Anything You Can Do - By Sally Berneathy Page 0,44

of the table.

"Can I get you anything else?" she asked the room at large.

"Looks like we're set," Stafford answered, and Paula turned and left the room.

Secretaries always served coffee, but this time Bailey felt strange about it. Paula was her friend. Paula was a part of any group she was a part of. Paula didn't serve food like a waitress and then disappear.

"I think we ought to consider the offer," Hollis Montgomery, the only partner under the age of forty, announced. "That guy they sent over from St. Louis is doing some good things with that firm. They're on the move, streamlining their operation. It's a real chance for us to grow."

"I don't like it," Edmund Bradshaw, second in seniority to Stafford, droned. "We're doing all right by ourselves, been doing all right for a lot of years."

"What's wrong with doing better than all right?" Eugene Lawson queried.

"How much better do you want to do?" Milton Chandler asked. "Between our salaries, bonuses, perks, and side investments, everybody’s been worried about tax shelters, not about meeting the mortgage payments."

Bailey studied Stafford Morris' face as the debate continued. He looked uninvolved, almost bored.

He already knew what everyone would say, she realized. Six partners. That's why I was invited. To break the tie. But on which side was he counting her? She'd have to try to think about this objectively.

"What's your opinion, Stafford?" she asked, her first comment since the discussion had begun.

"I agree with everybody," he growled around his cigar, his eyes squinted against the spiraling smoke. "There's advantages and disadvantages, and which ones are important will be a personal call for all of us." Without raising his head, he blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. "How about you?"

She nodded slowly. "I need to think about all the ramifications."

That pretty much told her which side he was going to come down on. Stafford was comfortable where he was, big fish in a little pond, king of the mountain. Which meant he probably expected her to vote against the offer too. Another aspect of the situation she'd have to ignore in making her decision.

"Be back here Monday morning," Stafford said when Hollis Montgomery slammed his fist onto the table in response to Edmund Bradshaw's latest statement. "We'll fight some more and then take a vote."

Bailey returned to her office feeling more disoriented than she had at the beginning of the meeting in spite of the coffee and rolls. Falling into her chair, she spun it around and looked out the window at the parking lot next door. The rectangular cars sat quietly in tidy, rectangular rows.

Until recently she'd thought her life was like that, tidy and symmetrical. Bad enough her personal life had gone down the tube with all her time and thoughts centering on Austin, but now her career, which had been proceeding on schedule, was suddenly an unknown element. And she would cast the deciding vote. That was a hell of a thing to put on somebody's shoulders who wasn't even officially a partner yet.

Leaning back in her chair, she crossed her arms and chewed on her bottom lip. Her instinct rebelled at the thought of merging with another firm. But on the other hand, maybe she'd grown into the situation here and could just as easily adjust to another. In a bigger firm, there was certainly greater potential for advancement and growth.

Not that Stafford Morris had ever tried to stop her personal expansion within the firm. They'd fought tooth and nail over a lot of things, and he had been known to pull rank on her. But in the overall picture, she had no real complaints. She'd pretty much been allowed to carve her own niche.

Conversely, stories she'd heard via the grapevine about the new and improved Kearns, Worley firm indicated the niches were carved before the insertion of attorneys. She could see that. Pushy as Austin was, he'd enjoy molding people to his specs, but she'd be damned if he'd get the chance to mold her.

Bailey kicked at the credenza behind her, spinning her chair back around to her desk. Damn! Her personal feelings were intruding on a business decision. She couldn't let that happen.

Pulling a yellow legal pad from the middle of one of the stacks on her desk, she ripped off the top pages and drew a line down the middle of the first blank sheet. On one side she wrote "Pro," on the other, "Con," and began making her lists.

She muttered an expletive as