“I’ll be representing him tomorrow,” I assure her. “But I’m not the best lawyer to defend him in a trial. He’d need a criminal lawyer for that.”

“You were that!”

“I was a prosecutor. Papa will need an expert at keeping people out of jail.”

Annie is shaking her head. “Who could do that better than someone who knows all the ways to put people in jail?”

Caitlin gives me a look that I have no trouble translating: Out of the mouths of babes …

“I want you to trust me on this, Annie. I promise I’ll be working on it night and day.”

She studies me in silence for several seconds. “If we postpone the wedding, when are ya’ll going to get married?”

Caitlin smiles, then leans down and kisses the top of her head. “We’ll just have to see how quickly your father can make this trouble go away.”

Both of them train their eyes on me, and the resulting ache in my belly must resemble what a soldier feels when standing before a military tribunal.

How’s that for motivation?

CHAPTER 28

FORREST KNOX GOT up from the house trailer’s queen-sized bed and fastened his belt. He hadn’t even taken off his boots. The auburn-haired woman lay stomach-down across the sheets like a wrung-out dishrag, red welts rising from her naked hindquarters. Forrest didn’t know why some women liked pain, but he’d learned long ago that many of the ones who did seemed to marry cops. It wasn’t the prospect of pain that attracted them, but power—not the power of money and status, but of immediate physical domination. And women like that tended to get bored quickly. They couldn’t push the edge with the same man again and again, because the edge was always being rounded off by experience. Once that kind of woman knew a man’s limit, she lost the thrill she’d initially sought.

Cherie Delaune was a perfect example. Thirty-three years old, she had one teenage daughter and a husband with sawdust for brains who spent most of his time patrolling highways on the state dime. Forrest had no doubt that she’d prayed more than once for her husband to die in a traffic accident, which was the widowmaker in their business. Most of the men on the memorial wall at state police headquarters had died in highway accidents of various types. A shoot-out was rare; more guys had killed themselves with their own guns than had bought it in Hollywood-style gun battles.

“Why do you want to rush out of here?” Cherie drawled. “Ricky ain’t gonna be back till dawn.”

“Got business to tend to,” Forrest said.

“What kind of business?”

“My business.”