What she wouldn’t do was ever give up her comfortable life in the city to marry an ex-soldier who wanted nothing more than to tend bar and keep his hole-in-the-wall small town together. She would be horrified by where he came from, likely disdainful of the town’s residents. Lisa was a big-city lady who wouldn’t be able to handle his low-class baggage.

It didn’t stop him from thinking of her.

“I knew it could happen,” Bridget said. “I told you that judge is on the take. I can see it in his eyes. They’re all in on it.”

“Pregnancy makes you paranoid, baby,” Will said, pulling her hand to his mouth for a kiss. “Remember when we had Brendon and you were absolutely sure the woman who had moved in across from us was working for Russian intelligence?”

“She worked for the IRS,” Bridget shot back. “That’s even worse. I bet she went through our trash looking for receipts.”

Lila sighed as though this was a long-fought argument. “We don’t know that the judge is on the take. We do know that jerk has a good lawyer.”

Mitch shook his head. “Nah, that asshole got lucky. He should have found that problem in the beginning. He stumbled on it during cross.”

“What’s going on?” If Remy let them go on, they would start arguing among themselves and it would take forever to get to the point. “Who’s in jail?”

“The problem is who got out of jail,” Laurel replied, a frown on her face. “Have you been following the Jimmy Vallon case?”

“No,” Remy admitted. It wasn’t too surprising. Unless it was a sports score, he didn’t follow the news. “What’s it about?”

“Jimmy Vallon owns the largest valet service in the DFW area. He supplies restaurants and entertainment venues all over the Metroplex. About a year ago, he hired a new accountant who quickly figured out he was using some shady practices with his cash flow. She was smart enough to ask an expert and then went straight to the police to turn her boss in. Turns out Vallon was laundering money for a local drug distributor,” Mitch explained. “So the police arrested him and up until yesterday he was absolutely going to be convicted and looking forward to doing some serious time. Then at the last moment, his attorney got lucky. He got one of the cops on the scene to admit to breaking chain of custody. Vallon kept a second set of books all by hand that the accountant discovered. Turns out there’s about six hours missing between when they took the books from Vallon’s office and when they were finally logged in at the police station. At some point in time two pages were pulled out and went missing. The main evidence was thrown out and a mistrial was called.”