LITMIR.BIZ

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you don’t know which is worse. My political chicanery was disgusting, but my writing is morbid and sick.” He smiled slightly at her startled look. “No, I’m not a mind reader, Mrs. Morgan. I’m just quoting my mom and my sisters, my grandmother and my aunts, except for Helen. You’d get along famously with them. They never miss a chance to lecture me on the perils of writing about evil.”

      “But you enjoy writing about evil?”

      She was looking at him as if he were Satan incarnate on a book tour. Luke felt compelled to offer some sort of defense.

      “Look, I’ll try to explain to you the way I’ve tried to explain it to the family. Inventing a crime and a case and solving it is fascinating. You can enter the mind of your characters and set up the cat-and-mouse game between the criminal and the police. Plus, on the practical side, it’s been a very good career move.”

      Okay, he wanted to brag a little about his writing success, Luke acknowledged to himself. Was that so bad, in light of the fact he’d been viewed as a disgrace to the Minteer clan, as the district pariah? His writing had elevated him to something akin to celebrity status.

      Celebrity or pariah? That choice was a no-brainer.

      “A person’s got to make a living, you know,” he added, with a practiced touch of boyish charm.

      Brenna Morgan stared impassively at him, uncharmed. “And since you’d already been kicked out of dirty-tricks politics, creating serial killers was the logical next step? There’s nothing in between? Not anything in the retail industry or in the business world or the—”

      “Aha! Now you’re joking. I see the glint of humor in your eyes, despite your best efforts to hide it behind that deadpan facade.”

      This time Luke flashed his most winning smile, the one on the back cover of his book’s dust jacket. He’d gotten fan mail based on that picture, from women who hadn’t bothered to read the book.

      Brenna slowly, almost reluctantly smiled back.

      Luke knew she would. No woman was immune to his special smile, not even pregnant ones who thoroughly disapproved of him and his profession. That is, unless she happened to be related to him. To his female relatives, his smile and his charm were distinctly underwhelming.

      “I really wasn’t joking,” Brenna insisted.

      “Sure you were. Those big gray eyes of yours are still shining with amusement.”

      “No, they aren’t.”

      “Are you one of those types who always has to have the last word? Your poor husband—and those hapless lawyers who have no idea that they’ve chosen an intractable force of nature to be on their jury.” Luke laughed. “Yeah, it’ll be a hung jury, all right.”

      The two of them started walking toward the door, toward freedom. They fell into step, side-by-side. Luke cast a swift glance over at her.

      He always noted a woman’s height, and he made no exception this time. She was wearing flat shoes, which allowed him to correctly estimate that Brenna Morgan was not quite five-four. At five feet ten inches, he seemed to be towering over her. Luke enjoyed the sensation in spite of himself.

      After all, he’d made peace with his less-than-six-foot height years ago. He didn’t mind being the shortest of the four Minteer brothers, he didn’t care that his three sisters were nearly his height. That two of his teen nephews already were as tall as he was and were still growing.

      It wouldn’t be long until he was surpassed in height by another generation of Minteer brothers. Not that Luke minded, of course.

      And to prove it to himself and everybody else in the world, he deliberately dated tall women, women close to his own height or even taller, especially in very high heels. He liked the elegance, the challenge of height. He was completely comfortable being one of the less-tall Minteers and didn’t need short women to make him feel—well, six-feet tall.

      In fact, he assiduously avoided pairing up with a petite woman. To prove his point to himself and everybody else.

      He cast another surreptitious glance at Brenna Morgan.

      She was pretty. That renegade thought fleetingly crossed Luke’s mind, surprising him. He did not, as a rule, take note of a pregnant woman’s looks. A pregnant woman obviously belonged to another guy, and he wasn’t the type who poached on his brother man’s territory.

      He might be viewed as a snake by some—okay, by many—but he did have a certain code of ethics that he followed. Cheating with another man’s woman was strictly taboo.

      Besides, a pregnant woman was a mother-to-be, and mothers deserved the utmost respect. The Minteer brothers had that canon drilled into them by their own mother and grandmothers, by their aunts and great-aunts and older cousins, too.

      He certainly respected mothers too much to think of them as pretty, Luke reminded himself. Because thoughts of prettiness too easily led to thoughts of desirability, which logically progressed to thoughts of sex.

      Mothers, those paragons of maternal virtue, were not sexy! At least, they weren’t to Luke Minteer.

      But Brenna Morgan, with her long black hair curving just over her shoulders, her thick bangs accentuating high cheekbones and big, clear gray eyes fringed with dark lashes, with her firm little chin and full, sensual lips… No, not sensual, he quickly amended. Sensual and pregnant just didn’t go together.

      Still, Brenna Morgan was definitely a pretty woman.

      To cleanse himself of the disturbing thought, Luke allowed his gaze to drift over her totally nonexistent figure. She looked like a balloon overinflated with helium, the skirt of her blue maternity dress swirling around her swollen feet and ankles.

      Luke expelled what might have been a sigh of relief. He admired long, shapely legs on a woman. Though he couldn’t see Brenna’s legs under the long blue skirt, her puffy ankles certainly failed his desirability test.

      As well they should. She was pregnant, some kid’s mother-to-be.

      She was some guy’s wife. She was of no interest to him whatsoever.

      “Is your husband going to be ticked off that you’re stuck with jury duty and that your poor unborn child is going to be exposed to lawyers and their sleazy clients for days on end?” Luke asked jovially, purposefully, as they reached the main entrance of the building.

      Brenna, in the midst of pulling on her oversize light-brown parka, looked up at him, in that serious, earnest way of hers. “I don’t have a husband. This baby is mine and mine alone.”

      She pushed the double doors open and walked off, leaving him staring after her, his jaw agape.

      “You were picked for jury duty in your condition? Are they nuts? Did you tell them the baby is due in six weeks?” Cassie Walsh, Brenna’s next-door neighbor, was outraged on her behalf.

      Cassie’s three-year-old daughter, Abigail, sat on the floor, transfixed by a video of Winnie the Pooh, and didn’t look up as Cassie rolled an ottoman toward Brenna, who was resting in the armchair.

      “I told them.” Brenna wearily propped her swollen feet up on the ottoman. “It didn’t matter. The judge told us at the beginning of the day that they were cracking down on people getting out of jury duty.”

      “How can you be expected to sit for hours when you’re so far along in your pregnancy?” Cassie demanded. “Can’t you get an excuse from your doctor?”

      “But then my name would go back in the jury pool and I might be chosen after I have the baby. I’d rather get it over with now. Anyway, sitting in the courtroom isn’t any different from sitting in an office all day—or me sitting in my studio drawing for hours, right?”

      “I suppose so.”

      “Uh, one of the jurors is the brother of our congressman, Matt Minteer,” Brenna added, keeping her voice carefully casual.

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