Lawyers In Love: In His Own Defense (9 page)

The boat’s engine roared to life when he turned the key in the ignition. He’d moved worlds away from those farm fields, come a long way from being that dirt-poor kid with a hot-tempered old man.

He’d moved far enough from his beginnings that he’d go up against anybody, go after any woman who struck his fancy. Right now that meant Kristine.

He pulled into the ship channel that he’d follow to the dock outside his condo, but his gaze followed the boat’s foamy white wake until the yacht club disappeared over the horizon. He hadn’t joined yet, but he had no doubt his application, if he decided to fill it out, would be accepted. When it came down to realities, pedigrees didn’t matter. Money and power did, and he had plenty of both.

Pity his wealth and position didn’t impress Krissy one damn bit. Fortunately the chemistry sizzled between them like lightning in a storm. He looked at a sheet of heat lightning that turned the blue sky red until it went away.

But raw sex would only take them so far.

He wondered where he’d have to go to buy the kind of class that went beyond knowing how to eat and dress, and what to say. The kind of refinement a guy could only learn at the knees of a soft-spoken mother, or with a dad on a manicured golf course or the deck of a boat like this one, or like the ones at the dock he’d just left. That elusive quality called breeding.

To hell with it. He was who he was, and people could take him or leave him. Even Kristine Granger. Gunning the engine and bracing himself as the big boat’s bow pushed up out of the murky water, Tony concentrated on arguments he would use tomorrow to get Ezra Ruggles a new trial.

Chapter Eight

For the first time, Tony faced Ezra outside prison walls. The suit Tony had sent over with Hank yesterday hung on the kid’s skinny frame. As he’d thought it would, the olive drab color accentuated Ezra’s prison pallor.

Leg irons clanked when Ezra moved to lean against a scarred wooden table in the room set aside for prisoners to confer with their lawyers outside nearby courtrooms. Tony made a mental note to insist the shackles be removed, but they were loose enough. He wondered why his client seemed barely able to walk in them.

“What’s going to happen?” Ezra asked. His fists, held together by handcuffs clamped around his bony wrists, clenched until the knuckles turned white. His expression reflected horrors Tony could only imagine. “Are they gonna take me back to Raiford?” The tremor in his voice resonated with fear—no, terror.

“Not if I can help it.”

If the judge granted Tony’s appeal, Ezra would stay in the county jail pending his new trial. Tony didn’t delude himself. Bail wouldn’t be granted. Even if it were, it would be too high for his client’s only living relative, a grandmother who cleaned rooms in an economy-class motel on Nebraska Avenue, to manage the bondsman’s fee. “Did something happen at Raiford before you left?”

“I’m gonna kill…”

Tony held up a hand. “Not good to say, Ezra. Not even to your lawyer. Come on. I’m trying to get you a new trial. Get you out of that place for good.”

“I got excited about gettin’ out. Wasn’t paying attention the other night. I got caught by myself.” Ezra paused, a look of anguish on his pale, thin face. Then he broke eye contact, stared at the scarred hardwood floorboards.

“They caught me. Six of ‘em. I tried to fight, but there were too many. Too big. Didn’t have a chance. Thought they were gonna kill me. But they just used me for their bitch. Every goddamn one rammed his dick up my ass…over and over ‘til I passed out.”

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 to have ignored the injuries he’d suffered just to avoid having to stay at Raiford another day. But 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 suppressed 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 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 weren’t on the prosecution’s team. “You’re not assigned to work on Ezra Ruggles’ retrial, are you?”

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.