Doubt (Caroline Auden #1) - C. E. Tobisman Page 0,59

felt so fine on her breasts, her waist, between her legs?

As if sensing her gaze, Eddie opened his dark eyes.

In silence, his black eyes traced along Caroline’s face. He reached out a hand and brushed it lightly along the curve of her hip.

Caroline’s body responded, her skin flushing hot at his touch.

She told herself she needed to get up. She needed to leave.

But again, her body refused to oblige.

In fact, it did the exact opposite.

CHAPTER 9

Caroline floated through the airport. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Eddie’s appreciative gaze as he’d leaned against the headboard, one arm behind his head, watching her move around his dimly lit hotel room as she’d dressed. His eyes had tracked her until she leaned forward to kiss him one last time. It had felt good.

Now she walked down the Jetway, pulling her rolling briefcase behind her. Before she’d closed the three-ring binder and shoved it into the briefcase, she’d added the one final, key piece of the puzzle: the Heller article. That had felt good, too.

As she entered the plane, some part of Caroline’s mind whispered that air travel usually triggered anxiety. But another part of her mind told her to stuff it. This flight was different. She was on her way to New York, where they were going to defeat Med-Gen’s Daubert motion. The plaintiffs would get their settlement. The danger to her would dissipate. She could stop thinking about getting a gun and learning how to fire it.

Caroline spotted Louis and Dale in first class. Beside Dale sat a portly man with a beard that failed to make him look any older than the twentysomething he probably was.

“How’s everyone doing this morning?” Caroline asked the group. In her ears, her voice sounded almost jarringly chipper. It couldn’t be helped. Nothing could sink her buoyant mood.

From his seat by the window, Louis smiled. “The dogs let me sleep in, so I’m grand this morning, Ms. Auden. Just grand.” Caroline knew the reason for his joy was more than his dogs. “I know I’ve thanked you already,” Louis continued, “but I want to thank you again in person. Finding the Heller article was nothing short of brilliant.”

“Yeah, great job,” said Dale from across the aisle. “I read it this morning, and boy, oh, boy, is that good stuff.” He gestured with his chin toward the man who overflowed the seat behind him. “This is my assistant, Harold. He’s my tech wizard. He’s the one I credit for getting me to step into the twenty-first century.”

Behind Dale, Harold met Caroline’s eyes and shook his head no.

Caroline allowed a flicker of a smile to cross her face in silent kinship with Harold. A fellow digital native trying to lead another digital immigrant into the future.

“Hello, Harold . . . I’m just glad we got it filed,” Caroline said, lifting her rolling briefcase into the overhead bin before sitting down in the aisle seat beside Louis and across from Dale. “Once we add Ambrose’s findings on mitochondrial degradation to Heller’s findings about how SuperSoy affects mitochondria, I don’t know how we can lose.”

Caroline knew she was supposed to hedge. Lawyers hedge. Always. They operate in the gray areas, battling to convince judges to buy their version of events, to believe their narrative over the other guy’s narrative. There’s no such thing as a sure thing in the law. Ever. And yet, Caroline felt bullish about their chances. SuperSoy damaged kidneys. The conclusion wasn’t debatable anymore. It was a fact.

She searched Dale’s face to gauge his reaction to her assessment of Ambrose.

Dale shrugged. “I confess I haven’t spent a ton of time with the articles. The way I see it, the meat of our argument is exactly what prompted us to file suit against Med-Gen in the first place—the proximity in time between the plaintiffs’ ingestion of SuperSoy and their kidney failure. That’s the best thing we’ve got. That a doctor would put SuperSoy on his differential diagnosis if he had a patient who came into his office with renal failure is going to be enough science for this judge.”

“You might be right,” Caroline allowed, “but the scientific literature helps us, too. You read those summaries of the main studies, right? Those short paragraphs I prepared?”

“I skimmed them. They were helpful and I appreciate you putting those together for me.”

With a cold bolt of worry in her chest, Caroline nodded.

“Don’t y’all worry,” Dale said. “We’ve got a solid six hours. Plenty of time for you to