Into the Blue (A Wild Aces Romance) Read Online Free Page A

to fly, Becca temporarily pushed from my mind.
    Time to go to work.

BECCA
    I downed my fourth cup of coffee for the day, cringing a bit as the lukewarm liquid hit my mouth. Definitely a Monday.
    I flipped through the case file again, skimming the words contained there. The First Appearance was scheduled for later in the week.
    Our circuit bled right up to Columbia, so we occasionally got some students who lived in between the two cities, taking advantage of lower-cost housing in exchange for a slightly longer commute. This case was a DUI, a college student who’d driven home after a night of partying too hard and throwing back too many beers. He’d been pulled over and failed both his field sobriety test and a Breathalyzer. He was a kid, but he was a kid who’d made the same mistake one too many times, and since this was his second offense, we were going after a harsher sentence than he would have received as a first-time offender.
    Luckily, he hadn’t injured anyone—or worse.
    A lot of the cases that came across my desk were difficult reads. I’d seen more of the horrible things people could and would do to one another than I’d ever imagined before I started working at the Solicitor’s Office seven years ago. The ones with children were the worst. I’d lost count of how many times I’d cried in private reading about some heinous act that had been committed, how many times the anger burned inside me, hot and bright.
    It wasn’t supposed to be personal; I understood the reasons behind it, at least, but sometimes nothing gave me greater satisfaction than watching someone pay for the evil they’d wrought.
    This case wasn’t the worst, not by a long shot; on its face it was mundane, even.
    Just not to me.
    I wanted to scream at this kid that he had no fucking business getting into a car after he’d been drinking. None. I couldn’t, of course—
it isn’t personal
—but God, I wanted to.
    I wanted to ask him if he thought the seven beers he’d consumed were worth the damage they could have caused, weighed against a life.
    I was ten years old and my parents were driving back from a wedding in Columbia when a drunk driver heading in the opposite direction crossed over the median and hit them head-on. My dad died at the scene, my mom a few hours later in the hospital from injuries sustained at the accident.
    The driver survived with little more than a few scratches.
    I’d gone to bed that Saturday night, my head full of my parents’ promise to take me to the beach for the day the next morning, dreaming of sun and waves, wondering if I could convince them to take our old Labrador with us. I’d woken up to tears and the stark reality that there would be no more family trips anywhere, because one person’s careless mistake had taken my family away from me.
    I’d gone to live with my mom’s elderly mother, moving from a house full of laughter and love to a quiet space where our grief swallowed us up.
    The driver received ten years in state prison and a twenty-two-thousand-dollar fine for what the court called a felony DUI, also known as killing both of my parents. Five years and eleven thousand dollars per parent. He was out in six.
    I went to law school.
    Twenty-one years later, my grandmother long gone, I was still angry. Maybe I should have been forgiving. Maybe thatwould have been a sign of my growth. But forgiveness had never come easily for me, so I stayed with angry. I couldn’t right the wrong done to my parents, but I sure as hell could do everything in my power to protect others from the same thing happening to them. There were hard cases, ones we lost that we should have won, times justice eluded me, but for the most part I genuinely felt like I helped people.
    My e-mail pinged, adding to the seventy-five unread e-mails filling my box, and I groaned, already reaching for the bottle of pain relievers I kept on my desk.
    My hand froze midway as I read the words on the screen.
    Eric Jansen has sent you