be needing them.”
“For what?” I asked suspiciously.
“Just write it off to my bad dreams.” He dismissed his weird statement with the wave of a hand.
“How did you get in?” But I knew as soon as I asked. I’d given a spare key to my landlady. Pearl would have been putty in Andre’s hands.
“Proves you haven’t learned the extra caution it takes if you’re planning on staying in the Zone against all better sense,” he said, not answering my question.
“Until you, no one has attacked me in my apartment,” I grumbled. Make a prediction vague and broad enough, and eventually some form of it would materialize. Andre was a master at fuzzy prophecies. “It’s only out in the real world that people come after me with guns and cameras.”
“Don’t believe that for a minute,” he warned, leaning against the couch cushion, crossing his hands behind his head, and sprawling his long legs across the floor. “We have the guinea pigs Acme wants, and they’ve already proved they’re willing to use force to get them. I don’t want you to be our weak link.”
I preferred having this discussion in the dark. I don’t entertain and don’t own much in the way of furniture. I wasn’t about to sit next to Andre on the couch. I pulled down a cushion and leaned against the wall. “Sarah’s the one who shifted before their wondering eyes. You’re the friggin’ moron who went after Gloria and ended up in jail. Anyone can be a weak link.”
“Okay, then you’re
“I didn’t do any damn thing,” I said, matching his frustration. “Even I don’t know what I am,” I added with as much scorn as I could muster, “so you get to take me at face value, just like anyone else. And if you swing one more bat at me, your ass is grass. I get enough grief elsewhere. What do you want, Andre?”
“Besides you?”
His voice was low and sexy and there was a certain appeal to sitting here in the dark, my cat curling in my lap and a hunk of glorious male relaxing on my furniture. My gonads hummed in expectation. Some casual sex would do us both good. But I’d learned the hard way that there’s no such thing as casual sex with someone you see every damned day. Or with someone who’s mental enough to come after you with a bat.
“Swinging a bat at me is not how to get on my good side, dipstick. Try another.” I squashed hormonal hope, his and mine.
“I need a lawyer.” It cost him to say that, I could tell.
I was still ticked by the bat and didn’t intend to make this easy. “Yeah, I gathered that. Julius is in a better position than I am to find you one. Oddly, people regard you with suspicion. How many lawyers have you swung a bat at lately?”
He ignored my sarcasm. “My father went to school with half those old farts at the courthouse, and the younger ones learned at his knee. They watched me grow up. You really don’t think I want a lawyer who used to dandle me on his lap?”
I snorted at the image. “You took bats to them, didn’t you?” I asked. “They tried to butter up your father by playing ball with you. What did you do, beat ’em all out of the park?”
“Sometimes,” he agreed, without concern. “I wasn’t a polite child. But I freaked most of them out when I came home and decided Acme was to blame for my mother’s coma. When no one would take the case, I pulled an assault rifle on them. They have reason to believe I’m psycho.”
Well, yeah, he probably had been. Might still be now. But he also had a point. “Not helping your case, macho man,” I said anyway, wanting more info than Andre is ever willing to give. “Someone give you Prozac? That’s why you’re so cool now?”
It was his turn to snort. “Hell, no. Gloria gave me a job at the plant to shut me up. Told me to snoop around all I wanted, see if I could prove Acme had anything to do with my mother’s condition. I shut up, learned to play Joe Cool, and almost got fried in the chemical flood a few months later.”
“Intentionally?” I had to ask.
“That’s a question only the devil can answer.”
Typically, he cut off the communication just as it was getting interesting by dropping to the floor next to me. Without warning, he swung one leg over mine and trapped me between his knees. I scrambled to escape; my cushion slipped, and I toppled backward. Milo had the sense to leap for safety before he was squashed by Andre’s weight. Andre had me flat on the floor with his big arms propped on either side of me before I could manage a protest.
Okay, maybe the humming gonads were in control after all. I really liked his crotch pressed into mine.
He planted kisses behind my ear and along my throat, and I shivered in anticipation. So much for my much- touted determination. The man was dynamite. I ached for more. As a diversion from a touchy topic, his move worked much too well.
Not according to plan, Andre propped his weight on his hands and bulging biceps and continued talking, depriving me of more intimate contact. “Paddy pulled me out of the flood. It was a Saturday night. I don’t know what he was even doing at the plant on a weekend. I didn’t know about the Magic lab then, but I suspected it.”
I didn’t scramble away. Torn between wanting sex and his story, I waited.
He bent over and kissed my lips this time, frying my brain before I could absorb the implications of Andre caught in a chemical flood. I wrapped my arms around his neck and drank in magic sex. Damn, but he was too good. I was hot and ready and so not doing this.
I grabbed his ears and yanked him out of my face. “Why are you telling me now?” I demanded.
Andre shifted upward, removing his ears from the imminent danger of my fingernails. He straddled my waist and cupped my breasts. I nearly creamed my pants until I summoned my damned rebellious self-control and tried to scramble out from under him. When he found the opening to my shirt, I located the pulse point on his arm and applied enough pressure to cut off circulation. Rather than lose use of an arm, he swung off me and leaned against the wall as I’d been doing earlier.
I hurried to sit up again. The battle of the sexes held new meaning when Andre and I went at it.
“We have to get Bill and the others out of Acme’s lab before the place blows again,” Andre announced, as if he’d just said,
“Paddy can do that if he inherits, can’t he?” I grabbed my cushion and scooted out of his range.
“There will be court battles and power struggles if Paddy tries to take over, but we need to see he has the chance,” he agreed. “It just won’t help Bill right now. I think there’s more going on over there than even Gloria knew. I can’t keep an eye on Acme from a jail cell. Haven’t you felt the rumbles?”
Damn, I’d been afraid those mini-earthquakes weren’t my imagination. Andre knew damned well I couldn’t abandon Bill to potential disaster. “What can I do?” I asked.
“Be my lawyer,” he said without inflection. “Keep me out of jail so we can stop Acme.”
He might as well have come after me with the bat again. Except I knew how to tumble and roll from a weapon. I didn’t know how to avoid a responsibility so huge I figured it would crush me like a spider under a steamroller. I gaped in amazement, but I doubted he could see me.
“I don’t have one iota of courtroom experience,” I protested, shoving back to lean against the wall. “It’s a murder one rap! I don’t own a law library. I don’t have a defense team of any sort. You’re asking the insane.”
“Not totally,” Andre argued. “No one else will take my case, so you’re a better option than nothing.”
“Thanks,” I muttered, neatly put in my place.
He ignored that. “My father’s available to offer his expertise and experience. He just won’t leave the house, so you have to be his face in the courtroom. He has the library and the contacts. And you have one advantage that no one else does—you understand the Zone and what’s at stake. To anyone else, we’re scum. They have nothing to lose if I go to jail.”
I had enough conceit to entertain the idea with great glee. I could rub Reggie’s nose in my dust. But I’m a realist as well, dammit. “You’re putting your life in feeble hands, Legrande. If money isn’t an issue, we can go outside Baltimore for representation.”
“The Zone needs its own lawyer, Clancy,” he said wearily. “Paddy needs someone to handle the estate’s
