Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) - By Elizabeth Ruston Page 0,52

and clasped Marcela’s wrist. “This has to stay between us. Please. It was a bad moment—I was sick. But it isn’t how things really are. So please just forget you ever saw it, whatever it was.”

Marcela smiled indulgently. “I won’t ever tell anyone, but just between you and me? I wish a man would look at me that way.”

Twenty-one

By the time Sarah returned to the hotel, her muscles felt like mush. She forgot how exquisitely painful and wonderful it was to have someone dig their fingers into her sore back and shoulders. And the Missoula massage therapist had fingers like thick wooden dowels, which made her work on the bottoms of Sarah’s feet particularly cruel and wonderful.

She lay on the bed in her hotel room for a while, still basking in the aftereffects of the massage, and enjoying the fact that for once she didn’t need to rush. Her next flight wasn’t until the morning. Unlike the previous weeks of depositions, these next ones were in cities too small to have more than a few flights a day. So they would all stay put wherever they happened to be every night, then catch the first flight out every morning.

Sarah had to marvel again at the insane schedule Paul Chapman devised. If it were up to her, they would have taken depositions all over the country, drawing from a larger sample, instead of deposing only a few people at a time in these towns all across the west.

But then, she didn’t agree with so much of how Paul Chapman ran his case, so that was nothing new.

And besides, she reminded herself, the only reason she had this job in the first place was because the schedule was so crazy. Mickey’s boss didn’t want to waste one of his own in-house lawyers on traveling hither and yon five days a week. So in a way, Sarah had Paul Chapman to thank for her nicely increasing bank account.

That made it a little easier to stand the man. Just a little.

But it wasn’t Chapman she was thinking about at the moment, and it certainly hadn’t been his hands she imagined working out the knots in her tense shoulders, kneading the muscles up and down her legs—

“Just between you and me? I wish a man would look at me that way.”

“Stop it,” Sarah said out loud. She never should have let the conversation with Marcela get that far. And she definitely didn’t need her own thoughts to spin out the irrational fantasy further.

What she needed to do was work. Hard. Now.

She took a moment to order a baked potato and a bowl of vegetable soup from room service, then she booted up her laptop. The purchase orders and other internal documents she started reviewing the week before were beginning to form a picture.

Every time she found some new piece of the puzzle, no matter how small, she felt a thrill, a buzzing all along her skin. Her eyes softened, and a smile tugged at her lips. It felt a little like lust, she had to admit, which maybe no one but another lawyer would understand. But she couldn’t deny the thrumming sensation in her nerves whenever she uncovered something she knew no one else had found—that no one was even looking for yet—and here it was, in her hands, ready to take advantage of whenever the time was right.

She was sure Joe didn’t know about it—why would he? And Chapman? The man was completely clueless.

But beyond the shear pleasure of discovery, Sarah felt something else: hope. Because if she was right—if she could prove this—then she felt certain she could save her career. What had begun as a temporary job—a job in purgatory, as Joe saw it—could turn into Sarah’s ticket back.

Sarah spent the next hour drafting a lengthy e-mail to one of the other attorneys in Mickey’s office who was also working on the case. She provided him with a list of the kinds of information she needed. She would have preferred preparing the interrogatories and requests for documents herself, but she knew it wasn’t practical during a week with so much travel. She only hoped that Mickey’s colleague could follow her detailed instructions, and get her the final, damaging proof she needed.

Then everything would change.

***

Chapman was in an unusually jolly mood. Sarah and Joe exchanged bewildered glances every now and then as the man chuckled and joked and teased his way through the morning deposition. At one point it seemed as if he