there that the Texas Hispanic League maintained its legal aid office. Her office was a small one tucked into one corner of the second floor. It was provided by the League and she shared the services of a secretary with one of the other lawyers. She was required to handle a certain proportion of the work of the legal aid office, but it was not really enough to fill her time, and the stipend she received from them was barely enough to get by, so she was also free to take on other legal work that might come in. Most of that extra work, like Benny’s case, was in the area of criminal law, and it generally involved acting as a court-appointed attorney, paid for by the state. A customer who paid out of his pocket, like Mr. Garza had done for Benny, was something of a rarity.

Her thoughts, having gone to Enrique Garza, stayed there. Given the reaction of Benny’s grandmother when she had told her who had hired her to represent Benny, she was inclined to think that Sutton was right: Benny was involved in something, and Garza was involved in it as well. He obviously was not a relative or friend; Señora Fuentes would have recognized his name if he had been. The odds were he was not even someone from Angel Eye, a town small enough that surely Benny’s grandmother or someone in the sheriff’s office would have heard of him. Just as obviously, Benny had recognized the name, for his look of puzzlement had changed immediately to a carefully blank expression. And there was little reason to suppose that someone who was not a relative or friend would have gone to the trouble and expense of hiring an attorney to get Benny out of jail. But if Benny were involved in something illegal and Garza was involved in it, too, he very well might pay in order to make sure that Benny didn’t tell the sheriff all about it.

She frowned, remembering the contempt in the sheriff’s voice as he had told her that she ought to help her client rather than merely represent him in court. That was what she would do, she argued mentally. She would help Benny, but the scope of her help was professional, after all, devoted only to legal problems. It did not include seeing that her client stuck to the straight and narrow or stayed away from bad influences. To expect a lawyer to do that would be like expecting one’s doctor to hang around supervising one’s diet or exercise program or reminding them to take their pills. She was there to represent Benny, that was all. And the fact that Mr. Garza might have pretended to be someone he was not did not change her duty to her client.

Lisa stood up and walked out to the small open area where her secretary sat at a desk, busily typing on a word processor. “Kiki…?”

The secretary turned toward her inquiringly, her fingers pausing on the keys. “Yes?”

“You know that man who came in here yesterday afternoon…Mr. Garza? Had you ever seen him before? Did you recognize him?”

“No.” Kiki frowned thoughtfully. “I didn’t know him. I just remember thinking that he was dressed awfully nice to be coming here.”

Lisa thought back, trying to remember what the man had had on. It had been a suit, fashionable and rather expensive looking, as she recalled. Kiki was right; their clients were generally far too poor to be able to afford a suit like that.

“My guess is he wasn’t from around here,” Kiki went on. “Nobody in Hammond dresses like that.”

“True.” Hammond, like Angel Eye, ran more to jeans and boots and work shirts, and when a man wore a suit here it was definitely not as stylish or as well-made as that Enrique Garza had worn yesterday. “He looked like he was from the city, didn’t he?”

Kiki nodded in agreement. “Why? Who is this guy? What did he want?”

“He wanted me to get someone out of jail. And the kid shouldn’t have been in there. But Mr. Garza told me he was the kid’s cousin and he isn’t. Just wondering why he’s lying to me.”

“Sounds fishy.”

“Yeah.” Lisa turned away, hesitated, then turned back. “Do you, ah, do you know Sheriff Sutton?”

“Quinn?” The other woman’s face smiled, her eyes warming. “Sure. Everybody knows Quinn Sutton. Is that the jail your client was in?”

Lisa nodded.

“Did you meet Quinn?” Kiki continued enthusiastically. “Isn’t he gorgeous? Well, I mean, maybe not gorgeous exactly. But there’s something about him.”

“His smile?” Lisa suggested a little sourly.

“Oh, yeah, definitely that. And there’s that little twinkle in his eye, like he knows all kinds of wicked things….” Kiki sighed a little ruefully.

“I take it he’s a ladies’ man,” Lisa added with great casualness.

“Yeah. He’s dated lots of women. He’s a terrible flirt. But charm!—that man’s got it coming out of every pore.”