by Laura Sutton
Sam sat back into the leather chair and discreetly wiped her palms on her black suit pants. She had dressed in one of her best business suits, smart flattering trousers and blazer in black and a cream-colored lightweight linen shirt.
She always got this question from her law professors, Justice Landry… hell, even from her dad. The time he had been in prison he told her most of the inmates, even if they said they were innocent, weren’t. She knew this, but firmly believed everyone had the right to a good defense. It was an integral part of the system.
“I understand that, really I do, but it’s my duty to give the best defense to all my clients regardless of guilt or innocence. In fact, I don’t believe in making that determination myself, because their guilt or innocence has no impact on how diligently I will represent them.” When she finished her boss was smiling.
“Excellent! I would expect nothing less from Landry’s star clerk.” He turned to a small table behind his desk and picked up a stack of four large folders, filled with papers, and a laptop on top.
“This is your new case. Most of our lawyers juggle two or three cases at a time, depending on how time-consuming or big they are, but I’m only giving you one case. It’s a capital murder charge.”
Her eyes widened as she accepted the heavy stack from him and opened up the first folder. The mugshot of a beautiful, well-put-together older woman was the very first page.
“That’s Debra Cork, our client. She’s accused of killing her husband– poisoning him. You’re going to be my third chair on this case.”
Sam looked up at him from the picture and gaped. Third chair? Already? On a murder case? She wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
“Samantha, don’t look so scared. As third chair you’ll be in the courtroom, yes, but you won’t get any time in front of the jury. I need those research skills you honed working for Landry more than anything.”
She nodded, her shoulders hunching a little in relief. “I can do that.”
“Great!” he said. “I–” He was interrupted by a knock on the open office door.
“Oh, great, Eli! I want you to meet Samantha, our third chair on the Cork case. You’ll be working together a lot.”
Sam's breath stuttered to a halt. Could it be? No, this had to be a different Eli. Her Eli, the one who had stolen her heart, lived in Florida. Surely the universe would not do this to her. It had to be a different man with the same name. ‘Eli’ wasn’t that rare a name, was it? She moved the stack of folders back to the desk and stood and turned around.
“Hi, nice to meet you, Saman–” His words ground to a sudden halt.
The floor seemed to disappear beneath Sam’s feet, because apparently ‘Eli’ really was that rare a name: it was him. It was her Eli.
She hastened to regain her composure, plastering a smile on her face and stepping forward, hand outstretched.
“Hi, Eli. Nice to meet you, as well.”
His touch was just as electric as had been a year earlier in Costa Rica. Just the sensation of his hand against hers awakened something of aching and longing within her, something that died little by little as the months wore on with no contact from him.
She took him in quickly. He looked as handsome as ever, his hair a little shorter and slicked back, hiding the curls she’d grown so fond of in the salty, beach air of Costa Rica. He now sported a close-clipped beard that didn’t do anything to hide his beauty; it drew Sam’s focus to his mouth, to lips she’d kissed and which had kissed her back… everywhere. To her mortification, a blush bloomed on her cheeks as her body responded to the memories of their time together. She darted a glance up to his eyes, expecting to find the same humor and warmth in their brown depths she had grown to love, but there was nothing in them now but frost.
No, it was more weariness, fatigue. Was he overworked there? Would he even admit it if he were? Would he confide in her again? Did she want him to?
“Samantha,” he said simply and released her hand.
“Eli, I want you two to take today and get Sam caught up on the case. We have voir dire on Wednesday and I want her prepped,” their boss said, sitting down. Sam moved to grab the large stack of folders and her work laptop, but Eli got to them first.
“Come on, you can follow me to my office and I can bring you up to speed,” Eli told her. Sam nodded and bid goodbye at her new boss, who waved and answered his ringing phone as they walked out.
Sam had woken up thinking that that day was the first exciting new day of the rest of her life. She had tried to prepare for every contingency, but how could she have expected her past to run her over like a freight train?
Chapter Fourteen
Eli
When Eli was called into Richard’s office on Monday morning, he knew he would meet the new third chair. She was all Richard and Mark could talk about for days after her interview, shaving impressed them with her intelligence and work ethic. He’d only known her first name, and Samantha was a common-enough name that he didn’t think in a million years she could be his Samantha, the Samantha he dreamed about almost every night. The Samantha whose number and email address he carried with him in his wallet like a talisman or a favor from a fair maiden to her brave knight.
Oh she was fair, her pale beauty shining like always, and he knew how alluring she was under that suit, too. He had kissed every inch of her creamy skin, tasted her, felt her, been inside her. He’d also made her laugh and held her while she slept.
This, then, was his penance. He would have to work side-by-side with Sam, watch her while she smiled and climbed the professional ladder of their firm and saved the fucking world. And one day, she would walk in talking about a great date with a normal man, a man free to love her, a man whose family didn’t pose a constant threat to her life. One date would turn into two, then five, and then she’d have a ring on her finger and she would be lost to him for good. Hell, maybe she’d already met the guy. It had been a year, after all.
Eli pushed open the door to his office and moved to sit on the brown leather couch, the low table in front of it always more conducive to working for him than his cluttered desk. It was where he did his best thinking and brainstorming for a case. It was also pretty comfortable for those nights when he’d worked late into the night and collapsed for a few hours of sleep before having to be in court.
At first he had been upset about taking on a green new lawyer for this case, worried how much hand-holding he would have to do, no matter how Richard had raved about her research skills. Knowing it was Sam, though, he wasn’t worried. She was one of the brightest legal minds he’d ever met.
In Costa Rica, they had spent much of their time debating cases and rulings. It had been the best foreplay Eli had ever experienced. He’d argue with her just to get her riled up, she’d flush red and her gray eyes would brighten. She would argue with such emotion, such passion, that he would have to kiss her. Kiss her and pull her astride his lap and fuck her, holding her hips in place and fuck her– hard. She would come apart in his arms, pulsing around his cock just as passionately as she had argued with him. It had been nothing short of miraculous and now he would have to work next to her, argue with her, smell her perfume… and not touch her.
It was going to kill him.
He sat on the couch and gazed at her, still hovering by the door, her eyes comically wide as she clutched that legal pad in front of her like a protective shield. Was she afraid of him… or her reaction to him?
“I thought this would be better, to go through the files. My desk is pretty cluttered,” he told her, gesturing to the surface covered in notes and briefs. He had wrapped up an appeal the day before, and now he could focus on the Cork case. Her wide eyes glanced at his desk and got even bigger, taking in the state of it, and he laughed.
“Yeah, it’s a mess. I’m not the most tidy of workers. ‘Organized chaos’, I’ve always called it, but it’s bad, even for me.” She turned to him and smiled, a small but real smile, and his heart clenched in his chest. He’
d missed those smiles; hell, he had missed everything about her.
Eli watched her furtively while he opened the folders Richard had given her. She seemed to come to some kind of decision regarding her proximity to him, decided he wasn’t a venomous snake looking to strike at any opportunity, and sat on the couch. Not remotely close to him, but close enough to get a whiff of her perfume. She hadn’t changed it, still smelled faintly of flowers, oranges, and coconut, and so many memories connected to that scent came flooding back. Memories that made his cock stiff and his chest tight.
“Okay, fill me in,” she said, and he released a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding.
“Debra Cork is the wife of Pastor George Cork, a prominent Protestant preacher, one of those mega-church types, very public, beloved… and abusive to his wife. Unfortunately, Debra never called the police on her husband, fearful for her children and their way of life. She had journaled the abuse that went on for years, and in later months had begun to record him, setting up a hidden camera in their bedroom. Presumably, this was to gather material to force his hand in a divorce, but he died before she could file,” he finished.
She chewed on her lower lip in concentration, reading the file in her lap. He would be annoyed with anyone else, thinking they hadn’t been paying attention, but he knew Sam better than that. He knew she could handle multiple streams of knowledge and not miss a tiny detail.
“He never hurt their children?” she asked, still absorbed in the reports compiled by the best investigators money can buy.
“She says not, and we can’t find any proof of it. Debra has had mysterious hospital trips – broken arms, concussions from trips on the stairs.”
Sam nodded, still reading the reports flipping through them a little faster. “He died of cardiac arrest? And the District Attorney is claiming she poisoned him?”
“Yup. The entirety of the state's case rests on an internet search Debra did about the oleander plant, because there was an excess of digitalis in George’s system.”
“But it says here that he suffered from congestive heart failure. Was he prescribed digitalis?” she asked.
Eli grinned. She was so smart and sexy, a potent combination. At least for Eli. “He was, and he’d had congestive heart failure for five years.”
“And what did Debra say she did the search for oleander for?”
“She said that the house had oleander bushes, which we’ve verified through photos and that she’d heard it was poisonous and she had researched how to properly dispose of it. That’s all the internet searches showed, and the plants were ripped out.”
Sam hummed in acknowledgment and kept reading, and that was perfectly fine with Eli. It gave him the chance to observe her. She hadn’t changed much, still all flawless skin and generous curves, but there was more. In Costa Rica there was at times a reticent air about her, making her seem younger and even more innocent than she really was. He had learned how to coax the passion out of her, not just the sexual passion but her passion for everything.
Now, though, Sam seemed to carry herself with more assurance. She had gone out and conquered a goal– no, not just conquered it, but excelled at it. It only made her more intoxicating for Eli. More dangerous to his self-control.
“How old are their children? It doesn’t say, in this folder,” she asked, startling him out of his reverie, and when she looked up at him his brain went blank for a moment.
“Oh, uh,” Eli fumbled through the folder on his lap. It had the family information. He found a family photo of the Corks and the biographical information of the children.
“Four kids, the oldest sixteen, a daughter, thirteen-year-old son, ten-year-old son and then a five-year-old daughter,” he said, passing her the family picture. On the outside they looked like an all-American family. Who would’ve guessed that, behind those attractive smiles, they were hiding such a secret?
“So what made her decide to finally start divorce proceedings? What changed after seventeen years of an abusive marriage?”
“I don’t know, she won’t tell us,” Eli replied.
“Hmmm,” she replied noncommittally, her eyes still tracing the photograph.
“What are you thinking?” he murmured, and she shrugged.
“Only that if she suddenly decided to leave him, something must’ve changed, something important,” she said, handing him back the photo, and he studied it, looking for something, anything, that could help get their client to trust them and tell them the full story so they could prepare the best defense.
“You think he started hurting one or more of the children,” he said, and she nodded.
“Most women will go to much harsher lengths to protect their children than themselves.”
Eli nodded and put the photo back in the file. “Well, maybe Debra will confide in you. She hasn’t been the most forthcoming with either Richard or myself, and she was downright hostile to our investigators.”
Sam leaned back into the soft leather of the couch, and while he was happy that she seemed to be relaxing in his presence, the action moved her body further away from him. Not what he wanted, but it was selfish of him to want her near and not give her all of himself– assuming she still wanted him after all.
“When can I meet with her?”
“Hmmm, maybe after voir dire on Wednesday. She is out on bond and maybe she would be willing to meet with us. She’s very cagey, sometimes.”
“That’s pretty standard with domestic abuse victims, especially those used to hiding the abuse,” Sam said, nodding her agreement.
“So how do you know so much about domestic abuse victims?” Eli couldn’t help but ask. The draw of her, the need to know Sam and be known by her was still very much there.
She shrugged and tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear, a nervous habit he remembered vividly.
“I spent a lot of time last year volunteering at the women’s shelter in Richmond,” she said. “Once I passed the bar, I helped women file divorce papers, or custody paperwork, and lots of requests for restraining orders.”
“When did you find time? According to Richard, Justice Landry is a dragon to work for,” he teased, and she blushed, the blush she would show when he would compliment her. He had grown addicted to that blush in Costa Rica. She was so expressive, and she didn’t realize how much.
“Justice Landry wasn’t that bad.” Her small smile told him she was telling the truth– she’d enjoyed clerking for the judge. “I learned a lot and was sad the job only lasted for a year, but excited to start here. Anyway, what happened to Florida?” she asked suddenly.
Her words stopped him short; he’d almost forgotten about that lie. It seemed so long ago. It had been so stupid to lie, but he’d never expected to fall for a pretty girl on the beach, and then after they parted ways, he had never expected to see her again.
“I lied,” he told her baldly, and she winced at his bluntness. But there was no sugar-coating it now.
“Why?” Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.
Eli rubbed his hands over his face, gathering his thoughts. Her quiet ‘why’ wasn’t just ‘why did you lie?’, it was also “Why did you never call, you asshole?’ He owed her an explanation, and he knew it.
“I lied at first because I didn’t know who you were. It was a knee-jerk reaction, really. And then once I got to know you, there didn’t seem to be a good way to say ‘Hey, I lied about where I was moving because I come from a crime family, and trusting outside that family is not something I ever learned how to do.’ Then when we got closer, and I was going to tell you, Dante showed up.”
“And ruined everything,” she added softly.
Eli shook his head. “He ruined nothing, bimba,” he said. “His presence just reminded me of what I couldn’t have.” He couldn’t stand the way her eyes filled with pain. He hated that he was causing it. “Sam, is this… is working with me going to be a problem for you? I can–”
“No,” she cut him off quickly, st
anding. “It’s not a problem. It was in the past, and it was nothing, right? Just a fling.” Sam gathered up the folders and her computer and started to make a hasty exit from his office.
“Sam!” Eli called out, unsure of what he was going to say, only knowing he didn’t want her to leave his office yet, at least not like this.
“What, Eli?” She looked weary and sad, and he hated that it was his fault. He didn’t know how to change it. He couldn’t be with her. It would hurt her more in the long run.
“Take your computer to Greg. He’s on the second floor, room 213. He’ll set you up with a company email. I bet Richard forgot to mention that.” He smiled a little at her and she returned it hesitantly. “Read the files and be prepared to help go through discovery by Friday. There’s not enough room for you to attend this voir dire, Richard has hired an outside firm to help, so it will just be him and I there. Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” she told him, a little brighter, as he stood and moved to his desk. She turned to depart but stopped. “Hey. Eli, do you need my number?”
“Oh– no, I still have it,” he said and her eyes widened a little. “I– I mean, I can get it from HR,” he tried to cover, and she nodded, accepting his lie and leaving his office at last.
Once she’d gone and his office door was closed, Eli sank into his chair with a sigh. Was it going to be a problem? No, sweetheart, it was already a problem.
Chapter Fifteen
Samantha
After her meeting with Eli, Sam threw herself into researching the Cork case. The first day, she stayed cooped up in her office, only leaving to meet with HR to sign her new-hire paperwork and to see Greg in IT. She knew throwing herself into the case was a way to not think about Eli and all the feelings dredged up by seeing him again, but she couldn’t find it in herself to try something more healthy. Right now, avoiding her feelings was the better option– facing them would just be admitting that, even after breaking her heart, she still wanted him, still loved him.