Innocent 'til Proven Otherwise

by Amy Andrews

  By the time the film finished she was halfway through her third glass of wine and feeling really mellow. Rain was beating against the roof and window pane, occasional lightning streaks illuminated the darkened room and Bruce had saved the world.

  She reached for the remote to turn the television down and her gaze fell on Max’s business card she’d tossed on her bedside table when she’d dumped her handbag earlier.

  Before a second thought could enter her head, she was dialling his home number.

  Max frowned as his phone rang at ten o’clock at night. He reached across the various files he had strewn across his bed and snatched the receiver. ‘Hello?’

  ‘So, I’m thinking movie stunt man … woman … whatever … sounds pretty wild and exciting.’

  Max gripped the phone as her voice murmured into his ear just as it had the night she’d spent right here in his bed. ‘Aleisha.’ He really didn’t need this. ‘It’s ten o’clock.’

  She squinted at the clock. ‘Sorry, I may be a little tipsy.’ He chuckled and her nipples tightened.

  ‘So, stunt woman, huh? What on earth brought that on?’

  ‘Just finished watching Die Hard.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘You know Bruce would be dead a hundred times over in real life, right?’

  ‘Of course. So?’

  He smiled. ‘So it’s not very realistic.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ The wine was making her belligerent. ‘Besides, I like it when the good guy wins.’

  Yeh, so did he. It was why he’d become a lawyer.

  His mind drifted back to their heated exchange in the lift, which, despite the mountains of work surrounding him, he’d been reliving most of the night. ‘Are you still wearing that skirt?

  ‘No.’

  Max nodded, relieved. Which lasted a beat until the possibilities of what she was wearing started to parade through his mind.

  ‘Because you’re wearing an old pair of tracky bottoms and a paint-stained T-shirt that hangs like a sack on you?’ he asked hopefully.

  Ali looked down at her matching hot-pink vest-top and boy-leg knickers that didn’t quite meet, leaving a strip of bare flesh exposed. ‘Er … okay.’

  Max shut his eyes tight. ‘Oh, God, you’re not, are you? Please tell me you’re not naked.’

  His voice was husky in her ear and this time everything tightened. ‘Did we just move into an ethically grey area?’

  ‘Yes. Are you?’

  Ali swallowed. ‘No.’ Although she might as well be given how aware she was of her body right at this moment.

  Max’s breath huffed out in relief.

  ‘What are you wearing?’ she asked.

  ‘Aleisha.’ No way was he about to tell her he was lying on his bed in nothing but his underpants. Or that this conversation was making them decidedly tight. ‘I hope you didn’t ring just to talk dirty to me.’

  Ali heard the warning note in his voice. ‘Grey again, huh?’

  ‘You could say.’ Although blue may have been more accurate.

  She sighed. ‘Sorry.’ She sipped her wine. ‘But it’s all your fault.’

  Max chuckled at the petulance in her voice. ‘You rang me.’

  Before she could stop them words tumbled out. ‘You’ve jump-started my libido,’ she grumbled. ‘Tom managed to kill it dead. And I was fine with that, do you hear? Fine. I was over and done with men. And relationships. And sex. But now … ‘

  Now one night with him and sex had managed to sideline the nagging worry that constantly gnawed at the back of her brain.

  That wasn’t good. The worry kept her focused. She needed to stay focused.

  ‘Now?’ he prompted.

  ‘I can’t get it out of my head.’

  Max heard the bewilderment in her voice but also the longing and felt his body respond. He too had thought of little else.

  But he wasn’t going to talk sex with her on the phone. Not with his nearly naked body hard and aching and her wearing what he suspected was also very little.

  Not when he was as done with women and relationships as she was done with men.

  Not when he’d drawn a line he couldn’t cross.

  Ali’s room glowed blue-white as more lightning lit up the night sky. ‘Is it raining at your place?’ she asked.

  Max frowned at the rapid change in subject. He glanced at his window as rain pattered and formed tiny tributaries down his pane. ‘Yes.’

  Ali yawned and snuggled down into the sheet a little more. ‘I love a rainy night.’

  The rain and her voice, low and sleepy in his ear, seemed to cocoon him in a cosy domesticity despite the fact they lived miles apart.

  It was equal parts nice and terrifying.

  ‘Was there a purpose to this phone call?’

  ‘You don’t love a rainy night?’

  Max detected the slightest trace of reproach in her voice. ‘Aleisha.’

  Ali tried not to be disappointed at his obvious exasperation. ‘No purpose … Kat’s not here and …’ She pushed herself up in the bed. ‘I’m sorry, forgive me. Kat always says wine gives me alcohol-induced Tourette’s.’

  Max chuckled and felt the terrifying ebb.

  ‘You should ask me whatever you want about the case now. I’ll be scarily honest.’

  ‘Oh,’ he teased. ‘You haven’t been until now?’

  Ali smiled, pleased to hear his tone lighten. ‘Of course I have. It was just … carefully considered. Filtered. Tonight, apparently, I have no filter.’

  Max smiled at her candour. A question came straight to mind; still he hesitated before he asked it. It was a question on his list but not one he’d been looking forward to asking. Maybe in her relaxed state she wouldn’t freak out.

  ‘What happened with your ex?’

  Ali sucked in a breath. That was one she hadn’t expected. ‘Oh.’ Her brain grappled with his blunt enquiry. ‘Is that relevant?’

  Max grimaced at the alertness to her voice. It sounded as if she’d sobered up in a second.

  And he’d been enjoying sleepy Ali.

  ‘From what I gleaned on Friday night, the break-up occurred a year ago. About the same time as the Cullen incident. I’m thinking maybe there were extenuating circumstances we can work into the case.’

  Ali felt the weight of the events that had king-hit her a year ago press her into the bed. But she wouldn’t blame her personal life for her professional issues.

  ‘There weren’t.’

  ‘Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?’ he murmured.

  Ali shook her head. ‘Tom left after Nathaniel Cullen died. Not before.’

  Max dragged Aleisha’s file closer. ‘How soon after?’

  Ali braced herself as the answer hovered on her lips. She was sick of the platitudes that little piece of info usually engendered and she most certainly didn’t want to hear one from him. ‘A week.’

  Max’s finger stilled on his pen. A week? Jeez, he sure knew how to kick a girl when she was down. ‘Well, now, he sounds like a real charmer.’

  A bubble of laughter escaped her lips at his unexpected reaction and she felt the same connection she’d felt on Friday—the camaraderie of two people who’d been through soul-destroying break-ups.

  ‘You want to know the worst part? I’d just miscarried his baby when he told me. I was lying in a hospital bed still attached to a drip.’

  Max dropped his pen and sat forward. ‘What?’

  ‘I was pregnant. Eight weeks. I’d only just found out two weeks before.’

  Max didn’t know what to say. The callousness of her ex’s actions was shocking and the enormity of what Aleisha had been through hit him.

  ‘So what you’re saying is … you find out you’re pregnant, one week later Nathaniel Cullen dies and a week after that you have a miscarriage followed closely by your fiancé ditching you.’

  Ali shut her eyes tight. The cataclysmic events of a year ago didn’t sound any better in his saxoph
one tones. ‘Pretty much.’

  Max eased himself back against his pillows. ‘You’ve been through a lot,’ he murmured.

  She kept her eyes shut. ‘It’s been a bit of an annus horribilus,’ she agreed.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had a lot of time to grieve either.’

  Ali slowly opened her eyes. ‘There’ll be plenty of time for that when this is all over.’

  Max stared at his rain-spattered window. ‘So, I take it your ex wasn’t as devastated by the miscarriage as you?’

  Ali snorted. ‘Tom didn’t want the baby from the beginning. He wanted me to get a termination.’

  ‘The pregnancy wasn’t planned?’

  Ali gave a harsh laugh. ‘No. The baby was a complete shock to both of us. I mean, we had talked about kids for the future, after we’d been married for a while, after I’d become a consultant.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘We were careless, I guess. We were busy, he worked long days, often times with my shift work I worked nights—we played tag with each other’s voicemail more often than not. Our sex life was sketchy but, you know, we’d been together for five years and life was crazy between his job and mine and sex just got squeezed in around everything else.’

  ‘That happens,’ Max said. God knew he and Tori had led the same frenetic existence.

  ‘I can’t take the pill because of my family history of clots and from time to time we … took educated risks. Obviously that didn’t work out so well.’

  Max tutted. ‘Didn’t you lecture me just last week on the importance of sexual health?’

  ‘Yeh, yeh, I know. I’m a doctor, I should have known better. But you know what? It may have only been a couple of short weeks but being pregnant was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me.’

  The soft note of wonder in her voice lanced his abdomen with a white-hot bolt of longing and his own thwarted desire to have a child returned with a crippling vengeance.

  He drew his knees up. ‘So you were pleased?’

  Ali shook her head and sighed. ‘It was the most inconvenient thing. The timing was wrong. We weren’t married yet, I still had a good few years of exams and study, so did Tom. But … yes, I loved my baby from the second that little pink plus sign appeared. I can’t remember ever wanting anything more.’

  Max nodded. ‘But Tom didn’t feel the same way. That must have been a source of friction?’

  ‘You could say that … I think he’d been planning on leaving for a while. He’d been seeing the other … the other woman for six months, apparently, and this obviously threw a spanner in the works. So we argued about it—a lot. The miscarriage was his get-out-of-jail-free card.’

  Max noted her stumble and the huskiness in her voice when she talked about the woman who had turned her world upside down. Also the bitter edge as she described her ex’s relief.

  He understood too well the overwhelming sense of betrayal she felt. When he’d found out about Tori’s infidelity he’d wanted to break things.

  The other guy’s face had been at the top of the list.

  ‘And you were facing all this—the pregnancy and the friction with Tom—the night that Nathaniel Cullen died?’

  Ali let that sink in for a moment. ‘It wasn’t affecting my work,’ she denied.

  ‘Of course it was,’ he said as he scribbled some notes in her file.

  ‘No.’

  Max sighed. ‘Just because it wasn’t overt doesn’t mean it wasn’t affecting you. You just didn’t realise it.’

  ‘It didn’t affect my judgement.’

  Max ignored her. ‘It could be important in the case.’

  ‘No.’ Ali sat forward. ‘I don’t want to have my personal life out there for the world to know. It was humiliating enough first time around.’

  ‘How many people know?’

  ‘Maybe a handful.’

  Max hesitated for a second while he debated telling her anything more. But it was best she knew everything. ‘We need to be prepared for when the other side bring it up.’

  Ali flopped back against her pillow. ‘What? How are they going to know?’

  ‘They’ll have had you investigated.’

  She vaulted forward again. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what I’d do if I was them.’

  ‘Isn’t that … illegal?’ she spluttered.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it bloody should be,’ she grouched.

  Max nodded. ‘It might not come up, Aleisha. But if it does … forewarned is forearmed.’

  Ali rubbed her temples as the last vestiges of her headache intensified briefly. She could see he was right. ‘I could be a hairdresser,’ she murmured. ‘I bet there aren’t too many hairdressers sued for wrongful death.’

  Max chuckled. ‘Probably not.’

  ‘It’d be nice to transform someone too, don’t you think? Kind of like plastic surgery. Without the permanency.’

  Max’s grin faded. ‘You’re going to be fine, Aleisha. We’re going to win this case and you’re going to get back on the horse.’

  Ali pressed the receiver hard against her ear. Getting back on the horse was terrifying.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ It simply wasn’t an option. ‘Are we done with the questions now?’

  Max heard the strain in her voice and wished he could be there to reassure her in person.

  And to hell with the ethics.

  ‘I think that’s enough for tonight.’ The rain had stopped and he capped his pen. ‘Goodnight, Aleisha.’

  ‘No, wait, hold up.’

  Ali didn’t want to leave it on such a downer. No way was she going to be able to sleep with her problems magnified tenfold by their conversation. And spilling her guts to him had only made her more curious about his ex. The woman who’d been married to a sex god and then foolishly let him go.

  Perhaps the best time to have asked was last Friday night but there hadn’t been a whole lot of talking going on.

  ‘What about you?’

  Max frowned. ‘Me?’

  ‘Sure. Doesn’t this work both ways? I’ve told you mine, it’s your turn to tell me yours.’

  Max laughed. So not going to happen. ‘Ah, no.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Ali cajoled. ‘Think of it as trust building.’

  ‘It’s not relevant to the case,’ he dismissed.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she insisted.

  ‘How?’

  Try as she might she couldn’t come up with a plausible link. She sighed. ‘It’s relevant to me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m trusting you with my most personal information, Max. Don’t you think a little reciprocation is warranted?’

  He snorted. ‘No. I don’t discuss my personal life with clients.’

  Ali bristled. ‘We’ve slept together, for crying out loud. The first person you’ve slept with since your marriage broke down. I am your personal life.’

  Max had to admit she made a good point. Still …

  Sensing his hesitation, Ali pressed home the advantage. ‘Please, the house is quiet and the second I get off this phone with you my brain’s going to kick in again and I’m sick of overthinking things. Besides, we have some solidarity here.’

  Max’s brow scrunched into a cynical frown. ‘We do?’

  ‘Sure. My personal life’s in the toilet. So is yours. It’d be really nice to hear about somebody else’s woes for a change.’

  Max blinked. Had she really just said that? He began to laugh. Another man might have been affronted but she was right—his personal life sucked.

  At least he could still laugh.

  ‘Thanks for pointing that out,’ he said after his laughter had subsided.

  ‘Any time.’ She grinned.

  There was a pause for a moment and he knew she was waiting for him to start. He brooded for a minute—where to begin?

  ‘How long were you married for?’

  Her husky question took him back to happier times when his marriage had been new
and he’d felt bullet proof.

  He sighed. It was as good a place as any for the whole sorry saga. ‘Eight years.’

  ‘That’s a while,’ she murmured.

  ‘Yeh,’ he said bitterly. ‘Long enough to know someone, you’d think.’

  ‘She wasn’t who you thought she was or she changed?’

  Max mentally dismissed the options. ‘We wanted different things. I just didn’t realise it until the end.’

  Ali waited for him to say more. ‘So what did you want?’

  ‘A family. Babies.’

  Ali’s heart thunked in her chest. ‘And she didn’t?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  Ali felt her empty aching womb contract. She understood that yearning. She hadn’t before, but she did now.

  Max thought back to his childhood. ‘I was an only child. It was lonely.’

  She understood that too. If it hadn’t been for Zoe her younger years would have felt barren.

  ‘So …’ She tried to find an easy way into her question. But there wasn’t really one. ‘Did you guys not … talk about children before you got married?’

  Max straightened his legs, displacing her file, and crossed them at the ankle. ‘Of course we did.’

  The question irked. He remembered all the conversations he and Tori had had about parenting and how he’d ignored the warning voice inside his gut that had known her enthusiasm for having children was not as strong as his.

  It was easy to blame her. Harder to face the truth.

  ‘Tori wanted them. As much as I did, I thought. Not as many as I did. Two, she wanted two. I was confident I could have talked her into three.’

  Ali heard the nostalgia in his voice, as if he’d just remembered the ways he’d planned on talking her into another baby, and felt a stab of something deep in her chest.

  Jealousy? Regret?

  ‘But she’d just joined a new firm and wanted to establish her career and, well … we were young, there was no rush. We agreed to start talking about it in a few years, when she turned thirty.’

  Ali guessed from his voice that thirty came and went and Tori had delayed but she remained silent, letting him tell it in his words.

  ‘I mentioned it on her thirtieth birthday and she was none too pleased. Fair enough.’ He shrugged. ‘It was probably the wrong time to bring it up. Thirty’s a milestone for a woman and I should have been focused on giving her the best day possible instead of pushing my own agenda.’