CHAPTER TWENTY
He wasn’t going back to the courthouse at all that afternoon, and Tish knew it. But as she waited outside of the Mercedes as he drove onto his driveway and parked beside her, and as she watched the stately judge unbuckle his seatbelt and finish a phone conversation he was having on his car phone, she felt as if she had been nothing but a burden to him from the moment he saw her in that courtroom. She wasn’t accustomed to depending on somebody so completely. She loved Shake, but she never depended on him. But she felt totally dependent on the judge. She always believed that if a man had too much power over a woman that he’d use it to his advantage. Not to hers.
Part of her concern, she thought, as he slowly began to get out of his car, was that she still hadn’t figured out why he was being so good to her. And the way he kissed her back at that police station only added to her concern. Was it just about sex in the end once again? “Thank you for escorting me back,” she said to him as he walked over to her.
He looked at her as if he didn’t want to be reminded of it and then began heading toward his front door. Tish hesitated for a moment. What was that look about? And then she followed him inside.
But once inside, and as he reached behind her and closed and locked the front door, she couldn’t hold back any longer. “It’s just that I don’t understand,” she said to him.
JJ was so close to her he could feel his pants brush against her leg. She looked so sincere, and so frightened too. “You don’t understand what?” he asked her.
“Why you’re helping me like this. Like in that courtroom. You were giving people way more time than even the prosecution recommended. But when it came to me, you gave me way less time than the prosecution recommended that even my own lawyer told me was a good deal.”
“Your attorney was a piece of shit who gave you shitty advice. I have notified the bar association of his conduct and requested they launch an investigation into all of his cases.”
Tish was surprised to hear that. But it only begged her point. “Why?” she asked him with all sincerity. “Everybody says their lawyers are crap. And you know they are. But how many other times have you turned in lawyers for giving crappy advice?”
JJ stared at her. He felt exposed. “Only that one time,” he said.
Which only helped frame Tish’s question even more. “Why are you doing all of this for me?”
JJ knew exactly what she meant. What’s in it for you, was what she was really asking.
“Why me?” she asked again.
He knew it was no real answer, but it was the best he could do. “Why not you?” he responded.
Tish just stood there. And tears appeared in her big, brown eyes. “I’m not. . .”
JJ could feel her pain. “You’re not what?”
“I’m not used to being singled out. I’m not used to somebody doing something kind for me. I’ve never had that happen to me before.”
“Not even with Shake?”
“Shake didn’t even know what he wanted. How could he know what I needed? I was never going to get anything like that from Shake. I just didn’t expect to be getting it from somebody like you either.”
JJ’s heart ached for her. She was such a good person who had to put up with so much bullshit. Before he realized he was doing so, he pulled her into his arms.
As soon as he wrapped her into such a warm embrace, Tish couldn’t hold back. She began sobbing. Her life, if she were to be honest, was in shambles. She didn’t really have anything going on but what Judge Brant saw fit to help her with. But it was all tied to him. And she knew that wasn’t good either. Because she realized, as he held her, he still hadn’t answered her question.
And that was why she moved out of his embrace. And she looked him in the eyes. “I need to know why,” she said. “There has to be a reason why you’re so good to me. And it’s not just because. Just because is not an answer.”
JJ was proud of the way she stood up for herself. But she was asking him to give of himself more than he was willing to do. But he knew he had to do it. Her eyes demanded to know the truth.
He walked away from her and made his way to the sofa. She followed him and sat beside him. He was leaned back, slouched down, and she was on the edge of the sofa looking back at him.
“I saw you in the holding room, just before court convened, on my office monitor.”
That surprised Tish. But she didn’t interrupt him.
“You looked so devastated to me. Like you could not believe you were there. And when I found out about the backstory, I knew then that maybe that look was real. That you really didn’t belong there. So I knew I had to act.”
She waited for him to continued.
He continued. “When I saw you that night, on that bench in the rain, it did something to me again. But I was still willing to overlook it. After my sister and her son were killed, I don’t care for entanglements with people anymore. In all honesty, I wasn’t that involved with mankind even before their passing. But that’s why I took you to that motel instead of bringing you here.”
Tish was surprised he brought her there at all. She would have really been surprised had he brought her home with him the very first time they had a real conversation. And how was his sister and nephew killed anyway? That seemed like a monumental thing to mention so casually. But she didn’t interrupt. She needed to know what this man was thinking. She needed to hear what he had to say.
“It wasn’t until you fainted at that awful motel did it hit me. How could I have been so callous as to leave you, an innocent, in a place like that?”
Tish felt a warmness toward JJ when he called her innocent. She wasn’t innocent at all, but for somebody to see her that way was refreshing. Even before she went to jail people tended to look at her and see nothing but some hood rat. Street all over her, she overheard one job interviewer say about her. But for a man like Judge Brant to see that there was more to her than that felt good.
“When I backed up and got to you, I saw one of those guys that were hanging around in that lobby already feeling you up while you were passed out, and it stunned me. Had I not been there when you fell, there was no telling what those men could have done to you. I felt responsible for your wellbeing ever since.”
Tish was blown away by what he had to say. It didn’t lessen her concerns: she still felt as if she was a burden to him and needed to get her own thing going. Who wanted somebody to feel responsible for them? She was and had always been responsible for herself. But it felt good to know that a man like him, who seemed to genuinely care for her, felt something toward her. That if she were to die tomorrow, he would at least feel just a little lesser without her.
But it still was tough to process. So she stopped trying and leaned back in a slouch position alongside him.
When she leaned back and JJ felt the touch of her shoulder against him, he placed his arm around her. Tish laid her head on his shoulder as his hand on her waist slid her closer against him.
But as the heat between them began to transcend mere warmth, the atmosphere became charged and electric. They both felt that different kind of heat. For several seconds, they did nothing. They understood the risks. But when they finally looked at each other, and saw that same look in one another’s eyes, they both knew, in that instant, that their relationship, such as it was, was about to change in a very significant way.
JJ knew it would come to this eventually. There was no way he could unsee what he saw of her body last night, and especially that morning. That was why he kissed her. Only this time, he wasn’t ambivalent about his feelings. It wasn’t guilt driving it or responsibility or any of that. It was pure lust. He wanted her unlike he’d wanted a woman in a long, long time. And he kissed her with such a passionate outburst that it was clear to Tish exactly what his intentions were.
Her first instinct was to stop it. But she couldn’t. Because she loved the way he made her feel. All those years with Shake and she never felt the way he made her feel. And she wanted more of that. She needed more of that.
JJ needed it even worse than she did. That was why he was grunting and groaning while he kissed her. That was why he was removing his suit coat, untying his tie and tossing it aside, and then stopping just long enough to lift over his head his dress shirt and t-shirt and toss them aside too. And then he straddled her on top of him, facing him, as he began kissing her passionately again.
It got real for Tish when he lifted her blouse and bra over her head, throwing them aside, and then his mouth moved from her mouth to her breasts. She let out a loud sigh of enjoyment when he began caressing and sucking her breasts. It had been so long! But when he laid her on that sofa, and completely removed her pants and underwear, and then moved his mouth between her legs, it was passion on steroids. She had never had it so good. She was gone.
JJ was lost in that feeling too. So lost and so in love with the way she was making him feel that he quickly removed his shoes and the remainder of his clothes, got on top of her, and entered her without so much as a second thought that he was entering this woman raw.
Tish hadn’t thought of it either. She just didn’t want those feelings to end.
And they went at it. Hard and unrelenting.
So hard that he carried her upstairs to his bedroom, where he laid her on his bed and went for it even harder. So hard that JJ couldn’t get enough of her, and she couldn’t get enough of him. He slowed it down, kissing her as he did her. Then he went hard again, pounding her as he did her. Then he fell in between, loving on her breasts as he did her. Until he did her too good and she began to have an orgasm that was so intense that he began cumming too.
It took several long minutes of cumming before they both collapsed. And JJ, still inside of her, rolled onto his back while rolling her on top of him. But he was so spent that all he could do was hold her.
And that was when reality set in and hit them both like a ton of bricks. She was his employee. That was a line, in many years as an executive, that JJ never crossed. Tish knew that her job would be in serious jeopardy if this change in their relationship turned soar. And both of them knew that he had entered her raw.
JJ removed Tish’s thick hair out of her face. He needed to see her eyes. Her eyes, more than any words she could say to him, always told her story. And when he looked at her and saw grave concern in her big, brown eyes, he knew he had crossed a line. All he could do was reassure her.
“I always wear a condom,” he said to her. “You have nothing to worry about.”
Tish was pleased to hear that. “You have nothing to worry about, either. I’m on birth control.”
JJ looked at her. Wasn’t sure if he liked hearing that. Had she been getting together with other guys since her release? “You are?”
“After I got out, I got back on, yeah. Not because I knew I was going to be hooking up with anybody. That was the last thing on my mind. But it helped my periods, so I wanted to get back on.”
JJ was pleased to hear that! “I see.”
“I always made Shake wear condoms too,” she added. “Not early on, because I was on birth control the whole time I was with him, but later when I found out he had been cheating on me. I forgave him, and we tried to make it work, but I knew then that I never ever wanted to have any baby from a man who could hurt me like that. Because he really hurt me.”
JJ knew the feeling. “I’ve been down that road too.”
Tish stared at him. “Who with?”
“My ex-wife.”
Tish realized in that moment that she had no real idea about his life.
“She was a serial cheater,” he continued. “The list of who she didn’t bang within our social circles would have been shorter than the list of who she actually did hook up with. It devastated me when I found out because I actually married this woman and believed she loved me. But she didn’t. She loved what I could give to her, but that was as far as it went. She didn’t love me at all. No woman ever had. Except for my sister.” He smiled thinking about her. “She loved me unconditionally and wanted the best for me. She was a great person.”
“Y’all were close?”
“Absolutely. She was my best friend. And her son was . . . he meant the world to me.”
Tish knew it was a bad time to ask it, but she’d just allowed this man to do all sorts of things to her body. She needed to know who she was dealing with before she got in any deeper than she was already getting in. “You said they were killed?”
JJ’s eyes went from bright blue to dullness. “Yes.”
“What happened?”
At first a flash of something else appeared in his eyes, as if he was going to tell her none of her damn business. But then she realized it wasn’t anger, but pain. “We were having dinner at a restaurant. A man came in, asked if she was with me, according to the witnesses. When she said yes, he shot and killed her and Logan.”
“Wow.”
“Then a cop killed him.”
Tish could tell he was fighting back tears.
“I could have saved Logan,” he said.
“How could you if the man started shooting right after he asked your sister that question?”
“Logan had asked to go to the bathroom with me. He didn’t want to eat his peas and that was a chance for him to get away from it. But I told him no. I left him there to die essentially.”
Tish placed her hand on the side of his anguished face.
“That was the toughest part of it,” he said. “That I still haven’t gotten over.”
Tish wrapped her arms around him and laid her head on his chest. He tightened his hold on her too.
“Did they ever find why the man did it? Was he somebody you sent to jail or something like that?”
JJ shook his head. “No. I probably presided over a case involving one of his relatives or somebody he loved and sent them to prison, but we never came up with the nexus and I just left it alone. I’ve been a judge a long time. Before I became chief judge, I was always in the courtroom sentencing thousands of people over my career. It would be a fool’s errand to try to figure out which one of those people he was connected to. And besides,” he added, but couldn’t continue.
Tish finished it for him. “You were in grief. They were gone. He was dead. You didn’t give a shit why he did it.”
JJ looked at her and then smiled. “That’s exactly right,” he said. Then he continued to stare at her. “What about you, LaTisha? After what happened today, are you okay?”
“I didn’t like it. I felt it was all about some bullshit. But I’m fine. And I promise you that when I go to work tomorrow I’ll finish everything on your list for today along with everything you want me to do tomorrow. I’m not about to let some racist asshole make me hide.” Then she looked at him and said what she really needed him to hear. “And that’s what will happen if you don’t let me do my job. Whoever made that 911 call will win.”
JJ knew it too. But he still had concerns about it. “Promise me you’ll be extra careful and pay attention to your surroundings. I already told Bill Goslin--”
Tish interrupted him. “Who’s Bill Goslin?”
“The Scottsdale Police Chief. I’ve already told him that he’d better notify every one of his men to never pick you up again because you will be driving my vehicles. So you shouldn’t have that issue again.”
Tish smiled. “Thanks. Again.”
JJ smiled, and then he kissed her forehead. But when she closed her eyes from that kiss, he began kissing her again. And she returned his kiss. And then he entered her again. And as if it was as natural as rain, they were at it again.