by Ivy Sinclair
“I think you and I need to go somewhere more private to chat,” Tony finally said.
His hard voice sent shivers down her spine for a multitude of reasons. She was intensely attracted to him and slightly scared of him all the same time. It was a deliciously naughty kind of feeling.
“I don’t know if That was the smartest thing for me to do,” Maggie said. “What if I don’t show up for work tomorrow?”
“If you didn’t show up tomorrow, it would only be because you were in my bed,” Tony said.
Maggie’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
Tony’s arm snaked around her waist, and he dragged her up to him. She could feel the long hardness of him pressing against her belly, and instantly, she was excited. She was excited in a way that completely blew all thoughts of cold cases from her mind. He put his finger under her chin and dragged her eyes up to his. “Don’t tell me that you don’t want me as badly as I want you.”
Now they had definitely crossed into dangerous territory. There was no doubt that there was an attraction there. But that wasn’t why Maggie was at the benefit. Maggie was there to find out the truth. She had a job to do. Of course, it was a job that hadn’t been assigned to her. She was really just kind of feeling her way around something that required a bit more investigation. She sensed that getting involved with this man in any way, shape, or form would be dangerous for her. The question was what kind of danger would it be? Would it be to her mind, her heart, or her soul?
She didn’t have a chance to answer before his lips descended and dragged across hers. Her lips parted instantly, and then his tongue was inside, exploring every corner of her mouth. She had no idea how long the kiss lasted. She just knew that she didn’t want it to stop. Goosebumps ran up her shoulders and down her spine as she felt his fingertips dig into her hips.
Tony pulled his head away and stared down into her eyes with a satisfied smirk. “Come on, Ms. O’Hara. Let’s get out of here and go somewhere where we can be alone.” The word alone was emphasized in a way that made her flush.
For the first time in her life, Maggie O’Hara was at a complete loss for words.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tony plastered Maggie to his side even as he quickly moved her out of the room. He glad-handed a couple of the men as they exited, but he barely stopped to acknowledge them at all. He realized that he had to keep up some semblance of appearances, even though he knew he had already attracted some commentary due to his aggressive pursuit of Maggie after his speech. It wasn’t like him to lose control like that. That was firmly in Eric’s bailiwick. But now that he had met Maggie, and he had caught a whiff of her need, he knew that he wanted her.
When he had gone to the bar, he had intended to confront her about what she had said. He needed to find out what she knew about that night. But when he approached her, he could smell the heat of her arousal. It drew out his wolf in such a way that he had just barely been able to keep control of it. He took a risk and a gamble. He had gone in for the kill, and when she hadn’t pushed him away, he knew that he was lost. He was going to have her, and he was going to have her now.
There was a limo at the curb, and he saw Cal standing there. Cal was their best security guard and was the designated driver for all of the special events that required the presence of an Urban Dweller. Tony trusted Cal implicitly. He knew that Cal would always have his back and also would keep his nose out of his business.
Cal opened the limo’s back door for them. Tony ushered Maggie inside, still a bit surprised that she wasn’t putting up a single ounce of fight. He sensed that she was feisty, and the fact that she had been so confident in her approach and accusation of him was astounding. It made him recall their interplay in the courtroom.
The details had come back to him as he been standing at the podium giving the speech. He had delivered a similar kind of speech so many times over the years that it came like second nature to him. He barely had to do any recalling of the words at all. They just came out delivered in his standard way, modified appropriately for the crowd and the event, and the crowd seemed to eat it up. It was what he was used to.
But his attention had been pulled to the woman at the back of the room. She had watched him for a period of time and had a calculating look on her face, as if she was sizing him up. Tony wasn’t used to being approached in that way by anyone, much less a petite assistant DA that he could probably snap in half with barely a thought. There were shifters, humans, and larger men who would cower in his presence. But this woman seemed to have no qualms about going toe to toe with him.
He remembered that day in the courtroom again. It had been for a case a couple of years ago, and it was a small case for him. He barely even remembered the defendant. He had been a boy who had been going through the transition and had gotten into trouble because he had attacked a neighbor inadvertently. Tony’s testimony had been what the defense had said swayed the jury. He just told the truth. During a time of transition, if shifters don’t take extra precautions to ensure that they don’t do anything to the people around them, it isn’t uncommon for them to lose control and injure someone else. More than anything, they were lucky if they didn’t kill them.
The thing was, for humans, the adolescent years weren’t marked by a similar kind of violence. It was harder for them to understand. That was why the defense had made sure that there were at least a few shifters on the jury. They all intuitively understood what Tony was saying. The fact that it was backed up by science also helped.
But Maggie had been ruthless in her cross-examination. First, she had tried to discredit him. That was the part that he should have remembered before she said anything at the benefit. She had made a big deal out of the fact that the field of shifter psychology hadn’t existed before he quite literally wrote the book on it. Now there were programs across the country, and people were being certified every day in not just human psychological behavior but also shifter psychology, so that they could be therapist for shifters. So, she had tried to throw doubt on the fact that Tony was nothing more than a charlatan who was creating pseudo-science to be able to back up his arguments.
When that didn’t quite work out for her, then she had attacked his theory. She had used the comparison of human adolescence to shifter adolescents. She had brought up three cases where human teenagers had exhibited similar violence. And, in those cases, the people who had been charged ultimately were charged as adults and sentenced according to the letter of the law. The crux of those cases was that she mentioned the defendants had gone to jail for life. It had been a fairly creative argument. Tony had to give her credit for that.
But he had refuted it again with the argument that although there was a thin argument to be made for comparing humans and shifters, there still had to be exceptions as well. At the end of the day, shifters were dealing with trying to control the animalistic side of their nature. That was what he had hung his argument on when he countered. He also called out that the boy was a panther shifter, and the panther is first and foremost a predator. His actions after he phased weren’t unnatural. They were entirely natural. Tony had gone on to explain the behavioral nature of panthers. Mixed together with the physical ramifications of his first phase, Tony’s argument had made perfect sense.
He had been able to tell that Maggie was furious when he had countered her argument. He had been gone after by the likes of her kind before. But it had been earlier in his career, and he wasn’t used to such persistent attempts to discredit him. For a while afterward it had annoyed him, and he had had his assistant pull up some information on the assistant DA.
He had studied her file, but there was little about her to know that wasn’t completely ordinary, which was probably why he had disregarded her as a potential foe.
One big thing, though, was he didn’t remember her looking so attractive in the courtroom. He recalled that she had been wearing a plain, nondescript brown suit. She had her red hair pulled back severely in a tight bun and glasses on her nose.
He didn’t even think she wore any makeup. He was starting to realize that she had camouflaged herself in the courtroom. He didn’t know why. Surely the fact that she was attractive would help her cases as opposed to harm them. But then he thought about it a little bit more, and a sudden realization gave him a little bit more insight into the mind of Maggie O’Hara.
She was a woman who was climbing the professional ladder, and she didn’t want there to be any question of how she got there. She wanted to gain her credibility on the power of her expertise. She wanted to win on the basis of her merit at being an attorney. Back then, he had closed the book on Maggie O’Hara without a second thought. He had not anticipated that he would run into her again. A woman with that kind of determination and drive would end up in private practice making millions of dollars someday. He knew that day that she was good; it was just that he had been better.
Tony was looking forward to the opportunity to dive in again and find out what made Maggie tick. Now that they were finally alone, his hand started to move across the space between them. She swatted it away before it was even halfway across. He looked at her in surprise. “What was that for?”
She regarded him coolly. “Now that I have your attention, I told you I have questions.”
Tony realized with a bit of chagrin that he had been played. Here he had been thinking all along that he was the one who held the upper hand in the situation, but Maggie O’Hara had once again surprised him. He shook his head. He thought that he had somehow maneuvered her into being alone with him. In fact, she had been the one who had done that to him. That was exactly what she said she wanted, and he had walked right into it. The wolf inside of him growled with frustration. It thought they were going to have a much different kind of interlude. Tony put a mental muzzle on it.
“Well, we can at least have that drink.” He reached over to the sidebar and opened it. He pulled out two glasses and poured a bit of scotch into them. He handed one of the glasses to Maggie, and she looked at it with a slight look of disdain. “It’s good for you; it’ll put hair on your chest.”
Maggie wrinkled her nose. “I most assuredly don’t want any hair anywhere.”
That comment sent Tony’s mind spinning into a whirlwind of possibilities. He was definitely eager now to get that dress off and find out if there was any truth to Maggie’s statement. As he was coming back to himself, he realized that no matter what Maggie said, she was attracted to him. He could still smell her arousal. He could definitely play that to his leverage. But there were so many other things that he wanted to know about her. Especially now that it was possible that she was his fated mate. He couldn’t go there with her quite yet though. Humans had a tendency to be skittish around the idea of being claimed. It was ironic, because most shifter women couldn’t wait for it.
“So what is it you want to know?” Tony had to admit to himself that he was nervous now, though. This whole situation was a tenuous one. That date that she had mentioned so offhandedly was a turning point in his life. He had never been the same after it, and neither had Eric or Kyle. It was a night that bound them together in a kind of blood kinship that could never be replaced, but never should have happened to begin with.
“Why don’t you start the beginning? It’s clear that you remember the day.”
Tony knew that he had given away a clue when she originally threw the date at him. She asked questions for a living, and she always assumed guilt. Tony sensed there wasn’t any of this ‘innocent until proven guilty’ bullshit when it came to Maggie O’Hara. Tony had been keeping tabs on her over the past couple of years. He saw her name attached to various cases that had to do with shifter defense defendants. It was as if she looked for the particular kind of wrongdoing that was associated with the night in question. He had given too much away by his simple reaction to her initial question. If he would have been on his game, he wouldn’t have even blinked at the insinuation that that day was anything more than what it was.
“What you mean? It was the day that shifters declared their independence and equality to the entire world. It was a day of celebration.” That was true, but how Tony and his friends had chosen to celebrate was where things started to derail.
“So you remember the day,” Maggie said.
“Every shifter in the entire world remembers that day,” Tony said with a snort. “It’s just like Independence Day. You remember it because it was a historical day.”
Maggie slid in her seat. She appeared like she was just warming up. Tony had to wonder what she knew. How was it that this attorney, this woman, would know anything about what happened that night at the quarry? She couldn’t know anything. He had to play it off that way.
“So since you remember the day, what did you do?”
“It was a school day. So I attended classes just like I did every other day. They did stop the last class of the day to turn on the TV so everyone could watch the announcement from the president. There was a lot of whooping and hollering and then the usual teenage antics after that.” Tony was hoping to leave it at that. He didn’t want to get any more specific if he didn’t have to. Actually, he wasn’t going to get more specific. There was nothing that he was going to admit to this woman. She was an assistant DA, and if she thought that there was something untoward going on, he had no doubt that she would drag it up, and it would become a reality of his present instead of an artifact of his past.
“So how did you celebrate then? You guys go out on the town or anything like that?”
“I was 18 years old. I might have been a shifter, but I still wasn’t old enough to go to bars and drink. It was just a regular kind of night,” Tony said. This was where things were treading onto very thin ice. It hadn’t been a usual night. He and his friends had celebrated, and it had ended in a nightmare of epic proportions.
“Interesting,” Maggie said. “It’s funny because my research around that night says that some other things happened in Croftsborrow that night.”
What the hell did this woman think she knew? The way she said the words so confidently, Tony had to wonder. But there was nothing that could tie him and Eric and Kyle to anything other than a usual night at St. Ignacious. The fact that they had been outside the walls of the school was something that had been completely covered up. At least, Tony thought it had been covered up. His father, along with the fathers of his friends, had gone to great lengths to ensure that no one would ever know what happened that night. Nothing was reported to the police or the press. It was as if everything that happened from the span of after school that afternoon until early the next morning had never even happened.
Well, in Tony’s reality, that was the truth. He had no recollection of what happened after he left the school’s grounds with his friends. They had gone out to celebrate, but what had happened after that was a complete mystery. It was a mystery that he had no desire to find out the answer to. And yet now, it seemed as if this woman had some clues that he himself didn’t even know.
“I don’t know what to tell you. St. Ignacious was a small school. Everybody knew everybody since Croftsborrow is pretty small, so I don’t know what you think you might have heard, but it was a normal night in town.” That was the story that Tony was sticking to. He felt rusty, though. He had not been asked about that night in eighteen years. He thought that it had been completely buried in his past. He, Eric, and Kyle never even spoke of it. It was as if it had never happened.
“Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you guys did do to celebrate then? You were minors, but you were teenagers. It was a big day. Surely you did something.”
Tony decided it was better to go on the offensive now. “I’ve told you everything that I think you need to know, Ms. O’Hara. Why don’t you tell me why you’re even asking these questions? That was a long time ago, and I hardly see how it’s relevant to anything now.”
Maggie looked away from him then. He sensed that perhaps whatever case she was building in her head wasn’t as solid as she thought it mi
ght be. “There was some information that came into my office. It had to do with a murder that happened the night of October 23, 1999.”
Now Tony’s blood ran cold. There was only a small group of people who knew anything about that night. It was his father, Eric’s father, Kyle’s father, and the three of them. There had been a couple of people on the periphery that had been brought in to help clean up the mess, but other than that, Tony wasn’t aware of anyone else who had any suspicion that something bad had happened that night.
“Murders happen in every city, every day, all across the world,” he said, keeping his expression and tone completely neutral.
“But if Croftsborrow is as small as you say it was, a murder that happened there surely would’ve made it into the rumor mill.”
Tony shook his head. “No, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He understood then. She was sniffing for information. Whatever she knew wasn’t completely solid. He had to be careful not to give away any other indication that might lead her to believe he had anything to do with whatever case it was she thought she knew about. He knew for a fact that no police report had been filed on the scene. So the fact that she knew that there was something that had happened was shocking in and of itself.
Tony couldn’t even be sure that a murder had happened that night. All he knew was that there had been enough blood spilled in the quarry for at least three people. Three young women to be exact.
The limo came to a stop. Maggie looked out the window and frowned. “How are we outside my building right now?”