Texas Proud and Circle of Gold (Long, Tall Texans #52) - Diana Palmer Page 0,71

I know you’re crazy about him.”

Bernie managed a smile. She didn’t answer. She went out onto the street with her coworkers and pretended that nothing at all had happened. But she was devastated.

* * *

Jessie smiled to herself. She was going to reap rich rewards for her little acts of “kindness.” Throwing Mikey off balance had been the first step. Now she had Bernie doubting. The next thing was going to happen just as they’d planned it. And soon.

* * *

They spent all too much time in the Jacobs County courthouse, Mikey was thinking as he waited for Paulie to come out of an office where he was comparing notes with a contact in the probate judge’s office.

He was staring at a plaque on the wall, denoting the building of the courthouse almost sixty years ago, and the names of the men on the county commission who’d authorized the construction. Farther down the wall were portraits of judges, many long gone. He was bored out of his mind.

“Fancy seeing you here again,” Jessie said with a smile. She was carrying a box with food and a cup of coffee in it. “I came to bring lunch to poor Billie. She hurt her foot and she can’t walk far.”

“How’re you doing?” he asked, and smiled, because she really did seem to have changed in the past week or so.

She shrugged. “Can’t complain. It’s just hard to get used to these Texans,” she laughed. “They aren’t like people up north.”

“Nobody’s like people up north. Where you from?”

She hesitated. “Upstate New York originally. You?”

“Jersey,” he said. He grinned. “Doesn’t the accent give it away?”

“It does, sort of.” She cocked her head and studied him. “I’ve heard of your family. You were an underboss to Tony Garza, weren’t you? Shame about him. He was a decent guy.”

“He still is,” Mikey said.

“I’m truly sorry that Bernie has such a hard time with your lifestyle...” She stopped and gritted her teeth. “Didn’t mean to say that,” she added quickly.

He scowled. “What did you mean?”

“Well, it’s just,” she hesitated. “Bernie doesn’t understand the world you come from and she’s afraid of it.”

He felt his heart sinking. “She told you that?” he asked suspiciously.

“Of course not. She’d never talk to me about you,” she said. “I told you about it before, remember? I heard her talking to Olivia, the other paralegal in our office. She said she was crazy about you, but that she wasn’t sure she could cope with the way you made your living. She said she’d never fit in with a bunch of, well, criminals.”

He could barely get words out. The pain went all the way through him. He’d wondered about the way Bernie accepted what he was, that she said it wouldn’t matter. But she was a girl who’d never cheated in anything. She had a tragic past that predisposed her to loving the police. After all, they’d saved her and her father from a potential killer after the tragedy her grandfather had caused.

Apparently he hadn’t been thinking straight at all. Rather, he’d been thinking with his heart instead of his brain. Bernie wasn’t like him. They had different backgrounds, and she didn’t understand the forces that honed his family into a criminal element over the years. The scandals of the Kennedy era, the unmasking of the five families, the scattering of bosses had been a wholesale offensive against organized crime. And it had largely succeeded. There were still bosses like Tony, who commanded power, but there was no more real commission that met and decided on who got hit, who had which territory, which politicians to support. Now the bosses were largely autonomous until they crossed the line. Nobody liked drawing attention to the outfit that was left, and people who did it got punished. Mostly, the days of wiping out a man’s relatives to make a point were over. But there were still renegades who paid insults back with blood. Cotillo was one of those. That would never really end so long as there were power-mad people in the loop.

“I’m sorry,” Jessie was saying. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It isn’t anything I wasn’t already thinking,” he confessed.

“You live in the fast lane. Fast cars, fast women, easy money,” she said. “Bernie likes band concerts in the park and watching television in her room.” Her mouth twisted. “Not a good mix.”

“No.” He wished he could forget what she’d told him about Bernie, the other day and now. But he knew it was true.