Page 10 of Wilde Nights in Paradise

“Fuck me,” Jude said. “Some things never change, huh? You’re still so freakin’ stubborn, knocking my head against a wall would be more productive than talking to you.”

She conjured up her sweetest smile and waved a hand at the wall. “Knock yourself out. Please.”

Jude scowled. “Libs—”

Her heart clenched. “Don’t. You lost your right to use cutesy nicknames eight years ago.”

With a heavy sigh that moved his wide shoulders, he corrected himself. “A.D.A. Pruitt, I need to hear the whole story from you. Your version, not some watered-down—or trumped-up—report.”

Sure, now he had to go and be all reasonable.

“All right.” She hitched the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder and started walking. She didn’t wait to see if he was following. He was. He even had the audacity to reach out and take her hand. She tried to pull away, but he only tightened his fingers.

Okay then. If he really wanted to go through with this ridiculous charade, she could manage it as far as the parking lot.

“It started about a month ago,” she explained. “Right after K-Bar made bond. Little things, at first, like a paper doll under my car’s windshield wiper. I just brushed it off, but then the dolls started showing up with fewer clothes. Then with no clothes. Then the letters started.”

“What did they say?”

“Things like ‘see me now?’ and ‘I’m here.’” A chill clawed through her at the memory, despite her best efforts to repress it. “The worst was ‘I’m waiting for you.’ Then I started getting phone calls on my cell and videos sent to my e-mail. Always a distorted voice saying the same types of things as the notes.”

“And the videos?”

They stepped into the elevator, and she hit the button for the ground floor. After the doors slid shut, she tried to pull her hand away from his. He held on and gave her a smile that was all challenge.

Giving up on the possibility of getting her hand back, she answered his question. “Same voice, but the picture is usually of a paper doll or blacked out. I saved them all if you want to see them. The first video frightened me enough that I finally told my father about it, and he overreacted and hired you.”

“I don’t think he overreacted.”

Yeah, he wouldn’t. For as different as Jude and her father were, in some ways they were very much the same. The elevator dinged, and the doors opened to the lobby, which she always thought looked more like the waiting area of a dentist office than a government building.

“Do you agree that the threats are from this gangbanger you’re going to put away?” Jude asked.

“They’re not threats,” she told him.

“What would you call them then?”

“Not threats. None of them are overtly hostile. Just…creepy. If I took this to a courtroom and named them threats, the defense would hand me my ass on a silver platter.”

“But do you agree with the possibility of K-Bar’s involvement?” Jude persisted.

“Yes. He’s trying to frighten me. He has been from day one. I had to get a restraining order against him to stop him from harassing me from prison.”

Jude fell silent for a moment, his brows drawn together in an expression of concentration that was so very familiar. “Maybe,” he said finally.

She sighed in exasperation. “Well, if not K-Bar, who else would it be?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “You do kinda have a knack for pissing people off.”

“And you don’t?”

“Hey, I didn’t say it was a flaw. It’s a knack. A propensity. No, a forte. That’s a good one.Forte.” He exaggerated the accent on the word and let go of her hand long enough to hold open the building’s front door. As soon as they were both through, his hand found hers again. “I want you to make up a list of other possible suspects that I can give to my brothers for background checks.”

“That’s not necessary. They don’t need to waste their time.”

“Nah, Reece’s only pleasure comes from running background checks. God knows the dude has no life to speak of.”

A cloud of dust danced across the pavement, and clouds lumbered toward the city from the east, dark and foreboding, promising a storm. The gusty, late spring wind still held enough of a hint of winter that it ripped the heat from her body, but with Jude’s hand encircling hers, she didn’t feel the chill. That hand, so familiar and yet so different, rougher with more calluses than she remembered… It could give pleasure like she hadn’t felt since he last touched her.

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