Heat Wave by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online

intend to pay you.”
    “Not necessary. It took me less than ten
minutes to get the situation squared away. At my hourly rate, that
comes to…” He pretended to calculate the amount. “Zero.”
    “That doesn’t seem fair.”
    “It’s okay. I’ll more than make up for it by
what I charge Jerry Felton.” Still, her smile melted into a
troubled expression, a delicate frown line denting the bridge of
her nose. “Tell you what—treat me to dinner and we’ll call it
even.”
    Whoa. Where had that come
from? She was a client , for God’s sake.
    No, she wasn’t. If she were a client, he’d
be charging her for the ten minutes he’d spent with Officer
Sulkowski this morning. Lawyers didn’t charge by the hour. They
charged by the minute.
    But if he wasn’t charging her, he wasn’t
working for her. And if she wasn’t too much of a southern
gentlewoman, she wouldn’t be too shocked by the prospect of taking
a man out for dinner.
    Her frown vanished and her smile returned,
if a bit hesitantly. “All right,” she said.
    A line from that song he’d heard at the
Faulk Street Tavern yesterday floated through his head. Something
about the devil in him. Something about a burning flame. Something
about being torn apart.
    Meredith Benoit was taking him out to
dinner. Just the thought of it made him hot.
     
     

Chapter Four
     
    They agreed to meet at the Lobster Shack at
six-thirty. Meredith had suggested dining somewhere a bit fancier,
but Caleb had said the Lobster Shack was fine. She considered
offering to pick him up and drive him to the unpretentious seafood
café, which stood on one of the wharfs where fishing boats docked
at the end of their runs, but that would make this dinner seem like
a date. And it wasn’t. There was nothing romantic going on between
her and Caleb, nothing at all. She was simply doing what she
could—what he would allow—so she could repay her debt to him.
    That she found Caleb Solomon ridiculously
attractive was irrelevant. He wasn’t her type. He was a lawyer,
after all.
    Every lawyer she’d ever known valued winning
over the truth. It was all about winning, not about seeking
justice. Of course there were noble lawyers, passionate and moral
in their fight to protect the civil rights of citizens, to defend
freedoms, to remove heinous villains from society so they could no
longer hurt anyone. But most lawyers were like her father, her
brother, and her brother-in-law, interested not in righting wrongs
but in winning, winning, winning.
    Winning was Caleb’s job, just as it was her
father’s, her brother’s and her brother-in-law’s. She wasn’t about
to fall in love with someone who considered winning more important
than divining the truth.
    For heaven’s sake, why was she even thinking
about love?
    She turned on her car’s stereo. The Dixie
Chicks CD was still in the slot, and she let their sweet harmonies
wash over her as she drove back to Brogan Heights. If she got
tenure, she would sink her roots deeper in the area, perhaps buying
a house. She currently rented a townhouse in the complex, choosing
not to invest in local real estate on the chance that she would no
longer be employed by the high school a year from now. Her unit was
owned by an older couple who’d bought it with the intention of
downsizing in a few years, when the youngest of their three
children left for college. For now, they were happy to rent it to
Meredith.
    The Brogan Heights condominium complex had a
few downsizing couples in residence, but most of Meredith’s
neighbors were single. More accurately, most were divorced. The
modest, appealingly landscaped community was where divorced women
who couldn’t afford to maintain a house on their single income
resided, and where divorced men whose ex-wives and children still
lived in the area settled so they could visit their children
easily. Since moving to her townhouse when she’d joined the high
school faculty two years ago, Meredith had dated a couple of