CHAPTER TWELVE
STONESUCKEDINa breath, surprised that she was actually listening to him. Had he finally gotten through to her? Maybe she’d realized when she’d seen his witness list that he wouldn’t have called a guilty client to the stand. He couldn’t knowingly suborn perjury. That was how his friend had nearly lost his law license—because someone had forged documents to substantiate that claim against Ronan.
But because the evidence had been forged, and proved so, the complaint had been tossed out. Now Ronan was seeing the woman who’d filed the complaint. She hadn’t forged the documents, though. They had been sent to her just as the bank records had been sent to Hillary.
Who the hell was out to make trouble for Street Legal? And why?
Hillary smiled over his hesitation. “You can’t come up with any other suspects, either.”
“I can’t come up with a name,” he explained, “because no one knows what it is, but even you insist the man exists.”
She sighed and settled her butt onto her desk. He wanted to lift her onto it like he had that first time he’d come to her office. He wanted to push up her skirt and push aside her panties and drive her crazy with his tongue and with his mouth.
But he drew in a deep, albeit unsteady, breath and forced himself to focus. He had made his client a promise—to do his best. And he hadn’t been doing that because of her, because she distracted him, with her silky blond hair, with her full lips, with her sexy body.
Her blue eyes darkened, dilating as she stared up at him. And it was as if she could read his mind, or maybe she was reliving that first time as well.
He nearly reached for her, but he curled his fingers into his palms instead. “No.”
“Yeah, it’s not him,” she agreed. “It’s Byron.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “That’s not what I was denying.”
“What were you denying?” she asked. And as if she knew she had him teetering on the edge, she tried his control more, reaching for the buttons of her suit coat. She flicked them open and shrugged off the jacket. It dropped onto the desk behind her.
And he swallowed hard. There was no denying his attraction to her. It was ridiculously powerful like the passion that burned between them.
He closed his eyes because he couldn’t look at her—her shoulders bare but for the thin-strapped camisole she wore—and not want her. “It’s the lover,” he said.
“Lover?” Her voice was husky as she whispered the word. It was also close, so close that her lips brushed across his earlobe as she uttered it.
He nearly shivered in reaction to the warmth of her breath, the touch of her lips.
It wasn’t fair how she affected him. Not when he was trying so hard to focus. But didn’t that alone prove his point? Her point. She’d made it first.
“It was a crime of passion,” he said. “Just like you said.”
“So you agree?” She’d pulled back. So he opened his eyes and met her gaze. She looked almost disappointed when she should have been triumphant as she added, “You think your client’s guilty, too.”
He groaned with two kinds of frustration. He’d thought she was finally going to listen to him. And he wanted her. His control snapping, he reached for her, closing his hands around those sexy bare shoulders. “Damn, woman, you are so infuriating!”
She smiled and acted all innocent. “Me?”
He laughed. Nobody had ever challenged him like Hillary did. In the courtroom and out of it.
But she wasn’t fighting him now. She reached for the buttons of his shirt. He’d left his jacket and tie in his SUV, along with his briefcase. Just as she had before, she jerked his shirt open. A button pinged off her desk and another off the wall.
“My dry cleaner wonders what the hell’s been happening to my buttons,” he teased.
“Did you tell her?” she asked.
“I showed her,” he said.
She tensed and pulled back. And he saw on her face what she’d made him feel that night when he’d shown up along with dopey Dwight at her door. Jealousy.
He grinned, as something warm rushed over his heart. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Jealous?”
She narrowed her eyes in a glare. “You’re just proving my point. It was a crime of passion.”
