Take the Chance (Top Shelf Romance #9) - Brittainy Cherry Page 0,157

looking like they wanted to say more. Both of them giving the Victorian a final, longing glance. After his wife was in the car, Gerald Abbott fixed me with a stern look.

“Good luck with your test,” he said, then climbed in.

I watched the sedan drive away. The instant it rounded the corner, out of sight, I sank to the steps, my briefcase scraping along the cement beside me as I dropped it to cover my face with my hands. I sucked in deep breaths, grasping for calm when panic was tossing me like a tiny ship on a vast ocean.

Holy fuck, it’s happening. And I was so close. A few more weeks…

Defeat tried to drown me, but I shrugged it off. I had rights. If the Abbotts were here for a fight, I’d give it to them. I’d give everything until there was nothing left of me.

Livvie…

I fished my phone out of my jacket pocket. “Jackson,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I need you.”

I’d never been more grateful for my eidetic memory in my life. The American Legal History exam was all names and dates, statutes and by-laws, ground-breaking precedents and Founding Fathers. I scanned my mental database for the answers, and finished the exam in record time.

At the meeting in my advisor’s office, she asked me twice if I needed a glass of water and once if I wanted to reschedule when I was ‘feeling better.’ I pushed through, pushed my emotions aside where they sunk their claws in my back and shoulders. Under the conference table, my leg wouldn’t stop bouncing.

The day crawled and yet flew by, and at a quarter to three, I met Jackson at the Starbucks.

“Jesus, will you calm down?” he said while waiting in line to order. “I’m getting an ulcer just looking at you.”

“I have a bad feeling about this,” I said. “A fucking horrible feeling. I have rights,” I spat. “They can’t just take her from me…”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down,” Jackson said. “We have no idea what they want yet.”

“They want a hearing, Jax,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the front entrance. “It’s already set up.”

“We’ll see,” he said.

“Do you know what you’re doing? It’s a far cry from tax law…”

Jackson fixed me with a raised-eyebrow stare. “You have the money to retain someone else? ‘Cause if you do, I’ll give you my phone to call him right now. I’m taking time out of my work to be here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, sucking in a breath. I clasped his hand. “God, I’m sorry, man, really. I trust you. I’m just scared shitless.”

“I know you are. Go ahead and be an asshole to me if it helps, but as your attorney, I’m officially advising you to not be an asshole to these people, okay? They’re Olivia’s family, for one thing. For another, you catch more bees with honey, or some shit.”

I nodded absently. My mind was reeling, going in a thousand different directions. One thought stuck out from the rest, in bold type.

Molly is dead.

I’d spent the last ten months praying she wouldn’t come back to try to take Olivia from me. She’d obviously been a mess the night she gave her to me; drunk and disheveled, and looking as though she lived out of her car. Maybe that wasn’t the real her, or she’d had a bad night, but that was the mental snapshot she’d left me of her as a mother.

But she had been Olivia’s mother, and in the back of my mind, I’d always assumed she’d be in our daughter’s life somehow. Now that was over. I would never have to explain to Olivia that her mother had left her. Instead, I would have to tell her she died.

She has no mother, either.

A deep pain for my little girl that I added to the noxious concoction of emotions swirling in my guts.

It was my turn to order. “I’ll take a tall coffee.”

“Decaf,” Jackson told the barista, and shot me a wink. His reassuring smile faded as he looked over his shoulder. “This must be them.”

I looked to the front where the Abbotts were coming in, Holloway holding the door for open.

“That’s them,” I said.

“They look like money,” Jackson said.

The knot of fear twisted tighter. The Abbotts had money. Enough to fight me. Enough to tell a judge they had the means to provide Olivia with a life I couldn’t afford.

Jackson sighed and elbowed me in the arm. “Hey. You’re jumping to conclusions in that big brain of yours.