Lovers and Madmen(Sasha McCandless 4.5)

by Miller, Melissa F.

  LOVERS AND MADMEN

  A Sasha McCandless Novella

  Melissa F. Miller

  Brown Street Books

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novella (approximately 15,500 words or 60-65 printed pages) is a gift to my existing readers, who’ve asked for more about Sasha and Leo’s relationship. If you’re new to the series, I recommend you start with any one of the full-length legal thrillers, which you can find at smarturl.it/sashaseries, and come back to this when you know Sasha and Leo a little bit better.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 Melissa F. Miller

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Brown Street Books.

  For more information about the author,

  please visit www.melissafmiller.com.

  For more information about the publisher,

  please visit www. brownstbooks.com.

  Cover design by SM Reine

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to all the readers who asked for more about Sasha and Leo’s relationship—this one’s for you. Sincere thanks and appreciation to my editing and proofreading team, especially Curt Akin and Lou Maconi. Any mistakes or errors that remain are mine and mine alone. Finally, and always, my love and thanks to my understanding husband and children for their support.

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

  William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  CHAPTER 1

  February 13th

  Sasha woke with a start. Had someone been rattling the knob on the condo’s front door?

  Her heart thumped. She strained to listen for the noise that had woken her, but all she heard was the faint hum of the building’s heating system, low and distant, and Connelly’s soft, even breathing next to her.

  Just a bad dream. Another bad dream.

  She checked the glowing numbers on the alarm clock’s display. 4:24 a.m. She nestled beside Connelly, curved her body around his, and waited for the rhythm of his slumber to lull her back to sleep.

  He turned in his sleep and threw his right arm and leg over her body, pulling her closer. She ran her hands along his strong, broad back and pressed her head against his chest.

  Despite Connelly’s warm presence, she already knew her efforts to recapture sleep would be futile. Her pulse was still racing, and her mind was keeping pace with it. Sleep would elude her for the rest of the night.

  Might as well be productive.

  She eased her legs from beneath Connelly’s thigh and slipped out of the bed without a sound. She crept down the three steps that led from the loft into the hallway and hesitated before walking to the front door to confirm it was, indeed, locked and chained.

  She padded through the dark living space to the leather reading chair that sat beside a floor-to-ceiling window, tucked her legs under a pale blue chenille blanket, and pulled her laptop off the side table.

  She powered it on. The display’s light was harsh and bright, and her eyes watered for a moment before they adjusted. While the computer cycled through its start-up procedures, she rolled her head from side to side to loosen her tight neck muscles.

  Then—just as she had done so many times in the past four months—she read and reread the rules of professional conduct that governed the behavior of attorneys practicing law in Pennsylvania. Logic dictated that the rules hadn’t changed since her last sleepless night. But she couldn’t resist the urge to check again.

  She’d always thought of the rules of professional conduct as an attorney’s crutch, a tool to lean on in making hard decisions.

  But since October, she’d come to see the rules as a set of handcuffs. Or maybe a straitjacket—an impediment to justice that refused to yield.

  It didn’t matter how many times she read them or how cleverly she parsed the language, the rules prevented her from telling the authorities what she’d learned only too late: her client had bashed in his pregnant wife’s skull with a hammer and left her to die in a parking garage.

  After her initial shock had worn off, she’d talked to Larry Steinfeld, the experienced criminal defense attorney who’d helped her in her representation of the Lady Lawyer Killers. Larry had been sympathetic but firm: Rule of Professional Conduct 1.6, Confidentiality of Information, prohibited her from sharing any information with the authorities that was adverse to a client’s interests, even after the representation had ended.

  Larry also tried, with limited success, to convince her that she should be pleased by a job well done, pointing out that most criminal defense attorneys represent people who did, in fact, commit the crimes of which they’d been accused. Intellectually, she understood that he was right. But, emotionally, all she knew was she didn’t have what it took to practice criminal law.

  Boxed in by the rules of ethics, she had to resort to hoping the district attorney’s office would stumble across the truth without her help. Because there had been no trial, there was no double jeopardy issue. But with a man already behind bars, who was widely perceived to have committed the murder, the district attorney had little incentive to go looking for a new suspect.

  She walked into the kitchen to sip some water and clear her head.

  Richard Vickers, the man charged with the murder of Clarissa Costopolous and her unborn child as well as the murder of one of Clarissa’s coworkers, had entered into a plea bargain in which he pled guilty only to the other murder. He’d maintained at his sentencing—and continued to maintain—that he hadn’t killed Clarissa, although he’d planned to.

  The denials of an admitted murderer who had an incentive to lie carried no weight, according to Larry. Under the pecking order that existed at Western Penitentiary, Vickers’s life would get considerably more unpleasant if he was known as the guy who’d killed a pregnant woman. Killing a non-pregnant woman was, apparently, not a social handicap.

  Let it go, she told herself, knowing she couldn’t. It was a weight she’d carry for the rest of her life.

  She returned to the reading chair and shut down the computer, then sat cross-legged on the floor and stared out the window until the sun rose.

  As light streaked the sky, she turned to happier thoughts. Valentine’s Day was just one day away, and she had a surprise planned for the man dreaming peacefully upstairs in her bed.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Connelly bounded down the stairs to the kitchen, full of energy even before his first cup of coffee.

  “Good morning, sunshine!” he enthused, reaching for the coffee.

  She joined him at the counter and extended her empty mug for a refill. He filled it and then pressed his lips against her ear.

  “Hi,” she said.

  His smile faded and concern filled his eyes.

  “You couldn’t sleep again?”

  She raised the oversized mug to her mouth and shrugged.

  “Guess not.”

  Connelly placed his cup on the counter and took hers from her hands, lowering it to the counter as well. He searched her face.

  “Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” he pressed.

  Because I can’t, she thought. It’s against the freaking rules.

  Instead she said, “Nothing’s wrong—other than the fact that you hog the covers. And sleep like a windmill. Snore like a buzz saw.”

  She reclaimed her coffee mug.

  He tried to maintain his serious fac
e, but she saw his lips beginning to curve. She stretched onto her toes and gave him a quick, coffee-flavored kiss.

  “Don’t forget—tomorrow night you’re all mine,” she told him over her shoulder as she started for the stairs to take a quick shower.

  He caught her by the waist and pulled her toward him.

  “What about every other night?” he said, pressing his mouth beside her ear.

  Her legs melted, and she leaned back into him.

  “And every other night, too,” she managed as he moved his lips to the hollow at the base of her throat.

  His hands were on her hips now, tugging at the waistband of her yoga pants. Warm against her cool skin.

  “What about the mornings?”

  She tried to form a sentence or even a thought, but desire flooded her body and overrode her brain. She turned and abandoned her coffee then slipped her hands up under his thin t-shirt.

  The shower could wait.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sasha glared down at the freckled hand clamped around her wrist. Her own left hand and the eight-inch blade in it were pinned down against the surface of the counter by the firm grip.

  With little effort, she could twist to her right and swing her elbow around with sufficient force to knock her tormentor across the narrow room and into the stainless steel shelving behind him.

  With only marginally more effort, she could break each of the small bones in the hand that trapped hers.

  But she did neither.

  Instead, she waited for Chef Rouballion to finish his series of dramatic sighs and launch into the diatribe she knew was coming.

  Three, two, one ...

  “That is not a chiffonade. I do not know what it is, but I know what it is not. You, Miss McCandless, are wasting your money and my time,” he sniffed in the heavily accented English that she had begun to think was an act.

  She counted to ten before she answered him. And then did it again for good measure. She just had to get through this final lesson without killing the man.

  Mastering French Cooking, allegedly written for the home cook, had resulted in an embarrassing visit from the condo board president regarding the frequency with which her smoke detector sounded but no apparent mastery of cooking techniques.

  So she’d turned to her mother. Valentina McCandless had approached the task with gusto. But after giving her daughter a grand total of two cooking lessons, she declared her in need of professional help and referred her to the executive chef at Pittsburgh’s most expensive French restaurant.

  This pretentious idiot was her last chance.

  Finally, she said, “Please, Chef Rouballion. Give me another chance. Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and I really want to get this right.”

  He eyeballed her in a very un-French-like manner then sighed and released her wrist. He reached into the colander and slammed another bunch of fresh spinach onto the cutting board.

  “Very well. Again. You must stack them. Neatly this time, please.”

  She arranged the greens into something resembling a pile.

  “Good. And now we roll them up tightly.”

  As precisely as she could, she rolled them into a small bundle.

  “And ribbons, please. We cut the thin ribbons.”

  She hacked at the roll with the blade, and slivers of spinach fell to the board. She smiled up at the chef.

  “That’s pretty good, right?”

  He took his time responding.

  “It is acceptable for a hobby cook. For you, it is astounding,” he said.

  Equally astounding was the fact that Rouballion hadn’t yet been attacked by some culinary student or prep chef who had tired of his constant snarking about poor knife skills.

  “Great,” she said, shrugging off the jab.

  She’d set her mind on preparing a classic, five-course French meal as part of her Valentine’s Day surprise for Connelly, and she was going to do it—even if meant she had to put up with Rouballion’s almost comically stereotypical haughtiness.

  “This man, he’s special, yes?” Rouballion remarked.

  “What?”

  “The friend you are preparing this meal for—he means a lot to you?”

  As much as she wanted to, she wasn’t going to stab the arrogant chef; but she certainly wasn’t going to engage in personal chit chat with him either. Connelly wasn’t just special; he was extraordinary. He understood her in a way no one ever had, and she needed him in a way she had never needed anyone before. He was a true partner. But that was none of Rouballion’s business.

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “Then you should make a superior dessert, too. This tarte you have planned is too bland for a romantic meal. I will teach you my recipe for pots au chocolat,” he said.

  Sasha’s face must have betrayed her dismay at having to learn yet another recipe and at the eleventh hour, no less, because the chef laughed.

  “It is decadent but facile. Even you can do it. I assure you,” he said.

  She bit down hard on her inner cheek then said, “Great.”

  She couldn’t wait to get out of Chef Rouballion’s kitchen and take out her aggression on Daniel.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Sasha had learned after her first two French cooking lessons that it would be best to follow each lunchtime cooking class with Chef Rouballion with a sparring session. She’d convinced her Krava Maga instructor to meet her three afternoons a week for a private hand-to-hand combat class. By the time she’d drained herself of her built up aggression and irritation in a flurry of jabs, punches, blocks, kicks, and takedowns, she usually felt positively Zen.

  “Do you feel plucky?” Daniel cracked, by way of greeting. “Today, we’re going to review defending against chokeholds.”

  She rolled her eyes at the pun but said, “Sounds good.”

  She rolled her shoulders and stood facing Daniel.

  For the next forty-five minutes, he choked her—from the front, from the back, from the side, while she was prone on the ground; he choked her one-handed and two-handed. And each time, she plucked at his hands to free herself and then unleashed a hail of combative moves on him.

  Finally, he held up a hand.

  “You did great.”

  “Thanks.”

  She took a long drink of water and reveled in her hard-earned serenity. Unfortunately, the tranquility lasted approximately ten seconds—until Daniel decided that a hundred pushups would be an appropriate way to celebrate completion of her final cooking class.

  “Oh, come on,” she protested.

  Daniel sighed. “Discipline, Sasha. I’d tell you that it might save your life someday, but I imagine you know that better than anyone. What’s it been—four near-death encounters in a year and a half? You’re a walking danger magnet.”

  She shot him a dark look and dropped to the studio floor.

  “First of all, I didn’t go looking for any of those situations,” she said, assuming the plank position and digging her toes into the floor.

  She pressed her legs together and braced her arms at shoulder width.

  Well, maybe that last one. But, she’d had a good reason, and she’d helped prevent a flu pandemic. He should be thanking her.

  “As far as I know, magnets don’t going searching for metal either. But somehow rusty nails find them anyway,” Daniel continued, apparently unaware of the debt of gratitude he owed her.

  She lowered herself until her elbows stuck out at 90 degrees and waited a beat. Then she pushed back up until her arms locked, out and straight.

  “One,” Daniel counted.

  She repeated the movement, slowly and precisely. She was careful to wait a beat at the bottom and to await Daniel’s count at the top. There was no sense in doing them sloppily; he’d just make her start over. In that regard, he was just like the chef.

  As she raised and lowered herself under Daniel’s watchful eye, she considered his statement. She had gotten herself mixed up in t
oo much trouble. But that was all behind her.

  Her current caseload included a breach of a supply contract; an insurance coverage action; and the defense of an unfair competition claim. Even her pro bono work was safe and mundane—she was drafting wills for first responders. The most dangerous activity on her schedule had been the French culinary class, and that was over.

  “Ten.”

  In fact, it had been her New Year’s resolution to avoid any situation that had a high likelihood of ending in gunfire, a stabbing, and/or the arrival of law enforcement officers. So far, more than six weeks into the year, she could boast of a perfect record.

  “Twenty. Watch that right arm. It’s getting wobbly.”

  She glared up at him and tensed the muscles in her forearms.

  “I think I like Chef Rouballion better than I like you,” she muttered, as she lowered herself to the floor again.

  “That’s too bad,” he said with a laugh, “I was going to see if you and Leo wanted to join my parents and us for drinks tomorrow.”

  “Us? You mean—”

  A warm smile spread across Daniel’s face and lit his eyes.

  “Yep. Christopher gave me an ultimatum: come out to my parents so we could quit skulking around like criminals or he was leaving.”

  “And? How did Larry and Bertie take the news?”

  “Forty. Dad said he’d known for years that I was gay, but he was glad to see I was no longer a coward. Mom doesn’t care that the mysterious Chris has turned out to be a boy, but she’s not exactly thrilled that he’s not a good Jewish boy.”

  “I told you they’d be happy for you,” she said, locking her arms and resting at the top of her pushup.

  “Don’t stop. You were right. They love him—religious issues aside. So, we’re having them over to our place for dessert and drinks tomorrow. Really, you should come. Sixty.”