by Abby Gaines
“I’m sorry, Megan,” he said, “you’re not a candidate.”
Her cell phone rang, and through a haze of tears that she would never, in a million years, let her dad see, Megan recognized it was the courthouse. She answered, listened to the clerk. “Thanks, I’ll be right there.”
She pushed her chair away from the table. “Potter’s back.” Already she was stabbing Brandi’s number into her phone, her finger thankfully steady.
“I won’t come with you.” Jonah stood. “I know you’ve won.”
Megan negotiated her way past clusters of dark-suited lawyers engrossed in conversations, doubtless unaware of her existence. Then past Ambulance Corner—she was no longer interested to know whether the Chief was noticing her departure. Failure beat a tattoo at her temples, drumming up a headache that somehow had a matching pain in her heart. Her father’s confidence in her imminent victory for Brandi Carter did nothing to console her.
What does it matter if I win the battle, if I’ve already lost the war?
CHAPTER TWO
BRANDI CARTER WAS sentenced to thirty hours’ community service, which she could complete at her son’s preschool.
“You’re a genius,” she said to Megan.
“Tell that to my dad,” Megan muttered.
Back in the office, she left the Carter file for Trisha, her paralegal, to wrap up, and summoned a list of pending cases to her screen. She was too ticked off to concentrate on a new case, so she might as well start allocating associates to clients.
After that, she moved on to monitoring the family practice’s finances—still billing more hours per head, and thus making more profit, than the other divisions. If Dad would let her at the rest of the business, she could bring clients in, she knew it.
The trouble with admin was that once you started, it ate up the time. Megan forced herself to stop at eight o’clock—the partners’ floor was nearly deserted. As she switched off her PC, her direct line rang.
“Got a lead for you.” The raspy voice could only belong to Bill Chain, a private investigator she occasionally hired for the kind of detective work needed in divorce cases.
“Hello to you, too, Bill.”
He made a chuffing sound. “You want the name?”
“Yes, please.” She picked up a pen.
The detective paused. “Theo Hoskins.”
Megan dropped the pen. “Are you sure?” Theo Hoskins and his wife, Barbara, were one of Atlanta’s wealthiest, most prominent—and reputedly happiest—couples.
“I delivered him some photos tonight. One peek and he was asking for a recommendation on a lawyer.”
People often didn’t want to use their regular family lawyer for a divorce.
“He wanted three names,” Chain said. “Yours was one of the ones I gave him.”
Megan’s mind whirred as she finished the call. Theo Hoskins was a well-known philanthropist and property developer. They called him the Trump of the South, as much for his flair for self-publicity as for his wealth. She wanted to handle his divorce, of course. But what if this time, she went after more? Theo’s extensive business interests made him one of the most sought-after commercial clients in Atlanta. He used a couple of large law firms…but not Merritt, Merritt & Finch.
She’d had high-profile divorce clients before, but hadn’t pursued other opportunities with them. It hadn’t felt right to take advantage of someone’s personal distress.
Right now, her own personal distress was at record levels, and it sure didn’t feel right that her father wouldn’t even consider her to head the firm.
If Megan could convince Theo Hoskins to hire her to represent him in the divorce…and if she impressed him with her work…and if she convinced him to transfer his commercial business to Merritt, Merritt & Finch…
Okay, so that was a lot of ifs. But they were all achievable. Not only would she boost the family division’s profile and prove its value to the rest of the firm, but she’d have made a significant contribution to her dad’s precious commercial practice. A contribution no one could overlook.
MEGAN STAYED in the office until the small hours, unearthing every available scrap of information about Theo and Barbara Hoskins, and sorting them by relevance.
When she was satisfied she knew everything she could be expected to, and several things she couldn’t, she crashed for a few hours at her apartment. At seven, she started making calls. She had to find the cheated-on husband before the other two lawyers the detective had recommended got to him.
It took tenacity, the rescheduling of several appointments, and a flight to Dallas on Theo Hoskins’s private jet, but by seven that evening, Megan had a new client.
The flight turned out to be the only time Theo had available to talk. Impressed by her efforts to track him down, he’d invited her along for the ride. After they landed, he went to a meeting, and Megan boarded a commercial flight back to Atlanta. All the way home, she’d itched to use the seat-back phone to call her father with the good news, but client confidentiality made that impossible.
When they landed it was too late to phone Jonah. Instead, she waited until the earliest possible hour the next morning that she could call without startling her dad into another heart attack.
“The Hoskinses are getting divorced?” Jonah’s voice rose.
“Theo says Barbara plans to take him to the cleaners.” Megan poured granola into a bowl and upended a carton of yogurt over it. Her client was naturally reluctant to let his wife walk off with hundreds of millions of dollars. “Of course, Barbara’s successful in her own right, so disentangling their entitlements could be complicated.”
“This is big,” Jonah said. “The press will be all over it, just like with Paul McCartney and that woman.”
It wasn’t quite in the same league, but her dad had a point. “We’ll be as discreet as we can, but yeah, it’s a headline case.” Megan held the phone closer to her ear, and stirred the granola into the yogurt. “When this is over,” she said casually, “I plan to ask Theo to give Merritt, Merritt & Finch some of his commercial work.” Stating her objective aloud sent a surge of excitement through her.
“I see.” Her father sounded surprised, in a good way. Then he added, “But first, you need to focus on the divorce. If Theo doesn’t come out of that feeling as if he’s won, you won’t stand a chance with anything else.”
As if she didn’t know that.
“I suppose Barbara’s hired some hotshot Manhattan lawyer,” he continued. Mrs. Hoskins was from New York.
“I don’t know,” Megan admitted. At her father’s disapproving silence she added, “Yet.”
To her frustration, she felt the ground she’d gained when she’d signed Theo slipping away.
“I plan to win this case, then win Theo Hoskins’s commercial business,” she said firmly. And refused to take her father’s silence as doubt.
Her dad now fully in the loop, Megan ate her breakfast, the silence of her apartment broken only by the crunch of granola. This was her favorite thinking time.
Whoever Barbara Hoskins hired would make a big difference to how easy Megan’s job was. If it was any of the regular Atlanta crowd, she was sure she could win.
But if it was, as Dad said, a hotshot New Yorker…I can still beat them. I just need to know my enemy.
FOR SOME INCOMPREHENSIBLE reason, Barbara Hoskins chose not to appoint a lawyer from the top echelons of the profession in Atlanta or even New York. Megan’s admin assistant took a call from the assistant of one Travis Jamieson of Prescott Palmer Associates. Mr. Jamieson was representing Mrs. Hoskins and had requested a meeting with Megan to scope out the case. When the assistants couldn’t find a time during the day, Mr. Jamieson’s assistant suggested dinner. Megan’s assistant agreed.
When the appointment notice popped up in Megan’s e-mail, she gave a whoop of excitement that had Trisha, her paralegal, swiveling in her chair at the meeting table in Megan’s office, where they’d been running through a stack of depositions.
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“Barbara Hoskins is represented by Prescott Palmer,” Megan announced.
Trisha took off her reading glasses. “Is that a joke?”
Megan read the e-mail again. “I don’t know Travis Jamieson, but if he’s a divorce lawyer at PPA, how good can he be?”
“Bad.” Trisha ran a hand through her graying curls. “Or very bad.”
Prescott Palmer had a halfway decent property division, but most of its business was family law, and the more dysfunctional the family the better. When sleaze made headlines in a divorce case, the odds were PPA was representing one of the parties. The firm’s strength lay in its ability to force a trial by media rather than in the courtroom.
Surely Mrs. Hoskins wouldn’t want her most intimate details dragged through the press?
Megan squinted at her screen, as if the answer to the mystery might lie there. “His assistant made a reservation at Salt.” One of Atlanta’s finest restaurants.
“Trying to impress you,” Trisha suggested. She sniggered.
“Meaning what?” Megan asked.
“Meaning you’re almost as hard to impress as your father and your sister.”
Megan threw a balled-up piece of paper at her. “I am not.”
Trisha put her glasses back on. “Whatever you say.” She filed away the deposition she’d just transcribed. “But if Travis Jamieson didn’t work for PPA, I’d feel sorry for the guy. He won’t know what’s hit him.”
MEGAN ARRIVED at Salt ten minutes early, with the intention of putting Travis Jamieson at a disadvantage by forcing him to apologize for keeping her waiting.
“Your dinner companion is already seated,” the maître d’ told her as he helped her out of the coat she wore over her rust-colored silk jersey wrap dress.
So much for catching him unawares. It was Megan who was forced to quickly gather her thoughts as she followed the maître d’ across the restaurant. He stopped at a table in the center of the room. “Ms. Merritt has arrived, sir.”
A dark-haired man stood and turned to face her.
Megan blinked, curling her fingers at her sides so she wouldn’t rub her eyes like a bemused moron. This was no stranger. This was the “Chief” from The Jury Room. What’s going on?
“Megan, nice to meet you. I’m Travis Jamieson.” He stuck out his hand and smiled at her. His mouth was generous, and his charcoal-dark eyes gleamed as he scanned her face and figure. Slowly, not so much assessing as…noticing.
“Pleased to meet you, too.” She shook that strong hand, making her clasp as firm as she could. But where her strength was calculated, his was careless, relaxed.
She slid into the seat across the table from him. The waiter poured her a glass of Chardonnay from a bottle Travis had evidently ordered without waiting to learn her preference. She used the small lull to reassert her lawyer’s brain. So Travis Jamieson was possessed of a certain primal male appeal, so what? He was still somewhere near the bottom of Atlanta’s legal hierarchy, and she could take him in a court battle anytime.
She colored at the thought of taking him. What was wrong with her? Was she that starved for attention that one long look from a pair of dark eyes had her fantasizing?
“I saw you last week in The Jury Room,” she said. It would be stupid to pretend she hadn’t. “You asked someone who I was.”
He shook his head. “I knew who you were.” His gravelly voice set up a tingle between her shoulder blades.
Really? “Quite a coincidence that I should see you for the first time last week, then end up opposing you on a case.”
“Good lawyers know there’s no such thing as coincidence,” he said. There was a small but unmistakable emphasis on the “good,” and a teasing inflection in his voice that she decided not to respond to.
“Exactly my point,” she said crisply. “What’s going on?”
He picked up his menu. “Sometimes, good lawyers are wrong. I didn’t know last week that I would be representing Barbara Hoskins…that you would be representing Theo.”
As she scanned her own menu, Megan wondered if he’d at least known of the Hoskinses’ plans to divorce. Even more, she wondered how Barbara had come to appoint him. But like many lawyers, she preferred not to ask questions to which she didn’t know the answer.
“I represented Barbara’s sister in her divorce some years ago,” Travis said. “Barbara felt her sister came out of it with more than they expected. I guess that gave her the confidence to hire me.”
Megan blinked. He’d just answered her unspoken question, no games, no tricks. “I’m not sure I remember…”
He grinned, obviously knowing she planned to look it up. “Mallory versus Mallory, Augusta Superior Court.”
She’d never heard of it, thank goodness. Travis Jamieson couldn’t have handled a divorce this high profile before. She hadn’t either, but she’d come close, and she knew the demands this kind of case put on an attorney. Even if Travis aimed to play it straight, with any luck, he’d be exhausted in a week. She and her client would steamroller through to victory.
She wasn’t about to warn him of the scale of the challenge. Why scare him into trying harder? The secret to her success was that other lawyers barely noticed her, and that made them overconfident.
Although Travis, it seemed, had noticed her. She could only assume he was one of those men who eyed up any woman, just for the sake of it.
“How long have you worked at Prescott Palmer Associates?” She chose the dull sort of question he could answer on autopilot, so that those intense dark eyes would move away from her face.
It worked. He leaned back, reached for a bread roll from the basket in the center of the table. “I had a few years with a big firm in Dallas after I got my degree, then came back to Atlanta ten years ago to join Prescott Palmer. Kyle Prescott and I were in college together.” He broke open the roll, began buttering it.
Megan fought the downturn of her lips. Prescott was reportedly a graduate of Dayton University in Ohio. Rumor had it he’d been thrown out of an East Coast school in his first year for cheating and Dayton was the only place that would take him. If it was true you could judge a man by the company he kept, then Travis Jamieson was…not exactly shady, but a small step above it. Prescott Palmer Associates milked mediocre cases to an extent that made other lawyers shake their heads.
But she wasn’t about to criticize opposing counsel. She would assume Travis was, like her, a professional who could discuss the merits of his client’s case objectively. Even if he worked for a bunch of cowboys.
Right now, he looked so laid-back, arms loosely at his sides, head thrown back, she could imagine he had a horse tethered outside and a range to ride. That wasn’t the kind of cowboy I meant.
And when had “know her enemy” expanded to include the color of his eyes, or the way his chin dimpled when he smiled?
Was he flirting with her in some subliminal way that she didn’t understand? It was more than possible, she conceded.
The waiter took their orders, and Megan sipped her wine as she cast about for a topic that wouldn’t put her in mind of popular romantic fantasies, but which wouldn’t encourage Travis to take her seriously as an opponent. If he’d done any research, he would know she won most of her cases. But lawyers were an arrogant breed; it didn’t take much for them to discount the evidence and assume it was others’ incompetence, rather than her skills, that had prevailed.
TRAVIS BUTTERED another roll while he watched Megan out of the corner of his eye; it seemed to disconcert her when he looked directly at her. He could practically see the cogs turning. He’d heard she was supersmart, and it hadn’t taken her half a second to figure out there was a link between his presence in The Jury Room last week and tonight’s dinner. Even if, at the time, he’d had no idea this dinner would happen.
Last week, she’d worn a gray suit that was all business, and it was her stillness that had drawn Travis’s attention from the more familiar figure of her father. When she’d left the café, she’d seeme
d on the verge of tears. Worried about her case? Later, Travis heard she’d scored a great result in a sentencing hearing—her nutcase client who practically destroyed an eighty-thousand-dollar car had got community service. Which reinforced what he knew: Megan Merritt was a first-rate lawyer.
He couldn’t think why he hadn’t noticed her before. She wasn’t exactly pretty, although she had a nicely shaped face and big eyes. In the dress she wore today, made out of some kind of clinging fabric, it was clear she had an alluring figure to go with her admirable brain. Definitely worth watching.
Travis could only put her previous invisibility down to her air of restraint, an aloofness that erected a barrier between her and others. Which he should not find intriguing, given that she reminded him of the women he’d met in college. Women who thought a blue-collar guy was good for a fling but not someone to take seriously, in class or in life.
He’d seen her reaction to his mention of Kyle Prescott, and it was pretty clear she judged Travis guilty by association. That was fine—best for her to believe he was her inferior in the courtroom.
He leaned back. “So, you handle many divorces?” Which was like asking Venus Williams if she played much tennis.
Megan sat back, too, and the movement highlighted her curvy figure. “Some,” she said demurely, her eyes wide. “How about you?”
“Commercial’s more my thing,” he said truthfully. “My last divorce was Barbara’s sister’s.” He paused, then said, “Not that it was my divorce. I’ve never been married.”
He eyed her bare ring finger. Her glance skittered away and she raised her water glass to her mouth, concentrated on taking a long, slow sip. She was definitely uncomfortable with any man-woman interaction between them.
“But I’d like to be,” he said thoughtfully.
Megan sputtered on her water. “Excuse me?”
“I’d like to get married,” he said. “You know, start a family.”