Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) - By Elizabeth Ruston Page 0,1
light, but obviously Joe had taken good care of himself. The results were . . . impressive. She couldn’t deny it, even if she would never admit it to Burke’s face.
But she was glad she wore her best suit today: the slim black skirt and perfectly-tailored jacket, with a white silk shell underneath. Her hair had behaved, looking smooth and under control and curling only at the ends the way she wanted. Normally it fought her—hard. She had taken special care with her makeup, too, giving her eyes more drama than she normally would for a daytime work event, and making sure the color on her lips would last for several hours.
It had been a long time since she had a reason to put on her full lawyer uniform and war paint. She’d gotten a little too used to spending her days bare-faced and in workout clothes. But she was back now, ready to do battle. And she knew she looked the part.
Joe wasn’t the only one who had grown up over the past six years, Sarah thought. She couldn’t help wondering if he noticed.
***
“I think I have something for you,” Sarah’s friend Mickey said when he called her the week before. “Get off the couch and come down here this afternoon.”
“I’m not on the couch,” she said, panting into the phone.
“Then get off of whoever you’re doing right now and get down here,” Mickey said before hanging up.
Sarah ended the call and her music kicked back on. She had both ear buds in and had already run two miles on the treadmill. Now Neko Case sang to her while she sweated through the next quarter mile. She already had her lineup of music to carry her through the last three miles, but glancing at the clock, she knew she had to cut it short or she’d never get the weight-lifting in, too. As much as she hated short-changing any workout—and what a laugh that was, considering how she felt about exercise as little as a year ago—she knew she needed the time to go home and shower and change and make herself look like a lawyer again. A working lawyer. An employed one. God, she hoped so.
Whatever the job was, she’d take it. If Mickey really had come through for her, she owed him something big. Just not the thing he pretended he wanted.
Sarah slowed to a walk, then hit the stop button a few minutes later. She signaled her trainer, Angie, who had her own ear buds in as she worked through a weight-lifting session of her own. Sarah’s time didn’t start for another half hour, but she hoped Angie wouldn’t mind taking her early. This could be it. This could be Sarah’s salvation.
Even, as she found out a few hours later, with Joe Burke on the other side.
***
“It’s just a contract job,” Mickey’s boss, Calvin, told her. “We decided to bring in someone from the outside instead of using manpower from in here.”
Mickey handed Sarah an expandable file that was expanded to its full capacity. “Here are the pleadings so far. It’ll probably take you the weekend to read through them.”
“Are you saying I have the job?” Sarah asked both him and Calvin.
“Mickey says you’re a killer,” Calvin answered, rising to his feet and signaling the interview was over. “Check in with HR and they’ll get all your paperwork.”
“We haven’t discussed the pay yet,” Sarah said, and even though Mickey gave her a look that said, Not now, Sarah persisted. She was doing this for the money, not for the prestige. Especially since there was absolutely no prestige in being the traveling lawyer who would take depositions all around the country for the next five months or so while the real attorneys on the case would sit comfortably in their plush Los Angeles offices waiting for her to report back in.
Calvin mentioned a number, and Sarah shook her head. As desperate as she was for the job, she guessed Mickey’s firm needed her, too. It was hard to find a lawyer with her experience and reputation—or at least her former reputation—who would be willing to fly to four or five different cities each week and sit through hours of testimony about how the firm’s client had ruined the plaintiffs’ lives.
And if Sarah could actually make something of the case, she thought, come up with some defense none of the other attorneys had considered, maybe this would be her ticket to a full-time job.