The Cost of Happiness: A Contemporary Romance

by Braden, Magdalen

  “What do you need?” Vicky asked.

  Dan gave a huge sigh and frowned. Overacting a bit, Meghan would have said.

  “Meghan here has screwed up some document retrieval in Ohio. I promised Darlene and Wally I’d supervise her, so I’m going to have to go with her to fix the mess. I need you to handle some things in my absence. Can you do that?”

  “Of course, Dan,” Vicky’s voice was breathless with her eagerness to help. “But wouldn’t it be better if you and I dealt with the problem in Ohio?”

  Dan appeared to consider this as a desirable alternative. Meghan nearly choked on her laugh when he tilted his chin back, pursed his lips and—yes, he actually steepled his fingers. How many clichés was he going for here?

  Suddenly he shook his head, slowly, sadly. “I wish we could fix it that way, but I don’t see how. Unfortunately, getting all of Meghan’s notes deciphered and sorted out would take too long.”

  Meghan hung her head, ostensibly in shame but really just to hide the way her lips were twitching.

  “Oh, Dan, you know I’ll do anything you need. Shall I stay so we can go over the cases you want my help on?”

  Oh, and can we go to your place to talk about them—? Vicky’s unspoken meaning was so obvious, it might as well be subtitled.

  “I wish we could. Unfortunately—” he really emphasized the word “—Meghan’s screw-up is going to require my attention. Let me get it sorted out, then I’ll let you know what I need you to do, okay?”

  Vicky sat for a while. From behind, Meghan could only guess what facial contortions she was making to convey her devotion to Dan’s needs—all his needs—and how he had only to let her know what he wanted her to do. His face, though, hit on an expression of exhausted gratitude and stuck there.

  Finally, Vicky sighed her disappointment and stood. “Okay. Well, you’ll call me when you want me, right?”

  “I will call you when I know what I need you to do, yes.”

  She reached out a hand as if to touch him reassuringly, caressingly, on the shoulder. “I’m happy to help. You know that.” Another pause, then she left, leaving the door open behind her.

  Meghan kept her face down, writing nonsense on her pad.

  Dan waited a minute, then buzzed Tessa. She came in, her face completely calm. She hesitated in the doorway.

  “Yes? Is there anything I can do for you?” Tessa’s voice was hiked up a notch, high and breathless. Meghan looked up at her, astonished. Tessa was one of the most no-nonsense administrative assistants in the firm. Out of the corner of her eye, Meghan could see Dan’s open mouth and wide eyes.

  “Were you listening in?” he asked, finally.

  “Please. I have actual work to do.” Tessa’s voice dropped to its usual timbre. “But you should know you’re just the latest in a long line of partners to be offered that woman’s undivided attention.”

  Dan rolled his eyes. “Spare me.”

  Tessa chuckled. “Others have tried, trust me. I’m pretty sure she limits herself to innuendo and invitation. At least, I haven’t heard of anyone actually getting hogtied in the parking garage.”

  “Good to know.” Dan shook his head. “Okay, here’s the thing. How soon can I clear my schedule for—how long will this take, Meghan?”

  “Two days, maybe three? I want to make sure we get everything.”

  Dan turned back to Tessa. “Three days in Ohio? Preferably this week?”

  “The two of you?” Tessa asked. Her tone was matter-of-fact but Meghan could feel herself blushing.

  “Yes,” Dan said. No blushing in his voice.

  “Where in Ohio?”

  Meghan flipped back several pages in her notes. “Elyria. Outside Cleveland, I think.”

  Tessa nodded. “Got it.”

  She closed the door on her way out.

  Meghan turned toward Dan. “Is she onto us?”

  He winced. “‘Onto?’ You make it sound like we’re committing some felony.”

  “No, although I’m pretty sure we’re violating a couple of Fergusson’s rules against workplace harassment and inappropriate fraternization by the staff.”

  “You just made that up,” he accused. His face had sobered, though, which took some of the fun out of her joke.

  Meghan smiled at him. “Okay, I made it up. But there is a policies and procedures manual and we have to be breaking some rule.”

  “Is that your way of saying you don’t want me to order in some pizza while we go over your notes?” He waggled his eyebrows in such a silly way that Meghan just laughed.

  “No, it’s not,” she said demurely. “Pizza would be lovely. No olives, though.”

  “I love olives!”

  “So get the pizza with half olives.” Meghan smiled. He was so cute, looking boyish and silly when he overacted for Vicky’s benefit. Now he looked earnest and happy. He looked like a—

  “What is it?” Dan asked immediately.

  Meghan had stopped, stricken by the thought that had popped into her head. She shook it off and changed the subject to something, picked at random from her notes.

  The thought lingered, though. Dan looked like a boyfriend.

  Her boyfriend.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Greg Agnarsson, a wiry man with graying blond hair, lived in a sprawling suburban ranch with a huge garage that he’d converted into a home office and workshop. Workbenches and pegboard dominated most of the perimeter, with clutter relegated to a large heap in the middle. Dan recognized the space as stream-of-consciousness electronics. There were computers, monitors, keyboards piled on top of keyboards. Everything a techie could want to play with.

  “How many of these work?” Meghan asked, staring at a mountain of computer towers.

  “What? Oh, all of them, sort of,” Greg said. He scratched his head, looking distracted by the question. He started to walk over to the collection of hardware when Dan called him back to the task at hand.

  “Documents?” he asked Greg.

  “Oh, right. Here,” the engineer said, taking them over to a bank of file cabinets. “Fireproof, locked, even water resistant, although I’m not in a flood zone.” He pulled a ring of keys from his pants pocket. The ring was connected to his belt by a solid-looking chain. He began to unlock the cabinets.

  “Okay, they’re organized by year, and within each year, by project. The projects are color-coded, so it’s easy to pick out the ones you want.” He reached into the drawer marked 1998 and extracted a thick hanging file with a purple tab. “Purple is the SMS project, codenamed Brief Encounter.”

  Greg handed the files to Meghan, then unlocked another drawer, extracted another purple-tabbed file, then another, and finally one from the 2001 drawer. Meghan carried them into the house, where Greg had cleared off the dining room table so they could spread out and work there.

  Dan looked at the engineer. “Has Meghan explained my concerns about your safety?”

  Greg shrugged. “Yeah, she has. I think you’re both a bit paranoid, but I guess I see what she’s talking about.”

  Dan slipped his hands into his pockets. “I would think a man with locks on all his file cabinets would understand that if the folks at Argus and Tech 3—not to mention ATC—knew you had this material, you might expect a visitor of one sort or another.”

  “Yeah, well…” Greg pursed his lips. “I thought about that a few years ago, after my wife got ill. We did okay with health insurance, but for a while it looked like she might need a procedure the insurance wouldn’t cover. So it occurred to me that maybe I had something of value, you know, something I could sell.”

  “Did you talk to anyone?”

  Greg shook his head. “Nah. Too much like hard work.” He cocked his head, then turned to face Dan. “And you know what else? I didn’t feel any loyalty to those bastards. I wasn’t bitter, but why should I make them sleep better at night, you know?”

  “So, I have to ask. Why are you talking to us?”

  Greg glanced at the door Meghan
had disappeared through. “Your associate, Ms. Mattson.” There was a smile in his voice. “Theresa and I never had kids, but if we had, that girl could have been our granddaughter. When she called, I could hear her eagerness, her desire for answers.”

  Dan nodded. “Yup, she’s very thorough.”

  “Yeah, but it was more than that. She cared what actually happened to me, and to my work. When I told her about the glitch, she got it. She understood how unhappy I was that a mistake was going to make those bastards millions of dollars. I didn’t want the money for myself, you understand. Sure, the customers weren’t even going to notice the extra cost on their bills. But I wanted to fix my mistake, and they wouldn’t let me.” He rubbed his hand across his upper lip. “She understood my frustration.”

  “She’s very good.” Dan wasn’t sure what else to say. Did he know anyone else who would have kept calling people, total strangers, until she knew every last aspect of the story? Blackjack, maybe, if he had the luxury of doing his own discovery. Other than him? No, no one else. And ironically, it was all because Meghan—who should be starting her third year at Franklin Law in a couple of weeks—worked as a paralegal. That gave her the freedom to dig this deep. As an associate, she might have been told not to spend so much time, and so much of the client’s money, on a wild-goose chase.

  Greg smiled. “You’re very lucky.”

  Dan nodded. “Well, I’m grateful she asked, but I’m also grateful you told her.” He patted Greg on the shoulder as he walked back into the house.

  Tessa had booked them into an upscale residential hotel. And she’d gotten them a two-bedroom suite with a separate sitting room/kitchen area. Dan made a mental note to give Tessa a gift certificate for a spa day.

  After they’d checked in and spread out, they read their emails. Dan had twelve—he counted them—from Vicky, plus half a dozen voice mail messages. He sent back one email reply, praising everything she’d done, and hoped that would shut her up. There was also a message from Tessa saying she was keeping his location secret from Vicky, but it was like guarding Fort Knox, the way Vicky kept stopping by Tessa’s workstation.

  Dan laughed, and read Tessa’s email out to Meghan.

  “Poor thing,” Meghan said.

  “You mean Tessa?”

  “No. Vicky.”

  “You’re feeling sorry for Sycophanta?” Dan found that hard to believe.

  “I heard something at the paralegals’ meeting the other day.” Meghan was in the kitchen, reading the microwave instructions on a Stouffer’s mac-and-cheese they’d picked up at a supermarket. She placed the black plastic container into the microwave, set the timer, double-checked the package one last time, then hit the start button with careful deliberation. She even watched the turntable for a moment to make sure it was moving.

  Dan smiled to himself. He really liked Meghan’s thoroughness, a quality she brought to every activity, it seemed.

  Finally she looked over at him. “Darlene was late, so I was working on some notes for this trip. Two of the other paralegals were talking—you know, what they were doing that evening, etc. Then one of them said she’d seen Vicky at the mall with her mother. I guess Vicky’s mom uses one of those power-scooters? She has Parkinson’s. Vicky lives with her. From what the paralegals were saying, that’s why she’s still single.”

  Dan digested this. “That explains a lot.”

  “What do you mean?” Meghan flattened the Stouffer’s box and placed it in the recycling bin.

  Dan shrugged. “Tessa seems to think she does it with all the male partners within a certain age range.”

  “I think it’s sad. I’ll be nicer to her from now on.” Meghan sat next to him on the sofa. Her office laptop was open on the coffee table, but the screen was black. She didn’t appear to have any personal emails or social media to check on the laptop the firm had lent her. Dan had unanswered emails from his siblings, his parents, even a cousin currently studying in Paris. And he refused to look at his Facebook page for fear he’d find messages from people wondering if he was dead.

  “Well, I guess it makes sense, then.” Meghan leaned her head against the back of the sofa. “She must really want to get married. You’ve got to be the only single male partner there, unless there are some divorcés I don’t know about.”

  “I gather Vicky doesn’t discriminate against married men, at least according to Tessa.”

  Meghan grinned. “Gossiping with the administrative staff? Tsk tsk.”

  “Do not quote the handbook to me again. I bet you’ll tell me that I need to go find a hotel on the other side of town.”

  Her smile turned sultry and her eyelids drooped. “No, I’m resigned to the fact that we’ve already broken those rules. It is what it is.”

  Dan rubbed the back of his neck, which was oddly warm. “Yeah, that’s us. Riding roughshod over the firm’s code of ethics.”

  She reached out to close her laptop, then closed his too. “Too much work.” She angled herself to face him. “Not enough kissing.”

  “Good point,” he said against her lips.

  Kissing Meghan was like nothing Dan had experienced before. The world dissolved around them, forgotten in the delight of connecting with her. Even these fully-clothed, tangled-limbs, lying stretched out on the couch kisses were engrossing enough that when the microwave beeped, they both looked up, surprised by the noise. Reality crept in slowly—Meghan, hotel suite, Ohio, dinner, work.

  “I’ll set the table,” she said. Her voice was low and husky. It made him want to skip dinner and go straight to bed.

  “I’ll open the wine.” He busied himself with the corkscrew attachment on his Leatherman tool, opening the bottle of white wine they’d popped into the fridge when they first got to the room. The wine was barely chilled, but he doubted Meghan—clearly still new to drinking wine with dinner—would care. And Dan could have had warm Coke with his meal and still ended up intoxicated by the situation.

  Unfortunately, he had to put his excitement on hold while they continued to work on the case.

  They talked over dinner about the documents Greg Agnarsson had shown them. Detailed notebooks on the project that showed exactly when he’d realized there was a glitch, his painstaking efforts to isolate it, even notes on the meeting with his bosses about the time crunch and whether he’d have time to fix the glitch before the production team needed to lock everything down.

  “I think it shows that it was a Jenner-specific glitch,” Meghan said. She was waving her fork in the air for emphasis. “We’ll need to get Greg’s permission to share those details with the ProCell techies, but that shouldn’t be a problem, right?”

  “I talked to Greg about retaining the firm to protect him when this goes public. He doesn’t see why he needs a lawyer but we know he does. Maybe it shouldn’t be us, though, so I have a call in to Wally to see if there’s any conflict of interest. Worst case, we get another firm to represent Greg. That way if he signs a waiver of privilege with us as ProCell’s counsel, we can use his documents.”

  Meghan stopped chewing, her eyes huge. She took a large swallow of wine. “I hadn’t thought about that. I can’t imagine Greg’s interests are adverse to ProCell’s, though.”

  Dan shook his head, then poured them more wine. “They’re not. The question is whether we can represent both clients simultaneously. A court may feel that we’re not adequately protecting Greg’s interests when we’re so obviously invested in getting ProCell off the class action case.”

  She mulled that over. He loved watching her process legal issues. It was as if the room disappeared and she was back in law school, or maybe even her own apartment, sitting at her desk or in a chair, reading a casebook.

  He wanted to see her apartment. Hell, he wanted to be let into her life. They’d been sleeping together for a few weeks, and still she hadn’t talked at all about what happened to turn Franklin Law’s best student into Fergusson & Leith’s best paralegal. Sometimes Dan thought she was getting closer to sharing t
hat with him, but it never happened. Given his own situation, he didn’t want to push. He was too much of a former prosecutor not to wonder, though.

  He couldn’t make the puzzle pieces fit. Why had she dropped out of law school with just a year to go? She’d said it was because of legal problems. What did that even mean? If she’d been convicted of a crime, the law firm wouldn’t have hired her—too much potential for embarrassment. If she was facing a trial, surely she’d talk about it. Some plea bargain, down to a misdemeanor perhaps.

  Dan had worked exclusively with the federal criminal code, so despite years in the US Attorney’s office he knew as little about state crimes as the next lawyer. She didn’t own a car, and he suspected she didn’t often drink, so not drunk driving. Drugs seemed equally implausible. Theft? Shoplifting?

  Not Meghan. Maybe Dan was blind, but she was a straight arrow. She let him pick up the tab if they ate out, but he could tell she didn’t like it. Nothing about her suggested someone who could rob another.

  Of course, some disputes were he-said-she-said. Two sides to the story and tough to defend. One could plead a case down to something inconsequential just to be spared a trial, but how often did that happen? And why wouldn’t she let Fergusson’s lawyers represent her? No, actually, Dan could well imagine that would be the last favor Meghan would ask for.

  “Okay, I think I see what you’re saying. Even if Greg is assured there’s no conflict of interest, the fact that we started as ProCell’s counsel could suggest that we’d manipulated him, no matter how zealously we represent his interests going forward.”

  “Appearance of impropriety.” Dan shrugged. “Cynical, but I’ve seen judges complain about less.”

  “Okay, but we have to get him a lawyer.”

  Dan smiled at her insistence. “Don’t worry, we will. As I say, I’ve got Wally on that. What I would really like is to bring Greg back to Philly with us, but I’m not sure how he’ll feel about that.”

  “I’ll talk to him, if you want.”

  “He does like you,” Dan agreed. “Let’s see how it goes tomorrow.”