Smooth-Talking Texan

by Candace Camp

  “Look. I’m going to be straight with you. Benny’s grandmother came to me because she was worried about him. He’s gotten into a few scrapes with the law over the years, but he’s not a bad kid. But because of his father and stepfather and her own son Pablo, she’s worried about him. She called me and told me that he’s hanging out with a bad bunch of guys. He used to work over here at the Moonstone, busing tables, but then he quit and now he doesn’t have any job. But he never asks her for money, not for clothes or gas or burgers or anything. Where is he getting his money? And he’s gone a lot. She tells me that she thinks his friends are a bad influence, especially this kid named Paco.

  “Now, it so happens that this Paco is frequently seen at a house in town where suspicious things are going on. When she told me Benny was hanging with Paco it worried me, too. I’ve been keeping a close eye on this house and you know what? Now I’ve seen Benny over there, too.”

  “That’s it?” Lisa asked. “You’ve seen him at some other house? Where suspicious things are going on? What suspicious things? And he has a friend that his grandmother doesn’t like?”

  “I can’t tell you what’s going on at this house. I’m not even sure yet myself. But I can pretty much guarantee you that it isn’t legal. There are a lot of kids coming and going at this house, and only some of them are from Angel Eye. That outside element adds something serious to it.”

  “This sounds extremely vague. You have no evidence of a crime.”

  “Not yet. But I will have. And I would hate for Benny to have been sucked into it. In this part of the country, especially with those outside people involved, the odds are it’s large-scale auto theft, drugs or smuggling illegal aliens. Those aren’t minor offenses. I’d like to get Benny out of if before it’s too late.”

  “Oh, I see. So you hauled him down to jail and questioned him for hours without an attorney present just because you were concerned about him. It didn’t have anything to do with trying to get information out of him about this house and these activities that you know so little about?”

  “Why are you so all-fired determined to dislike me?” he shot back. “I’m telling you things I wouldn’t normally reveal to a suspect’s attorney. To anyone, in fact. I’m giving you information about an ongoing investigation, because I want to help Benny, not put him in prison. I am trying to make you understand why it’s so important.”

  “Why?” Lisa asked bluntly.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Why are you telling me this? Are you hoping that I will encourage my client to tell you what you want to know? Is that it?”

  Quinn clenched his teeth together, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “You are the most exasperating, pigheaded woman I ever had the misfortune to meet.” It did not help his irritation any that he knew he was laying out his reasons for her partly because he hated for her to continue thinking of him as a bumbling redneck going around trampling on the rights of others.

  “Why, thank you,” Lisa told him sweetly. “You have certainly succeeded in winning me over now.”

  She turned on her heel and started toward her car again.

  “Wait!” He hurried after her and stepped in front of her, facing her, forcing her to stop. “Think about this—who is Enrique Garza? He’s no cousin to Benny Hernandez.”

  “So? He’s a friend, I suppose.”

  “Deputy Padilla says he’s not from Angel Eye. I don’t think he’s any friend to Benny. Why don’t you ask yourself why he is so eager to help some kid who’s been picked up on petty charges? What’s in it for him? I’m sure he didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “Who he is does not change my job. I am Benny Hernandez’s attorney, and my duty is to protect his rights.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll get a chance to do that when he’s hauled in on auto theft or marijuana-smuggling. You know, you might think about helping your client, not just representing him in court.”

  He whirled and took a few steps away from her, then stopped, muttering a curse beneath his breath. He turned and covered the distance between them in two quick strides. Grabbing Lisa by the arms, he pulled her up against him and buried his lips in hers.

  Chapter 3

  At the touch of Quinn’s lips on hers, desire burst through Lisa. The intensity and ferocity of her hunger was overwhelming. Every atom in her body seemed suddenly alive and pulsing, every nerve throbbing with sensation. His lips were smooth and hot, pressing into hers, opening her mouth to him. His hands left their grip on her arms, one of them sliding behind her back, pulling her even more tightly into his hard body. His other hand came up to the back of her head, tangling in her hair, fingertips pressing into her scalp.

  Without thinking, she slid her arms around his neck, pressing herself up into him as her lips responded hungrily to his. She trembled, clinging to Quinn, as lust unfurled deep inside her abdomen, hot and aching. Her breasts were pressed against the hard bones of his chest; she could feel the line of his body all up and down her own.

  Then, abruptly, his arms loosened around her, and he raised his head. He looked down into her face, his eyes lit with a red fire. The heat of his body surrounded her; his arm was like iron against her back. Lisa sagged against it, too numb to speak or even think. Her mouth was slightly open in bemusement, her lips soft and faintly moist, darkened from the bruising pressure of his kiss. Quinn sucked in his breath, hunger slamming through him with the force of a freight train.

  But he was also aware of the windows of the restaurant behind him and the wide sweep of street in front of him, and he knew that if he continued, the gossip would be all over town tomorrow.

  He tried to speak and it came out a croak. He cleared his throat, his arms sliding away from Lisa, and tried to bring his scrambled brains back into sufficient order to make sense.

  “Oh, God!” Lisa squeaked, her hand clapping over her mouth, her brown eyes huge and horrified above her hand. “Oh, no!”

  She whirled and almost ran to her car. Quinn stood and watched her go, having no words to stop her. The engine of her car roared to life and she whipped out of the parking space, then tore out into the street in a squeal of tires. Quinn pulled in a deep breath.

  What in the hell had just happened?

  He remained standing there for a long moment before he got into his car and drove home in a state of profound disquiet.

  Sitting in front of the small, old-fashioned brick house where he lived was an ice-blue BMW, which could belong to only one person he knew.

  “Hey, Cater,” he said as he swung out of the patrol car and cut across the lawn toward his front steps.

  “Hey, bro,” the black-haired man sitting on the top step replied, standing up. “How you doing?”

  “Not too well at the moment. What are you doing here?”

  The other man’s brows rose and he replied in a mocking way, “Well, I’m doing fine. Thank you very much for asking. I always appreciate it when my brother is so pleased to see me.”

  “Sorry.” Quinn took the front steps two at a time and stopped beside his brother.

  Cater, almost exactly the same height as his younger brother, was dark-haired like most of the rest of the family, and his eyes, under straight black brows, were a deep blue. Generally considered the most handsome of the Sutton brothers, there was about him an air of sophistication that usually earned him a good deal of ribbing from Quinn and their older brother Daniel. A successful author of mystery novels, he lived in Austin, but he had bought a piece of land near Angel Eye and built a small house on it, which he frequently visited.

  “Bad day?” Cater asked.

  Quinn shrugged. “An unusual one. I haven’t yet decided whether it’s bad or good. Come on in.” He unlocked the door and opened it, leading the way inside and calling back over his shoulder, “You want a beer? I could sure use one.”

  “Sure.” Cater trailed after him.

  A cat jumped down from the windowsill and stalked toward Quinn, meowing plaintively. The
cat was big, and few would call him attractive. Orange in color, his tail was unnaturally short, and the tip of one ear had a small chunk missing. A scar curved down over one eye and across his nose, and another short, thick scar cut through the fur on the top of its head. He looked like what he was, an old fighter, and he had adopted Quinn a couple of years earlier. Apparently Quinn was as far as his affection for humans would go, for he treated everyone else with contempt. He cast a dismissive glance toward Cater now, then twined himself around Quinn’s legs, complaining at length until Quinn dished out some food for him.

  Cater sat down at the old wooden table in the kitchen, watching Quinn. It amused him a little that Quinn, the hard-bitten cop, was the sentimentalist of the family and had been the one horrified when their father intended to give away the old wooden kitchen table that had sat in their grandparents’ kitchen since the 1920s. He had taken it back with him to his apartment in San Antonio and since then had been adding furniture that complemented it, until now his small house was almost entirely furnished with Texas farmhouse antiques. The furniture suited the little house, too. It had been built in the 1920s, with the sharply peaked gables of the era that always brought to Cater’s mind the witches’ houses of his childhood fairy tales. The house had been run-down, and Quinn maintained that he had bought it because it was such a bargain, but anyone who had seen the amount of time and sweat he had poured into restoring and repairing the building knew that it had been much more a labor of love and art than a business decision.

  “You come down early for Daniel’s wedding?” Quinn asked, setting down two bottles of beer on the table and swinging one of the chairs around to straddle it as he faced his brother, crossing his arms on the back of the chair.

  “Yeah. I sent off my proposal for my next book, and I figured I would take a few days’ rest. A week after the wedding I have to go on tour, so I thought a reward in advance was in order.”

  “Your new book’s out?”

  “Next week.” He grimaced. “It’d be great if it weren’t for two weeks of living in hotels and flying so many places I hardly know where I am.”

  “Shall I get out the violin?” Quinn joked.

  “I know. I know. I’m an ungrateful jerk. I should be glad people want to meet me and buy my book. And I am. I just hate all those airports.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, being a country boy myself.” Quinn took a swig from the bottle. “Where’s Cory? Did he come down with you?”

  Cory was another brother, the youngest child in the family, now in his senior year at the University of Texas at Austin. He lived in a garage apartment behind Cater’s turn-of-the-century house.

  “Nah. He’s coming down Friday. He’s doing his student teaching this semester, thinks the school would crumble if he missed a day or two.”

  Quinn shook his head. “Who’d a thought that boy would decide to be a schoolteacher? After all the trouble he used to cause.”

  Cater snorted. “Look who’s talking. You are, if I remember correctly, the one who set fires in the trashcans behind the high school.”

  “Now, that was all a mistake,” Quinn protested.

  “Sheriff didn’t seem to think so.”

  Quinn groaned. “I thought Dad was going to bust a blood vessel that time.”

  “It was your getting in trouble with Sheriff Woods,” Cater said. “He didn’t want to have to be beholden to the man.”

  “Yeah, I know. Woods was a dangerous guy, whether he was a friend or an enemy.”

  “What do you know about him?” Cater asked casually.

  “Not much. Mostly what everybody else knew, I guess. You didn’t cross the man, not in this county. Other than that…well, he was a political power, the kind that swung elections, even if he had to vote all the residents of the cemetery to do it. It would be my guess that there were a few skeletons in his closet.”

  “You know anything about his death?”

  Quinn shook his head. “No. Nothing but the facts of it. I was in college when it happened. Long time, probably ten years, before I came back here. Why?”

  “I’m looking into it a little. I’ve been thinking about writing a book about it.”

  “Oh, great!” Quinn groaned. “As if I didn’t have enough problems…. First I got some crime ring operating here, only I can’t figure out what the hell is going on or who’s behind it—all I know is that a suspicious number of young men are going in and out of old man Rodriquez’s house at all hours, some of them complete strangers to this town. Lots of different cars parked there, some of them nice. Then I have to be insanely attracted to this defense attorney who’s threatened to sue me, and now my own brother is going to stir up some ancient scandal in the sheriff’s office!”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m not even certain about doing it yet. I have another book to write first. I’m only toying with the idea. Murdered sheriff…scandal…pretty intriguing stuff. But it’ll be fiction. I’ve never written true crime. I’ll use it as a starting place.”

  “That’s faint comfort,” Quinn retorted. “Everybody will know it was a true story, so they’ll believe whatever you write is true, even the stuff you make up.” He pointed his index finger at his brother warningly. “Just don’t involve the guy who becomes sheriff a decade later.” He paused, then added with a grin, “’Course, I guess if you wanted to make him the hero who solves everything, you could.”

  Cater’s snort promised little hope of that happening. “Yeah, right. But what I want to know is—what’s this about a defense lawyer? Male or female?”

  “Female, you idiot. Her name’s Lisa Mendoza, and she’s about as pretty as they come. And she thinks I’m a redneck good ol’ boy who’s harassing her client and miscarrying justice whenever I get the opportunity.”

  “I see. Doesn’t sound too hopeful.”

  Quinn grinned in his familiar cocky way. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring her around.”

  Cater couldn’t resist smiling at his brother’s attitude, but he shook his head. “One day, brother, you are going to take a hard fall at the hands of some woman, and then you’ll find out what it’s like.”

  Quinn offered him a faint smile, saying, “Who knows? Maybe I already have.”

  Lisa blasted down the farm-to-market road toward Hammond, scarcely noticing anything she passed. Afterward, she was grateful for the rural lack of traffic on the road, as well as the absence of police. Her mind was not on her driving.

  She had never experienced a kiss like that before. It was like something out of a book, a movie. She had enjoyed the kisses she had shared with other men, had felt passion and desire. But this! This was different. Never before had she felt as if every nerve in her body was standing on end, or as if she burned from the inside out. When Quinn had kissed her, she had melted. Electricity had shot through her. Every romantic cliché she could think of had happened to her—only it had not been clichéd at all, but real and thrilling.

  It was crazy, she thought. Wonderful, too, but definitely crazy. She did not even like the man. He was arrogant, cocky, and bullheaded. He obviously didn’t care about following the dictates of the law, only about getting what he wanted, and it was clear from that grin that he was used to getting what he wanted from women, as well. He was precisely the sort of man whom she most disliked.

  So how could a kiss from that man have affected her like that? How could he have made her feel as if she were about to fall into an old-fashioned swoon?

  Lisa had always been someone in control of herself and her life. Even her teenage years had contained only a minimum number of tantrums and crushes. Mostly she had maintained an even keel: dating, studying, working—keeping everything in proportion. She was an intelligent girl, accustomed to being ruled by her head, and she had always hated the classic stereotype of the tempestuous, passionate Latina.

  Somehow Quinn Sutton had shattered all that with one kiss.

  She turned into the parking lot of her apartment, faintly surprised to find that she had a
lready made it home. She parked and turned off the engine, then sat for a moment, her hands still gripping the steering wheel. Her head dropped to her hands.

  It was vital that she get a grip on this, she told herself. She was not about to start letting her passions rule her life at this late date. What had really happened this afternoon, anyway? It was not as if she had fallen in love with the man or fallen into bed with him, she pointed out reasonably. They had shared a kiss, that was all, and Quinn Sutton had proved to be a superior kisser to anyone she had ever met. That was all.

  It was what she made of it that was important, and the worst thing would be to attach a significance to the moment that it did not have. The thing for her to do, she knew, was to get on with her life. The things that were important to her were her work and her family; Quinn Sutton did not matter to either of those things, except as a possible adversary. The odds were that she would not even see him again.

  Firmly she ignored the deflation that went through her at that thought. The thing to do, she decided, was to put the kiss out of her mind, to reject it as the aberration that it was. With that resolve, she got out of her car, locked it, and went inside her apartment, doing her best to ignore the weakness that remained in her legs.

  An evening of cleaning up her apartment helped to quell thoughts of her encounter with the sheriff—although she found herself all too often simply standing and staring sightlessly at the wall, work forgotten, and she had to shake herself and return to the job at hand. The evening crept by, and it was something of a relief when it grew late enough for her to go to bed. But she found once she lay down that sleep would not come. Instead, her mind returned to her encounter with Quinn Sutton. She went over their arguments, coming up with clever retorts that she had not had the presence of mind to think of at the time and remembering, too, the tilt of his head, the way his shoulders filled out his uniform, his walk as he strode across the restaurant toward her. The eyes of every woman in the place had been on him, she was sure of that.