“Home sweet home,” Gen said. “Thanks for the ride.”
She started to get out of the car, pushing open the door and trying to find the sidewalk with her foot, but Lord Severn was already out of the car. He appeared right beside her, offering her his hand one more time.
Politeness and fear scuffled in her stomach.
Gen tried to take his outstretched hand. She really did. She let go of the back of the seat and tried to move her hand forward, but it stopped in the air. Her hand fell straight down onto the soft leather of the seat. “I’m fine. Thanks, anyway.”
Lord Severn dropped his hand, but in the wan glow of the dome light inside the black town car, Gen saw his smile turn soft. He backed up. “I’m right here if you need a hand.”
Gen struggled her way out of the car into the cold, night air. Her high heels scraped on the sidewalk and slipped, but she saved herself. Lord Severn’s hand hovered in the air when she bobbled, but he didn’t touch her.
She stumbled up the sidewalk to her house with Lord Severn trailing behind her. “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to. I’ll be fine.”
“It’s quite all right. I’m worried about the state you’re in.” His hand grazed her elbow, turning her to face him. “I meant what I said before.”
“About what? King Charles the Second being your homeboy?”
“About not molesting you. I would never force myself on a woman. I abhor the thought.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t.” She thought no such thing.
“I just want to see you inside.”
Gen slid the key into the lock and jiggled the stiff lock. “Oh, all right. But I’m fine.”
Lord Severn put his hands in his pockets.
Gen’s key grated in the lock. The door knob wasn’t an antique and distinguished like the one on her office door at Lincoln’s Inn. This set was just as mundane as the building around it. Decades of dust had settled in the mechanism, making it hard to turn. She forced the key.
The lock clicked, and Gen pushed her front door open. Inside the vestibule, which was about the size of her closet-office, she set her keys in the empty bowl on the little table so she could find them the next morning.
Lord Severn followed her inside and waited.
She pushed open the next door, which led directly into the kitchen. Gen and her mother had just remodeled the kitchen a few years ago with stainless steel appliances and bamboo counters on two walls. Four tomato-red melamine chairs clustered around a small table of light wood over on the side wall.
With the two of them in there, the tiny kitchen almost felt a little crowded.
Gen said, “I’m inside. You can go now.”
He nodded. “What’s through there?”
“Just the reception room that leads out to the garden.”
“Can I see it?”
He shouldn’t be invading this far into her house. Her neighbors would talk, and his delicious smell would get all over her stuff. “Um, sure.”
She led him through the door and stopped in the middle of the room. They hadn’t redecorated in there yet, and it looked like they had jumped back in time to the nineteen-fifties. Chintz and ruffles wrapped all the furniture and draped over every available surface. French china stuffed a hutch in the corner. Her mother had shipped the blue rose-painted dishes from England to Texas and then back after Gen’s father had died. A thick blanket was folded on the back of the couch.
Lord Severn glanced around the living room.
Arthur Finch-Hatten, the Earl of Severn, also called “The Right Hottie Lord Severn” by the press, was impossibly standing in Gen’s apartment. Any red-blooded woman would have grabbed him by his shirt and kissed those lush lips until his gray eyes closed and his strong arms wrapped around her and carried her to the bedroom.
Gen bet that many women had done exactly that.
An impulse to also do exactly that seized her.
For the first time in months, Gen felt a wanting, a warmth, that made her feel stupid and excited at the same time.
Damn, it was like mind control. It was like she could smell his high-status-male hormones and wanted to jump him.
His cologne was scented with cinnamon and warm wood smoke.
Maybe that was the actual smell of money.
Gen glanced around her little house like she was seeing it for the first time. “Yes, I know. Nine hundred square feet that looks like it was decorated by a little old lady.”
“I think it’s perfectly respectable.”
Gen said, “It’s my mother’s house.”
“Does she live here, too?”
“No.” She stared straight at him, unwilling to say more.
He gestured to a door on the other wall that led to the stairway. “Are the bedrooms upstairs?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think that’s appropriate.” Under her feet, the floor slanted and she stumbled, grabbing the wall.
Lord Severn sauntered over to stand beside her, but he didn’t touch her, just stood there with his hands outstretched in case she fell. “I want to make sure you’re settled for the night.”
Gen sighed, “I’m fine. Time for you to go, Lord Severn.”
“Arthur,” he said. “When we can be informal, call me Arthur.”
“It seems unprofessional.”
“I’m begging you to.”
She looked at him, trying to focus her bleary eyes on the right angle of his jaw and those stunning silvery eyes. “Why?”
“Why not?” Lord Severn, Arthur, retracted his hand. “All right. My work here is done. Sleep well.” He began to turn but looked back at her. His silvery eyes weren’t sad exactly, nor wary, but there was a softness to them. He said, “Lock the door after I’m out. You can’t be too safe these days, what with letting strange men into your apartment and all.”
Her jaw dropped. “But you insisted!”
“Still, can’t be too careful.”
He walked out the door, his hands in his pockets, and Gen watched out the kitchen window as he walked towards his car. His butt was just the right amount of round in his snug jeans as he strolled down the short sidewalk. Just grabbably round.
The driver got out of the car to try to open his door, but he waved her off. Her slow walk and quick retreat suggested that they went through that charade often.
Lord Severn, Arthur, was just a nice guy, making sure that she got home safely.
Yeah. Right.
VISITING MOMMA
Early the next morning at the nursing home, Gen pushed open the door from the hallway to a small bedroom. Medical smells clogged the air of the room, irritating Gen’s tender stomach. She rarely drank that much, and being this hungover was an altogether new experience.
No more whiskey after beer. Never again.
In the small bed in the corner of the room, a frail woman stared at the ceiling. Her gray hair was matted to her head, not dirty, just flattened bedhead because she never left the bed.
When Gen had been a child, her mother had loved or pretended to love helium balloons. Every time Gen got one, her mother confiscated it and tied the string around her own wrist, miming for hours that the balloon was pulling her hand into the air and almost lifting her off her feet if she stopped paying attention to it. The play-acting had made Gen laugh for so many years, all the way through the teenage times.
Now, IV bags leading to her mother’s arms hovered over the bed like those balloons. Gen’s heart broke some more.
“Momma,” Gen said in her strongest Texas accent. “Momma? I’m here for a while.”
The woman in the bed melted, the tension leaving her arms and body.
Gen went and sat in the chair beside the bed and took out her phone. “I can’t read for long this morning, momma. I’ve got a case to argue later this morning at work. Octavia has me cross-examining and giving arguments right from the get-go, far more than Horace did. I loved Horace Lindsey, absolutely adored him, but being Octavia’s pupil is trial-by-fire. Don’t you
worry, though. We’ll get through at least a chapter before I have to go.”
Gen began reading from a new mystery that she had downloaded a few days before.
The stroke which had incapacitated her mother six months before had been the massive, hemorrhagic kind. A blood clot had lodged in a vein in her mother’s skull, and the blood vessel had blown apart. Gen had gotten a call at work from their next door neighbor, Esme, who had said that her mother had fainted in the garden. When Gen had arrived at the hospital, the doctors had said it was a miracle that her mother had survived at all.
They kept using that word, miracle.
Her mother’s life—lying in a bed for six months, alternately shaking and sweating, grunting and groaning, unable to tell them if she was in pain, her blue eyes uncomprehending and staring at the walls or tracking things that were not there—did not seem like a miracle.
It seemed like she was in Hell.
Gen prayed for a real miracle.
She knew better than to pray for her mother to recover. The doctors had been imaging her brain and had seen no recovery, despite the physical therapy that the assistants were trying.
Every night, Gen prayed hard that a miracle would come in the form of enough money to keep her mother in this better nursing home here in London where Gen could visit her every day.
The administrators had first assigned her mother to a different nursing home, one much farther away and beyond the suburbs of London. Gen hadn’t been able to visit during the week, only on weekends. It had taken three hours to take the tube to the suburb and hire a cab to take her to the nursing home.
Plus, that first nursing home had had something wrong with it.
Things were better, now, but they were far more expensive.
Her mother had little equity in the Islington house that she had bought when she moved back to the United Kingdom.
The health care facilitator had demanded to know where the thirty thousand pounds that had been in her mother’s bank accounts two years ago had gone, so Gen had had to admit to the woman that her mother had loaned it to her to pay for the bar course over a year before her stroke.
The woman had demanded the money be put back in her mother’s accounts immediately, which was impossible. The tuition to the college had already been paid. The woman then said that Gen could “top up” her mother’s monthly nursing home allowance so she could be moved to the more expensive home in the city.
So Gen was doing that.
The office was paying Gen only a pitiful stipend during her pupillage. She couldn’t pay the money back to her mother’s accounts until she obtained tenancy in the chambers.
If she were offered tenancy.
She was one of six pupil barristers competing for exactly one job.
If she didn’t get the job, she had few options.
There was a year-long solicitor’s course that she could take to become the other kind of lawyer, but it cost even more money that she didn’t have. Plus, she wouldn’t be paid for that year she was taking yet another course, and then she would have to do a solicitor pupillage for a pittance, again. It would be over two years before she started earning money in any amount if she did that.
Hanging out her own shingle as a barrister wasn’t an option. Barristers who don’t work in an approved chambers are severely limited by the Bar Council in what they are allowed to do. She wouldn’t make enough money to pay her mother back that way.
She was too chubby and horse-faced to dance on tables, so that was straight out.
Nope, she had to survive the barrister pupillage and win the job or else her mother was going to be sent back to the other nursing home.
So Gen would do that.
Gen opened the book. “It takes place in America, Momma. Here we go. ‘Angel Day focused the black tunnel of her gun sight and crosshairs on the man holding the shotgun, ready to shoot him.’”
THE GIRLFRIEND TACTIC
“We have a problem,” Octavia Hawkes said.
Gen fidgeted in her chair, which had been placed squarely in front of Octavia Hawkes’s huge desk like Gen was a naughty schoolgirl brought before the headmistress. Hawkes had called Gen into the meeting as soon as she had arrived.
Octavia’s lips had contracted into the red dot of anger on her face, frightening to behold.
Beside Gen, Lord Severn, Arthur, lounged in his chair, his long legs stretched out. He had been ushered into Octavia Hawkes’s office right after Gen had and not glanced at her when he sat down. Instead of the jeans from last night, he wore a navy blue suit, and a whiff of soap and warm-spiced cologne had puffed from him to Gen.
The man smelled like cinnamon rolls, cleanliness, and sheer male power. No wonder women wanted to lick him.
He examined the end of his dark blue tie and dropped it to flop on his hard stomach.
Wow.
To be any more unconcerned, Lord Severn, Arthur, would have had to light a cigarette and sip a shaken martini.
Damn it. Gen needed to pick one of those names and run with it. Constantly brain-stuttering “Lord Severn, Arthur,” was driving her crazy.
She fidgeted on the hard chair, gripping the edges of the wooden seat, trying not to look like she had been caught out of bed after lights-out.
Octavia Hawkes spun her laptop around so that Gen and Lord Severn, Arthur, could see what she had been looking at. “What the living hell is this?”
Of course, her screen showed that damned picture of Lord Severn, Arthur, sprawled on the throne with the three women twining around him and that stupid drug dealer headline.
“I can explain.” Gen had no idea how she was going to finish that sentence.
Lord Severn asked, “What of it?”
Hawkes stood and strolled around her desk while she spoke to him. “Horace spoke to you, repeatedly, about the fact that your lifestyle,” she spat, “might jeopardize your case. If you are going to behave in such an undignified manner, your solicitor will need to retain another barrister. You need adult supervision, you adolescent wanker.”
“I assure you, I have no need to wank,” Lord Severn, Arthur, intoned with mock seriousness.
Octavia wound up for a verbal punch. “We don’t fight hopeless cases. I certainly don’t, and Gen needs court wins in her column before the tenancy decisions are made at the end of September. We aren’t Atticus fucking Finch, here.”
She meant the honorable lawyer from the novel To Kill A Mockingbird.
All lawyers know that book.
All lawyers have read that book and, at one point, were inspired by that book.
Most senior lawyers laugh at that book, Octavia included. Now, Octavia went to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Machiavelli’s The Prince for inspiration and quoted them liberally.
“Hmmm, Atticus fucking Finch,” Arthur Finch-Hatten said. “Good name. Good, strong name for an idealist.”
Gen spoke up, “I’m sure that if Lord Severn understands—”
“I understand perfectly,” he said. “I understand that I will live my life as I please, and you will fight my case to the best of your ability. The law and tradition are on my side. We will prevail.”
Hawkes leaned against the front of her desk and glared down at Lord Severn. “Judges and juries are capricious and unpredictable. You could very well scuttle this with an ill-timed indiscretion.” She sighed. “We could sue that gossip website. Perhaps a court injunction.”
“That would fuel the fire,” Lord Severn, Arthur, said. “They would report on the injunction and imply that it must all be fact.
Hawkes scowled at him as much as she could, which meant that the sides of her mouth turned down around the surgical filler in her cheeks. Her forehead between her eyes didn’t move at all, remaining Botox-smooth. She said, “You’re close to the royal family. Can’t their connections run interference with the press for you?”
He laughed. “They gave up on me years ago. Besides, it takes the spotlight off their downstream heirs if I’m caught behaving badly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the official palace photographer is the one following me around and feeding these photographs to the tabloid sites.”
“Libel?” Hawkes asked. “Defamation? Damages?”
Gen said, “The pictures back up their statements pretty well.” She asked Lord Severn, Arthur, “They aren’t photoshopped, are they?”
Lord Severn shook his head, and his dark hair fell over his forehead. “All genuine.”
“Damn it,” Hawkes muttered. “You must stop giving them ammunition.”
Gen backed her up. “You can’t get drunk and let them take pictures anymore, Lord Severn.”
“Arthur, not Lord Severn.”
Octavia’s eyelids flared open, which meant that she was trying to raise her eyebrows at this breach of etiquette.
He flipped his fingers in the air. “I wasn’t that drunk.”
Gen said, “You were falling all over the place. And you can’t do drugs, especially not in public.”
“There are no photographs of me with drugs because I used none. I had a few cocktails, vodka and soda. What were you drinking last night?” he asked Gen.
Octavia Hawkes turned her over-waxed eyebrows toward Gen, but her face didn’t move. Her lips remained contracted into an angry, red dot.
Gen admitted, “Stout. Then whiskey.”
He said, “Wrong order. That’s dangerous. Do be careful. There might not be such a harmless man such as myself around, next time.”
“You were with him last night?” Hawkes glared at Gen, turning to stand between her and Lord Severn.
“No,” Gen said, raising her hands, palms out. “No way. I was here, in the office, working. I put in billable hours.”
Octavia didn’t open her teeth when she spoke. “Then to what is Lord Severn referring?”
Behind Hawkes, Lord Severn, Arthur, was smirking. Seriously?
Gen said, “I needed a ride home from the office last night, and Lord Severn happened to be in the area and provided it.”
Lord Severn interjected, “Arthur.”
Stiff Drink: Runaway Billionaires: Arthur Duet #1 Page 7