The Next Right Thing (Harlequin Superromance) by Colleen Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

jar, she crossed through the living room, opened the sliding glass doors and stepped onto the covered backyard patio. Quiet. Except for the distant barking of a neighbor’s dog.
    Hard to believe the flashy, boisterous strip was only a few miles away.
    Looking over the brick wall at the settling dusk, she drank directly from the blender jar. The burn felt good, centering, as it glided down her throat. The first star twinkled to life in the northwest sky. Farther in that direction lay the mysterious Area 51 and a long, lonely stretch of road called the Extraterrestrial Highway. Her uncle said people were always calling into local radio stations, claiming strange aircraft were spotted in the skies over that highway, but he thought it was more likely people, after a few too many drinks, were imagining stars and clouds to be spacecraft.
    She took another sip, wondering if she could ever get that tipsy. Nah. Even in a dead sleep, she’d never dreamed of things like aliens and space travel. Growing up, her mom had loved watching Star Trek, which Cammie had thought was ludicrous. She’d once watched the movie ET with a friend, who cried at the ending. Cammie thought it was a cute flick, but totally unbelievable.
    More stars twinkled on the horizon over the outlying Extraterrestrial Highway. Huh. Okay, what if those stars morphed into some kind of cool-looking space-travel vessel that zapped over here, right in Uncle Frankie’s backyard, and alien beings, who miraculously spoke English, convinced her to travel to some distant galaxy...?
    Marc would probably show up there, too, wondering why she hadn’t answered her phone.
    Clouds drifted in front of the moon, shading the twilight a deeper blue.
    She took another sip—less burn, more buzz—and contemplated the hazy, silver-edged clouds. Wherever she was in this world, even if she were magically whisked away to another star system, Marc could convince her to return for one person.
    His dad.
    Harlan Hamilton, whom The Denver Post had tagged “the roar of the Rockies” for his booming voice and gutsy legal maneuvers, was a Colorado legend infamous for defending some of the state’s most notorious, high-profile criminal cases.
    His personality was as big as, if not bigger than, his courtroom antics. Part bulldog, part raconteur, he had a reputation for intimidating people one second, charming them the next. Wife number three, furious upon learning he had a girlfriend on the side—later to become wife number four—had called him “beyond a reasonable lout”—a moniker that became yet another news headline.
    Who knew what demons drove the elder Hamilton to cross the line and steal money from clients? Some guessed past debts, others claimed his tyrannical ego, while others pitied him, surmising his downfall was an act of self-destruction because even he didn’t believe he was as great as the legend.
    Cammie hadn’t known what to believe when Marc first asked her to visit his father in prison and start compiling a witness list for the next parole hearing. She’d been nervous, curious and intrigued. Harlan had once thrown a chair at opposing counsel, sued a reporter who had dared to ask the wrong question and called a judge he deemed backward-thinking a “troglodyte.” People either detested him or loved him. And loved him plenty of women had, although with his shiny egg-shaped head and bulbous nose, he hardly looked like a chick magnet.
    But the blustery luminary had been nothing like the man she’d met. Frail, circumspect and soft-spoken, Harlan had been like a smoky trace of his former fiery personality.
    As she took another long sip, breezes ruffled her hair, and she thought how she’d grown to like and respect him. At their prison meetings, they’d started out discussing potential witnesses in detail. After a few visits, they’d wrap up their meetings with some quiet conversation about their lives. He’d told her how his parents, Scottish immigrants, had come to