LITMIR.BIZ

      In Austin, a slender woman with her long blond hair in a bun, wearing big gold-rimmed glasses over her twinkling dark brown eyes, was trying to console one of the state attorney general’s computer experts.

      “He really likes you, Phil,” Josette Langley told the young man, who was in the first month of his first job out of college. He looked devastated. “Honest he does.”

      Phil, redheaded and blue-eyed, glanced toward the door of Simon Hart, Texas Attorney General, and flushed even redder. “He said it was my fault his computer locked down while he was talking to the vice president on-line about an upcoming governors’ conference. He got knocked off the network and couldn’t get back on. He threw the mouse at me.”

      “Lucky you, that it wasn’t attached to the CPU at the time,” she said with a wicked grin. “Anyway, he only throws things when Tira’s mad at him. It doesn’t last long. Besides, the vice president is his third cousin,” she pointed out. “And mine, too, come to think of it,” she added thoughtfully. “Never mind, Phil, you have to learn to just let it wash over you, like water on a duck’s back. Simon’s quick-tempered, but he gets over it just as fast.”

      He gave her a baleful look. “He never yells at you.”

      “I’m a woman,” she pointed out. “He’s very old-fashioned about yelling at women. He and his brothers were raised strictly. They don’t move with the times.”

      “He’s got four brothers and he says they’re all just like him. Imagine that!” he said.

      She remembered that Phil was an only child, like herself. “They’re not just like him. Anyway, they live in Jacobsville, Texas. The married ones are a lot calmer now.” She didn’t dare allow herself to think about the two remaining Hart bachelors, Leo and Rey. The stories about their homemade biscuit-craving and the things they did to satisfy it was becoming legendary.

      “The bachelor ones aren’t calm. One of them carried a cook out of a Victoria restaurant kicking and screaming last week, and they sent the Texas Rangers after him!”

      “They sent Judd Dunn,” she replied. “He’s our cousin, too. But it was a joke, sort of. And she wasn’t exactly screaming…Well, never mind. It’s not important.” She was talking too fast. She felt her face go hot at the mention of the Texas Rangers.

      She had painful memories of one particular Texas Ranger, whom she’d loved passionately. Gretchen, Marc Brannon’s sister, had told her that Marc Brannon had gone on a drunken rampage two years ago, just after they broke up and ended up on opposite sides of the courtroom in a high-profile murder trial. Marc had left the Rangers shortly afterward and enlisted with the FBI. He was back in San Antonio now, back with the Rangers again. Gretchen also said that Marc had almost driven himself crazy with guilt over an even older incident when Josette was fifteen and he was a policeman in Jacobsville. Odd, she thought, remembering the painful things he’d said to her when they broke up.

      Josette had told Gretchen that she didn’t blame Marc for his lack of belief in her innocence. Part of her didn’t. Another, darker part wanted to hang him by his spurs from a live oak tree for the misery of the past two years. He’d never really believed her story until their last disastrous date, and he’d walked out on her without another word, after making her feel like a prostitute. She’d loved him. But he couldn’t have loved her. If he had, he’d never have left Texas, not even if the murder trial had set them at odds.

      She cleared her throat at the erotic images that flashed through her mind of her last date with Marc and turned her attention back to poor, downcast Phil Douglas.

      “I’ll square things with Simon for you,” she promised him.

      “I really like working here,” he said eagerly. “You might mention that. And I promise I’ll fix the computer next time so that his e-mail won’t ever lock down again. I’ll put it in writing, even!”

      “I’ll tell him, Phil. Right now, in fact. I have to see him on a question one of the district attorneys faxed in this morning. Chin up, now. The world hasn’t ended. Everything passes with time—even things you think will kill your soul.”

      And she should know, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.

      When she walked into Texas Attorney General Simon Hart’s office, she found him scowling at the telephone as if he’d just taken a bite of it and found it rotten.

      “Something wrong?” she asked as she paused in front of his desk.

      He shifted, the artificial hand resting on the desk looking so real that sometimes it was hard to remember that he was an amputee. Simon was big, dark-haired, pale-eyed and formidable. His gorgeous redheaded wife, Tira, and his two dark-haired young sons smiled out from a jumble of framed photographs on a polished table behind him. There was one of him with his four brothers just after he’d been elected attorney general. His brothers were giving him apprehensive glances. She smiled. Disabled or not, Simon was a force to behold when he lost his temper.

      “That was the assistant district attorney in San Antonio,” he said, indicating the phone. “They’ve got what looks like a mob-related hit in an alley just a few steps from Jake Marsh’s nightclub.” He glanced at her. “A local mob figure,” he added. “Ever heard of him?”

      “The name rings a bell, but I can’t place it. That case won’t concern us, will it?” she asked.

      He was tracing a pattern on his desk. “As a matter of fact, it might. It depends on whether or not we can tie Marsh to the murder. I don’t have to tell you how hard the district attorney in San Antonio has been trying to shut him down. The D.A. phoned the deputy chief of police and cleared it to have the Texas Rangers send an officer over there to assist in the investigation. If the case can be tied to Marsh, we’ll be looking at multiple jurisdictions and we’ll end up in a high-profile

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