His grin would have turned her inside out if she weren’t such an emotional wreck.
“Best place for an office. No one can overhear anything. Let me fetch the goodies and we’ll get started.”
Chapter Three
Blaze studied the woman across from him as she slowly chewed the pastry and sipped her wine. At first blush, he’d assumed she was like any other uptight client facing an emergency that they needed help to handle. She looked so tightly strung, struggling to keep it together, he was afraid she might break apart at any moment. But then he took a closer look and saw that along with the fine tension running through her was a healthy dose of anger. He was sure it was the latter that made her posture so rigid, even seated, and the muscles in her jaw so tight he thought the bone would crack. There was definitely a lot more to this story than she’d told him, otherwise Nolan wouldn’t have sent her to him. He’d have to ease it out of her little by little, put the pieces together.
This wasn’t exactly a high-concept case like a hostage rescue or finding a company executive who’d disappeared along with a hefty portion of company funds. But they’d decided at the outset that they’d consider cases where the usual avenues either didn’t work or had already been explored with no results. This was even worse, because it looked like there was a massive coverup.
He had a really bad feeling about it. On the surface, someone could write it off as a drunk losing control and not even registering two people crossing in front of him. If that was the case, why not pursue it further, find the drunk driver and stick him in jail? Cops didn’t write off hit and run as a practice. Oh, sure, it took a lot more work, especially if no one had any idea who the driver was. Still, Blaze had seen situations with less information than this being pursued.
If this turned out to be a massive coverup, he could be sure there was power and money involved and people who would stop at nothing to protect what was theirs. How in the fucking hell did someone like Peyton West and her family get mixed up in that kind of stew?
Just to complicate things, he was still fighting the attraction that had blasted through him the moment he saw her. It wasn’t just unprofessional. It was completely unexpected and he had to figure out a way to deal with it. Here was where he hoped his SEAL discipline would help him, because he seemed to be on the verge of breaking his own rules. He hadn’t been this close to losing his discipline since he was sixteen years old. He was just damn glad his partners couldn’t see him now. They’d yank his balls out and roll them down the runway. No playing with the clients was a hard-and-fast rule.
Shit.
A little color had come into her face now and her hands were a little steadier. He’d been afraid when she unclenched them each time she picked up the coffee cup that she’d drop it, but the wine was settling her. Nolan had told him he was not optimistic about the outcome for the sister, but he was trying everything he could think of to bring her out of the coma.
Blaze refilled Peyton’s wineglass.
“First things first. Each of us has the ability to accept a client, and whoever brings in the case is the lead on it. That means you’ll be working primarily with me. I hope that’s okay.”
“Of course.” She frowned. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Just checking.” He opened his phone to the notes section. “I hate making you go through all of this again, but—”
She held up her hand. “I’ll tell it a hundred times if it means you can find out who did this and make them pay.”
“That’s what we do.” He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “Okay, let’s go back before that night. It would be too easy to write this off as some crazy drunk behind the wheel of a car. If that was the case, everyone wouldn’t be trying so hard to cover it up. No, there has to be an underlying reason for this whole thing. Tell me about Dane. What kind of law does he practice? And how long has he been doing it?”