He hadn’t seen her since she’d come to tell him that she’d been successful with the judge, but clearly she’d settled things with his cash or he wouldn’t be back in his own boxers.

The lockdown part of the courthouse was separated from the public section by a series of gates that took him by the room he’d met with her in. The last set of don’t-even-think-about-its was by central processing, where he’d been checked in and photographed.

God, he could still smell her perfume.

With a clank, the steel lock was sprung and the guard gave him a shove in lieu of a “bon voyage”—

“Do you need a ride?”

Isaac stopped dead just inside the waiting area. Ms. Childe was standing across the linoleum, looking like she belonged at a cocktail party and not the county jail: Her hair was in the same twist, but she wasn’t in a suit anymore. She was wearing some kind of little-black-dress thing . . . as well as a pair of sheer black panty hose that made him swallow hard to keep from groaning.

What a woman she was.

“Do you?” she prompted.

Feeling like a Neanderthal for going the goggle route, he shook his head. “No, thank you, ma’am.”

She walked over to the exit and opened the way out, standing to the side, looking like a million bucks . . . and as if she had nothing better to do with her time than play doorstop for him.

Isaac stepped out of the waiting room and into a hall that had just a bank of elevators and a fire exit.

“Let me give you a ride,” she told him as she punched the down arrow. “I know where you live, remember? And it’ll be hard for you to get a cab at rush hour.”

True enough. Plus he only had five dollars in cash on him. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Exactly. By letting me drive you. It’s cold and you don’t even have a coat, for God’s sake.”

Also true. He’d lost his sweatshirt in the rush of getting cuffed. But like everything else about him, that was not her problem.

When she turned away, as if the decision had been made, he stared at the complicated swirls of her hair. He couldn’t see any pins or anything, and yet it didn’t look shellacked.

Magic, he thought.

Without being aware of it, he reached up with his busted punching hand like he was going to touch the nape of her neck. He caught himself in time, though.

And he was gone a moment later, ducking soundlessly into the stairwell.

Which had an open square layout. Perfect.