Defender: A Stepbrother Romance Page 5

  It was nearly forty minutes to Lubbock from my father’s house. I sat back against the uncomfortable and strangely sticky seat, my eyes glued on the window. The man sitting in the front beside Brent asked me a few questions–mostly about the night of the accident–but I didn’t answer any of them. My ears were filled with a roaring sound, my heart pounding in fear. I chewed on my bottom lip and tried to remind myself that it was not the end of the world. Crawford would do something to get me out quickly. If he didn’t, Mom would never understand, and she had more power over him than any woman alive.

  At the police station they took me into a small room that housed a table and chairs, as well as a small couch off to one side. It didn’t really look like the interrogation rooms on television–it was more like someone’s cramped apartment dining room–but I supposed nothing ever really did.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” the stranger from the car asked as soon as I’d taken a seat.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to have a Coke myself,” he said, moving close to me to remove the handcuffs. “You might want a bottle of water, or something. It tends to get pretty warm in this room. Air conditioner is pretty iffy in here.”

  I shook my head, sticking to my guns.

  He shrugged and walked out of the room. He was back less than five minutes later, two Cokes in hand. “In case you change your mind.”

  He read me my rights again, then made a point of showing me the tape recorder before he turned it on.

  “If you could just run me through the events of the night of April 2, 2015, then we can get you processed and back home, okay?”

  “My lawyer told me not to speak to you without him present.”

  The cop’s eyebrows rose. “Then you’re refusing to speak to me?”

  I shrugged, dropping my eyes to the tops of my hands. He looked almost crushed that I didn’t want to talk to him. I knew it was an act. He was trying to get me to feel guilty so that I would talk anyway. I wasn’t as stupid as I looked. I watched shows like CSI.

  “Can I explain to you that not talking to me will only prolong the situation? You have been accused of some serious crimes. DUI, reckless driving, attempted vehicular manslaughter. That last…it carries some pretty serious jail time if you’re convicted.”

  I inclined my head slightly to show him that I’d heard him, but I didn’t say anything.

  “You could go to jail for several years, Miss O’Reilly.”

  And that scared the crap out of me. I wished I remembered what happened that night. But, no matter how hard I tried, all I could remember was getting my car from the valet. I don’t even know where the accident happened. Was it on the street, or was it in the wide driveway in front of the restaurant? Did I pull out in front of that guy, somehow? Or was I on the street already? Did I ram into the back of his car at a stop light?

  I had no idea.

  Even if I had answered his questions, it would have been mostly full of things like, I don’t know or I don’t remember. And then they would likely think I was lying.

  The cop continued to badger me for several more minutes. Finally, he sighed and stood up. “Okay. I’ll get a female officer to process you.”

  And I thought I’d had all the fun I was going to have that night.

  A tall, heavyset woman came into the room a few minutes later and grabbed me by the arm, dragging me out of the room to another room at the end of the hall. She pushed me roughly up against a board and took my picture. Then she manhandled my fingers as she took my fingerprints on long, thick cards that would forever be in the shared police computer system all over the country. At least my body could be identified if I was ever killed and unidentifiable.

  Gruesome thought.

  Then she took me to a restroom and shoved a urine collection cup in my hand. “Pee,” she ordered, gesturing to a stall without a door.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  Her eyes narrowed. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who joked a lot.

  I approached the toilet and discovered that it was covered in some sort of rust colored crud that looked like it was older than I was. The need to vomit overwhelmed me and I was unable to resist that time around. The woman–she just stood there and watched. Then she insisted that I pee in the cup before I flushed my dinner down so that she could be sure that I wasn’t…I don’t know. I stopped listening about that time.

  Urine sample collected, she pulled me back out of the bathroom without allowing me the opportunity to wash my hands or wipe the vomit from my lips. Never get sick in jail. It’s just not worth the brief moment of relief that follows.

  I was put into a small cell that was more like a bench behind a set of bars, positioned next to a woman who was dressed in nothing more than a pair of panties and a set of pasties, and another who smelled worse than I probably did at that point. And there I sat for hours. It felt like an entire night, but I would be told later that it was only four hours.

  Might as well have been all night.

  I was never so happy to see Crawford. They came and got me without warning, without explanation, and took me down a narrow hallway that I thought would take me to yet another indignity, but actually led to a side door that opened onto the dark parking lot at the back of the building. Crawford was standing just outside the door, his hands pushed deep into the front pockets of his dark suit pants, a contemplative expression on his face that made him look almost approachable.

  “About time,” he said as the cop who was escorting me pushed me through the door. “I’ve been waiting nearly three hours.”

  The cop didn’t bother to answer. He simply turned and disappeared behind the heavy door.

  “You okay?” Crawford approached me, his hands pressing the hair away from my face so that he could see my eyes. “Did they hurt you?”

  I shook my head and promptly burst into tears. I expected Crawford to tell me to grow a spine. Instead, he pulled me against his chest and ran his hand slowly down my back, whispering something I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant for me to hear.

  “I’m sorry, Eden.

  Thirteen

  Crawford

  I decided to get a hotel room in order give Eden a chance to clean up before we went back to Ralls. She smelled. But, more than that, she was shaken by her first and—hopefully—only experience with the American justice system. She needed rest. And I needed to find out what she’d overheard at the police station before she forgot it all.

  We pulled into the parking lot of what passed for a luxury hotel in Lubbock, Texas: Overton Hotel and Conference Center. I managed to get us into a single room with a king sized bed. Not ideal—I would have preferred double beds, or two separate rooms—but the place was packed. The Red Raiders baseball team had a game that night. Not as popular as football games, but popular just the same.

  I urged Eden into the shower as soon as we were in the room. I listened at the door until I heard the water, then settled into the office chair situated by the work station on the far side of the room, running my fingers through my hair with one hand as I dialed our parent’s number.

  “She’s out,” I said in lieu of a greeting. “They held her longer than I expected. I thought we should stay in town instead of trying to make that long drive home, so we got a hotel room.”

  “She’s okay?” Dad asked.

  “She’s exhausted and overwhelmed but seems physically well.”

  “Good,” Mom said. “The two of you should get some sleep, Crawford.”

  “We will. And then I’ll bring her back to town early tomorrow morning.”

  I hung up a minute later, and my phone buzzed in my hand, reminding me I had several emails that I hadn’t looked over yet. I pulled them up only to discover they were the files I’d told my assistant to gather for me. The initial police report on the accident. Pictures of both cars. Pictures of Eden in the hospital immediately following the accident. The hospital report from Eden’s stay at the hospital.

  I ha
dn’t realized just how injured she’d been. The pictures showed a gash that was long enough and deep enough that the entire top of her head looked like raw meat in the photographs that must have been taken by the investigating cop. Doctors were preparing to suture her, meaning these picture were taken a good hour, maybe longer after the accident. Once I was able to draw my gaze from the blood smeared on Eden’s face and the bruises that were already forming around her eyes, I noticed that there was a fine, white powder on her face and hands, that her hair was littered with the same powder as well as glass from the windshield imploding. I knew the powder was from the air bag deploying. There was obviously a strong impact, but the paperwork filed with the lawsuit alleged that no air bags deployed in the plaintiff’s car. Why not?

  That prompted me to open the case file, and I was soon lost in the investigator’s interesting leaps of judgment and information that wasn’t there. I knew the police commissioner was involved in the case, but I hadn’t realized how deeply involved he was allowing himself to become until that moment. The data pointed to the rookie cop who was first on the scene initially putting the commissioner’s son, Joel, in handcuffs, allegedly determining by the scene that Joel was at fault. But when a second cop arrived and recognized young Joel, the handcuffs disappeared, and the young cop was assigned to watching over Eden at the hospital.

  I didn’t see mention of a breathalyzer test on Joel. Why not? That was basic investigation. Both parties in an accident of this type should be tested for alcohol, especially if they were acting strangely. And from some of the notes in the report, Joel was acting oddly enough that they should have done a test. Where was it?

  It was clear that they were railroading Eden. They didn’t even put much effort into trying to hide it. I had bits and pieces of the truth right there in my hands. And I was going to fill the missing links to crucify them all.

  Eden came out of the bathroom just then, wrapped in a thin towel and nothing else. She blushed when she saw me sitting there in the dim light, only a small lamp and the light from my phone to illuminate the room.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t want to put the smelly clothes back on, and there doesn’t seem to be a bathrobe in the room”

  I bit my lip to keep from saying the words that were sitting on the end of my tongue as my eyes slowly slid over her bare legs, her slight waist, and the lovely mounds of her breasts that were barely covered by her towel.

  “Check the closet,” I said instead, jumping to my feet to search it. I could feel her eyes on me, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt awkward as I moved around the room. Confidence had never been a problem for me. Even as a young man, I never doubted myself, never wondered what people thought of me. I learned at a very young age that it didn’t really matter what people thought. My real dad was obsessed with the way people looked at him, the way they looked at us. And that obsession led to some of the worst beatings he let out against my mother. So I didn’t care what anyone thought.

  But despite everything, I cared what Eden thought.

  I found a robe and handed it to her, my balls tightening quite unexpectedly at the touch of her hand against mine. I pulled away quickly, practically jerking my hand away, and crossed back to the chair. Eden disappeared into the bathroom for a few more minutes, the water in the sink running off and on, as I sat there and tried to concentrate on the information streaming before my eyes on my phone. But I couldn’t read a word of it. I was too conscious of the fact that Eden was half-naked just a few feet away.

  It’s been too long since I was laid.

  But that wasn’t really it. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been with a woman in a long time. It wasn’t about a physical need. There was Eden, and she was vulnerable and hurting, something I swore I no longer cared about. Eden once made it very clear that she didn’t need me. She didn’t need anything I could offer her. And I swore that I would no longer offer... but…

  Fuck, I was tired!

  I turned off my phone and tossed it onto the bed, then ran my fingers through my hair. I needed sleep. I needed to clear my head and figure out what I was going to do about the case before I had to go back to New York and take care of Mr. Stone’s nephew.

  Although suddenly, that juvenile delinquent didn’t seem quite as important as Eden.

  “I should call Daddy,” Eden cooed as she came out of the bathroom again, dragging a thin comb through her hair.

  “I called. I told them I’d bring you home first thing in the morning.”

  “Thanks,” she said, sinking down onto the edge of the bed. “It must have been pretty awful for him to see that, his only daughter dragged off in handcuffs. I wish they’d stayed inside during the whole ordeal.”

  “They’re more worried about you than upset about you getting arrested.”

  “Yeah. But that makes it worse, somehow.”

  I got up and went to the windows, staring down at the city so that I wouldn’t have to look at her. But all I really saw was my own reflection in the glass and the shadow of her movements behind me.

  “What happened at the jail?”

  Her shadow stopped moving. “What do you mean?”

  “What did they say to you? What did they do?”

  She was quiet for a long minute. I waited, trying not to watch her in the window, but unable to pull my eyes away. She lifted her hair off of her neck, the shadow colored image not giving justice to the movement. There was once a time when that movement was so familiar, was so definitive of who she was, that it made my heart ache to see it after we’d been apart for a long period of time. The power of it even in that blurry image wasn’t gone.

  What was wrong with me? I was standing there thinking things that I shouldn’t have. I was thinking things that were not only wrong when one considered our relationship, but that I’d promised myself a very long time ago I would no longer think about.

  “I don’t know what you want to know,” she said quietly. “They asked me questions, then they booked me.”

  “Booked you? How?”

  Her shadow shrugged. Then she stood and moved away, disappearing from the small space of the window’s reflection. I turned and watched her pace silently along the far side of the room.

  “They took my fingerprints, then made me pee in a cup.”

  That last bit set off alarm bells in my head. “Why?”

  She paused and threw a glance at me. “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why the urine test?”

  She shrugged. “They didn’t exactly explain the process to me.”

  I couldn’t imagine why they would need a urine sample now. The accident was more than a month ago. A urine test wouldn’t prove anything. Unless they were trying to show that she had an addiction of some sort, that she drank or did drugs on a regular basis. And that was what worried me.

  “Did you have anything to drink tonight?”

  She turned and leaned against the wall, crossing her legs at the ankles as she studied me. I wished she would straighten up, pull that robe a little tighter around her. Her bare legs were a little distracting.

  “You were there. Do you think I was sneaking gulps of bourbon behind your back?”

  “Are you taking any prescription drugs?”

  “No.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She was getting irritated, and I could see it as clear as if it was written on her forehead. But I needed to have as much information as I could get before I started trying to figure out how I was going to attack this thing in court.

  “What did they ask you during the interrogation?”

  “If I was drinking that night. If I can remember what happened that night. If I could describe the accident in detail. What I did before the accident, what happened immediately after. Basically all the same things you asked.”

  “And what did you say?”

  She pushed away from the wall and lifted her hair again, the movement graceful and nonchalant. It did things to me that made it impossible to take my eye
s from her as she brushed past me and wandered to the window. She stood there for a minute, silhouetted by the city lights, her jaw set in a way that was clearly not graceful or nonchalant.

  “Eden, I need to know everything that happened tonight. It could be important as we go to court on this.”

  I ambled up behind her, lifting my hands to rest them on her shoulders. I hesitated a second, telling myself it was just a gesture of comfort. But it felt like something so much deeper than that.

  I really shouldn’t have moved so close, but I did it anyway.

  There was tension in her shoulders that seemed to radiate through her body and into mine. My own shoulders began to ache, an ache that extended into my head and seemed to pound behind my eyes. What a long fucking day! I suddenly just wanted to crawl under the sheets and let it all melt away.

  When she turned, I could see the same desire that was tormenting me burning in her eyes as well. And then her eyes welled with tears and they began to roll down her cheeks in great, big drops that washed over my wrists and dripped onto the front of her cotton robe. I rubbed them away with my palm, wishing that such a simple gesture could wipe away everything that had happened that day, everything that was about to happen. I wished I could fix everything that was wrong in her life so that she would never cry again. Never had I wanted anything as much as I wanted that in that moment. I wasn’t used to that sort of emotion. I was so used to locking my emotions away, keeping myself focused on the logical, the facts. It didn’t pay to get emotional in my line of work, especially on the fast track to partner that I’d chosen for myself. So this…it wasn’t me.

  Maybe that explains why I pressed my damp hand into her hair, why I pulled her closer. Maybe it explains why, after promising myself I would never allow her to wiggle her way past my defenses again, I lowered my head and pressed my lips to her forehead, then the tip of her nose. Perhaps it explains why I moved and a little lower, kissed her, and my heart did a funny little flip when she responded.