I have a good education; I’m a smart, ambitious, twenty-eight-year-old woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. When was the last time I’d even had a boyfriend? It had certainly been too long since I’d been in... Well, anyway. I’ll stick with Todd and visit this naked mole rat and look at his signatures and pretend I care about golf and...
“I guess that’s it,” Todd says, pushing back his chair and standing. He helps the elderly councilman’s wife from her seat and we say our goodbyes. “Time to go home.” He smiles at me hopefully, and I see a tiny glimpse of the man I’d found sexy six weeks ago, with his floppy dirty-blond hair and perfect white teeth. And then he picks up his sweater, ties the arms around his neck as if he’s finished a successful round of water polo and holds out his arm.
Yeah, I’m going to break up with him.
* * *
“There’s going to be a naked mole rat named after you?” Parker laughs uproariously.
“Well...not anymore.” I try and fail to hide a smile. Breaking up with Todd had been awkward, but it wasn’t without its upside.
I glance at Parker Finch, my favorite work friend, across the backseat of the company car the partners hired to schlep us out to the middle of nowhere. Parker is ten years older than me, though we’d been hired on the same day almost four years ago. He got married young and stayed home to raise his two kids while his surgeon wife worked her way up the ranks. When she was established in her career he returned to school and became an attorney, and my frequent partner in crime.
“Seriously, Rach. This place is dreadful.” He squints out the window as we approach the town of Camden, just outside the Chicago city limits, on a sunny Monday. Unfortunately, dreadful is an accurate description of the area. For better or worse, Camden is mostly lumpy swaths of concrete with the occasional dead tree tossed in to add visual interest. It’s gray and hopeless, as we have learned from our near-daily visits over the past several weeks. We’re here signing up potential clients for a class action lawsuit against a company that used a carcinogenic cleaner to degrease its machinery, knowing full well it had been outlawed years earlier. As a result, thousands of innocent families are suffering as the latent effects of the chemical unleashes its fury on the central nervous system.
“First stop,” Jose, our driver, announces, parking in front of a run-down blue house with a tilting picket fence. Parker and I exchange a look before climbing out of the car and heading up the gravel driveway. The gutter hangs at a dangerous angle from the corner, and, though it’s June, the grass is patchy and yellow. Parker holds the gutter as I duck under, climbing up chipped concrete steps to knock.
The inner door swings open instantly, as though the household is as punctual as we are. “Good morning.” A little girl, maybe four, greets us, peering up through the screen. She’s wearing pink cartoon-print pajamas and her dark hair tumbles around her shoulders.
I smile down at her. “Good morning. Is your mom home?”
She turns to holler over her shoulder. “Mama!”
“Judy?”
If I squint into the darkness I can see the faint outline of a stooped woman hurrying toward us from a dim hallway. She wipes her hands on her apron and chastises Judy in Spanish, warning her about the dangers of opening the door to strangers.
“They’re not strangers,” Judy pouts.
“Go,” the woman orders, pointing up a narrow staircase. “To your room.”
When Judy’s out of sight the woman warily pushes open the door, her worn face and prematurely gray-streaked hair making my heart pound. I know from her file that Pilar Castillo is twenty-eight, the same age as me, but she looks at least ten years older. Deep grooves are etched on either side of her pursed lips, and crow’s-feet radiate from her dark eyes. She looks tired...and suspicious.
I sigh inwardly.
“Mrs. Castillo?” I ask, extending a hand as she cracks open the door. “I’m Rachel Moser from Sterling, Morgan & Haines. This is my coworker, Parker Finch. We have an interview this morning?”
She gives my hand a light squeeze and glances between Parker and me, sizing us up.
“We’re here about the Fowler Metals case,” I add. Her expression doesn’t change, but she knows what I’m talking about. Her husband worked the night shift for Fowler, a massive manufacturing company that produces parts for refrigerator motors. Two years ago he’d woken up one morning, unable to move his arms and legs. That night he’d died. Chronic exposure to an unnamed chemical—known then and now as perchlorodibenzene—had wreaked havoc on his nervous system, and one day his brain gave up. He was twenty-seven. And he is just one of the five hundred and eleven cases Parker and I have been assigned; less than one-eighth of the cases our firm is investigating in the class action suit against Fowler.
Pilar wants to let us in, I can see it in her guarded eyes. “We’ve already spoken to many of your neighbors,” I tell her quietly, though she knows this too. “This is just a preliminary interview. You don’t have to sign anything today or make any promises. We’d just like to talk about your husband.”
Her eyes well up with tears that she blinks away. “My English...” she says cautiously, her accent heavy. “I don’t...”
I switch to Spanish. “That’s okay,” I tell her. “Whatever you’re most comfortable with.” Before starting these trips to Camden, I hadn’t spoken Spanish in ten years, but now the words roll off my tongue easily. I’ve worked so hard to shape myself into someone better than my upbringing foretold, and it’s scary to see how easy it is to slide back into old habits. I shake my head and focus on the task at hand. The scrappy girl who grew up in a trailer park has been methodically replaced by a well-groomed, refined woman who promised to never look back, and never, ever will.
* * *
“Jesus,” I moan, dropping into the backseat of the sedan an hour later.
“Don’t you mean hay-seuss?” Parker replies, buckling his seat belt. “I don’t know what the hell you two were discussing in there.”
Up front, Jose smothers a laugh.
“How many of these have we done?”
It’s a rhetorical question and Parker knows it, but still he answers. “Fifty-one. Just...four hundred and sixty left to go.”
“I’ll never make it.” Not through hours upon hours of brutal interviews, having the inner workings of these poor families’ lives revealed, splayed out as facts and figures that just get worse and worse the more we pry.
“You’re Rachel Moser,” Parker reminds me, patting my knee. “Nothing gets to you.”
I force myself to straighten in my seat, smoothing my dark hair into its standard chignon and touching up my lipstick. “I don’t know why I care so much,” I admit, squinting into my compact mirror.
“Because you’re human?”
I shoot him a look as Jose pulls away from the curb to take us to our next interview a few blocks away. Camden alone is home to one hundred and twenty of our potential cases, and I know I’m being melodramatic, but I can’t help imagining that every cracked sidewalk and pockmarked building, broken window and stray dog is a result of that damn chemical.
“You know what’ll make you feel better?” Parker continues as we turn down Camden’s main drag, a nearly deserted strip consisting mainly of cheap restaurants, pawnshops and storefronts promising cash advances with low interest rates.
“What?”
“Food.”
“It’s ten o’clock.”
“You’re not going to believe this, Rachel, but people eat at ten o’clock. Jose, pull up here, please. The one with the red sign. Thanks.”
“Jose,” I counter. “Keep driving.”
But Jose, no doubt hungry, parks at the curb and gets out of the car to stretch after he opens my door.
“I told you not to bother with the door,” I scowl.
He ignores me.
“You want some empanadas, Jose?” Parker calls, heading into the small, dingy shop. Through the open door I can make out a glass display case holding an assortment of potentially delicious food. My stomach rumbles, the traitor.
“Yes, sir,” Jose replies.
“He’s going to get murdered,” I mutter, hustling in after Parker. In his eight-hundred-dollar suit, shiny, tasseled loafers and coiffed—yes, coiffed—blond hair, he’s a walking ATM. One that requires no pass card.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jose answers.
I hear Parker greet someone, but it’s so dim inside the bodega that it takes a minute for my eyes to adjust, even as I’m bombarded with the mouthwatering smells of fried food and spice.
“What can I do for you?” the skinny teenager manning the counter mumbles. He’s wearing a pristine white wifebeater and the requisite baggy jeans. His scrawny arms are covered in skull-and-dragon tattoos and he looks bored out of his mind.
“A dozen empanadas.” Parker beams.
The kid looks him up and down before grabbing a brown paper bag and a pair of tongs, following Parker’s instructions to include a “decent variety of flavors.” I don’t need to be a mind reader to know what the kid is thinking—everyone who meets Parker assumes he’s gay, but he’s not. He’s just a friendly guy with a standing date at his pedicurist. And artfully coiffed hair.
“Here,” Parker says, jarring me out of my analysis. He thrusts a fifty-dollar bill into my hand and gestures to the back of the store where a sign reading Restrooms hangs vertically, one nail lost to the elements. “I’ll be right back.”
I hold up the money. “How much do you think empanadas cost?”
“Fifty dollars,” the kid tries.
I smile as I fiddle in my pockets for something smaller. I normally have cash on me but today’s search turns up only a business card, an old mint and a wet wipe. I set them on the counter and dig in my other pocket, looking up when a shadow falls across my strappy black pumps.
I squint into the gloom and feel my heart stop. Because there, more unlikely than fifty-dollar empanadas and Parker emerging from the bathroom without a fungal infection, is a massive hulk of a man, big body silhouetted in a misleading halo.
Dean Barclay had nothing to do with my decision to flee Riverside Trailer Park ten years ago, but he is one hundred percent of the reason I vowed to never look back.
* * * * *
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TIME SERVED by Julianna Keyes
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Copyright ©2015 by Julianna Keyes
Acknowledgments
I’ve said this before, but here it is for the last time: I had no intention of ever writing this book. Time Served was the beginning and end of my ideas for this particular world, but the good people at Carina Press said they wanted to offer a two-book contract, so I had to come up with a second story, and this is it. This is the hair-pulling, eye-gouging result of what felt like an endless series of starts and restarts, edits and re-edits, deleting and undoing. (This before the manuscript ever saw a professional editor!) And in the end, it turned into something I’m very, very proud of.
So a huge thanks to the smart minds at Carina Press and in particular to my editor, Kerri Buckley, who got all these wheels turning in the first place.
And thank you, of course, to everyone who supports the crazy idea that maybe I could make a go of this whole writing thing. Thank you to my parents, who read these books even though I think we’d all be more comfortable if they didn’t; to friends and family whose outpouring of support has touched me more than my cold heart can express; and an enormous thanks to the readers who take the time to turn the pages and invest in these characters and their stories. The fact that anyone is reading my books is still hard for me to believe, but trust me, I’m trying.
Also Available from Julianna Keyes
and Carina Press
Time Served
About the Author
Julianna Keyes is a Canadian writer who has lived on both coasts and several places in between. She’s been skydiving, bungee jumping and white-water rafting, but nothing thrills—or terrifies—her as much as the blank page. She loves Chinese food, foreign languages, baseball and television, though not necessarily in that order, and she writes sizzling stories with strong characters, plenty of conflict and lots of making up.
In addition to In Her Defense, she is the author of three contemporary romances: Just Once, the story of a world-weary socialite and a stubborn ranch foreman; Going the Distance, a love story set in China between a kindergarten ESL teacher and a former army interrogator; and Time Served, the tale of an ambitious young lawyer whose perfect world is jeopardized when she reunites with her ex-con ex-boyfriend.
For more details on these and any upcoming books, visit her online at juliannakeyes.com, or sign up for her free newsletter here or at juliannakeyes.com/newsletter.html.
To learn more about Julianna, follow her on Facebook or Twitter.
Meet Caitlin’s coworker Rachel in the hot and gritty romance TIME SERVED.
TIME SERVED by Julianna Keyes
“If you’re looking for a gritty story with a lot of heat and real characters, I’d definitely recommend TIME SERVED.”
—Dear Author, Recommended Read
Dean Barclay had nothing to do with my decision to flee my old life, but he is 100 percent of the reason I vowed to never look back.
I’ve never forgotten how it felt to follow Dean—dangerous, daring, determined. I was sixteen and gloriously alive for the first time. When I felt his hand cover my leg and move upward, it was over. I was his. Forever.
Until I left. Him, my mom, and the trailer park. Without so much as a goodbye.
Now Dean’s back, crashing uninvited into my carefully cultivated, neat little lawyerly life. Eight years behind bars have turned him rougher and bigger—and more sexually demanding than any man I’ve ever met. I can’t deny him anything...and that just might end up costing me everything.
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ISBN-13: 9781459290099
In Her Defense
Copyright © 2015 by J
ulianna Keyes
Edited by: Kerri Buckley
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
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In Her Defense Page 31