by TA Moore
“I will talk to my client,” he said as he gathered up the papers and dumped them in his briefcase. Before he closed the lid, he hesitated. “Clayton. My client is very… determined that he’s been wronged in this. He wants recompense.”
The polished latches clicked under his thumbs, and John nodded quickly and chased after his client.
“He wants recompense,” Charity parroted, a mockery of John’s careful Nevada accent. She slouched down in her chair, all long, onetime-starlet body and red suit that matched her lips. “He has feelings. Oh, poor baby.”
Clayton filed his own paperwork into heavy, firm-branded folders. “He was implying that your husband could do something stupid,” he said.
“I have excellent security,” Charity said. “And my new boyfriend is a fight choreographer. So….”
“Just be careful.”
She tapped a nail on the desk and sniffed. Then the vim visibly drained from her, and she sighed. “You know he’s wrong.”
Clayton nodded as he stood up. “I think it’s an equitable enough settlement,” he said. “Like I said, I could have gotten you more.”
“The winery is a black hole for money,” Charity told him dismissively. “The wine tastes like vinegar, and the manager is keeping his whole extended Italian family afloat with jobs. I don’t want it. And I wasn’t always in this for what I could get. I did… really… care about Declan. He just… he cared about the person he wanted me to be.”
Clayton looked down at her in surprise. In his experience Charity wasn’t a reflective woman. Of course, the first time he met her, she’d driven straight to the office after finding her husband in bed with her twenty-year-old niece. So she’d started out angry.
“You think I’m lying, don’t you?” Charity asked him.
“No,” Clayton said. He offered her a hand up from the seat and then went around the table to right Declan’s chair. “In my experience most people go into marriage with the best of intentions. It’s just that once it breaks down, they forget that sometimes.”
Charity nodded and unhooked her sparkly clutch bag from the back of the chair. “I guess,” she said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, Clayton. I want to hurt him. If I could claim custody of his penis, I would have it mounted over the toilet. It wasn’t always like that, though. You think he’ll back off my agency?”
“He thinks you want the winery,” Clayton said, one hand in the small of Charity’s back as he showed her to the door. “Between that and the threat of losing control to a judge, he’ll settle.”
Clayton left her at the elevator and headed back to his office. His brain purged the particulars of the Tate case as he weighed the rest of what he had to do that day. He flicked chasing up Nadine’s restraining order to the top of the list since it wouldn’t take a lot of his time. After that he needed to reject the changes to the prenuptial agreement that Harris’s fiancée had instructed her lawyer to make. Hardly unreasonable, since he doubted Harris’s lawyer would want to argue the legal case for contractually obligated reciprocal oral sex.
Today Heather had gone for a slicked-down page-boy wig and Rat Pack suit. She popped up from behind her desk as she saw Clayton approach.
“Clayton—” she blurted out.
“Could you chase up the court clerk to see if the judge has granted the temporary restraining order for Nadine?” Clayton asked. “And when the hearing will be for the permanent one? If there are any problems, kick up a fuss. I don’t understand how our original DV-100 got misrouted to the wrong judge. That doesn’t happen.”
“I will,” Heather said. “Clayton—”
“I’ll also need someone to serve the order to her husband,” he said as he pushed the door to his office open. “Apparently Kelly was going to track him down today, so hopefully he can do that. On the Neilson case, my client wants to appeal the custody order, so could you pull the original paperwork—”
The words caught in Clayton’s throat as he caught sight of Kelly perched on the edge of the couch at the side of the office. He expected the clutch of awkwardness—it had been a long time since he’d gone to bed with someone who might expect more—but not the cold drench of sick anger that hit as he saw the bloodstains dried into Kelly’s T-shirt and jeans. Bruises dappled Kelly’s arms in dull, ready-to-bloom pale blues, and he was hunched over with a tissue wadded against his nose.
So he wouldn’t bleed on the couch. The floor would still get you a slap around the back of the head, Clayton recalled from his childhood, but if you got it on the furniture, you were in for another beating. Which was counterproductive, really.
“WHAT THE fuck happened to you?” Clayton rasped out. It sounded like the anger was aimed at Kelly, but he couldn’t pin it down to shut it up.
“He won’t say,” Heather blurted from behind Clayton. “He just limped out of the elevator and said he’d wait for you. Look at his poor face.”
Kelly lifted his head and grimaced around the tissue.
“You make it sound like I lost a nose,” he muttered, his voice thick.
Clayton stalked over and caught Kelly’s chin so he could tilt his head back enough to get a good look. His nose was still there, but the rest of his face showed wear. There was a livid, road-rash scrape on one cheek, a lump on his jaw, and a black eye patch crooked over one eye. Clayton had seen worse. It still shouldn’t have been on the face he remembered under his fingers, its only scar an old and faded one in his eyebrow.
“Ow,” Kelly muttered.
“What happened to your eye?” Clayton demanded.
“Popped out.”
“Oh my God,” Heather squawked. She clapped her hands over her mouth and squeezed the words out through her fingers. “Should I call 9-1-1? I should call 9-1-1.”
“Very funny,” Clayton said. “Did it fall in the bog with Liam’s family?”
He reached for the patch, and Kelly caught his hand. “Yeah, don’t. It’s not pretty. I mean it’s not gross, but—”
“Seriously, your eye fell out?” Heather said as she fidgeted in the background. “I should call someone.”
“No,” Kelly said.
“Yes,” Clayton corrected. “You look like hell.”
“What do I do?” Heather dithered.
Kelly lifted his chin out of Clayton’s grip and leaned back. He gingerly peeled the tissue away from his nose and then balled it up when blood didn’t spurt again. “Seriously,” he said. “I’m fine. Could you just get me some wet wipes or something?”
After a moment, Clayton nodded at Heather. She looked relieved to have something to do and skittered out again. He sat down next to Kelly and worked his fingers through the scruff of his sable-dark hair—no sticky patches, no tender lumps of bone.
“They didn’t want to kill me,” Kelly said.
“So you’re just being an idiot, then?”
Kelly cracked a grin and then winced as he poked at his nose.
“Did you know the LAPD don’t have a height requirement?” he asked.
Clayton paused for a second and then reluctantly freed his hand.
“I did not know that.” He got up off the couch and walked over to the cabinet where he kept the “well, shit” whiskey. It wasn’t good whiskey. It wasn’t even okay. But every new dad he’d ever had drank it, and the sour burn of it fit a bad mood. “You’ve always said that’s why you aren’t a cop.”
“I lied. The LAPD don’t care if you’re a shortass,” he said. “They do expect new recruits to have all their parts, and I was short one eye.”
Clayton poured a glass and brought it over. “Drink that.”
Kelly sniffed it first and blinked at the acid sting of it. He braced himself and took a swig. It made him wince.
“How did it happen?” Clayton asked. The question sounded more suspicious than sympathetic, as though he wanted to check the story for inconsistencies.
“I was a kid. It was traumatic. I don’t really remember,” Kelly said. Something about the way he said it sounded off
to Clayton—not a lie, necessarily, but something he’d said so often it had lost any connection to the actual event. “To be honest I don’t think about it most of the time.”
“Until someone punches you in the face?”
Kelly shrugged his acknowledgment of that.
“Yeah. They knocked the fake eye right out of my head.” Kelly held the whiskey out and tilted it in invitation. Amber liquid sloshed up the sides of the glass. Clayton took it and drained what was left in the tumbler. It still tasted like drain cleaner smelled, but the raw punch of it helped him focus past the anger and mild confusion.
“Nadine’s husband did this?”
“Not exactly.” Kelly rubbed at the edge of his eye patch as though it itched. “This was courtesy of what I think were some undercover cops.”
Clayton licked harsh liquor from his lips. “They were police? You’re sure?”
“You know what undercover means, right? They didn’t show their badges,” Kelly said. He leaned back and wrapped an arm protectively over his ribs. “I grew up around cops, though. One of my brothers is undercover. They moved like cops. Tall, dark, and blandsome used his nightstick like a cop.”
“Blandsome?”
“It was a beating, not a hookup. We didn’t really get around to introductions.”
Clayton’s mouth twitched. He had a feeling his definition of hookup and Kelly’s were a bit different. There had been a few where he really hadn’t seen their faces. There was just hot-breathed agreement and hands in a dimly lit club. Meanwhile, he’d hardly ever been beaten up by someone whose birthday he didn’t know.
That was just one reason he wasn’t what a ridiculous romantic like Kelly needed.
“So what does that mean?” Clayton thought about another glass of whiskey but decided against it. One was a bracer. Two was just day drinking. He set the tumbler down on the edge of his desk. “They’re investigating Jimmy too? They don’t want you to scare him off. He wouldn’t be the first man to deal with a divorce by not leaving a forwarding address. That’s why I’m pushing to get his finances frozen.”
Kelly looked dubious. “Maybe.”
“But?”
“More likely it’s an ongoing investigation, and he’s an informant,” Kelly said. “I’d talked to a few people. He wasn’t popular with his neighbors. The cops were called a couple of times, but nothing was done. No record of it on the search I did on the address.”
Clayton frowned. “It’s not proof,” he said.
“I know,” Kelly said. “Something is going on, though.”
He snapped the elastic band of his eye patch to make his point. Clayton couldn’t argue with that, and some form of interference would explain the unprecedented misplaced DV-100.
“I’ll talk to Baker,” he said. “He used to work for the DA’s office. He’s still got friends there. If there’s something going on, they’ll at least have seen the ripples.”
Kelly nodded. “I’ll—”
“Nothing,” Clayton said firmly. He ignored Kelly’s attempt to protest and talked over him. “I asked you to do a favor, run a few searches on a two-bit abuser. This has clearly gone beyond that. Stay out of this, Kelly.”
It was good advice, but Kelly just snorted rudely at it. “Bite me,” he said as he pushed himself up off the couch. “I’m not doing it for you. I like the kid, I feel bad for Nadine, and I’m going to help them.”
Clayton brushed his thumb over the scrape on Kelly’s cheekbone. “I don’t need this on my conscience, Kelly,” he said. “I don’t need you.”
Hurt flickered over Kelly’s face—the sort of emotion that anyone other than heart-on-his-sleeve Kelly would have hidden—and then was gone. Kelly shrugged.
“They do.”
The door popped open, and Heather scurried in with a pile of paper towels and a first-aid kit clutched under her chin.
“I found these in the… umm…. Sorry.”
Clayton resisted the urge to snatch his hand back. He wasn’t doing anything intimate, just showing basic concern for an injury. He calmly stepped back and smoothed his shirt down over his stomach in an absent, habitual gesture. The crisp cotton under his fingers was a reminder of who he was now, and who he had been, as well.
“Get yourself cleaned up and go home, Kelly,” he said flatly. “If I need anything else, I’ll call Larry.”
Clayton ignored Heather’s half-voiced protest and stalked out of his office. Anger was hot and ragged in his gut, and it grated against itself as he walked. Kelly was a good person. He fell in love and planned holidays to Bali. He took in a baby to give his brother a break. Now some assholes had decided to hurt him in order to do an abusive husband a solid.
It was the sort of thing Clayton had left home to get away from.
BAKER SAT back in his ergonomic leather chair and pushed his thin wire-framed glasses up onto his forehead. He folded his hands across his stomach and tapped his thumbs together.
“The Graham case?” he said as he rocked his weight back. “Now, I could pretend to be confused, like it’s slipped my mind, and force you to actually lay it out for me. Hopefully, in the process, you’d realize how unreasonable you are. Or I could just point out that I thought we’d agreed that the firm wasn’t wasting any hours on that. Decisions, decisions.”
Clayton folded his long body down into one of the chairs on his side of the desk. Unlike Baker’s custom-fit, lumbar-support-enabled piece of hi-tech seat technology, they were all metal tubes and crisscrossed knots of leather.
An uncomfortable client, Baker liked to say, paid attention. Luckily Clayton was used to them.
“We can just assume you did both,” he said. “Then I could explain why I’m putting my neck on the line here.”
“Well, I had assumed that was something to do with the bloody Kelly boy in your office.” He smirked at Clayton’s surprised look and pretended to buff his nails against the lapel of his jacket. “I have eyes everywhere, Clayton.”
“Heather told you?”
“Heather told me. So—” Baker checked his watch. “You have ten minutes to convince me I shouldn’t give you a lecture and stick you with our most miserable clients. From now.”
He pointed a silver pen at Clayton in the Go signal and waited.
“I think we have a problem with the LAPD.”
There was a pause, and the flicker of interest in Baker’s deep sea-blue eyes. He’d taken the hook. From all muttered accounts—and even Clayton wasn’t in on the full story—Baker’s exit from the DA’s office had been acrimonious.
“Okay. Bait taken,” Baker said. He also hadn’t quit as a DA because he wasn’t sharp enough. “Twenty minutes. Go on.”
Clayton outlined what had happened, from the delay at the courthouse to Kelly’s professionally delivered beating. The anger leaked back into his voice as though it had waited for the chance. Judging by his pursed lips and the ticktock sway of the pen, Baker noticed it too.
It wasn’t a case that Clayton would have wanted to take to court, just supposition and coincidence. There was something, but he didn’t know if it would be enough to convince Baker.
“Basically Kelly thinks they were cops. If he’s right, we have a problem,” he wrapped up.
“Not to be a downer, but if he’s wrong, you still have a problem,” Baker said. “How’s Kelly?”
“Still an idiot,” Clayton said. His conscience gave him a kick, and he grimaced. “That’s not fair. He’s not an idiot, just… Kelly. Which is like an idiot, just on purpose.”
Baker chuckled and shook his head. “You know, one day you’re going to have to admit you’re a little bit in love with him.”
For a second, Clayton entertained the wild speculation that Baker’s “eyes everywhere” extended to Kelly’s living room. They didn’t, of course.
“Don’t tell me that you’ve fallen off the Romantics Anonymous bandwagon,” Clayton sighed.
Baker snorted and stood up. He unhooked his tailored jacket from the hanger behind his
desk and shrugged it on. “Romance is when you think the object of your affections is better than they are. Love is when you can’t convince yourself they’re an idiot, no matter how hard you try.”
“I don’t love Kelly.”
“Of course not,” Baker mocked lightly. “You don’t believe in love.”
“I’m a divorce lawyer,” Clayton said. The words had sounded light when he framed them in his head. By the time they got to his tongue, there was a bitter tang to them. “I believe in prenups.”
Baker paused as he fastened the buttons on his jacket. “Love can last, Clayton. My parents were madly in love for fifty years,” he said. “From the moment they met.”
“You hated your parents.”
“Well, they were homophobic assholes,” Baker said. “But just because they hated me didn’t mean they didn’t love each other.”
Clayton rolled his eyes. “An improving story,” he said impatiently. Then he tried to drag the conversation back on topic. “What do you think I should do about this case? I’ve been threatened before, but that’s usually direct. No one has ever sent the heavies in after our investigators before.”
“They were also racist,” Baker said. At Clayton’s confused look he shrugged. “My parents. I don’t like to leave it out. Right now, do your job and concentrate on your caseload.”
“I can’t ignore—”
Baker talked over him. “I’ll make some calls,” he said. “See what I can find out about this Jimmy Graham. There are still a few debts I can call in. Leave it with me.”
“Thank you,” Clayton said as he stood up. “Now I owe you one. Like you said, this isn’t the firm’s case.”
“I was a very good DA,” Baker said. He looked unusually serious, almost grim. “I left because I couldn’t be a good DA anymore for… various reasons. So I expect the people who stayed to do their jobs and protect people to not sell an abused woman and her child out for the sake of dubious information from a dubious source. If you’re right about this, it’s our case. If the other partners object, I’ll deal with them.”
