The defense attorney, a walking cliché of paunch and righteous anger, set a composition book in front of Dr. Maria Keaton on the witness stand.“Do you recognize this diary?” Buck Collier pointed with his thick finger.Maria stared at the marbleized cover, rubbed almost gray. Her patient, Griff Butler, had scrawled shapes into the cardboard, bearing down so hard he’d drilled red and blue ink beneath the surface. He’d written words and then crossed them out with heavy marker. He’d drawn muscle-bound men firing guns that sprayed bullets across the mottled cover.And he’d tried to make her read the pages, swollen with his secrets.He’d had a crush. Sometimes patients got them, but as they healed, they also found out they didn’t truly love their therapists.But one look at the man behind the judge’s bench, just above her, made her reconsider. The man whose gaze she’d avoided because his black eyes made her painfully aware that inappropriate, nearly mind-drugging attraction could also afflict her.
