In His Own Defense

by Ann Jacobs

  Tony wanted to throw up.

  He had to get Ezra a new trial. No way could he sleep nights if he let this kid down and had to watch them lock the door on him again in that place where only big, tough bullies managed to survive intact. The place where his old man had spent the last twenty years of his life.

  “No use them puttin’ leg irons on me. I couldn’t run if’n they paid me to.”

  “I’ll have the guard take them off you before you go before the judge. The handcuffs, too. Look, Ezra. I’m going to try to get bail set if the judge grants my petition for a new trial. It’s not likely he will, though.”

  Ezra swayed on his feet. “I’ll have to go back?”

  “No. They’ll keep you at the county jail until the new trial. I’ll try to see that you get a cell by yourself.” Tony watched Ezra catch himself before he hit the floor. He settled his client onto a chair before calling for a guard.

  Instead of being at Tony’s side while he argued for a new trial, Ezra spent the next three days under guard at Tampa General while the doctors patched him up. Cracked ribs, internal injuries. Tony itched to let the press know the whole story, but he had to respect Ezra’s desire to keep it quiet.

  Stupid kid, Tony thought, to have ignored the injuries he’d suffered just to avoid having to stay at Raiford another day. But he figured he might have done the same, if he’d managed to endure a brutal gang rape without committing murder. Had his father been a victim, or had his size and strength protected him? Tony couldn’t bear to imagine his old man being a perpetrator of that kind of atrocity.

  Tony succeeded in getting Ezra’s conviction thrown out, and when his client left the hospital four days later, sheriff’s deputies escorted the kid to the county jail. Tony had to prepare for a new trial, right a five-year-old wrong that could never be fully compensated.

  The case was still eating at his gut when he picked Kristine up for dinner the following night.

  * * * * *

  “You’re quiet tonight,” she said, smiling across the table at Tony as they ate dessert. “Hard week?”

  He met her gaze, gave her a wry smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Yeah.”

  That was hardly a typical response from the silver-tongued defense lawyer. He’d hardly said a word since he picked her up two hours earlier. Something must really be bothering him.

  “Want to talk about it?” Kristine asked, suppressing the urge to reach out and squeeze his hand.

  “You don’t need your appetite spoiled too.” He set down his fork, leaving his amaretto cheesecake untouched except for a small wedge he’d sampled from the pointed end.

  Suddenly she wasn’t hungry, either. She needed to ease his pain, help him fight whatever demons were at his throat. “Let’s go somewhere private,” she suggested. She took her napkin off her lap and set it on the table.

  He met her gaze, his expression somber. “Where?”

  “My house?” He’d seemed comfortable enough there the day she sprained her ankle. “You can relax. Lie down on the sofa with your head on my lap. Tell me what’s got you in this blue funk.”

  * * * * *

  When they got to her house, Tony let Kristine strip him of his tie and suit coat. He tackled the buttons at the collar and cuffs of his white dress shirt while she hung the jacket and tie on the old-fashioned coat rack in her front hall.

  Relaxing didn’t seem to have much effect on his lousy mood. Nothing had, not since Ezra Ruggles had told him about the gang rape that had happened in a communal prison shower room a hundred and thirty miles away. “Sorry I’m such lousy company, Krissy,” he said when she came out of her bedroom wearing running shorts and a T-shirt that matched her eyes. He followed her to the couch he’d laid her on the day he’d damn near run her down.

  “Pain hurts less when you share it,” she told him, sitting down and sandwiching his hand between hers. “Come on, stretch out and let me take on some of whatever’s got you down.”

  He couldn’t talk to her about prison brutality. Not the way she felt about criminals deserving whatever it was they got. “You don’t want to hear it,” he said as he lay his head on her firm, slender thighs.

  “I do.”

  Her gentle fingers on his temples soothed away some of his inner tension. Tony shifted his head a little so she could reach both sides equally.

  Maybe she would understand, Tony told himself as he savored her nearness. If she wasn’t on the prosecution’s team.

  “You’re not assigned to work on Ezra Ruggles’s retrial, are you?” he asked.

  She slid her hands behind his head and massaged his neck. “The child molester? I’m nowhere near high enough on the state attorney’s totem pole to get anywhere near a high-profile case like that one. Or a retrial of any case, for that matter.”

  Relieved, because Tony found he did want to tell her about the case, he met her curious gaze. “Ezra never touched his niece. I’m going to prove it. Damn it, the system screwed an innocent kid. Sent him off to Raiford to be victimized as violently as that little girl ever was.”

  Her fingers stopped moving and she met his gaze. “You defended him?”

  “I’m handling his retrial. If I’d defended him five years ago, your boss wouldn’t have won the conviction I got set aside on Thursday.”

  “Andi prosecuted him?”

  Tony squelched an urge to laugh. “Hardly. Your big boss, Harper Wells, cinched his first election as state attorney by convicting Ruggles.”

  “Who handled his defense?” Kristine asked, resuming her gentle massage.

  Tony rested one hand against her elbow. “A junior-level attorney in the public defender’s office. Very junior. He’d passed the bar less than two weeks before the trial began. A month after the trial was over, he left the PD’s office and set up a private general practice over in Lakeland. Poor bastard never had a chance.”

  “The public defender or the defendant?”

  “Neither one. Keep that up, Krissy. Your hands feel so good on me.” Tony kicked off his loafers and propped his feet on the upholstered arm of the sofa. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated on how good it felt to have her touching him.

  “What makes you think this man was innocent?” she asked.

  “Because his mother knew who did it all the time.” Tony would never forget that downtrodden woman, Marva Jean Bragg, or the hopeless expression she’d worn on a face that obviously had seen too much.

  “Did she come to you in Miami?”

  “No. I ran into her about a year ago when I was visiting a prisoner at Raiford. We were staying at the same rundown motel.” Marva had been sitting out by the murky pool when he’d gone there to escape the heat in his room, where a wheezing air conditioning unit hadn’t yet made a dent in the oppressive heat.

  “She pegged me for a lawyer, she told me, because nobody but lawyers and prisoners’ families stayed there,” he told Kristine, quashing the guilt he felt for deliberately not saying he’d gone to Raiford to visit his father. “We talked awhile. Marva finally broke down. She admitted she’d let her son spend four years in that hellhole of a prison while the real culprit, his stepfather, had taken his time dying. Apparently the malignancy that finally killed Toby Bragg hadn’t rendered him too sick to molest her granddaughter, or to terrorize Marva into letting Ezra take the blame.”

  “My God, Tony. What did you do?”

  “Nothing at the time, except go talk to Ezra. He confirmed what Marva Jean had told me. I said I’d see what I could do, but Ezra was at Raiford, and I was in Miami. His case had been tried here in Hillsborough County. Tom Ellis was getting ready to retire, so I wasn’t able to talk him into handling Ezra’s appeal. When I found out I would be moving back here, replacing Tom, I decided to take the case myself. Unfortunately by the time I got here, Marva Jean had died. If she’d been around to testify, I doubt your boss would have opted to retry the case once I got the original conviction overturned.”

  “I’d be thrilled if I ever managed to get
a wrongful conviction set aside,” Kristine said. “Why aren’t you?”

  Tony couldn’t look Kristine in the eye. It was all he could do to speak. “Before they transported Ezra to Tampa for the hearing, six of his fellow inmates attacked him. Instead of getting to watch me get his conviction overturned, Ezra spent most of this week at Tampa General, getting patched up from what those bastards did to him.”

  “My God.”

  Kristine didn’t need to hear the gory details. What had happened to Ezra would have been awful even if he’d been guilty of the crime for which he’d been doing hard time. It made Tony sick to think of that attack and similar ones he imagined had preceded it.

  He knew one thing for sure. The Ezra Ruggles he was going to restore to freedom would not be the same man as the one Ezra’s frightened mother, Harper Wells, and a flawed system of criminal justice had wrongly sentenced to life imprisonment at the state’s maximum-security facility.

  “How awful. But how lucky this man is to have you in his corner. I didn’t know you did pro bono work.”

  He took her hand, brushed it across his lips. “As much as I can and still put in the kind of billable hours my partners like to see. Thanks for listening, Krissy.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Tension dissipated, leaving Tony so relaxed he felt his eyelids drooping. He not only wanted Kristine, he liked her. She knew when to question, when to accept, when to let him blow off steam. She made him think of giving up his condo for a home like hers, only bigger—big enough for them and a couple of kids. With room to entertain the way the old guard at Winston Roe expected of a married partner.

  Kids? Marriage? Those words should be scaring him half to death, but they sounded strangely appealing when he thought about them and Kristine together. Breathing in her faint, old-fashioned gardenia fragrance, he looked at her and smiled. He’d never wanted a woman so much, yet he’d never been so afraid of taking what she offered with every gentle touch, each heated look.

  “I’d better be going,” he said, but it felt so good to lie in Krissy’s lap and enjoy the way she rubbed away the tension from his mind that Tony couldn’t make himself get up.

  Her softly spoken invitation poured over him like molten honey. “You can stay if you want.”

  Chapter Nine

  “You know what’s going to happen if I do.”

  Kristine did, at least in theory. She wanted to comfort and be comforted, to hide from the nasty realities of the world in this man’s arms. She needed to be close to him, as close as she could get, more than she feared falling in love when they had no future together.

  “I know, Tony.”

  When she stroked his cheek, he turned, nuzzling her palm. “Oh, God, Krissy,” he muttered, his hazel gaze meeting hers. “You’re too good. Too young and sweet. Honey, I don’t deserve you.”

  “Tony, please.” She pressed a hand against the hard plane of his chest, let his heartbeat flow from him to her. “I know what I want.”

  “I want you, too, Krissy. Too much to think about all the reasons I should go. You’ve got me, unless you change your mind and toss me out in the next few minutes.”

  Kristine bent and kissed him. A long, slow, open-mouthed response. What he’d said he needed. What she wanted. For tonight and however long it lasted. No strings, no forever promises they would surely break.

  She savored the sweet taste of Belgian chocolate and cool mint their waiter had brought with the bill for their dinner. Cherished the warm, sheltered feeling she got when he held her.

  The sweet feeling of lethargy and sexual tension simmered rather than boiled this summer night, and the night promised its own kind of forever. The kind that wouldn’t end until the morning sun poured in on lovers who had shared the darkness. Sex and secrets that wouldn’t come out in the light of day.

  “We’ve got all night, Krissy,” he told her when she lifted her head and studied his handsome face, her breath ragged. “Longer.”

  A slow, soft rasp of his callused fingers across her lips echoed the promise in his words, the unspoken commitment that this thing between them went beyond lust. Beyond physical yearning. Kristine laid her head on Tony’s shoulder, rested one hand on his thigh. Savored the easy silence that settled between them.

  “I want to see what the press has to say about the appeal judge having overturned Ezra’s conviction,” Tony said after a few minutes.

  Reaching for the remote control on the cocktail table, Kristine flipped on the TV.

  State Attorney Harper Wells filled the screen, blustering and smiling, glad-handing the voters as he kicked off his bid for re-election. He’d asked everybody in his office to show up at Lowry Park for the event. Kristine had begged off, figuring an evening with Tony would beat the hoopla of an old-fashioned political picnic where her presence wouldn’t have been noticed in the crowd.

  She was right. There must have been a thousand people milling around, sipping sodas and gnawing on chicken legs. Mr. Wells apparently was just warming up to his subject, the way the noise level suddenly diminished. Kristine concentrated on the steady beat of Tony’s heart beneath her hand, the heat he generated as he stroked the length of her bare leg from ankle to thigh. She tuned out her boss’s political mumbo-jumbo for the vote-gathering hype it was.

  “Son of a bitch!” Tony sat up and hit the volume button on the remote. “Self-serving, rotten bastard.”

  Kristine heard the last of her boss’s comments about Tony’s having gotten that poor boy a new trial. “…Ezra Ruggles was guilty five years ago, and he’s just as guilty now. No matter what Tony Landry says, the boy’s a child molester. I intend to see he spends the rest of his unnatural life in prison.”

  “Mr. Wells, how did you feel about Landry getting Manny Garcia off last month?” asked a reporter on the front row.

  The state attorney cleared his throat and met the reporter’s gaze. “Well, sir, I’m looking into that. I’m not convinced there wasn’t tampering with that jury.”

  “He knows better than that,” Kristine said, suddenly embarrassed that she worked for her daddy’s old friend Harper Wells.

  Tony squeezed her hand. “Listen.”

  Another reporter shot a question at Wells. “Why did you entrust Garcia’s prosecution to an attorney who had never tried a case before?”

  “…one of the best young lawyers in my office. She had Garcia nailed dead to rights … showed Landry up… can’t understand why the jury voted to acquit him…”

  Kristine could hardly believe the man’s deluded blustering. The nerve! Harper Wells had foisted the Garcia case off on Andi, who had dumped it on her. He had then refused to let her accept the plea bargain Tony’s associate had offered and insisted she take the case to trial. He had to have figured before she or Tony made opening statements that Garcia would be acquitted. Garcia hadn’t needed Tony’s expertise. The newest lawyer in the PD’s office could have won him acquittal.

  “Tony, what Mr. Wells just said isn’t true. He knew the evidence against Garcia was weak. Even I realized that. Damn it, the judge did all but call for a directed verdict of not guilty.”

  Tony smiled as he silenced Wells with the remote, and the dimple on his cheek deepened. “I know. So does Harper. He’s just trying to make political hay. Can’t say I like his doing it at my expense, though. He’d better watch himself, making comments about me tampering with juries. That could get him a passel of trouble.”

  “From Manny Garcia?”

  “From Winston Roe. I wouldn’t hesitate to okay slapping Wells with a lawsuit if the civil liberties people in the firm think there’s a good chance of knocking him off his soapbox.”

  Kristine shook her head. “Mr. Wells was a good friend of my dad’s. He’s the one who hired me. I’ve never worked with him on a case, though.” She paused, reaching up to brush her hand across Tony’s cheek.

  “He was lying about the Garcia case. They didn’t give it to me because I’m so good. I got that case because my boss, Andi Y
oung, knows how I feel about drug trafficking. She knew I’d take it to trial since that was what Mr. Wells wanted. She also knew the case was too weak to win. If it hadn’t been, she’d have jumped on it herself.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You can’t help what your boss does, any more than I can keep all my clients on the straight and narrow.”

  Kristine couldn’t have felt colder if Tony had upended a bucket of ice on her head. Some—a lot—of the people he defended were guilty. He bought a lifestyle most people only dreamed about with the blood of those guilty clients’ victims. “Some of your clients kill people, Tony. Yet you defend them. Mr. Wells confines his sins to lying and blustering.”

  Tony caught her chin between his fingers and forced her to meet his gaze. “Are you rescinding your invitation, Krissy?”

  She didn’t know. On the one hand, she wanted him. On the other, she wasn’t sure. “No,” she said, less decisively than she intended.

  “I think you mean yes, Counselor. Think about us. Us, as in the two of us, tangled up in the sheets. Naked, as close to each other as two people can get. My cock buried in you so deep we can’t tell where I end and you begin. Decide whether you can stomach sleeping with a man who defends the kind of people you’re bound and determined to see locked up in jail.

  “Make up your mind, honey, because once you cross that line, there will be no going back. I’m not looking for a night or two of fucking. I want a hell of a lot more from you than that. If you sleep with me, you’re mine. And I don’t give up what’s mine without a fight.”

  He looked so fierce he frightened her. He’d tossed down the gauntlet, challenged her to pick it up, turn her back on everything but him and the passion that burned between them.

  Could she? Did she dare?

  “You’d better go,” she told him, her voice little more than a whisper in the charged silence. “Go, Tony, before I betray myself to have you.”

  * * * * *

  Just after closing time the following Wednesday afternoon, Andi and Kristine sat in Harper Wells’s office for the first time in over a year, being quizzed about the Manny Garcia trial.