The Truth About Love

by Sheila Athens

  He chuckled. “Are you saying it’s not going to happen?”

  Of course she wanted it to happen again. And although her heart had recovered from Christopher’s betrayal, the experience had taught her to be wary. And—after all—this was Landon Vista. The man all of Tallahassee fawned over. The man who could sleep with any woman in Leon County he wanted to. Yes, she’d have to be careful. “I’m saying you’d better be on your best behavior.”

  His breath warmed her ear as he pulled her toward him even more. “I’m pretty sure you just saw my best behavior.”

  Landon could see the slate-gray dawn through the curtains of Gina’s bedroom. She slept in the crook of his arm, one of her long legs draped over his. Warm. Content. As beautiful a woman as he’d ever seen. And certainly the most desirable he’d ever held. Maybe what she said about him last night was true. Certainly no one else had ever made him feel as . . . worthy as she had. Not the football boosters or the coaches or the scouts or the other girls he’d slept with. He looked at her, wondering how a single human being could challenge him so much—his notion of right and wrong, guilt and innocence. His perception of who he was. Of who he might be one day.

  He slid back the sheet and slipped his leg out from under hers. He hated to wake her, but he had to go pee. She stirred, turning over in the bed. He stilled and waited for her to settle back in.

  Finally, he slipped out of bed, eager to return to her warm cocoon as soon as he could. The kitchen light was still on—the one that had barely lit them last night in the living room. He checked the lock on the front door. All was good. Life, for at least tonight’s brief interlude, was going well.

  He walked to the kitchen to turn off the light; a stack of Gina’s files and work papers was strewn across the table in the small breakfast nook. He quickly scanned the labels on the files. All names he didn’t recognize. Were they convicts? Or victims?

  Then the sheet of paper on a pile of loose notes caught his eye. Notes to the file on Cyrus Alexander. The first entry—a punch to the gut—had some scientific mumbo jumbo about the lab, then concluded in plain English that the results of the DNA from his mother’s clothes were inconclusive. That the DNA was unusable. He already had the news, but seeing it here, in black and white, was like having it branded into his soul.

  His gaze shifted to the next entry.

  Due to limited resources, Morgan’s Ladder dropping the case.

  His back stiffened. His forehead and scalp chilled with a cold sweat. They were dropping the case? They brought all this up in his life and were now going to leave him hanging? With no answers about who’d killed his mother? With the wrong guy maybe sitting in a prison cell? When he could be out raising his son?

  Landon looked at the closed door of Gina’s bedroom. He’d walked out of there just seconds ago satisfied. Content. Maybe even in love.

  But now white-hot anger simmered in his chest. She’d slept with him. Not once, but twice. She’d talked to him about his father. They’d stayed awake until 2 a.m. talking and cuddling—her strong, soft body pressed against his. Her head resting on his shoulder. His arm wrapped around her shoulders possessively. And she hadn’t told him about this?

  She’d used him, just like everyone else had. She’d writhed and moaned underneath him, enjoying the sex as much as he had. That’s all it was for her.

  He rubbed the back of his neck, willing the tension away that gathered there. Disappointment and anger roiled in his belly. Last night, as they’d lain beside each other, he’d thought they might have a future together, but she’d betrayed him. She hadn’t told him the truth. And that was something he couldn’t handle. Not from her. Not from anyone.

  He went to the bedroom and peered through the darkness to locate his shorts, then quietly pulled them on.

  Maybe one day he would understand what last night meant. Maybe as an old man, he’d look back and realize that she was the one who made him see things differently.

  But for now, all he knew was that she’d hidden something important from him. Sure, they’d been consensual adults having sex, but she should have told him that Morgan’s Ladder was dropping the case. Something of this magnitude wasn’t a topic you withheld because you had a chance to sleep with someone you’d been lusting over for weeks.

  He was sick and damn tired of being used.

  And he was sure as hell going to leave before she had a chance to use him again.

  Gina felt a warm glow cascading down her body. A glow only Landon could provide. For the second or third time that night, she scooted toward him, unconsciously seeking his warmth, the pleasure of knowing he was near.

  Her eyes shot open at a sound across the room, behind her. The soft clinking of a belt buckle?

  She rolled to face him. “Landon?”

  His head came up, a surprised look on his face. Or was it guilt?

  “You’re leaving?” She tried to hide the fact that a predawn departure hurt her. She would have liked more class, more respect, than what looked like sneaking out once the handiwork was done.

  But most of all, it wasn’t how she wanted her evening with him to end.

  He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the front door. “I’ve . . . ummm . . . got to go.”

  She sat up and pulled the sheet across her naked bosom. “Is something wrong?” She turned on the lamp beside her bed. He’d talked about making love to her again in the future, and now he was walking out? “I mean, I thought last night was . . .” Great. Fantastic.

  He nodded, as if he could read her mind. “Yeah. It was.” But the tone in his voice didn’t match the words in her head. His green eyes bored into hers, saying far more than he was apparently willing to share out loud. Confusion and regret roiled inside the olive green.

  “But you’re leaving.” She felt as if their intimacy had been siphoned out of the room, replaced with a negativity so thick she could feel it crawling across her skin.

  “We’re two consenting adults who should know better than to get involved.”

  “And what we did last night”—she hated the sound of disappointment in her voice—“is how you don’t get involved?”

  “You asked me to make love to you. We . . .” He couldn’t seem to find the words to describe what had been between them.

  But Gina could think of several options to finish his sentence.

  We connected.

  We shared our souls.

  We may be falling in love.

  “We shouldn’t get involved.” His voice had a tone of resignation to it.

  “If that’s how you feel”—she swallowed, but her throat remained dry—“then you’re right. You should go.”

  Their gazes locked for another moment, then he retrieved his keys from her dresser and left her apartment without another word.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Gina stood from her desk as her boss unlocked the front door of Morgan’s Ladder and pushed the door open.

  Suzanne let out a startled scream when she realized another person was in the room. Her hand flattened on her chest. The rasping of her quick breaths filled the room. “Oh, my God. If you’re in here”—she looked toward the front of the office—“why was the door locked?”

  “I’ve been here since five a.m.” Gina worked hard to control her anger. It wasn’t going to do either of them any good if she yelled at her boss. “It was still dark outside when I got here.”

  Suzanne moved toward her office, but Gina stepped away from her desk and into the center of the main work area—not really blocking her boss’s way, but pretty close to it.

  Suzanne’s eyebrows rose with a questioning look. “Can I help you with something?”

  “We’re dropping the case?”

  Suzanne took a deep breath, as if steeling herself for the conversation. She let her worn messenger bag fall onto a nearby stack of file boxes. “I assume you’re
talking about Cyrus Alexander?”

  “It didn’t even take you forty-eight hours to come to that conclusion? You couldn’t even wait until Monday to enter the notes in the file?” Gina motioned to her computer.

  Realization spread across Suzanne’s face. Her skin paled. “I was working on some cases Saturday night. I didn’t think you’d see the notes before I had a chance to tell you this morning.”

  “So you let me find out by reading about it on the computer?” She’d even printed them out, ready to have the hard-copy proof in her hands when she confronted her boss on Monday morning.

  What she hadn’t planned was for Landon to find the paper in her breakfast nook before she got Suzanne to change her mind. She couldn’t think of any other reason why he’d left the way he did.

  Gina wasn’t sure who had been more callous—Suzanne for not telling her, or herself for letting Landon discover it before she’d had a chance to change Suzanne’s mind. She still wasn’t sure how she was going to approach this with him.

  “We can’t drop the case.” Gina’s voice was forceful, unwavering.

  “You leave in a couple of weeks and then it’s just me. I don’t have the manpower to work a case if the DNA isn’t going to help me.”

  “So you just leave him there?” Gina held her hands in the air, begging. “Rotting in jail?”

  Suzanne’s lip quivered. Gina could tell this upset her, too. “There are many others who need my help,” the older woman said, as if trying to convince herself as much as Gina. “Men and women I haven’t even met yet.”

  “But Cyrus . . . and Landon . . .”

  Suzanne’s chin came up. “So now we get to the crux of the matter.”

  “I can’t let him not know who killed his mother. He deserves to know the truth.”

  “They all deserve the truth.” Suzanne’s gaze was steady. “Not just the ones who”—she cocked her head—“get your attention for other reasons.”

  Gina sank into her chair. She’d slept with someone involved in one of their cases. She’d own up to that fact. She’d figure out how to reconcile that at a later date, but for now she needed to figure out how to find Landon some peace.

  She rested her elbows on her desk and braced her forehead on the heels of her hands, her head down. She heard Suzanne move to the little sink in one corner of the office and start a pot of coffee. The older woman then returned to where she’d once been and stood there silently, waiting.

  Finally, Gina spoke, her head still down. Her anger had eased, leaving her in a pit of quicksand filled with sadness and loss. A pit she didn’t think she’d ever escape. “What made you take on Cyrus’s case to begin with? What made you think he was telling the truth?”

  “Sometimes I can see how sloppy the work was done the first time around. Sometimes the facts don’t add up. But with Cyrus, it was like . . . a feeling I got when I looked in his eyes.”

  Gina raised her head to look at her boss. “I thought the same thing, but I tried to ignore it. Lawyers are trained to look at the facts, not to feelings.”

  “One of the many crocks of shit they teach you in law school.” Suzanne leaned against a filing cabinet on the other side of the room. “Or just about any school you go to.”

  “Do you ever get used to this . . . futility? To this . . . up and down of emotions?”

  Gina wasn’t sure she could handle knowing how much was at stake and not always being able to help. Maybe the party they’d attend this weekend to celebrate Buford Monroe’s release would restore her confidence in their ability to change people’s lives.

  “I haven’t been through what you’ve been through.” Suzanne knew all about Gina’s testimony helping send Nick Varnadore to juvi. She’d said it was part of why she’d selected Gina for the internship. “And I’ve never been in love with someone who had anything to do with one of my cases.”

  Gina reached for the bottle of water on her desk and twisted the cap off. She took a drink, contemplating what her boss had said. “Why do you think I’m in love with him?”

  “Are you saying you’re not?” Suzanne moved back to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup.

  “I don’t know.” Gina wasn’t prepared to answer the question. Not to herself. Not to anyone. “Have you ever been in love?”

  Suzanne took a long breath, then smiled. “Rodrigo Martino Gonzalez.”

  Gina grinned at her boss’s obvious pleasure at remembering him. “That’s quite a name.”

  “He was quite a guy.” Suzanne opened an individual container of creamer and poured it into her cup. “We lived on Key Biscayne together for about a year and a half. In a little hut right on the beach.”

  That explained a lot about Suzanne’s choice in footwear. “You were married?” For some reason, she’d never imagined her boss as anything other than single, like she was now.

  Suzanne shook her head. “Living in sin.” She chortled. “At least that’s what they called it back then.”

  “What happened?”

  Suzanne seemed lost in the circles of her coffee as she stirred. “I said I was in love with him. I never said he was in love with me.”

  So Rodrigo had been her boss’s equivalent of Christopher—a guy she’d thought she was in love with, but who’d broken her heart.

  “How do you know when it’s the real thing?” This wasn’t exactly the kind of conversation one was supposed to have with their boss, but then she and Suzanne faced life-and-death issues that regular office workers didn’t face.

  “When it’s the stupidest, most difficult thing that could happen”—Suzanne looked up, mist glistening in her eyes—“and you still want to do it. Then you know it’s really love.”

  Sleeping with Landon had certainly been stupid, especially with the case at such a critical juncture. Suzanne wanted to drop it from Morgan’s Ladder and Gina had slept with a key witness. She couldn’t have screwed up much worse than that.

  So why did she think she was in love with him? Or, like Suzanne, might she end up middle-aged and alone? Not that her boss wasn’t an admirable woman. Gina had grown to respect her as much as anyone she’d ever known, but she wondered how her boss’s life might have been different if she were still on the shores of the ocean with Rodrigo Martino Gonzalez.

  Suzanne picked up her messenger bag and moved toward her office. “We can’t stand here all morning wishing we were back in the Keys.”

  “Will you tell me about him sometime?” Gina asked.

  Suzanne laughed. “I don’t know. That was a long time ago.”

  “Oh, come on.” The half smile on her boss’s face told Gina that at least some of the memories were pleasant. “Key Biscayne. Sounds exotic.”

  Suzanne scoffed. “If you like being dirt poor and having to fish for your dinner every day.” She stopped in the doorway to her office and turned. “And Gina?”

  Gina looked up.

  “This is why you don’t get into a relationship with someone who’s involved in one of your cases. It doesn’t work here. It doesn’t work in a law firm. It doesn’t work if you work in a corporation.”

  “You think I’m no longer objective?” That was the worst criticism an attorney could receive.

  “I think you stopped being objective on this one a long time ago.” Suzanne walked into her office and shut the door.

  Gina closed her eyes. She prided herself on her professionalism. On being above reproach. She’d done the worst thing she could have done this summer.

  She’d fallen in love with Landon Vista.

  Gina hopped from her SUV and looked toward the gathering of people who milled outside the white clapboard house where Buford Monroe grew up. An old abandoned chicken coop stood behind the house; weeds licked at the bumper of a faded red truck that looked like it hadn’t moved in years. A gaggle of children played in the water of an old hand pump.

&nbs
p; This part of her job—the celebration of Buford’s release—made her proud of her work, but it also shone a bright, glaring light on their failure in the Barbara Landon case. It had been a week since Landon had discovered that Morgan’s Ladder was dropping Cyrus Alexander’s case.

  She’d tried texting and calling Landon at first, but her attempts had gone unanswered. Finally, he’d texted back and said he was on some kind of business trip with the senator and had been really busy.

  She shook her hair back and raised her head high. Today, she would concentrate on Buford and try to hide the gaping wound in her psyche from Landon and Cyrus Alexander.

  She walked toward the gathering of people, knowing she’d be seen as a friend of the family, but it still felt funny when she realized she’d be the only white person in a crowd full of African Americans. Maybe this was how Lisa Pinkney, the one black girl in her graduating class, felt during high school. Like an outsider. A person who didn’t quite fit in. Someone whose life experiences had shaped them into a different person than those standing before her.

  She knew her support of Buford and Ella Monroe would propel her forward. That there were many more similarities between her and these people than there were differences. They, too, had suffered grief and happiness. Victory and sadness.

  “Hey, hey, Gina,” Buford called as he rounded the corner from the back of the house. His booming bass voice filled the air like the noise from a freight train. “Come on over to meet everybody.”

  A sea of faces turned toward her. She jumped across the narrow ditch separating the yard from the roadway and was immediately engulfed in Buford’s burly arms. Men in seersucker suits and women in cotton dresses surged toward her.

  “My redheaded angel,” Buford repeated as he introduced her to aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. One by one, they thanked her for helping to free Buford from prison.

  “After all these years, you brought our Buford home,” an elderly uncle said as he held both of Gina’s hands in his.

  An older woman placed her warm, leathery palm on Gina’s cheek. “I haven’t seen Miss Ella look so good in years,” she said. “Thank you, honey.”