Page 17 of Some Like It Deadly
One hour turnedinto three and Richard insisted on seeing her home, until she’d pointed out he’d shared a limo with Alyx and Daniel to the bar and sent his own car home. By the time they’d reached that realization, however, the royals and their vehicles had departed, which was how she ended up driving him to his place.
Fortunately, she’d switched to water after her beer and the fish and chips she’d ordered for supper had offset any lingering effects of the alcohol. Richard leaned his head back against the seat, a hand against his eyes. “I have no idea why I do it sometimes.”
“Do what?” She kept her attention on the road. The follow car had drifted back and the lead car was only two ahead of her. Tiredness weighed on her. She should have had a cup of coffee, but bar coffee was only slightly above military grade industrial solvent.Soft living and wealthy clients are spoiling me.
“Keep up with Armand when he decides he’s in a good mood.” Richard’s rueful words held a trace of a slur. “I should have stopped at the first glass of wine instead of finishing the bottle with him.” He patted her thigh lightly. “You were the smart one, paying attention and switching to water so you could be sober to drive, but I suppose you had to be. You drive everywhere, even when you let me drive.” His laugh came out a little hollow and Kate considered how many glasses of wine he’d drunk.
She’d counted three and a half—enough to share one bottle. The second could have happened when she had to excuse herself for the restroom. If they’d traded out bottles, she might have missed it. “Did you take your medication at six?”
He’d eaten sparingly—he and the prince had begun a debate on French politics and the elections approaching in the U.K.
“You watched me do it.” He walked his fingers against her leg, back and forth, as though fascinated by the fabric.
Waiting until after she’d gotten on the highway heading toward his house along the coast, she tapped his fingers lightly to get him to move.
“Sorry,” Richard mumbled, but he didn’t sound apologetic. Stretching an arm behind her, Kate flipped open the cooler in the well behind the driver’s seat and took out a bottle of water.
“Drink,” she told him sternly. It was mineral water she kept in the car for post workouts and when she was feeling rundown. It did have some caffeine in it, but not enough to upset his current restrictions and better to flout that one than the alcohol.
“Bossy.” He grinned. “I like bossy. You like being the bossy of me.”
Her lips twitched in spite of herself and she cut a sideways glance at him. Instead of drinking, he stared at her. It was hard to make out his features in the low light when she had to keep the majority of her attention on the road. “You pay me to be the boss of you.”
“No, I pay you to be my assistant. Miranda made assistant mean the boss of my schedule.”
“You live by your schedule,” she countered. “Drink.”
He opened the bottle and took a long swallow obediently. “I do live by my schedule. Lots of things to keep track of.” Traffic leaving the city thinned and the follow car was only one behind them.
“You could pare your schedule down.” After the last few weeks, she’d seen plenty of cases he could hand off to junior associates in his firm. Cases like the Johnson one—he didn’t need to hand hold so many cases personally or put in so many billable hours above and beyond the work he did for thegrand duke, his extended family and the multi-billion-dollar corporations they operated.
“If I fired Armand as a client, he would be pretty pissed.” Richard laughed. “And I like working with him.”
“You have other clients.” Like the files he kept in his locked drawer. Cases he worked on that she knew nothing about.
Richard sighed. “That’s good work and I won’t give them up. I had to let too many go to others while I was recuperating.”
Curiosity swiped at her. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
He shifted in his seat, turning his head so he just stared at her. “I’m near to sloppy drunk in your car and I think I was trying to feel you up a minute ago. That definitely earns a question.”
Another smile tugged her mouth wide. He made an adorable drunk, a lot like he’d made an adorable pit bull about the actor on the golf course. The quiet fury in his eyes had stunned her. She was more than capable of taking care of herself and the little nuisance was easily ignored, still—he’d wanted to defend her and that counted a lot in her books. “Why do you take all those pro bono cases? I get giving back, but you’re on at least a dozen different non-profit boards that have nothing to do with the Dagmar Foundation in addition to the work you do for the Foundation. You write checks monthly to several inner-city organizations and the LAPD fund for fallen officers.” Pressing him for more information in his current state didn’t seem ethical, but she was curious. “What are you trying to make up for?”
He went quiet for so long, she thought he might have fallen asleep. It might be for the best, considering the dangerous line between professional and personal she teetered on. The information focused on him, the man, instead of him, the protectee. Yet, she wanted to know. He was a bit of a marvelousfind, generous to a fault, and in possession of a work ethic that didn’t quit.
And angry? Angry he went from handsome good boy to sexy bad boy.
“When I was seven years old, the FBI came to my door and arrested my father. My sister Barbara was four, she didn’t understand what was going on. My mother was in the kitchen, the doorbell rang and these men in black suits poured inside. They had a warrant, so they took my father into custody and then went through our house. My sister and I had to sit on the floor in the living room while my mother answered questions she really didn’t want to answer.” His words didn’t slur, but his tone managed to sound faraway. “What I didn’t understand was what my father had done wrong. After they tore up our house, they took a lot of boxes with them. A week later, my dad still wasn’t home and a notice was served on the house—a legal seize order.”
Kate frowned, because while the man sitting next to her was strong, capable and fierce—he’d been seven years old. What an impossible situation for a child.
“You see, my father had gotten involved in a scheme with a couple of other men. They thought it would help them make some money. At first it was a few hundred here and a few hundred there. Nothing big, but one of the men took it larger and he’d bilked some retirees out of about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. My father—knowingly or not—helped him do it and he profited by it. They froze his bank accounts, took the house—took everything—and we had to live in a woman’s shelter downtown for ten weeks.”
“Christine’s Center.” She knew the name. That name had been on one of the folders he’d locked away, but he also represented the center in several legal matters and thedocumentation she’d dropped off earlier had also been related to the center.
“Yes. Mom got a job pretty much right away and started saving, but we stayed there free and, during the day, the staff looked after Barbara and me. Eventually Mom had enough to move us into a tidy little apartment and things seemed to go back to normal. Dad came home when I was eight.” Another long silence. They’d reached the exit and traveled up on the long winding road to his house. Fortunately, she had his address programmed into her GPS and she’d been there before during daylight hours. “He moved back in, went back to work, and it all seemed like something out of a bad dream. We got a new house. Barb and I got a new school…normal. We’d gone back to normal.”
Her stomach clenched.
