She went through her cases, reread notes she’d made to herself and flagged the ones that had anything that seemed the least acrimonious to her before passing them on to Cormac. And then she looked at the list Cormac gave her that he’d compiled of recent prison releases from cases that had her name listed, either as ADA, or even back in her earlier days when she was second chair.
She pulled out a couple of names from his list. “This Blake Nygren. He was one of those guys that stared at you the whole time. Trying to intimidate you with his threatening looks every minute you were in court prosecuting him.”
Shaking her head, she circled the name and moved on. Couldn’t sit there with the memories the name brought back. The nights she’d lain in bed fearing for her life, imagining who on his crew he’d call to stop her from putting away their boss.
“And Julius Hemming. He referred to me by his version of my first name, Bitch, more than once. And told me that I’d pay for what I was doing to him. He insisted that he was innocent.”
“Is there a chance he was?”
Shaking her head, she shrugged, too. And said, “Without a confession or video, there’s always a chance, isn’t there? That something wrong happened with forensics on a case? Or someone lied about what they saw. Maybe ballistics weren’t right.” She said it because she was talking to Cormac. The man had a way of loosening her tongue like no one else had. Ever.
She’d felt safe talking to him. As though he wouldn’t use her words against her. Read things into them that weren’t there. Or judge her by them, either.
Not that she’d thought everyone else in her life did. Until Cormac’s advent into her world, she hadn’t even known she’d watched everything she said around everyone.
Until, with him, she hadn’t.
They’d talked about everything.
Because there’d been nothing attached to any of it. They were two rocks on the same beach, until the tide came in and swept them eternally apart.
The tide. Not Cormac. The fact that their liaison had come to an end was not the issue. They’d known going in that it would happen. Had both only gone in because they could count on the fact that it would happen. But in the future.
Not abruptly. Cold turkey. After only a week.
Corman, not the tide, had told her it was best if they didn’t stay in touch, or even speak again.
Sean had been gone a couple of hours and Cormac hadn’t said a word to her that wasn’t case related. He’d told her, after a call from Sean, that Jason Willoughby, the young attorney who’d tried to upstage her, had left the DA’s office a few months before and moved out of state. But he said little else, as they’d both been focused on getting through her information, looking for suspects.
“I’m not going to take your money,” Cormac’s words came out of the blue. “Me protecting you, it’s personal. The right thing to do. I’m protecting my kid, too.”
“And how are you going to explain that to anyone else?”
He nodded. “I know. I get why you said what you did. But between you and me, I’m not taking your money.”
She wanted to argue the point. But decided it wasn’t worth the battle when there were so many in front of them. If she chose to pay him, she would. What he did with the money was up to him.
She turned back to her list.
“Look over the names carefully,” he said, coming around to her side of the table, to look at the document on her screen—the list he’d just emailed her, complete with case number references and key data attached for each possible suspect.
She was already working her way farther down the list but started to share her thoughts aloud.
“James Kinney. That’s a no. He’s seventy, had a nasty temper when he drank, but was a model prisoner and has been dry for five years. I spoke in his favor at his parole hearing. Myles Garcia, maybe, but I don’t see it. He’s a drug dealer, not a killer. I could see him spitting on me, but he’s too small-time to have any crew, and too short to have done this himself. Peter Bezos, no. He’s white collar, a now disbarred lawyer, who had some wrong clients. It was a slippery slope thing and I recommended the lightest sentence in a place where he’d be safe. He sent me a letter from prison thanking me for my treatment of him.”
Cormac’s deodorant, or soap or something, was slowly infiltrating her system. With every breath she took, more of him became more of her. To the point that, for a second there, they were transported back a couple of months, working together and on the verge of becoming something she’d never thought she could be.
“Eugene Maxwell,” she blurted, a bit roughly, “is a possibility. He shot the guy who killed his cousin, claiming that if I’d done my job right, the dead man would be the one going to jail. His attorney heard him tell his wife that one day I’d know what it felt like to be on the wrong side and not get a fair shake.”
“You prosecuted the guy who killed his cousin, didn’t win, and then he killed the guy?”
“Yeah. It was a turf-war drug deal gone bad. The claim was that the cousin wasn’t part of it. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up with a bullet. But the case was all circumstantial, based on unreliable witness testimony. Anyone who was really there, who knew what had happened, wasn’t talking.”
“Who was the detective on it?”
“Mitch Mallard.” As soon as she started to say the name, she glanced at Cormac and found him staring at her, too. The man they’d all agreed they weren’t happy to have on the Brinkley case in Sean’s stead. The man did his job well enough to stay employed, but even that was a stretch.
“The Brinkley case is as high profile as it gets,” Emily said, holding Cormac’s gaze as he took a step back, but stayed focused on her. “All over social media...”
“It’s pretty much all everyone’s talking about,” he agreed.
“And Mallard has given me nothing more on it. Nothing. Everything I have is from Sean. The guy’s, at best, lazy as hell. Dragging his feet on what could be the most notorious case of his career...”
“And if you follow through on that, you have to wonder, if he’s a slacker on a high-profile case, how much effort would he put into prosecuting the killer of a guy suspected of drug connections with no one who seemed to care except a cousin...”
“Right.” Cormac had stood upright, but was still there. Close enough that she could touch him if she reached out. Watching her.
While she watched him back.
And then, abruptly, he was around the table, grabbing his laptop. “I’m going back to my room to make some calls,” he said. “I don’t want to interrupt your concentration. Hopefully by the time we meet again, I’ll have an alibi for Eugene Maxwell, or Sean will have an arrest warrant. In the meantime, take one more look at that list, just in case...”
An arrest warrant?
It could all be over just that quickly?
While relief spread through her, profound relief, leaving her somewhat weak in the knees, Emily wasn’t completely overjoyed.
She was...a little disappointed.
Which made no sense at all.
Unless, some small part of her heart had wanted the excuse to be close to Cormac Colton while she got over the shock of finding out that she was having his baby.
Because she didn’t have a lot of time for shock. More to the point, she had to be working through the logistics of how a voraciously independent forty-three-year-old New York City ADA was going to continue to excel at her job while growing and having a baby, and then while raising the child alone.
She had no doubt she’d do it.
She just needed time to figure it all out.
“Eugene Maxwell has no alibi.” Cormac hadn’t had nearly the time away from Emily he’d needed, but the two hours he’d taken had helped some.
Focusing his mind on work had always been the cure. Mental concentration had been the only way the fourteen-year-old him had survived the death of his father, then later the wrong roads his twin had taken, followed by the death of a woman Cormac had firmly believed he’d be growing old with.
“He says he was at home alone and no one can verify that,” he continued, glancing at the folders and notes scattered around the laptop currently open on his dining room table, rather than looking at the woman to whom they belonged.
Peripheral vision told him Emily was watching him. With pursed lips, he continued to move through the room, giving him an excuse not to meet her gaze directly. “He’s been interviewed, they had to let him go.”
“There wasn’t enough cause to hold him,” his unexpected houseguest concluded. As ADA, she’d know as well as anyone how it all worked.
It wouldn’t make the circumstance any easier to swallow. He knew the only way she’d be able to feel safe, to go home, was to have the morning’s evildoer behind bars.
And maybe to have Cormac gone for a bit. Lord knew, he needed some air to breathe that wasn’t mingling with hers.
“I have to go out for a bit,” he told her, raising his voice just enough to be heard as he continued through the room toward the door. “The department has assigned a detail to sit outside the building until this guy’s caught, and while I’m gone, there will be someone patrolling this floor, too.”
He’d already had her put him and Sean on speed dial.
He paused by the door. “I’ve got a meeting with my siblings on the Kelly case.” He owed her no explanation.
Had specifically decided not to report in to her, except where it directly involved her. They weren’t a team. A family.
Or even roommates.
They were...he didn’t know what.
People who would barely speak to each other, having a baby, seemed to be the route she wanted to take. He’d tried to bring up the subject on the drive to his apartment, trying to grasp who he’d just become, to process the fact that his world had just changed dramatically. Drastically. Forever. Separate and apart from her.
He was going to be a father.
He had no idea where he’d fit into the plan.
And he needed to know.
She’d shut down the conversation in the car. And again, when he’d tried, after they’d entered his apartment...
He had to get out.
He reached for the door handle.
“Cormac.” Her tone was a little louder, as his had just been. Filled with authority. Like a court voice.
“Yeah?” He spun around, was glad to see that, while she’d turned in her chair, she wasn’t coming any closer to him.
“Please don’t tell your siblings about the baby.”
He’d had zero plans to...wasn’t anywhere near even thinking about that yet. But he was not fool enough to walk away from an open door. “They’re biologically related. They have a right to know.” He had rights to conversation with her about it all.
A look of consternation, followed by vulnerability, crossed her face. He’d never seen either before, and his gut clenched. What an ass he was being. Thinking about his needs. His fatherhood. She had to be nearly as shocked as he was, since she’d expected negative test results, and her immediate role in their monumental development was far more encompassing than his.
“But... I didn’t intend to tell anyone about it. For now.”
Her nod, the flash of relief—of...gratitude?—she sent his way had him throwing up his own defenses again. Against the intensity of the emotions she raised in him all across the board.
What in the hell made her so different? And how did he diffuse her power over him?
“But we need to talk,” he said then, taking a stance for his own sense of control. “Soon.”
“I’ve got the case of my career sitting before me, and a maniac out to get me, Cormac. The rest...there’s time later for any conversation we might need to have.”
What in the hell did that mean? Might need to?
“You...you’re thinking about not having the baby?” He tensed, waiting.
“No. I’m not considering that option.” Just that. Nothing else. She turned back to her computer and started typing.
She was... Emotions swirled faster than thought. How did he move forward, know what steps to take, what thoughts to dwell on, while being so critically cut out of his major life event?
Knowing her, he understood her reticence. In any other case he would have welcomed it. They were alike that way. Did he come across as inaccessible to others as she was seeming to him right then?
How could she just turn her back on what seemed to him to be his moral right to be involved in, something that was so intimately personal to him?
Hating his sense of helplessness, feeling more like a wounded animal than his usual impenetrable self, he left without another word.
Emily’s shoulders slumped as soon as she heard the click of the door lock behind Cormac. Finally, for the first time since she’d seen the test results, she had a few minutes wholly to herself.
Not as welcome as they’d have been in her own home, but at least she was alone...
At first, she relaxed. Welcomed the respite from being under Colton’s scrutiny—even from another room, Cormac’s ability to see and know and figure out was intimidating.
Then she started to shake. Which wasn’t acceptable.
Jumping up, she explored the kitchen she’d had in view from her seat at the table. Looked through the cupboards she knew Cormac used for dry goods, then took stock of the contents in the refrigerator and freezer, too.
She was shocked to find the two thick salmon filets she’d bagged up and left in his freezer after dinner one night, thinking, at the time, that they’d have them together the next time she was over.
There she was, her next night over, and there the salmon was, too. Blinking away tears, she shut the freezer, not at all amused by this one of life’s little ironies.
The night she’d made that salmon she’d been standing in that very kitchen, thinking about how incredible life was, to give her exactly what she needed. A man she didn’t have to worry about hurting. One who would never, ever open his heart up to her so completely that she had the possibility of breaking it. One who’d never need more from her than the leftovers.
Because her job always got first dibs.
For that week with him, she’d been so happy. More so than she could ever remember being. Even as a child with her idyllic upbringing.
And now...she had a child? Just growing inside her, yeah, but...there. Already needing things from her.
A human being who would have to come first.
Who would pull her away from her life’s work. Her life’s purpose.
That alone was more than she could contemplate.
And Cormac wanted to talk? To figure out...what? The kind of mother she could be?
How could she possibly talk about something she knew nothing about? Or give him what she didn’t have?
Answers.
She couldn’t even be a successful partner in an adult relationship—as was proven by the severely damaged heart she’d left behind when she’d been Cormac’s age, the young vibrant college professor she’d promised to marry who’d ended up with a heart jaded by her inability to put personal life before work—how could she possibly be responsible for raising a helpless innocent?
One step at a time, she left the kitchen. She sat back down to work at the dining room table.
One step at a time was how she found the truth lurking inside of every case she’d ever had.
So...one step at a time.
And the first step wasn’t knowing all the answers. It was calling her doctor and making an appointment to get in to see her as soon as possible.
She couldn’t begin to make plans without all the facts.
And if Cormac wanted more, he was going to have to wait. She’d already given him the one truth she had, when they were together before and creating the current situation. With what she gave to her job, she didn’t have much left to give to relationships in her life. She would be stretched even thinner with a baby needing her.
She wasn’t going to make promises, even small ones, that she couldn’t keep.