Read Online Utterly Charming by Kristine Grayson - Free Book Online

that the ambulance carried the body of a woman found on the driveway of the house where they arrested Blackstone.
    Max wanted to catch a glimpse of the body before taking the case. He had made a pact with himself when he became a defense attorney: if the case sickened him, he wouldn’t take it because he wouldn’t be able to provide a good defense. So far in his young career he’d had no problems, but this whole burning of a neighborhood thing had him spooked, more than he wanted to admit.
    So he got out of his car and walked toward the ambulance. He was coming up behind it as the attendants pulled the doors open. One of the men stepped inside while the other waited below. Max heard the sound of metal bumping against metal as they took the gurney out.
    The body on the gurney was a woman’s, just as he had suspected, and he was surprised to see that she wasn’t in a body bag. Her long black hair flowed freely down the sides. She wasn’t strapped in either, which he thought odd.
    The attendants set the gurney down, and one of them bent over to reach for the strap that was dangling close to the pavement.
    The body moaned, and the attendant who was still standing sighed. The other attendant stood. “A little soon for that, isn’t it?” one of them asked.
    “Soon for what?” Max asked. He stopped beside them as if viewing bodies was a normal part of his day.
    The attendant closest to him—a beefy man with a bit of a sunburn and an embroidered name tag that read “Lane”—one of those names which was impossible to tell if it was a first or a last—said, “Dead bodies fill with gas, and the gas moves, and sometimes the bodies make this awful moan as the gas leaves.”
    “You’re kidding,” Max said.
    “Nope,” said the other attendant, a slender reedy man whose pasty-white skin made him look like a native Oregonian—the kind that never saw the sun. His name badge read “Bill,” answering the mystery question of first or last once and for all. “Sometimes bodies’ll even—”
    The body on the gurney moaned again. Hair rose on the back of Max’s neck. Then the body sat up.
    “—sit up,” Bill finished weakly.
    The body looked right at Max. It—she—it—had stunning gray eyes that he could have sworn were filled with laughter. Then she threw the blanket off her legs and got off the gurney.
    “Sit up?” Max asked. “You mean like that?”
    “N-N-No,” Lane said.
    The woman grinned. She had dark red lips and a silver streak that ran along one side of her dark black hair. She got off the gurney. She was six feet tall and at least forty, maybe older, and stunningly gorgeous in a buxom but expensive Cruella de Vil sort of way. Then she tilted her head, held her hands out as if in apology, and started for the bank of elevators near the double glass doors.
    Max watched her go, thinking she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the attendants staring after her as if they felt the same way. She pushed the elevator call button with one long red fingernail and then Max remembered that he hated women with long red fingernails—it meant, to him at least, that they were incredibly self-absorbed—and the spell—if that’s what it was—was broken.
    He had just seen a dead body up and walk. His mouth went dry, and he stepped on the curb, not sure what he was going to do. His movement seemed to stun the attendants out of their stupor. Lane gasped as if the sound had been bottled up inside him, and Bill ran for the bank of elevators but wasn’t even halfway there when the woman got on her elevator, turned around, and smiled as the doors closed.
    It wasn’t a nice smile. In fact, the smile made Max shudder.
    He took a deep breath and tried to pull himself together, using all the tricks he had learned in law school and his brief career as an attorney—which then reminded him that he was an attorney, which then made him think about his potential client, under