The Maverick - By Jan Hudson Page 0,2

Witches up near the capitol. It’s a family business that my mother and aunt started years before my sister and I were born. What kind of lawyering brings you to town?”

“I’m doing some research for a client.”

“What kind of research?”

He cocked an eyebrow and looked amused. “I thought you said you were a lawyer.”

“Ahh,” she said. “The confidential kind. I assume you’re not a trial lawyer then. Not a defense attorney from back East who has come to defend a dastardly criminal?”

“Nope. I’m more into corporate concerns than drug dealing and murder.”

“Is there a difference?”

His eyebrow went up again. “You really are down on the profession, aren’t you?”

“Sorry,” Cass said. “I went too far. How do you like Austin?”

“It’s a fantastic little city. I’m thinking of moving here.”

This time her eyebrows went up. “Really?”

After their food was served, they ate and chatted about the town and its various attractions. Casual talk, but unspoken inferences seemed much more intimate. She couldn’t quite put her finger on the subtle undercurrents she felt, but they were there.

He was a charmer to be sure. Slick, handsome and magnetizing with those fabulous baby blues. Her own lawyer’s antennae went up.

She wouldn’t trust the bastard as far as she could throw him.

Chapter Two

Cass would have bet a thousand dollars Griff Mitchell would show up at Chili Witches that day. She would have lost. Guess she’d read the signals wrong. Usually she wasn’t so far off.

Oh, well, no big loss. He was a nice looking guy and interesting—even if he was a Yankee lawyer. Her track record with Yankee lawyers wasn’t good. Her former fiancé was both. They’d worked for the same New York firm, and he’d sworn his undying love for her when he’d presented her with a large emerald-cut diamond and asked her to marry him. First chance he had to make points with the senior partners, he’d thrown her under the bus for a leg up.

What was worse, he didn’t see anything wrong with what he’d done.

Cass couldn’t see being married to someone ruled by jungle ethics. She quickly soured on New York, the high-powered firm and the eighteen-hour days. She also missed Austin and her twin sister, Sunny. They’d never been so far apart for so long.

At closing time, Cass locked up behind the last of the staff and stashed the cash in the office safe. As was their custom, she made a final round of Chili Witches, with its rough-hewn walls and over forty years of rotating Texas kitsch. Her New York colleagues would laugh if they could see her now in jeans and a red tee instead of a power suit, but she was happy here among people who mattered.

She was startled when she saw the gray-haired man sitting at a corner table with a cup of coffee. He smiled at her as she approached.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I didn’t realize anyone was still here. We’re closed. You’ll have to leave.”

He suddenly vanished. Poof. Gone. Her heart jumped into overdrive. Oh, gawd! Was she going crazy? Maybe her eyes were playing tricks on her. She double-checked the locks, then hurried out of the café and up the back stairs to her apartment on the second floor.

She locked her door, reset the alarm, slapped her hand on her chest and struggled to keep herself from hyperventilating. No way was she admitting to what she’d seen. Correction: make that what she thought she saw. No way.

Not only had the incident scared the pants off her, the whole thing was impossible. Totally, utterly, completely impossible. Snatching up her phone, she punched the speed dial for Sunny, but hung up before it rang. Her sister would never let her hear the end of it if Cass admitted to seeing some sort of apparition. There was some perfectly reasonable explanation for what she thought she’d seen. Perhaps a flicker of a passing car or a glint from streetlights had somehow created an odd image. It had been a long day, and she was tired and ripe for her eyes to play tricks.

Forget it.

Certainly there was no reason to be afraid. After all, there was a cop in the apartment only a few feet away from her front door, and a baseball bat under her bed.

Flipping on the TV to catch the last of the news, she pulled off her sneakers, shed her jeans and tried to get her mind on something else. The phone rang.

“Did you just try to call me?” her sister asked.

“I did, but