Mandy’s smile steadied at that, and Adam gave her a look that made her earlier worry seem foolish. Because no man who looked at a woman like that could be in a hurry to get away from her. But this wasn’t his home. Not anymore. His home was that ranch, which she’d never even seen.

Or been invited to see.

Her self-pitying thoughts ended when the new arrival stepped into the room, Cutter beside him. He was a very striking man, and after she caught her breath Mandy’s brow furrowed. He seemed familiar somehow, although she was sure she’d never met him before. Those dark eyes that did nothing to mask a razor-sharp intelligence behind them, that casual grace, the way a couple of strands of dark hair kicked forward over his forehead, that immense presence, were not something she would have forgotten.

“Adam, Amanda, this is that friend I mentioned who can more than take this on. Meet the Foxworth consulting attorney, Gavin de Marco.”

She gaped at the man, while Adam let out a long low whistle. “No wonder you seemed familiar,” Mandy said as he greeted them both. How could he not be, when not so long ago he was a front-page name at practically every news outlet in the known world?

“I was in the academy when the Keppler trial was going on,” Adam said as they shook hands. “We were glued to it. Afterward they used your summation as training, to show us why we had to be exacting about probable cause and evidence protocol. Because it would have to stand up to people like you.”

“Somehow I think they probably used a stronger description of me,” the man said with an easy smile.

Adam grinned at him. “Yeah. Unrepeatable in polite company.” Then, more seriously, he said, “Always wondered why you dropped out.”

She had wondered as well, when the household name had vanished from public view.

“Let’s just say I saw the light,” Gavin said. Then he looked at Mandy, and with an amazing gentleness for the firebrand she knew he had been, he said, “And I saw too many cases like your father’s, good, brave men cut down. I’m sorry you—and we—lost him.”

He’d lost none of his eloquence, or his knack of projecting an empathy that had had juries eating out of his hand. Her eyes stung a little as she thanked him, because unlike many who said they were sorry because they didn’t know what else to say, she sensed on a deep level that this man meant it.

“So now he’s on the side of the angels,” Quinn said, with a crooked smile at the man.

“A motley crew though they are,” Gavin agreed, smiling as he reached down to Cutter, to scratch that favored spot behind his right ear. Then, straightening, he asked briskly, “What do we have?”