Her arms wind around my neck and she brings me closer, threading her hands through my hair. It’s all I can do not to push things further than I know she’s ready for. I want to touch her. Everywhere. I want her to touch me. Bringing her tight against me, I use my mouth and tongue to say the things I can’t. The little sound she makes as she moves against me drives me crazy. If she keeps this up I’m going to break the promise I made to myself to go slowly with her. She’s not ready for everything I want to do to her.

I pull back with little nips and kisses along her jaw. She tilts her head, giving me more.

“Go out with me again,” I whisper, then bite her earlobe.

She makes a noise that I can’t quite make out.

I lick around the shell of her ear. “Cora,” I coax. “Go out with me again.”

“Yes,” she moans.

For a moment I’m struck with the image of her beneath me saying that over and over again. I put one hand on the door behind her, then the other, because if I don’t get my hands off her I’m not going to be able to stop.

I give her a hard kiss and push away from her, separating us and unwinding her arms from around my neck.

“Good night, Bluebird.” I open her door and guide her inside.

She blinks at me for a moment, then slowly closes the door. I make myself walk back to my car and climb inside. That girl is going to kill me. I force myself to start the car and pull away from the curb. You’ll see her tomorrow, I tell myself. And I did get the promise of another date out of her. Even after nearly blowing it with my comments about her brother.

The whole way home, what Cora said about prosecutor misconduct rolls around in my brain. I can’t get it out of my head. Somehow I have to prove to her that not all prosecutors are in it to close cases at any cost, including the DA who got the conviction on her brother. If I can somehow get ahold of the DA’s case notes and copies of her files, I can show her that Beau’s conviction was an unintentional mistake. He truly was a dolphin in the fish net.

Chapter 13 Cora

I don’t know how Leo does it. From the outside he looks like a total slacker. But somehow he manages to pull things off that I never could. Like getting Beau to open up to him and actually agreeing to talk on the phone. Beau hates talking on the phone. Even before he went to prison he had a thing about telephones. He’d say what he needed to say and then end the call. Sometimes in the middle of the other person’s sentence. Used to drive my mom nuts. The only person he ever spent any real time with on the phone was Cassandra.

That fact says everything about their relationship.

I also don’t know how Leo managed to get me to agree to go out with him again. Our first date proved how much I suck at it. I can’t even carry on a normal conversation without bringing it back to me and especially back to what happened to Beau. I never used to worry about how that little quirk of mine affected my relationships with people. After losing just about everyone in my life after Beau’s conviction, there weren’t a lot of people left around to offend. And those who stuck accepted my obsession.

What does he see in me? He could have just about anyone. Hell, he had Savannah and probably a dozen girls just like her. What does he want with me and my cargo ship of baggage?

I pace our tiny office, waiting for Leo to get back from talking to Cassandra’s friend Maisy. It took us a few days to track her down. To our surprise she agreed to meet with Leo, totally buying his ruse of being a law student researching a high-profile local case. Leo had an appointment with her first thing this morning and texted me an hour ago to tell me he has some news, but he didn’t say what. It’s killing me not to know.

At some point in the past few weeks I’ve come to see Leo as a partner in this fight. Before I met him I never would’ve been comfortable sitting on the sidelines while someone else worked on Beau’s behalf. No, that’s not true. I can pinpoint exactly when it was that I gave over all my trust to Leo—when he got Beau to agree to his visit.

The outer door opens and I rush out to the reception area, hoping it’s Leo at last. I come to a screeching halt at the sight of my mother peeling off her sunglasses.

“Hello. I’m here to see Cora Hollis.”

My first reaction is to back away slowly and pretend I’m not here. No such luck. Both my mom and Savannah turn toward me. I have no choice but to paste on a smile.

“There she is,” my mother says.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“I came to see you, since you don’t answer your phone.” She says this as though she sees me all the time. I haven’t seen her since Mother’s Day and I saw her then only out of guilt.

And there’s a reason I don’t answer my phone when she calls.

Savannah leans back in her chair with a smirk, totally onto what a giant farce my mother’s visit is.

“Why don’t we take this to the conference room?” I don’t want my mom to see Leo’s and my office. It’s littered with snippets of Beau’s case. She’d take one look and launch into some shit about how I don’t take her feelings into account and how could both of her children have turned out so badly?

“Mr. Nash has a client coming in fifteen minutes,” Savannah says. She’s enjoying this way too much.

“We’ll be finished by then,” I say. “Mom?” I motion for her to follow me down the hall and close the door after us. “What’s wrong?”

“For starters, you can tell me why a private detective—one of your coworkers, I assume—called me, wanting to talk about your brother. I’m trying to put that chapter of my life behind me. I don’t need my failings shoved in my face all the time. I can only assume this is your doing. Why do you have to constantly find new ways to torment me?”

I take a deep breath. When my mom gets that look of righteous indignation she reminds me so much of Beau that it makes it hard to look at her. He gets most of his features from her, whereas I look my like our dad, except for my eyes—those are all Mom. She used to like it that Beau looked so much like her. Now she does all she can to separate herself from him. Hence the blond highlights and colored contacts. I have good memories of my mom, but they’re washed over and scarred from moments like this.

“You assumed wrong. I didn’t tell anyone to contact you.” Goddamn Leo. Why didn’t he check with me first before involving my mother?

“I don’t understand you.” She looks around the room. “What are you doing here? What happened to that nice job at the law office? And when are you going to stop dying your hair that god-awful color? It’s not professional. Men, real men, aren’t going to give you a second look, let alone a first one, with that blue hair. You’re a beautiful young woman. Why are you trying to turn people off?”

“I don’t care what other people think of me.”

She props a hand on her hip. “That’s obvious.”

“I’ll tell Leo to leave you alone.”

“Who’s Leo?”

“You said someone from this agency contacted you.”

“His name wasn’t Leo.”

If it wasn’t Leo, then who? “What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“If it wasn’t Leo Nash, was it Ed Nash?”

“It was nobody named Nash.”

“Jerry Sullivan? Al Torres?” She shakes her head after each name. I’m stumped. Those are the only guys who work at the agency. “Then it wasn’t anyone from this agency. Probably a crank caller and you came down here for nothing.”

“No, he said he was with a private detective agency and that he wanted to talk about your brother.” Your brother, not Beau or her son, as if his conviction is somehow my fault.