Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
I didn’t look up but heard amusement in his voice. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Leave your contact information with my paralegal on the way out. Have a pleasant day.”
A minute later, the door clicked open, so I chanced a glance up. Of course I found Gray waiting for my attention. He pointed his eyes down to my trash bin full of roses.
“Allergic?”
I couldn’t hide the smirk. “Yeah. That’s it.”
Gray’s eye’s crinkled at the sides, and he winked. “Next time I’ll send candy.”
“Next time send them to your wife.”
Chapter 4
* * *
Layla
2 years earlier
“You’ll need to change your shoes.”
“Shoes?” I looked down at my feet. The red Brian Atwood strappy sandals didn’t exactly go with the look of my conservative lawyer suit. But if I was forced to work here on a Saturday, I needed something to help me feel human. And they certainly weren’t so off that I’d need to change them. I looked back up at the corrections officer. “What’s wrong with my shoes?”
“No open-toe shoes allowed in a federal correctional facility.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
“No one told me. I drove four hours at five o’clock this morning to get here. It’s my first day of volunteering.”
She smirked. “What’d you do wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“Lawyers who volunteer up here on the weekend are usually not really volunteers.”
“Oh.”
The corrections officer raised a brow—she was waiting for an actual answer.
I sighed. “Two hundred hours of community service for violating attorney-client privilege.”
She whistled. “Two hundred hours. Sanctions dished out here are easier than that.”
“Oh yeah? What happens when someone gets in trouble here?”
“Snitches get stitches.”
Great. Just great.
She handed me back my identification. “So you have an extra pair of shoes or what?”
“I don’t. Is there a store around here where I can grab a pair of pumps or something?”
“Twenty miles up the road is a Walmart.”
I looked at my watch. “I’m supposed to start in thirty minutes.”
“Better get a move on then.”
***
I was inside a prison. Not in the type of visitor room you might see on TV—one where the visitor is on one side of thick safety glass, and the parties need to lift a phone to hear each other—but inside an actual prison where men walked around freely. Unlike the neighboring, higher-security prison, the Otisville minimum-security prison camp where I’d be teaching classes every Saturday for the next few months felt sort of like a college. The perimeter of the facility had no fencing. Inmates didn’t even live in locked cells. Instead, they had dormitory-style housing and lockers. If I hadn’t known it was a prison when I walked in, I wouldn’t have looked twice at the men walking around in leisurely khakis and button-downs. Most could have passed for professors. They seemed to be mostly older men, clean cut, and with an air about them that said their other homes were penthouses.
“How many people does this facility house?” I asked the guard walking me to the library.
“Goes up and down on any given day, but usually a little over a hundred.”
We walked through a door and down a long, windowed corridor. The men outside were smiling and seemed to be enjoying themselves.
“Is that…a bocce court?”
He chuckled. “Yep. Got a baseball field better than my kid’s high school, too. They don’t call these camps Club Fed for nothing.”
The place was way nicer than I’d expected, but the library—the library was pretty damn insane. Two dozen stacks held more books than my local public library had housed growing up. There were large tables with wooden chairs that reminded me of the ones I’d sat at until late at night in law school. A glass wall separated a large classroom with a flat-screen computer monitor at every desk.
“Jeez.” I looked around.
“Not what you expected, I take it.”
“Not at all.”
The guard pointed toward the classroom. “The library will be closed to anyone who isn’t registered to take your classes. So you can use the classroom or the library, whatever you want. I think there are fourteen guys registered in the class that starts today, not including Westbrook. So you’ll have plenty of room.”
“Westbrook?”
“He coordinates all the classes going on right now.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Speak of the devil.” The guard lifted his chin. “Here comes our resident pretty boy now.”
I turned to find a tall, dark-haired man coming toward us. Walking with another man, he kept his head down until he reached the doorway to the library. When he lifted it, the view made my heart do a little two-step dance. “Pretty boy” didn’t do the man justice. He was gorgeous. Ridiculously so. The type of rugged, dark, masculine looks that probably made him completely arrogant and full of himself. My weakness.
Our eyes caught, and a slow, cocky smile spread across his face. It was then that the big guns came out—the most prominent, deepest dimples I’d ever seen.
Yep. He’s definitely full of himself.