If You See Her Read Free Page B

with the public defender around, she doesn’t want to talk. Only time she really talks much is when Lena shows up—she asks about Law a lot, but nobody other than Lena will talk about him.” The sheriff sighed.
    Keith, one of Remy’s endless cousins, gave him an unhappy look. “She doesn’t much like people in uniform, I think. Won’t look me in the eye—seems the same with others. She’s quiet around King, but I think that’s just habit. I don’t think she’s as nervous around him as she is around me.”
    “Nervous?” Remy asked, cocking a brow. He already knew she was freaked out about people in uniform—namely the boys in blue. Or tan, like the county boys. But he wanted the opinions from Nielson and Keith.
    “Hell, Remy. You know damn well what I mean.” Keith shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve already noticed how nervous she is around people in uniform. It’s not like I’m telling you something you don’t know.”
    Remy glanced down the hall. Twenty feet or so down that way, he could see the uniformed officer standing outside Hope’s room.
    Hope. Hell. He couldn’t even think of her as anything
other
than Hope.
    Not suspect.
    Not Ms. Carson.
    Just Hope … with sea-green eyes. Long, silken brown hair.
    Hope.
    Shit.
    Shit.
    Shit.
    He couldn’t keep thinking of her as
Hope
. She was a suspect in a very brutal assault and she had a history of being mentally unbalanced. And he couldn’t think of her as a suspect.
    Plus, even though the timing didn’t add up, he couldn’t entirely write off the possibility that she’d killed Earl Prather, either, or was involved in it, somehow.
    She was dangerous, and he had to remember that.
    Maybe
he
was the one who was unbalanced.
    If he’d been alone, he might have taken a few minutes to rip himself a new asshole and remind himself of that,
again
. Remind himself,
again
, that he couldn’t think about Hope Carson, that long, silken hair, or her big, sad eyes, or how much he’d like to pull her up against him and promise her … everything. Anything …
    Suspect
, he reminded himself.
    Bad timing
, his dick interjected—and something else … some part of him that he couldn’t examine too closely.
    She wasn’t in town when Prather died, remember? She’s got an alibi
.
    It wasn’t the most solid alibi, true, but it was definitely enough to shed some doubt.
    And do you really think she would have hurt Reilly? She looks at him like he’s some kind of god
.
    Common sense, the lawyer in him, and other assorted and sundry control-freak-related issues pointed out,
So the fuck what? Even if she didn’t kill Prather, it’s all too likely she
did
attack Reilly. She looks at him like a god, so what happens when she realizes he isn’t a god—when he screws up? She’s going to be pissed
.
    Get over it, man. You can’t go getting a hard-on for a woman who is messed up in the head
.
    Damn it.
    Common sense was being a serious pain in the ass here.
    Remy was a big believer in common sense. He liked it. He listened to it. If more people listened to common sense versus things like lust, greed, stupidity … well, he might not be as busy as he was. That was his lot in life. Lawyers had jobs because people didn’t always listen to their common sense.
    His told him he needed to forget that Hope Carson was a pretty woman with sad, green eyes. He needed to remember only that she’d been found in a building with a dead man and one who’d been hovering near death.
    And it wouldn’t hurt to remember that she had a lot of weird shit in her past, too—that kind of stuff he really didn’t need to mess with. Big green eyes and that long brown hair, a sad smile, being pretty as hell, none of that was worth the trouble she would come with.
    The fact that something about her made him just want to pull her close and protect her and fuck her all at the same time … no, he needed to forget that and listen to reason.
    Yeah. That’s what he needed to do.
    For some weird