by Ann Jacobs
Where the hell had his confidence gone? Tony laughed out loud, reminded himself they could always exchange the damn ring if Kristine didn’t like it.
He’d love to put it on her finger now, but his conscience told him no, so he closed the box and stashed it under his hairbrush and cologne. After brushing his teeth and running his electric shaver over the lower half of his face, he headed for the bed.
Her smile dazzled him as she slipped off her sleep shirt, relieving the chill of fear that still held him in its grip. When she held out her arms, he went into them willingly…eagerly. He tunneled his fingers into her hair, breathing in the clean, fresh scent and listening to her quick, shallow breathing.
Each little puff of air she exhaled prickled against his neck, traced a pattern along his jaw, got him hotter than if she’d been blowing on his cock. Well, maybe not, he allowed, but that admission did nothing to diminish the sensual pleasure he was getting, just holding and loving her.
When she made her way to his lips, he took hers, plunged his tongue inside the warm wet cavern of her mouth. And he made no move to stop her when she clutched his butt, digging her fingers in, lifting one leg and sandwiching his cock between her firm, slender thighs.
He’d planned to go slow, stroke every inch of her delectable body, committing her to memory in case…no, he wouldn’t even consider that he might lose the most important fight of his life. They’d make love like this tonight and every night.
And right now Krissy had him hotter than hell. Too hot to take his time.
Desperate to take her yet determined to make it good for her, he shifted his upper body and slid his open mouth over her throat, her pretty breasts. Nipping gently at first, he followed the love bites by soothing her satiny skin with his tongue. Her sexy little moans would have let him know she liked what he was doing and wanted more, even if her cunt weren’t drenching his throbbing cock with its hot, slick love juice.
She slid a hand between his legs, fondled his cockhead, then grasped his shaft and positioned him at the entrance to her dripping pussy. His balls tightened as he surged forward, seated himself inside her.
“Oh, yeah,” he murmured when she clenched his cock inside her incredibly tight, wet heat. But he wanted more. More of her than this position allowed. “Roll onto your back, honey. When she did, he lifted her hips and sank inside her to his balls.
“Oh, yesss. Tony, that feels so good.”
He’d never felt a pussy so wet, so responsive…suddenly he realized he hadn’t protected her. “Hold onto the feeling,” he said as he pulled out. “I’ve got to grab a condom.”
“Afraid of a paternity suit, Counselor?” She sat up and ran her hands up and down his back while he fumbled to rip open the small package. Damn, the flimsy plastic didn’t seem to want to give way any more than he wanted to use its contents to numb the delicious, incredibly arousing sensations of her hot, wet pussy surrounding his bare, straining cock.
Her question registered as he finally rolled the condom on and turned back to her. “You wouldn’t have to sue me, baby, but you’re too classy a lady to do the shotgun wedding bit. Now lie back and enjoy.”
Sheathed now, Tony lifted Kristine’s legs over his shoulders and slid his cock back into her welcoming heat. He caught her scream of pleasure in his mouth when his cockhead grazed her G-spot, fucking her harder and faster and deeper until she convulsed around him again and again.
Fast. Hot. Kristine would almost say his moves seemed desperate, once she came down off the first waves of incredible pleasure that had her trembling and squeezing his hot shaft as furiously as he was pounding into her.
Maybe he was afraid to tell her the whole story of his life. And maybe fear had driven him to taking her as though he was intent on placing his mark on her…branding her. “Tony, I…”
“What, baby?” he asked without losing the hard, fast rhythm of his thrusts.
No. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, that she’d love him no matter what. But damn it, she wasn’t going to let him off the hook. “You make me feel so good,” she said, telling herself that certainly was no lie.
“You make me feel good, too. Hold on and I’ll make us both feel even better.”
Tony felt himself coming almost before he got those words out. Hard. Spurting for what seemed like hours while she milked him with her tight little cunt. When he collapsed on his side and pulled her with him, she nuzzled his chest with her open mouth. God, but he didn’t want to move.
No. He wanted to stay with Krissy, in her, all night long for as long as they lived. But responsibility soon kicked in and made him get up to discard the condom. When he slid back in bed, she snuggled close, warming him, yet reminding him he had yet to earn her trust.
The next morning Tony almost canceled the interview with Claxton. It was too beautiful a day to spend behind dismal prison walls. Too beautiful a day to risk losing the woman he loved. But he had no choice. No choice at all if he were to live with himself.
Chapter Sixteen
How could men live like this, behind high thick walls topped with concertina wire? The buildings had iron bars at every window. What looked like decades’ worth of accumulated grime adhered to every surface.
Everywhere Kristine looked, she saw rifle-toting guards. Their expressions were all the same: hard, closed, as though they’d become immune to human emotion. What a horrible, hopeless place!
“Take your driver’s license and business card, but lock your purse in the trunk,” Tony told her when he parked the car. “Whatever you take inside, they’ll search.”
They crossed the parking lot and got into line behind a sad-looking assortment of humanity. Kristine sensed Tony’s discomfort as they showed their identification and passed through a visitors’ gate. When he submitted to a pat-down search at the entrance to a room filled with lockers, she saw him clench his jaw and take several deep breaths as if to control his distaste.
“You, too, lady,” the burly guard said as she prepared enter the turnstile where Tony had just passed through.
When he heard her gasp, Tony whirled around, his expression fierce.
Kristine steeled herself to endure the indignity, made herself smile. She tried to ignore the pervasive smells of unwashed bodies, cheap perfume, and harsh disinfectant that assailed her nostrils.
“It’s all right, Tony.”
“You lawyers think you should get special treatment. May work some places, but not here. You’re no better than the other scum that come to visit.” The guard spat out a stream of tobacco juice that hit the concrete floor, just short of a garbage can he’d apparently aimed for.
Kristine tried to recall whether judges had sent any of the defendants whose cases she’d prosecuted here. She didn’t think so. She hoped not. None of the convictions she’d won had been for crimes serious enough to merit incarceration for the perpetrators in a maximum-security facility.
When she recalled Tony’s claim that Mr. Wells would have had Manny Garcia’s sixteen-year-old nephew sent here if he’d been convicted, she shuddered. Raiford Penitentiary was nothing like the minimum-security facility she’d toured when she’d first gone to work for the state attorney’s office.
“Claxton’s waitin’ for you over there, Landry. Figured you’d want the lawyers’ room so both of you could chat with him.” The guard gestured toward a barred window at the end of a long row, the only one that was walled off to give the visitors an illusion of privacy.
The prisoner’s side of the cubicle, Kristine noted, was identical to all the rest of the spaces behind a row of windows: a straight chair pushed up to a narrow sill that framed a barred opening. She stifled a gasp when she noticed more gray-clad prisoners shuffle in, their progress measured by the clanking of leg irons and handcuffs and scrutinized by more armed guards wearing blue uniforms and belligerent expressions.
It was a good thing Tony wasn’t expecting her input, because Kristine caught only snatches of the interview. Her mind was on Ezra Ruggl
es and anybody else well-meaning prosecutors might have sent to this hell unjustly. And on Tony, who had to live with knowing his father had been locked up here.
For Raiford Penitentiary had to be worse than hell. No doubt about it. Kristine looked around. Blustering bullies stripped of any vestige of humanity flaunted their chains and spouted their vitriol for all to hear, while defeated-looking men with dead eyes hung their heads and spoke in hushed tones to whoever had come to visit them.
“Then you’ll testify?” she heard Tony say.
“Yeah, I’ll tell the court what I just told you. Never felt good about screwin’ Ezra over, but ol’ Toby sure did make it worth my while.” When Claxton stood and rattled his handcuffs, Kristine assumed the interview was over.
* * * * *
Tony watched a guard haul Claxton away, then turned to Kristine. His confidence left him as certainly as his witness had disappeared beyond a thick steel door.
He imagined this place must make Krissy’s skin crawl. When she stared wide-eyed at the prisoners and their visitors, Tony saw her suppress a shudder. He never should have brought her here.
An aura of degradation flowed from hard-eyed inmates, made shame well up in Tony. How could he admit to Krissy that his own father had been little better than the worst of these miscreants and sociopaths?
He couldn’t drive away from the prison fast enough, couldn’t wait to shower and rid himself of the stench that felt very real though he knew it existed only in his imagination. It took every bit of courage Tony could dredge up to make him pull over at the same rest stop where his well-meaning foster parents had staged a picnic lunch, the first time they’d brought him here to see his old man.
A rest stop close enough to hell that, if he looked through a curtain of lacy pine needles and strained his eyes, he could make out the walls of the penitentiary.
Kristine sat on a cracked concrete bench and accepted the bottled water he’d taken from a cooler in the trunk. “This is a peaceful spot.”
“I guess it is, at that.”
Anywhere but here, Tony imagined he’d have appreciated the gentle breeze, the shade from a big old oak tree, and the densely needled deep green pines that blocked the view of the two-lane highway and nearly hid the prison from view. Anywhere but here, he could have dispelled the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, the memory of another time and a twelve-year-old boy who hadn’t yet hardened himself to ignore his feelings so he wouldn’t vomit.
“I’ve been here before,” he said, hoping he’d manage not to vomit now.
Kristine glanced at the forbidding walls that loomed on the horizon, then met his gaze. She hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “Tony, I know about your father.”
What the hell? “Who—”
“Mr. Wells. I wish you’d trusted me enough to tell me, yourself.”
“I wanted to. Damn it, that’s a lie. I wish I’d never had to tell you. But I was going to. Now. That’s why I pulled over here.”
Maybe if he brazened this out, he could hold onto her after all. When he met her troubled gaze, though, Tony had his doubts.
“What my old man did isn’t something a man can be proud of, Krissy. But the sordid story is about him, not me. I don’t often talk about him. Since he died, I don’t even think about him a whole lot.”
When she reached up and stroked his jaw, hope burgeoned. “Don’t shut me out. Not about something that important, a tragedy that had to have shaped your life. I need to know, and not just the bare facts Mr. Wells so maliciously provided.”
“It doesn’t disgust you, to have been carrying on with the son of a common garden-variety murderer?”
“Asked and answered, Counselor.”
“Point made.” She’d expressed many emotional reactions toward him these past few weeks, but he had to admit disgust hadn’t been one of them. Tony took her hand, drew it to his lips. “Sit down, sweetheart, and I’ll fill you in on the gory details.”
From her expression, he guessed she needed some space, so instead of sitting beside her, he claimed the bench on the other side of the picnic table, straddling a heavy chain that anchored the whole assembly—benches and table—to a presumably heavier concrete slab beneath his feet.
“When I said I’d been here, I meant it. About twenty-two years ago I sat where you’re sitting now. I took a look back at where I’d been and heaved my guts out.”
“No.”
“Yes. This is where I decided to become a lawyer. I was going to get my old man out.” He gestured toward the prison, shook his head. “That was one promise I made to myself that I couldn’t keep.”
“But you tried.” When she met his gaze, her expression was questioning. “Didn’t you?”
“He wouldn’t let me. When I tried to persuade him to let me petition for a retrial, he shot down my theory that he’d killed that man in self-defense. All the years when I’d believed he got a raw deal went straight down the tubes.”
“You loved him, didn’t you?”
He squeezed the hand she placed on his open palm. “Yeah, I loved him when I thought about some good times we’d shared when I was a kid. But I hated him, too. Especially after I couldn’t believe in his innocence anymore.”
“It must tear you apart, coming here, seeing that awful place—”
“He spent almost half his life in Raiford, Krissy. He died there over a year ago. I wasn’t seeing a client the way I let you believe, when I met Ezra’s mother. I was visiting my dying father, sticking around until he breathed his last so I could claim his body and put it to rest.”
Kristine’s eyes widened, and tears ran down her cheeks. Her pretty mouth dropped open. When she moved her lips, apparently trying to speak, not a sound came from her throat.
Tony’s gut clenched, chilled him, yet some force compelled him to go on. “Speechless, are you?” he asked, certain that if he didn’t vent his raging emotions, he’d explode. “I won’t blame you if you walk away.”
He watched her swallow convulsively, as if she still wasn’t certain she could talk. “Surely your father wasn’t all bad,” she finally said.
“He killed a man in cold blood, Krissy.”
“He had to have had some good qualities or you wouldn’t have loved him,” she said. Standing, she staggered a moment before finding her footing, then moved toward the stand of pine trees that partially blocked the prison from view.
In for a penny, in for a pound. Tony came up close behind her and looped his arms around her waist. Quietly, deliberately, he filled her in on the sordid details that had uprooted him and changed his life: a crime of passion that had taken place outside a bar where migrant workers gathered and ended with a worker dead and his old man behind bars.
“I was ten years old, and my mother had died six weeks earlier,” he said, bracing her trembling body against him as he finished his story. “The social worker came to the trailer where we lived after the deputies had taken my father away. They put me in foster care that night.”
“I’m sorry. So very sorry.” The words came out through soft sobs she couldn’t seem to control.
She was sorry, he imagined, that she’d ever thought she wanted anything to do with him. “Don’t be,” he said, choosing to let her think he believed she was hurting for the little boy he’d been. “The worst of the foster homes I stayed in beat living in a migrant camp.”
“You said the first time you came up here to see him, you were twelve years old.” Her voice was strained, as though she was trying to hold back tears.
“I’d just gone to a new foster home. The social worker must have talked them into bringing me up here. Mike and Ellen Nugent brought me back once a year, until I graduated from high school and went out on my own. They were decent people. Still are.”
“I’d like to meet them.”
Tony doubted they’d hit it off. He’d gone to see the Nugents when he’d returned to Tampa, tried to pay them back for the six years they’d given him the closest thing to a home he’d ev
er had at the time, but they’d shooed him away.
Simple blue-collar people, they’d apparently felt ill at ease to see him, dressed in his lawyer clothes and driving his fancy sports car. He imagined they’d feel even more out of place with a woman like Kristine, who’d been brought up in a high-society lifestyle beyond their comprehension.
He doubted Krissy would feel any more comfortable with them, or with their simple concrete block home that still teemed with foster kids, dogs, and the occasional pet snake or possum. “They’d like you, I’m sure,” he said, doubting that a meeting would ever take place.
Then he met her teary gaze and he knew. Though hurt that he’d held back a vital part of who he was and where he’d come from, Krissy still loved him. She’d loved him knowing his deepest secret, cared enough about him to hold back the knowledge until he found the courage to share it with her.
She’d known almost from the first, and knowing hadn’t kept her from turning her life upside down for him. Hadn’t stopped her from loving him.
A weight lifted off Tony’s chest.
* * * * *
When they went back to their room at the bed-and-breakfast, the details of Tony’s ordeal still rang in Kristine’s ears. What amazed her was how hard and single-mindedly he must have worked to achieve goals forged in pain and hurt and loneliness. She imagined him in the foster home he’d mentioned, cared for yet…different because he wanted more than survival, more than the life people would have expected for the son of a migrant worker—and a murderer.
She wanted to show him with actions what she’d told him on the way back from that dreadful prison. Actions she’d never dared think of before that now seemed not just acceptable but right.
He sprawled in the easy chair by the window while he stared out at the big oak tree he’d mentioned sitting under to study before this was a swanky bed-and-breakfast. He looked emotionally drained, which was certainly no surprise considering the effort it must have taken him to bare his soul.
Taking a deep breath, she went to her knees in front of him, slipped off his polished loafers and socks, and began to massage one large, high-arched foot.