Lovers and Madmen(Sasha McCandless 4.5)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This
novella (approximately 15,500 words or 60-65 printed pages) is a gift to my
existing readers, who’ve asked for more about Sasha and Leo’s relationship. If
you’re new to the series, I recommend you start with any one of the full-length
legal thrillers, which you can find at smarturl.it/sashaseries, and come back
to this when you know Sasha and Leo a little bit better.

Lovers and madmen have
such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies,
that apprehend

More than cool reason ever
comprehends.

William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

February 13th

Sasha woke with a start.
Had someone been rattling the knob on the condo’s front door?

Her heart thumped. She strained to listen for the
noise that had woken her, but all she heard was the faint hum of the building’s
heating system, low and distant, and Connelly’s soft, even breathing next to
her.

Just a bad dream. Another bad dream.

She checked the glowing numbers on the alarm clock’s
display. 4:24 a.m. She nestled beside Connelly, curved her body around his, and
waited for the rhythm of his slumber to lull her back to sleep.

He turned in his sleep and threw his right arm and
leg over her body, pulling her closer. She ran her hands along his strong,
broad back and pressed her head against his chest.

Despite Connelly’s warm presence, she already knew
her efforts to recapture sleep would be futile. Her pulse was still racing, and
her mind was keeping pace with it. Sleep would elude her for the rest of the
night.

Might as well be productive.

She eased her legs from beneath Connelly’s thigh
and slipped out of the bed without a sound. She crept down the three steps that
led from the loft into the hallway and hesitated before walking to the front
door to confirm it was, indeed, locked and chained.

She padded through the dark living space to the
leather reading chair that sat beside a floor-to-ceiling window, tucked her
legs under a pale blue chenille blanket, and pulled her laptop off the side
table.

She powered it on. The display’s light was harsh and
bright, and her eyes watered for a moment before they adjusted. While the computer
cycled through its start-up procedures, she rolled her head from side to side
to loosen her tight neck muscles.

Then—just as she had done so many times in the
past four months—she read and reread the rules of professional conduct that
governed the behavior of attorneys practicing law in Pennsylvania. Logic
dictated that the rules hadn’t changed since her last sleepless night. But she
couldn’t resist the urge to check again.

She’d always thought of the rules of professional
conduct as an attorney’s crutch, a tool to lean on in making hard decisions.

But since October, she’d come to see the rules as
a set of handcuffs. Or maybe a straitjacket—an impediment to justice that refused
to yield.

It didn’t matter how many times she read them or
how cleverly she parsed the language, the rules prevented her from telling the
authorities what she’d learned only too late: her client had bashed in his
pregnant wife’s skull with a hammer and left her to die in a parking garage.

After her initial shock had worn off, she’d talked
to Larry Steinfeld, the experienced criminal defense attorney who’d helped her
in her representation of the Lady Lawyer Killers. Larry had been sympathetic
but firm: Rule of Professional Conduct 1.6, Confidentiality of Information,
prohibited her from sharing any information with the authorities that was
adverse to a client’s interests, even after the representation had ended.

Larry also tried, with limited success, to
convince her that she should be pleased by a job well done, pointing out that
most criminal defense attorneys represent people who did, in fact, commit the
crimes of which they’d been accused. Intellectually, she understood that he was
right. But, emotionally, all she knew was she didn’t have what it took to
practice criminal law.

Boxed in by the rules of ethics, she had to resort
to hoping the district attorney’s office would stumble across the truth without
her help. Because there had been no trial, there was no double jeopardy issue. But
with a man already behind bars, who was widely perceived to have committed the
murder, the district attorney had little incentive to go looking for a new
suspect.

She walked into the kitchen to sip some water and
clear her head.

Richard Vickers, the man charged with the murder
of Clarissa Costopolous and her unborn child as well as the murder of one of
Clarissa’s coworkers, had entered into a plea bargain in which he pled guilty only
to the other murder. He’d maintained at his sentencing—and continued to
maintain—that he hadn’t killed Clarissa, although he’d planned to.

The denials of an admitted murderer who had an
incentive to lie carried no weight, according to Larry. Under the pecking order
that existed at Western Penitentiary, Vickers’s life would get considerably
more unpleasant if he was known as the guy who’d killed a pregnant woman.
Killing a non-pregnant woman was, apparently, not a social handicap.

Let it go,
she told herself, knowing she
couldn’t. It was a weight she’d carry for the rest of her life.

She returned to the reading chair and shut down
the computer, then sat cross-legged on the floor and stared out the window
until the sun rose.

As light streaked the sky, she turned to happier
thoughts. Valentine’s Day was just one day away, and she had a surprise planned
for the man dreaming peacefully upstairs in her bed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Connelly bounded down the
stairs to the kitchen, full of energy even before his first cup of coffee.

“Good morning, sunshine!” he enthused, reaching
for the coffee.

She joined him at the counter and extended her
empty mug for a refill. He filled it and then pressed his lips against her ear.

“Hi,” she said.

His smile faded and concern filled his eyes.

“You couldn’t sleep again?”

She raised the oversized mug to her mouth and
shrugged.

“Guess not.”

Connelly placed his cup on the counter and took
hers from her hands, lowering it to the counter as well. He searched her face.

“Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” he pressed.

Because I can’t
, she thought.
It’s
against the freaking rules.

Instead she said, “Nothing’s wrong—other than the
fact that you hog the covers. And sleep like a windmill. Snore like a buzz saw.”

She reclaimed her coffee mug.

He tried to maintain his serious face, but she saw
his lips beginning to curve. She stretched onto her toes and gave him a quick,
coffee-flavored kiss.

“Don’t forget—tomorrow night you’re all mine,” she
told him over her shoulder as she started for the stairs to take a quick
shower.

He caught her by the waist and pulled her toward
him.

“What about every other night?” he said, pressing
his mouth beside her ear.

Her legs melted, and she leaned back into him.

“And every other night, too,” she managed as he
moved his lips to the hollow at the base of her throat.

His hands were on her hips now, tugging at the
waistband of her yoga pants. Warm against her cool skin.            

“What about the mornings?”

She tried to form a sentence or even a thought,
but desire flooded her body and overrode her brain. She turned and abandoned
her coffee then slipped her hands up under his thin t-shirt.

The shower could wait.

Sasha glared down at the
freckled hand clamped around her wrist. Her own left hand and the eight-inch
blade in it were pinned down against the surface of the counter by the firm
grip.

With little effort, she could twist to her right
and swing her elbow around with sufficient force to knock her tormentor across
the narrow room and into the stainless steel shelving behind him.

With only marginally more effort, she could break each
of the small bones in the hand that trapped hers.

But she did neither.

Instead, she waited for Chef Rouballion to finish
his series of dramatic sighs and launch into the diatribe she knew was coming.

Three, two, one
...

“That is not a chiffonade. I do not know what it
is, but I know what it is not. You, Miss McCandless, are wasting your money and
my time,” he sniffed in the heavily accented English that she had begun to
think was an act.

She counted to ten before she answered him. And
then did it again for good measure. She just had to get through this final
lesson without killing the man.

Mastering French Cooking
, allegedly written
for the home cook, had resulted in an embarrassing visit from the condo board
president regarding the frequency with which her smoke detector sounded but no
apparent mastery of cooking techniques.

So she’d turned to her mother. Valentina
McCandless had approached the task with gusto. But after giving her daughter a
grand total of two cooking lessons, she declared her in need of professional
help and referred her to the executive chef at Pittsburgh’s most expensive
French restaurant.

This pretentious idiot was her last chance.

Finally, she said, “Please, Chef Rouballion. Give
me another chance. Valentine’s Day is tomorrow and I really want to get this
right.”

He eyeballed her in a very un-French-like manner
then sighed and released her wrist. He reached into the colander and slammed
another bunch of fresh spinach onto the cutting board.

“Very well. Again. You must stack them. Neatly
this time, please.”

She arranged the greens into something resembling a
pile.

“Good. And now we roll them up tightly.”

As precisely as she could, she rolled them into a
small bundle.

“And ribbons, please. We cut the thin ribbons.”

She hacked at the roll with the blade, and slivers
of spinach fell to the board. She smiled up at the chef.

“That’s pretty good, right?”

He took his time responding.

“It is acceptable for a hobby cook. For you, it is
astounding,” he said.

Equally astounding was the fact that Rouballion
hadn’t yet been attacked by some culinary student or prep chef who had tired of
his constant snarking about poor knife skills.

“Great,” she said, shrugging off the jab.

She’d set her mind on preparing a classic,
five-course French meal as part of her Valentine’s Day surprise for Connelly,
and she was going to do it—even if meant she had to put up with Rouballion’s
almost comically stereotypical haughtiness.

“This man, he’s special, yes?” Rouballion remarked.

“What?”

“The friend you are preparing this meal for—he
means a lot to you?”