Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) - By Elizabeth Ruston Page 0,100
I understood how clever he was.”
“Good,” Sarah said. Letting an opponent bask in some momentary triumph was always a good foundation for then chipping away at his victory.
“He wanted information from me,” Joe continued. “How long it had been going on, whether I thought Chapman suspected, but you know me.”
“You didn’t say a thing.”
“Nope. Then after a while, once he’d talked enough, I finally told him he’d convinced me—I’d have to leave the case.”
Sarah had been expecting that. It made strategic sense.
“I told him it might take me a day or two to find a replacement,” Joe said, “but that I’d be gone sometime this week.”
“So Felix shows up day after tomorrow,” Sarah said, “you’re gone, and Sollers thinks he won.”
“Yep.”
“Then you quit the firm at the same time and hope you’re out of there before the indictments get served.”
“That’s the plan,” Joe said.
Sarah nodded. “Good. I think you handled it right.” And she meant it. He’d done the right thing—for him.
But now came the hard part.
“I quit, too.”
Joe rounded on her. “You what?”
“I sent an e-mail to Calvin. I told him I have to leave the case.”
“Why?” Joe roared. “Sarah, are you crazy? Why would you do that? Why didn’t you at least wait to talk to me?”
“Because I knew you’d try to talk me out of it.”
“Damn right I would have!” Joe ran a hand over his tired face. “Sarah, you didn’t have to do that. All it takes is for one of us to quit—you know that. Sollers got what he wanted. So why would you throw away your job, too?”
“Because it’s already over,” Sarah said. “You understand that guy as well as I do. He’d always keep this hanging over my head—our little secret. Then one day he’d use it against me when he thought he could get some advantage in the case.”
She looked him intensely in the eyes, willing him to understand. “Joe, I actually have a viable defense in this case. Something I came up with that nobody else has. Do you think I’m going to jeopardize that for the client just so I can hide something about my personal life?”
Joe groaned. “There has to be some other solution.”
“There isn’t,” Sarah said. “Believe me, I thought it through for hours and hours this afternoon. But I kept coming back to the same thing: I’m not going to be one of those people who pretends the law doesn’t apply to me. Look what happened to the partners in our firm—is that the kind of lawyers we want to be?”
“This is a hell of a lot different, Sarah, and you know it.”
“You’re right, it is different. But the fact is, Joe, we got caught. We’ve been doing something that is technically, ethically wrong, and now there’s a price to pay for that. And I’m willing to pay it.”
“Tell me how this is different from what I did after my mother died,” Joe said.
“What?” The comparison made no sense.
“Me punishing myself for not being there. And look how I did it—by pushing you away. Do you think that was smart?”
“No,” she said carefully, “I think it was dumbest thing you’ve ever done in your life. But I’m not punishing myself by pushing you away. I want to pull you toward me, Joe. A night like tonight? I want that all the time. No more of this sneaking around, waiting for someone like Ryan Sollers to snap a few pictures of us and hold them over our heads. I want what we had before. I want a redo. I think I’m entitled.”
Joe shook his head, but she could see a light glimmering somewhere in his eyes. She was getting through to him—she knew it.
“Do you remember that Negotiation class I took?”
Now it was Joe’s turn to seem confused. “Yes, but what—”
“It has everything to do with this,” she answered before he could finish. “The professor—that guy Shefter—told us the most important thing in any negotiation is to understand our bottom line. Then to pile on a whole basket of terms we don’t actually care about, so we can start giving them away, one by one.
“So I asked myself that this afternoon,” Sarah continued. “What is my bottom line? What can I absolutely not give away? And I came up with two things.”
She shifted position now, kneeling on either side of his thighs. “One of them is the interests of my client—I’m never going to sacrifice that. And the other one is you, Joe. You have to know that