20
Goose took her home in the early dawn hours before light spread across the town and they could easily be spotted. Instead of using the new van, Goose used his own truck. No need advertising Old Garnet or themselves at four thirty in the morning.
He promised he’d return that afternoon to put the new tires on her car, but she cautioned she might not be around.
“Need to go to the office,” she explained. “Being out for an entire day can really put me behind. Not sure how long I’ll be away from home.”
“And I need to get to the distillery this morning. Lots of tours scheduled.” He kissed her. “Tonight?” he asked.
“Yes, but on one condition.”
“Anything.”
“Make some more of that ice cream,” she begged.
“Done.”
They parted with kisses and promises of further contact later in the day. But as she was about to open her front door, she returned to him. Goose put the window down.
“Let me tell Hannah first,” Harriet said. “Will she be at the distillery today?”
“Yeah, but so will I. If I run into her, there’s no way I can keep our not-so-little secret from her.”
“Invite her to lunch, and I’ll show up at the café around noon. We’ll tell her together. Deal?”
He approved, and she was about to leave but grabbed her hand.
“Wear your riding boots again today,” he said, biting his lip.
“Maybe.” She fled inside her condo before she burst out laughing or burned up from sheer embarrassment.
They’d made love a second time during the night, and it had gotten just a wee bit kinky.
Harriet slammed the front door behind her and leaned against it, laughing and giggling like a nervous bride at the recollection.
“Put ’em on, Harriet,” Goose had told her as he pulled the boots onto the bed.
“Is this a fetish I should know more about?”
“No, just a fun idea I had when I nearly tripped over the damned things on the way back from the bathroom a minute ago.”
She had offered him her legs, and he slipped the boots onto her bare feet. The only thing she had been wearing at that point, besides the sheet which partially had covered one of her arms, were her new boots.
Goose had then pulled her down onto him, kissed her, and reached for another condom packet as he gave her one simple instruction.
“Ride me.”
And she had done so, to their great mutual pleasure, wearing the boots and nothing else.
Harriet caught a little nap after Goose dropped her off; it had been the most frenetic twenty-four hours of her life, and she needed more rest. After a quick shower and slipping into a clean pair of jeans and blue polo shirt, she got to the office around nine to find it unoccupied. Upon unlocking the front door, she saw CiCi and Walker leaving their house, heading in the direction of downtown, their likely destination the farmer’s market.
CiCi waved enthusiastically. “At work so early on a Saturday?” she cried from across the street.
Harriet rolled her eyes but laughed and waved back. Before slipping into her building, Harriet saw CiCi whispering to Walker, who then turned toward Harriet and waved.
And now those two were on their way to the farmer’s market. Hannah would know by lunchtime, no need for a lunch date to break the news to her.
But Harriet still wanted to go have lunch with Goose.
And she’d worn the boots, despite the still-warm weather. She couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he caught sight of them. If he didn’t have a fetish for those boots, she was going to damn well make sure he developed one.
Harriet retreated to her office on the third floor, smiling to herself as she replayed images and feelings from the previous day. It was hard to get into work mode, but she managed to focus on the matters that had stacked up in just the one day she’d been out of the office.
She was surprised to hear a knock on her door, which was ajar, and see Jon’s face peeking into her office.
“Hey,” he greeted her and entered her office. “Can’t stay away, can you?”
“I can, but if I do, evil file fairies come to visit me. Look.” She pointed to a stack of files on her desk that had been deposited there by her assistant during her absence the previous day.
Jon grimaced. “Yikes. I just came in to check on a few things.”
More like he came in to make sure Bruce saw him, she thought to herself. Bruce was sure to be around the office sooner or later, Harriet knew. He liked to putter about and see whether the other lawyers were there working hard—and making the firm money.
“So,” Jon said, walking farther into her office, “how’d it go yesterday in Frankfort? Must’ve been like going to the genius convention with the village idiot.”
Harriet’s mouth dropped open. “Excuse me? Did you just call Goose Davenport—a relative and employee of clients, I might add—the village idiot?”
“You know what I meant,” Jon protested her outrage. “Guy’s got a reputation, and you know it. Hard to see why he—”
Harriet stood, put her hands on her desk, and leaned forward. “For your information, Goose Davenport knows a lot about Old Garnet, and he made a great impression on the curator with whom we met. I can’t believe you’d talk about someone like that.”
“No worse than what I’ve heard Bruce call the guy,” Jon said defensively.
“Then you should both know better,” she said and sat back down. “And why would Bruce trash-talk Goose Davenport? He doesn’t know him except by reputation.”
“Oh, you don’t know about Goose and Evie?”
Harriet’s stomach lurched. “What?”
Evie was Bruce Colyard’s daughter, a few years younger than Harriet, and a doctor in Louisville. Harriet didn’t know her that well, but she’d never cared for her. She was a snob and a drama queen. And even though they hadn’t been in the same grade together through their school years, Harriet could still recall seeing Evie, always dressed well, surrounded by a little posse of girlfriends, sought after by guys. In short, the center of attention.
“Apparently you don’t know,” Jon said. He moved to Harriet’s door, looked outside her office briefly, then closed the door behind him.
“Well?” Harriet demanded.
Jon sighed, ran a nervous hand over his short blond hair, and looked at the ground.
“Story goes that when Evie returned here for Christmas break during her freshman year in college, she had a date with Goose. Suffice it to say it didn’t go well.”
“Explain.” She crossed her arms over her chest and sat back in her office chair, causing it to squeak.
“Goose left Evie naked alone in a field after a party,” Jon said, looking up at Harriet. “In the winter. Bruce had to go and get her. Evie’s friends called him to come get her after Goose left.”
“How… but why—”
“Evie never would say. Bruce wanted to prosecute Goose for all kinds of things, as you can imagine, but Evie wouldn’t talk. So that was that. And ever since then, Goose Davenport has been on Bruce’s shit list.”
“But why would she say nothing?” Harriet asked.
Jon shrugged. “Beats me. And no one knows to this day. Like I said, she never told. Of course, Bruce assumed the worst, but her friends didn’t see anything. Said they found her naked or nearly so in the field, roused her awake, and called her dad. Bruce once told me he confronted Goose, but Goose denied anything wrong. Said that when he left Evie, she was crying because he wouldn’t take her to get some Garnet, and she was underage at the time.”
There was that ugly thing rearing its head again: Goose’s bad reputation. Strange thing was that even though some of the stories were terrible, just like what Jon had told her, they were still old. Harriet hadn’t heard one bad thing about Goose in the past several years. And if there had been anything bad to say, the grapevine in Craig County would have been gleefully ripe with such tales. But the
re was an odd silence about the recent past even though Goose couldn’t shake off the tarnish of the older stories. Was she missing something? Out of the gossip loop? Or were people just that unforgiving?
After telling her Bruce was in the building, Jon apologized. “Look, sorry if I offended you,” he said, rightfully interpreting her silence as disapproval. “I’ll watch my comments and gossip from now on,” he said and left.
“You do that,” she muttered after he’d closed the door.
Her regard for Jon had gone down precipitously lately, but not just because of his comments about Goose, which she thought were rather hypocritical.
Jon had recently had a spate of failed relationships, and his seeming inability to get along with the opposite sex in romantic matters had left him embittered and snarky, as he had just demonstrated. She thought his problems dated back to his divorce, when his wife had left him because of his close friendship with another woman. But even that woman, Pepper Montrose, had distanced herself from him over the years. She was a busy schoolteacher, taking care of an aging parent, and was involved in animal rescue. Harriet’s lunches with Pepper were few and far between, but when they did manage to get together and the conversation turned to Jon, Pepper often became wistful. Maybe she’d made the same calculation so many other smart and busy people made: no time for assholes, even if they had been a friend back in the day.
Harriet got a little work done, but the interruption by Jon had unexpectedly distracted her.
She was going to have to tell Bruce about her new relationship with Goose, and sooner rather than later.
After checking her text messages, Harriet saw a confirmation from Goose that they had a lunch date with Hannah, Bo, and Lila at the distillery. This news made her nervous—she hadn’t expected such a big audience. But at least it would get the news of their couplehood out there.
And she needed to do the same when it came to the senior partner in her firm, seeing as he apparently had a big problem with Goose Davenport, regardless of the man’s family connection to Old Garnet.
No better time than the present.
Harriet finished her work, shut down her computer, and headed to the first floor where she found her senior partner. He was sitting with his feet up on his desk, reading the newspaper, and drinking—was that bourbon on the rocks? Probably. It was Saturday, and no clients were around. She briefly wondered where he kept his stash.
“How’d it go in Frankfort yesterday?” he asked with little actual interest in his voice.
Harriet stepped into the office and told him about the wrinkle in the plans. “I’ll call this coming week and rattle some cages at the state. We need an answer on that boundary line issue. The sooner that’s resolved, the sooner we can get the historic site expanded and proceed with the application for National Historic Landmark status.”
“Sounds like you have everything under control.”
“Maybe.”
Bruce’s head slowly turned to Harriet, and she closed the door behind her.
“I am about to tell you something that could make you very angry with me, Bruce, but it’s something you need to find out from me first rather than anyone else.”
He closed his newspaper and dropped his legs from his desk.
“You’re not leaving us, are you? Please don’t say that, Harriet. You’re a partner and—”
“No, I’m not going anywhere.” Bruce waved her into a seat in front of his desk, and she sat. “I’m in a relationship with Goose Davenport,” she stated firmly.
Bruce’s face turned an ugly red. “Him? That man?” Bruce stuttered. “Harriet—that’s insane—and he works for your client. It’s unethical it… it—”
“I have an ethics opinion that says I can pursue the relationship.”
She thought the man was going to have a stroke. He became maroon in the face, suddenly stood, knocking the newspaper from his desk. She could hear the paper rattling and fluttering to the floor in his wake as he came around to confront her.
“You damn well know it’s firm policy that I have to—”
She stood to face him, angered at his arrogance. She might be able to understand his prejudice against Goose—maybe—but she wasn’t going to let a challenge where ethics was the subject to go unanswered.
“And you should damn well know that such a policy in itself is unwise, if not unethical.”
“I happen to have almost thirty more years in practice than you, but apparently that counts for nothing!”
“You got that right,” she said, immediately silencing him.
“What did you say to me?”
“Do you even know how an ethics opinion works? If you ask for one, then comply with it, you can’t be disciplined for abiding by the advice. Did you know that?”
His lips moved, but no words, not even the curses she expected, issued forth.
“So you can give me all the advice in the world, all the benefit of the wisdom of all those years in practice, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep me out of trouble if it came to that.”
“You should’ve told me you’d asked for one,” he countered.
She shook her head. “And have you try to talk me out of it? Or demand to know just what I was asking? I don’t think so. It’s my license, my question, and my life.”
“But it’s my firm.”
“It’s not all yours. I’m a partner, too, remember? You just reminded me of that fact when I walked into your office. This isn’t your world to rule—especially when it comes to my law license and my personal life.”
“I just can’t see how this could possibly be ethical,” he grumbled.
“I have an opinion that says the opposite.”
“But what if it doesn’t work out? What then? Have you thought about that?” Her silence answered his question. “If it doesn’t, Harriet, you know you’ll have a conflict, don’t you? And what if Goose falls out with his family? Gets fired or leaves under bad circumstances? That’s got to be a conflict!”
“The opinion did say that the latter thing you mentioned—conflict in the family—would cause me to have a conflict, too, and I’d have to be careful.”
Bruce shook his head. “I thought that’s what the rules were all about—being careful. But you’ve gotten someone to tell you that it’s okay until it’s not okay? That’s never how I thought the rules worked. I hope this doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket—for you personally as well as professionally.”
“Not planning on it.”
“And that’s the problem right there.” He returned to his desk and flopped into his chair. “Rules make you do that. Make you stop, plan, think. But some idiot has given you a green light to do this? Incredible.” He picked up his drink and finished it.
Bruce’s arguments had exclusively addressed the logic and the ethics of getting involved with Goose, not his prejudice against the man. He’d not spoken one bad word against Goose’s character.
“Bruce, I can appreciate that you want me to think like a lawyer about this. But I did. I got that opinion.”
He put his glass down and stared hard at her, and she sensed his irritation at her display of independence. For the past five years, she had labored to break free of Bruce’s suffocating self-righteousness when it came to how to practice law. Unwilling to be completely subservient to his direction and with an eye to the future, Harriet had expanded her client base and had helped solidify the firm’s relationship with Old Garnet. As a result, their professional interests had been coming into conflict more and more, and this latest disagreement was just another manifestation of the growing gulf between them.
“Not just think, Harriet,” he said in a low tone, almost like he’d been defeated. “A good lawyer thinks about the worst thing that could happen in any given situation. We’re wired for that. But a great lawyer does more. A great lawyer plans for the worst. Have you done that?”
“I just wanted to tell you myself,” Harriet said, not answering. She turned and left, Bruce’s question hau
nting her as she walked back to her condo.
21
Harriet felt like an idiot for forgetting she didn’t have transportation to the distillery. Her tires were still all flatter than apple fritters. When she texted Goose with her dilemma, he texted back, saying he probably couldn’t get away from the distillery until later in the afternoon.
Ask CiCi or Walker, was Goose’s solution to her problem.
Harriet called CiCi and asked whether she could get a lift out to Old Garnet.
“Yeah, Walker’s going out there this afternoon,” CiCi said with irritation in her voice. “Has to check on something, of course.”
In the background, Harriet could hear Walker protesting.
“It’s for a good cause!” he cried.
“And just what would that be?” CiCi called back to him.
“Bourbon!”
Ten minutes later, Harriet was getting into Walker’s car a few blocks north on Main Street, profusely thanking him for his courtesy.
“Never a problem,” he said. “But what about your car? CiCi mentioned something about the tires?”
Harriet explained that her tires were slashed but that she’d gotten new tires yesterday and that someone would be coming over later to put them on.
And then an awkward silence descended upon them.
“CiCi tell you about seeing me in the grocery store?” Harriet ventured, although she was pretty sure of the answer she was about to get.
“Of course she did, Harriet,” Walker laughed. “Really glad for you. And Goose too. He’s a great guy.”
Walker kept his eyes on the road and thus didn’t see the smile spreading across her face.
She was thrilled that Walker held Goose in high esteem since Walker was well respected at the distillery and around town. Walker knew Goose personally and professionally and worked with him on a daily basis according to what Harriet knew of the operations at Old Garnet. Walker was someone who knew the Goose of today, and his impression of Goose’s character wasn’t tainted by some stereotype from the never-retreating past in a small town.
Bourbon Springs Box Set: Volume II, Books 4-6 (Bourbon Springs Box Sets Book 2) Page 49