Shattered Read Free Page A

been anyone other than him. Stomach tight, she stopped in the center of the spacious corner office to meet his gaze.
    "Bullshit." He stood behind his battered metal desk--no expensive mahogany for this district attorney, the blue-collar man's friend!--glaring at her out of light blue eyes that were, on this Tuesday morning, slightly bloodshot, as though he'd tied one on the night before or, more probably, though she hated to admit it, been working until the wee hours. His short, thick tobacco-brown hair looked as if he'd recently run his hands through it from sheer aggravation. His thick brows beetled over his meaty nose. His square jaw looked even more pugnacious than usual. He had his suit coat off--it was draped over the back of his chair--and the contrast between his white dress shirt and pale blue tie and the tanned skin of his face and neck was marked. He was a wide-shouldered, muscular man of thirty-two who looked like what he was: the son of a no-account, chronically unemployed sometime mechanic, who'd done physical labor all his life until he'd managed to claw his way through law school.
    "It's the truth."
    His face tightened. "Come here."
    From the way he was looking at her she knew he meant it, so she complied, holding her head high as his eyes ran derisively over her, aware that her cool elegance in the face of his wrath and the already sultry late-June heat was maddening to him and taking at least a small degree of pleasure in the fact that this was so. At age twenty-eight, she'd been told often enough that she was beautiful to have a healthy sense of her own attractiveness, and she was perfectly sure he was aware of it, too. Her face was oval and fine-featured. Her eyes were large and caramel-brown, with a slight tilt to them. Her complexion had a naturally tawny tint that meant she only rarely had to resort to fake tans, and her hair, currently twisted into a chignon at her nape, was long, thick, and black as a crow's wing. Her black linen pantsuit looked as though it had cost the earth, and never mind that it was two years old. It fit her tall, willowy form like it had been tailored to it, which it had. The sleeveless white shell beneath was silk. Wearing her expensive Louboutin heels, unmistakable because of their red soles, she still lacked a few inches of reaching his height of six-foot-one, but not many, which she devoutly hoped he found maddening, too.
    "Look out that window." As she reached him, he slid a hand around her arm just above her elbow, pulled her a few inches to her right, and yanked the cord of the dusty mini-blinds that covered the big window behind his desk. The blinds shot up with a rattle. Blinking at the sudden onslaught of bright sunlight, Lisa found herself looking out on busy Main Street, the building's front entrance, and the nearly full parking lot. "That's what I was doing about, oh, let's say ten minutes ago, because I got a call from Kane saying you hadn't shown up for court and I was checking to see if your car was out there in the parking lot. Know what I saw instead?"
    It was a rhetorical question, and Lisa knew the answer even before he told her. Knowing he was looking at her, she had to suppress the urge to grimace.
    "Loverboy in his red Porsche, dropping pampered Princess off at the door. Oh, and let's not forget the five-minute-long good-bye smooch. Pretty steamy, especially when you're a fricking hour and twenty minutes late. What, did the morning quickie run long?"
    He let go of her arm. Head high, she moved away from him, walking back around his unbelievably messy desk to stand facing him across it.
    "Go to hell." Her voice was perfectly pleasant.
    "You're fucking fired." His wasn't.
    "I'm sorry, okay? My car really did break down." She desperately needed the job, or she wouldn't have said it. "I had to call Joel"--the man she was currently dating, Joel Peyton, aka Loverboy--"to come and pick me up."
    "How about calling in to the office at the same time? Just to say, oh,