Pride And Pregnancy

Caroline looked up, but instead of seeing her clerk, Andrea, she saw a huge bouquet of flowers.

“Good Lord,” Caroline said, standing to take in the magnitude of the bouquet. Andrea was completely invisible behind the mass of roses and lilies and carnations and Caroline couldn’t even tell what else. It was, hands-down, the biggest bunch of flowers she’d ever seen. Andrea needed two hands to carry it. “Where did those come from?”

Because Caroline couldn’t imagine anyone sending her flowers. She’d only been at her position as a judge in the Eighth Circuit Court in Pierre, South Dakota, for two months. She had made friends with her staff—Leland, the gruff bailiff; Andrea, her perky clerk; Cheryl, the court reporter who rarely smiled. Caroline had met her neighbors—nice folks who kept to themselves. But at no time had she come into contact with anyone who would send her this.

In fact, now that she thought about it, she couldn’t imagine anyone sending her flowers, period. She hadn’t left behind a boyfriend in Minneapolis who missed her. She hadn’t had a serious relationship in...okay, she wasn’t going to go into that right now.

For a frivolous moment, she wished the flowers were from a lover. But a lover would be a distraction from the job and she was still establishing herself here.

“It took two men to deliver,” Andrea said, her voice muffled by the sheer number of blooms. “Can I set it down?”

“Oh! Of course,” Caroline said, clearing off a spot on her desk. The vase was massive—the size of a dinner plate in circumference. Caroline hadn’t gotten a lot of flowers over the course of her life. So she could say with reasonable confidence that the arrangement Andrea was carefully lowering onto her desk was more flowers than she had ever seen in one place—excepting her parents’ funerals, of course.

She knew her mouth had flopped open, but she seemed powerless to get it closed. “Tell me there was a card.”

Andrea disappeared back into the antechamber before returning with a card. “It’s addressed to you,” the clerk said, clearly not believing Caroline would receive these flowers, either.

Caroline was too stunned to be insulted. “Are you sure? There has to have been a mistake.” What other explanation could there be?

She took the card from Andrea and opened the envelope. The flowers had been ordered from an internet company and the message was typed. “Judge Jennings—I look forward to working with you. An admirer,” was all it said.

Caroline stared at the message, a sinking feeling of dread creeping over her. An unsolicited gift from a secret admirer was creepy enough. But that’s not what this was, and she knew it.

Caroline took her job as a judge seriously. She did not make mistakes. Or, at the very least, she rarely made mistakes. Perfectionism might be a character flaw, but it also had made her a fine lawyer and now made her a good judge.

Once she’d found her footing as a prosecutor, she’d had an impeccable record. When she’d been promoted to judge, she prided herself on being fair in her dealings on the bench, and she was pleased that others seemed to agree with her. The promotion that had brought her to Pierre was a vote of confidence she did not take lightly.

Whoever would spend this much money to send her flowers without even putting his or her name on the card wasn’t simply an admirer. Sure, there was always the possibility that someone unhinged had developed an obsession. Every time she read about a judge being stalked back to his or her house—or when a judge and her family in Chicago had been murdered—Caroline resolved to do better with her personal safety. She double-checked the locks on doors and windows, carried pepper spray, and had taken a few self-defense classes. She made smart choices and worked to eliminate stupid mistakes.

But Caroline didn’t think this bouquet was from a stalker. When she’d accepted this position, a lawyer from the Justice Department named James Carlson had contacted her. She knew who he was—the special prosecutor who had been chasing down judicial corruption throughout the Great Plains. He’d put three judges in prison and forcibly retired several others from the bench after his investigations.

Carlson hadn’t given her all of the details, but he had warned her that she might be approached to take bribes to throw cases—and he’d warned her what would happen if she accepted those bribes.

“I take these matters of judicial corruption seriously,” he had told her in an email. “My wife was directly harmed by a corrupt judge when she was younger, and I will not tolerate anyone who shifts the balance on the scales of justice for personal gain.”

Those words came back to her now as Caroline continued to stare at the flowers and then at the unsigned note. Those flowers were trying to tip the scale, all right.

Damn it. Of course she knew that people in South Dakota would not be less corrupt than they were in Minnesota. People were people the world over. But despite Carlson’s warning, she’d held out hope that he was wrong. He had stressed in his email that he didn’t know who was buying off judges. The men he’d prosecuted had refused to turn on their benefactors—which, he had concluded, meant they either didn’t know who was paying the bills or they were afraid.

Part of Caroline didn’t want to deal with this. Unknown individuals compromising the integrity of the judicial system—that was nothing but a headache at best. She wanted to keep believing in an independent court and the impartiality of the law. Short of that, she didn’t want to get involved in a messy, protracted investigation. There was too much room for error, too much of a chance that her mistakes might come back to haunt her.

But another part of her was excited. What this was, she thought as she stepped around her desk to look at the flowers from a different angle, was a case without a resolution. There were perpetrators, there were victims—there was a motive. A crime needed to be solved and justice needed to be served. Wasn’t that why she was here?

“How long do we have before the next session starts?” she asked, returning to her chair and calling up her email. She had no proof that this overabundance of flowers had anything to do with Carlson’s corruption case—but she had a hunch, and sometimes a hunch was all a woman needed.

“Twenty minutes. Twenty-five before the litigants get restless,” Andrea answered. Caroline glanced up at the older woman. Andrea was staring at the bouquet with an intense longing that Caroline understood.

“There’s no way I can keep all of these,” she said, searching for Carlson’s name and pulling up his last email. “Feel free to take some of them home, decorate the office—strew rose petals from here to your car?”

She and Andrea laughed together. “I think I will,” the clerk said, marching out of the office in what Caroline could only assume was a quest to find appropriate containers.

Caroline reviewed the emails she and James Carlson had exchanged before she opened a reply and began to type. Because one thing was clear—if this were some nefarious organization reaching out to her, she was going to need backup.

Lots of backup.

* * *

Sometimes, Tom Yellow Bird thought, the universe had a sense of humor.

What other explanation could there be when, the very morning he was scheduled to testify in the court of the Honorable Caroline Jennings, he had received an email from his friend James Carlson, informing him that the new judge, one Honorable Caroline Jennings, had received a suspicious bouquet of flowers and was concerned it might be connected to their ongoing investigation into judicial corruption in and around Pierre, South Dakota?

It would be funny if the situation weren’t so serious, he thought as he took a seat near the back of the courtroom. This trial was for bank robbery, and Tom, operating in his capacity as an FBI agent, had tracked down the perpetrator and arrested him. The robber had had the bank bags in his trunk and marked bills in his wallet. A cut-and-dried case.

“All rise,” the bailiff intoned as the door at the back of the courtroom opened. “The court of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, criminal division, is now in session, the Honorable Caroline Jennings presiding.”

Tom had heard it all before, hundreds of times. He rose, keeping his attention focused on the figure clad in black that emerged. Another day, another judge. Hopefully she wasn’t easily bought.

“Be seated,” Judge Jennings said. The courtroom was full so it wasn’t until other people took their seats as she mounted the bench that Tom got his first good look at her.

Whoa.

He blinked and then blinked again. He had expected a woman—the name Caroline was a giveaway—but he hadn’t expected her. He couldn’t stop staring.

She took her seat and made eye contact across the room with him, and time stopped. Everything stopped. His breath, his pulse—everything came to a screeching halt as he stared at the Honorable Caroline Jennings.

He’d never seen her before—he knew that for certain because he’d remember her. He’d remember this pull. Even at this distance, he thought he saw her cheeks color, a delicate blush. Did she feel it, too?

Then she arched an eyebrow in what was a clear challenge. Crap. He was still standing, gawking like an idiot, while the rest of the court waited. Leland cracked a huge smile, and the court reporter looked annoyed. The rest of the courtroom was starting to crane their necks so they could see the delay.

So he took his seat and tried to get his brain to work again. Caroline Jennings was the judge on this case and she was his assignment from Carlson—nothing more. Any attraction he might feel for her was irrelevant. He had testimony to give and a corruption case to solve, and the job always came first.

Carlson’s email had come late this morning, so Tom hadn’t had time to do his research. That was the only reason Judge Jennings had caught him off guard.

Because Judge Jennings was at least twenty years younger than he had anticipated. Everyone else who had sat on that bench had tended to be white, male and well north of fifty years old.

Maybe that was why she seemed so young, although she was no teenager. She was probably in her thirties, Tom guessed. She had light brown hair that was pulled back into a low ponytail—but it wasn’t severely scraped away from her face. Instead, her hair looked like it had a natural wave and she let it frame her features, softening the lines of her sharp cheekbones. She wore a simple pair of stud earrings—diamonds or reasonable fakes, he noticed when she turned her head and they caught the light. Her makeup was understated and professional, and she wore a lace collar on top of her black robe.

She was, he realized, beautiful. Which was an interesting observation on his part.

He had no problems noting the physical beauty of men or women. For Tom, the last ten years had been one long observation of the human condition. Looking at an attractive person was like studying fine art. Even if a woman’s physical attributes didn’t move him, he could still appreciate her beauty.

But his visceral reaction to a woman in shapeless judge’s robes was not some cerebral observation of conventional beauty. It was a punch to the gut. When was the last time he’d felt that unmistakable spark?

Well, he knew the answer to that. But he wouldn’t let thoughts of Stephanie break free of the box in which he kept them locked up tight. He wouldn’t think about it now. Maybe not ever.

He sat back and did what he did best—he watched and waited. Judge Caroline Jennings ran an efficient courtroom. When Lasky, the defense lawyer, started to grandstand, she cut him off. She wasn’t confrontational, but she wasn’t cowed by anyone.

As he waited for his name to be called, Tom mentally ran back through the email Carlson had sent him. Caroline Jennings was an outsider, appointed to fill the seat on the bench left vacant after Tom had arrested the last judge.