Free ROMANCING MO RYAN by Mallory Monroe Page B

said.   “You’ll be surprised.”
    Lance told her to always be complimentary.   “Don’t overdo it,” he had warned, “but don’t be your regular, honest-to-a-fault self, either.”
    “Maybe you can help me to appreciate it,” she said to Mo.   “Maybe you can lend me one of your jazz CDs.”  
    Mo stared at Nikki without responding.
    “Well,” she asked, smiling, attempting to play the game for the first time in her life.   But somehow she felt Mo was worth it.   “Do you think you can lend me one of your jazz CDs?”
    “Don’t, Nikki,” he said with a frown on his face.
    Nikki had no clue what he meant.   “Don’t what?” she asked him.
    “Don’t try to play that sweet little seductress bullshit with me because that’s not who you are.   And that’s not who I want you to be.”
    Nikki’s heart plunged.   Was she that obvious?   She was a pro when it came to journalism, to doing her job, but she almost felt retarded when it came to men and sex and love and relationships.   She thought she had learned a lesson by watching her mother and sisters go through the pain and heartbreak of all of those love gone wrong sagas, and she thought she had learned the lesson well.   But now that she was with Mo, a man who broke every image she had in her mind of the man-as-dog stereotype, she began to wonder if maybe she had learned the wrong lesson.
    “I didn’t mean to come across that way,” she said, that sincere look on her face.   “Well, actually I did mean to, but I thought I could get away with it.”
    Mo smiled, shook his head, and then laughed.   “You are really something special, you know that, Nikki?” he said.
    Nikki smiled too.   Then, since she had him in a good mood, she got down to business.   “What about the Sheppard case?” she asked Mo.   She decided to stop groping around in darken rooms she knew nothing about, and get back into a place she knew quite well. A safe place for her.
    “What about it?” he answered her question with a question of his own.
    “Sheppard’s innocent.   He didn’t kill that mother and her daughter.”
    “I don’t know that, and neither do you.”
    Nikki stared at him.   No he didn’t say that, she thought.   “How can you say that?” she asked.   “The hair and fiber evidence, at least what the defense team has been able to salvage, all points to innocence.”
    Mo leaned back in his booth, his eyes trained on Nikki’s.   “Maybe,” he said.
    “Maybe?   What are you talking about?   The evidence has exonerated him.   It’s cut and dry!”
    “It’s not so cut and dry to me, nor the prosecutor who tried the case.   From what I understand, the prosecutor has already made clear that if Shepard’s conviction is overturned, his office will retry the case.”
    Nikki shook her head.   “But Shepard is obviously innocent.   The hair and fiber evidence proves it.   What more do y’all want?”
    Mo sighed.   “Did you attend the trial?” he asked her.
    Nikki paused.   She knew what was coming next.   “You know I didn’t,” she said.
    “Did you read the court’s transcripts?”
    “Not all of them, no.”
    He looked at her.   “Then what the hell are you talking about?”
    But she wouldn’t back down.   She might have been relationship-challenged, but she was as feisty as a charging bull when it came to right and wrong.   “From what I’ve read of those transcripts, the case itself was purely circumstantial,” she pointed out.   “If there’s any evidence to show that somebody else was at the crime scene, as there now is, it would shoot to hell the prosecution’s theory and would have to point to innocence for Wade Sheppard.   Everybody knows that.”
    “Everybody who didn’t attend the trial knows that,” Mo pointed out.   “Everybody who never read the court’s transcripts knows that.   But Max Gerard, the prosecutor, was there.   And so was I.   So before you completely conclude that we’re