Secrets that Simmer Read online

  “I’m sorry, but I’m just not at liberty to share that until you sign the NDA. Hopefully we’ll get everything else settled in the next couple days and then there will be full disclosure. In the meantime, though, I need to write an opinion to be provided back to the courts in preparation for trial. To start, hearing some of the details, I’d like to hear how you would start to build your case if you were the prosecutor.”

  “So you’re looking for me to tell you where I’d try to poke holes in the defense’s case?” she clarified.

  “There’s no reason to be modest, Maggie. You were on your way to becoming one of the best prosecutors in the country when it comes to shifter murder trials. I know for a fact you have received five job offers in the last six months. You didn’t even interview for any of them. I’m surprised.”

  No more so than Maggie was at that point in time. She had to wonder what else Tony knew about her life or why he cared. “I love living in Copper City. It’s my home. Ever since I was little, I’ve had a sense of responsibility to try righting the wrongs in the world. I don’t have anything against shifters, no matter how the press tries to paint me. It’s just about doing what’s right and protecting the people who live here. I didn’t choose what I do; it chose me. I didn’t see any point in entertaining any job offers when I already was doing what I loved to do.”

  Tony had a thoughtful smile on his face that made her uncomfortable. Maggie realized that she had just spilled far more about herself than she had intended. Tony was a psychologist as well as a medical researcher.

  “What?” she asked nervously as she took another sip of wine. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I can see why juries like you. You speak with a lot of passion despite your obvious analytical leaning, and it comes from your heart.”

  Maggie wondered if she was being analyzed. Suddenly, she felt like she was the one on trial. She took the confidentiality agreement in her hand and did a quick scan of it. She needed the distraction. There wasn’t anything that jumped out at her as being something that she necessarily needed or wanted to negotiate. She took out a pen and signed it before pushing it back to him.

  She cleared her throat. “There’s your agreement. Give me the facts of the case. Just lay it all out there. Don’t hold back.”

  “I never do,” Tony said with a smirk. Maggie realized that she had put her foot in her mouth again, and it seemed as if Tony was planning to exploit every time that that happened. That was going to get irritating fast. Unless, of course, her body would stop reminding her that she was far from irritated. She was intrigued.

  Tony motioned at her to move closer to him inside the booth. She reluctantly did so, more because she was afraid of her reaction to him overall. He spread out the documents in front of them. Now she was sitting uncomfortably close to him. She could feel the heat of his body warming the small space between them. She was reminded again of just how big he was. She felt like he could engulf her in one massive hug. But yet every part of him was lean and muscular.

  Maggie forced herself to focus on the pieces of paper in front of her. “Start with the high level facts. Shoot.” She closed her eyes and listened.

  “The defendant is male. Twenty-seven years old. He was coming home from a night on the town. When he got home, he saw his apartment door was open. He walked in and found his roommate passed out in the corner of the room. At first, he thought his roommate had just forgotten to shut the door, but when he went back to his room he found an intruder hiding there. He attacked the intruder, and they fought. The intruder ended up dead.”

  “I’m assuming the man was a shifter, and the intruder was a human.”

  “You got it,” Tony said. “The defense is going to plead, of course, that it was a case of self-defense.”

  Maggie opened her eyes. “And the prosecution is going to say that it was unnecessary brute violence. He could have easily just stopped the attack by calling the police. Did he shift during the attack?”

  Tony nodded with a grimace. “Unfortunately, he did.”

  “Did he lie about it?” That was something that Maggie saw often in her cases. It looked even worse for the defendant if he had killed in his shifted form. So often they tried to lie about the fact that they had phased during the course of the attack. Of course, DNA evidence and thread and fiber analysis always showed some type of animal fibers on the scene if they were present. Then the defendants were caught red-handed in their lie.

  “In his initial statement, he omitted to mention it,” Tony said smoothly.

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “You and I both know that omission of fact is the same as lying.”

  “No one who is a shifter living in this city or any other doesn’t understand how bad it looks when you commit a crime while in your animal form. He did fess up to having phased. Eventually.”

  Maggie took another sip of her wine. She could feel the muscles of her limbs starting to loosen. “You can try using whatever brilliant theory you want, but he’s going to get jail time. He killed the guy. That was use of brute force, and it didn’t have to go down like that.”

  “The man had invaded his home. His territory. There is a primal instinct within a shifter’s animal to protect their territory and to use whatever force necessary against those who would dare cross that kind of boundary.”

  Maggie had heard this argument before. It was one of the staples in Tony’s stable of arguments. “Nonetheless, it isn’t that dissimilar to if I came home and found someone in my apartment. I would feel exposed, vulnerable, and angry. But I wouldn’t immediately jump to pulling out a kitchen knife and ripping the guy into little, bitty shreds.”

  “A little thing like you? You should be more worried this fictitious intruder would turn the tables on you,” Tony said.

  “I’ve lived in Copper City my entire life, Mr. Atwood. A girl doesn’t grow up in a city like this without taking many self-defense classes. I can hold my own.”

  Tony smiled as he swirled the wine in his glass and stared into it thoughtfully. “That sounds like a unique challenge that I would enjoy exploring further.”

  “Does that mean you’re planning to break into my apartment?” Maggie asked with a smirk.

  “I don’t break into women’s apartments uninvited,” Tony said as he leaned back in the booth. “There is usually a standing invitation.”

  “Cocky, much?” she quipped.

  “Do you want to find out?” Tony pressed himself against her and whispered the words against her earlobe. Maggie felt herself melting against him but shook herself before the lust could fully take hold. She shoved her hand into her briefcase and pulled out the one thing she knew could cool off the entire situation. She hadn’t planned to show her hand so soon, but she needed to stop Tony’s relentless pursuit.

  “No, what I want to know about is this,” she said. She put the file down in front of him.

  Tony pulled away and stared at it. “What’s that?”

  “A copy of a police report from the Croftsborrow Police Department on October 24th, 1999. Several large parts have been redacted, but it’s still possible to figure out the general gist of the story.”

  “That was impossible. A police report was never filed,” Tony said as he stared at the file. The color drained from his face. He grabbed her hand and hauled her into him. The flirtatious moment had definitely turned into something else entirely. “Tell me where you got this. Tell me now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tony had to be careful. He felt as if he had already said too much, but as his eyes scanned the document in front of him, he felt a pit of dread grow in his stomach.

  The report detailed a crime scene at a quarry just down the road from St. Ignacious Preparatory. It said that three teenage boys from the prep school had been involved in the incident. The report said a call had come into the switchboard asking for the police department’s forensics team to get to the scene as soon as possible, but by the time the police arrived, all signs of the r
eported crime had vanished.

  Further questioning of the teenagers wasn’t possible. Any further leads about the potential victims in the case were never found.

  Images flashed through Tony’s mind. The one thing that he did remember with complete clarity was all of the blood. There had been so much blood. When he dreamed about that night, and that still happened on a more regular basis then he cared to admit, he heard chanting as well. The chanting he wasn’t even sure was real. Eric and Kyle didn’t remember anything like that on the few times he had broached the topic with them.

  It was so eerily simple it was scary. They had all woken up, naked and half-phased in the quarry, covered in blood. Further testing of the blood revealed that some of it was theirs. Most of it was not.

  All of these things swirled his mind as he stared into Maggie’s eyes, trying to read there what she knew and who she had told about it.

  “I don’t know where it came from,” Maggie repeated for at least the tenth time. Her voice was tight.

  Tony moved closer to her again, and she shrank back in the booth. He knew that his eyes glinted in the dim lighting of the restaurant, and they were completely alone on the veranda. He had no intention of harming her, but he figured he might get some answers out of her if she thought that he would.

  “I think it would be best if you back up and let me out of this booth, before I make you let me go.”

  Tony snorted. No matter what Maggie’s confidence level in her ability to defend herself was, he was certain that he could overtake her in short order. Despite the fact that she raised her chin at him, he could still smell the fear on her. That was when he realized what he was doing. He was trying to intimidate and scare the shit out of his mate. That wasn’t at all how he wanted to start off their relationship, but he knew he needed to find out what she knew about that night. It was dangerous for both of them.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself and then slowly rocked backward, although he still stayed close to her just in case she tried to bolt. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This situation has me a bit off kilter.”

  “If this is how you act when you are a bit off kilter, I think I’d hate to see you fully derail,” Maggie said as she rubbed her wrist. He instantly regretted getting physical with her when she had revealed the case file to him. He had to find a way to keep a better grip on his emotions. Maggie’s presence in general had him off kilter. He felt his wolf pacing in his mind. It was anxious to claim Maggie and didn’t understand Tony’s hesitation. It was frequently that way between them.

  “I’m still not sure why you think I would know anything about this,” Tony said as he pushed the file back toward her.

  Maggie looked at him with her mouth agape. “Are you still going to deny that you were one of those three teenage boys? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who they were. It was you, and your buddies, Kyle and Eric.”

  “What’s your interest in this, Maggie? Why the dogged determination? It sounds like this has already caused you enough grief,” Tony said.

  “You mean like losing my job?”

  “You quit your job.”

  “I quit my job because I was being reprimanded for doing my job. This might be a cold case, but it was sent to me for a reason, and no matter what you say, I would bet the last dollar in my bank account that you were there that night. Somebody died, Tony, and based on what I see in this report and after checking the Croftsborrow case files, no one was ever charged for it. That was my interest in it. Somebody has to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves. Someone has to bring to justice the people who are responsible for harming others. No one is above the law.”

  Although Tony knew he was the focus of her tirade with her insinuations, he couldn’t help but admire Maggie’s passion and fervor. He swirled the liquid in his wine glass again and considered his options.

  If he had learned anything about Maggie, he knew that she was like a dog with a bone once she sunk her teeth into a case. If he had known that Eric would go around his back to the DA after their chat, he would have stopped him, but that damage was already done. He was going to see if there was anything he could do to rectify the situation. It was his fault that Maggie was currently without a job.

  He had decided it would be far better to have Maggie on his side as an ally. It was exactly what he had thought earlier by asking her to be a consultant for him. The truth was he had lost twelve hours of his life eighteen years ago. It was a gaping hole in his memories that still haunted him. Perhaps, if someone was reaching out to Maggie with information, he could finally figure out what had happened that night. He had always believed that someone out there knew something, and it was just a matter of time until it came to light.

  “What I’m telling you is completely off the record,” Tony said thoughtfully. He refilled their wine glasses. “I know you think you know everything about me, but you don’t. The only reason I’m telling you anything is because we currently have an employment contract that guarantees your complete and total discretion.” Tony picked up the confidentiality agreement that Maggie had signed and waved it at her.

  He watched Maggie’s face as she realized the ramifications of signing the non-disclosure agreement. The whole consulting gig had been a carefully constructed ruse to get her to sign it. Maggie was nothing if not ethical, and now she was bound by attorney-client privilege whether she wanted to be or not. He knew that eventually she would have started inquiring about that night again, and he had needed a way to keep her quiet.

  “If you’ve committed a crime, I have to tell someone,” Maggie said quietly. Her voice sounded as if it was strangled in her throat.

  “As you have already accepted the terms of the retainer, you are bound by the rules of attorney-client privilege,” Tony said triumphantly. He lifted his glass to her. “And that contract is in full effect for the rest of your life. That was in the small print had you bothered to fully read it instead of simply scan it.”

  “Damn you,” Maggie said in a cold tone.

  “Do you want to know the story or what?” He took another sip of wine. His wolf was agitated at the look of hatred on Maggie’s face, and it whined at him. The wolf didn’t like seeing their mate upset, but Tony muzzled it again. He had to protect both of them, even if Maggie didn’t understand yet that she needed protecting. By the expression on her face, she was only concerned with the fact that, once again, he had one-upped her.

  “I need something stronger than wine,” Maggie finally said. She scooted away from him in the booth. Tony lifted his hand and Benson materialized next to him. Although Tony didn’t believe in magic, he thought that if such a thing did exist, Benson was a master.

  “Benson, Ms. O’Hara requires something from the bar,” he said.

  “Very good, Mr. Atwood. What’s your pleasure, Ms. O’Hara?” Benson asked her.

  “Whiskey. Pappy Van Winkle if you’ve got it.”

  Tony’s eyebrows rose at the mention of the expensive liquor. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford it, which she surely knew, but he also had to admire a woman that liked hard liquor. He was finding more and more things that he had in common with Maggie whether she liked it or not.

  “Make that two, Benson,” Tony said.

  “Very good, Mr. Atwood. It’ll be just a moment,” Benson said.

  Benson was true to his word. Less than five minutes later, he set two glasses of whiskey down in front of them, and Tony was relieved to see her face brighten.

  Tony picked up his glass. "To truly new alliances," Tony said. He could tell that this was less than a pleasing idea to Maggie, but suddenly, the idea of him unburdening his soul was even more appealing. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that he knew that Maggie was his mate.

  There it was again. He had been trying to ignore his wolf’s insistent whining about this fact. He had tried to rationalize that the other night when he met her, it was simply a strong random attraction. It wasn't as if he hadn't lusted after plenty of human women in hi
s life. But seeing Maggie again the moment that she entered the front door of Violet Lune, he knew that he was done for. The more that he tied her to him through informal means, the more she wouldn't be able to escape him. He could have two bonuses in one, being able to unburden his soul, and bind her to him with a secret that she would never be able to tell another living soul.

  The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if fate had taken a more active role in the situation than he could see. Maggie had resources that went even beyond what they had with Urban Dwellers. There were plenty of politicians and high-ranking police chiefs in their pockets, but Maggie had a direct line to the DA’s office. That had so far proved to be impenetrable, despite the fact that they still obviously had an influence with Maggie's boss. It was comforting in a way for Tony to know that there were still some organizations within Copper City that were incorruptible. Annoying, but comforting.

  "So what do you suggest?” Maggie’s voice was petulant. She didn’t like being beaten at her own game. “How are we going to proceed now?"

  "We're going to enjoy the dinner prepared by Chef Marco. Then we're going to go somewhere a bit more private before I tell you what I know," Tony said.

  "I think I prefer the restaurant," Maggie said.

  Tony shook his head. "If you want the whole story, I can't risk talking about it here. We’ll go back to my place."

  He watched as Maggie drew her lip into her mouth. It made him want to reach across the space between them and suck it into his own mouth. This woman would truly be his undoing.

  "It's still all business, right?" Maggie asked. "None of that funny business that guys try to do to women by luring them back to their apartments."

  "Do you want me to swear on a Bible?" Tony said with barely an ounce of humor. It was frustrating how much she distrusted him, even though it was obvious to him that she was fighting the attraction too. He was not sure if it was because of who he was or because she was afraid of losing control. He sensed Maggie was not the type who enjoyed losing control in anything, which made her an even more intriguing challenge for him.