by Hope Ramsay
“A couple of college roommates.”
“Oh? Tell me about them.”
She settled back and listened as Andrew talked about his roommates from the University of Virginia Law School. Each of them was wildly successful. One had been a Supreme Court clerk and was now a hot-shot litigator, and the other, a guy named Connor Strickland, had started a digital legal search firm that was faster and cheaper than LexisNexis. His company had just gone public and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The IPO had made him a millionaire, and he’d recently been profiled in Washingtonian magazine.
“I’d love to go out with a millionaire. I mean, who wouldn’t? And just to help you in your planning, I actually need a plus-one for Emma’s wedding coming up in a couple of weeks.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
“But I’m totally down with doing something else. Something new and different and maybe a little dangerous.”
“Like what? I don’t think your father would approve of anything dangerous.”
“How about a date at a dance club?” she asked.
“That’s not dangerous.”
“No?”
He shook his head and took out a pen and made a note on his lined paper.
“What about bungee-jumping?”
He looked up. “No. I am not sending you on any bungee-jumping dates. Your father would have my head on a plate if I did that.”
A little more than forty-eight hours later, Andrew sat in his office with a pile of briefs in front of him and a container of not-very-good Chinese at his elbow. He was thinking about that moment at the coffeehouse when Laurie had touched the back of his hand. Every cell in his body had reacted. It was as if he’d suddenly awakened from a long nap, looked around, and remembered that he was still a man capable of being turned on.
Damn. He was compromised. He no longer wanted to see Laurie and Brandon get back together. Somehow he needed to talk Noah out of this mediation. It was wrong. Neither of them was impartial.
Andrew pushed the pile of papers aside and pulled out a legal pad and wrote the words Why Does Noah Want Laurie and Brandon to Reconcile? at the top of the page. He focused for a long moment and started making a list:
1. He wants Laurie to be happy.
2. He’s suffering early-onset dementia.
Andrew stalled at number three.
Damn. Did Noah really believe that Brandon would make Laurie happy? It was almost inconceivable. Brandon had damaged her career, humiliated her in public, and broken her heart. Surely Noah knew this. Didn’t he?
Maybe not. Maybe he was demented.
Or maybe there was something Andrew was missing. With Noah, you never knew. He was a master at spinning out plans that he shared with absolutely no one until he sprang them on unsuspecting clients. Oddly, Noah’s surprises worked most of the time. He had an amazing track record of bringing people together.
Andrew sat pondering his problem for a long moment. If Noah had a secret plan, what would it be? What benefit did Noah get if Laurie married Brandon?
And there it was. Finally another potential motive for Noah’s odd behavior, his single-minded fixation on Laurie and Brandon, and his insistence that Andrew break most of the rules of objective mediation.
Brandon’s father, August Kopp, was one of the preeminent Supreme Court litigators in the nation. August had argued many of the seminal cases of the last decade, and he’d won most of them. Andrew didn’t know all the details of Lyndon, Lyndon & Kopp’s financial situation, but August’s practice was clearly lucrative.
Wilson Kavanaugh, which had grown to gargantuan proportions in the last few years by gobbling up law firms right and left, didn’t have a Supreme Court litigation team, and the buzz around the office was that they wanted one. Could it be that Laurie and Brandon’s marriage was the first step in an effort to convince August Kopp to leave his firm and bring his practice to Wilson Kavanaugh?
Damn. Would August really walk away from Lyndon, Lyndon & Kopp? He and Andrew’s uncle Charles were the closest of friends—almost like family. But if Noah’s daughter and August’s son married, then a merger would truly be all in the family, so to speak. It made a certain amount of sense.
Andrew tore his notes off the pad and ripped them into pieces before throwing them in the trash. He took a deep breath. Was he being paranoid? Maybe.
Dammit. Andrew needed more information. He needed to talk to Uncle Charles, and maybe even August Kopp to lay his worst fears to rest.
Hopefully he was wrong about this, and Noah was merely laboring under the delusion that Laurie wanted Brandon back and that helping them to reconcile would be good for his daughter.
In the meantime, Andrew needed to keep Laurie safe as she ventured out into the world of dating. So when Connor Strickland returned his earlier call and said he’d be happy to take Laurie dancing on Saturday, Andrew cleared his calendar too. Laurie would get her date with a millionaire at a dance club, but she’d also have a secret wingman whether she wanted one or not.
It was customary for Courtney to schedule a meeting with each bride a week or so before her wedding to go over last-minute details. On Wednesday, Emma Raynerson, one of Laurie’s bridesmaids, visited Eagle Hill Manor for this pre-event consultation.
In Courtney’s experience, it was usually a disaster if a bride and one of her bridesmaids chose the same wedding venue. Drama usually ensued that could literally bust up friendships. But with Laurie and Emma, that didn’t seem to be a problem.
For one thing, their weddings couldn’t be more different. Laurie and her mother had wanted the whole royal wedding theme: the chapel, the Carriage House, the three-course dinner, and the open bar.
On the other hand, Emma and her fiancé, Nabil Alfarsi, wanted a small wedding officiated by a judge, with a reception for forty staged on the inn’s portico. In addition to the reception, Eagle Hill Manor would be hosting a traditional Turkish henna party on the Friday before the wedding. The Raynerson-Alfarsi wedding was one of three events scheduled for Saturday, September twenty-third, which also happened to be the opening day of the Shenandoah Valley Harvest Festival. It was a busy time for the inn.
Emma and Courtney spent an hour in the inn’s solarium, where the henna party would take place, sipping tea and going through a punch list of final details. When they reached the end of the list, Emma settled back in her chair and said, “Okay, now that we’ve gotten through all that, let’s discuss the important business. How is Laurie? Really. I call her every day, and she puts on a good face, but I’m really worried about her. Yesterday she didn’t even respond to a text I sent her, letting her know that I’d found Brandon’s Camaro.”
“Oh, was it missing?”
“Well, sort of. You see Andrew tipped him off that we were planning to do something to it. So he moved it from its usual parking place. It took a lot of skullduggery to figure out where he stashed it.”
“Awesome.” Courtney drew the word out. “Where is it?”
Emma leaned forward and dropped her voice to a near-whisper. “It’s here, in Shenandoah Falls. He’s hidden it in the garage out behind his father’s river house.”
“Oh, too bad.”
“Too bad? Why?”
“Because if you really want to use a man’s car against him, you need to get into his head and ruin all the joy he feels about driving the car. You want to change that joy into fear and dread. And to do that, you kind of have to sabotage it on a continual basis.”
“You mean like a siege?”
“Yeah, over a long period. It’s like death from a thousand small cuts. But if he’s stashed it in a garage and isn’t driving it, then there’s no real fun in it, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. I’ve never sabotaged a guy’s car before. I’m not even sure what we should do.”
“Oh, honey, there are a million things an angry woman can do to a man’s car. She can cover it in birdseed and let our feathered friends do a number on the paint. Or she can co
ver it in honey and park it near an ants’ nest. She could pour milk onto the carpet and let it ferment, or tape bacon under the driver’s seat and let it rot. If she puts a few ball bearings in the door panels—just enough to create a rattle—it will drive him insane. There’s also dog poop under the door handles, black shoe polish on the windows, replacing the gas cap with a lockable one. One of my favorites is to loosen the screws holding his plates so that he loses them and has to stand in line at the DMV to get new ones. And then, when he does get new plates, you go back and do it to him a second time. And then there’s my personal fave—putting a sign on the bumper that says, I’m a jerk, honk and give me the finger.”
“Oh my God, Courtney, how much time did you spend researching these ideas? They are phenomenal.”
“Are you kidding? I didn’t do any research. I’ve got a world of experience when it comes to unfaithful men and their automobiles.”
“So we should start right away.”
Courtney shook her head. “Like I said, it won’t work. If the car is parked here and Brandon is living in D.C., we can’t really get into his head.”
Emma leaned back with a sigh. “Okay, I can see that, but if you think for one minute I’m not going to exact revenge on his car, you can—”
“Wait, I’ve got an idea,” Courtney said. “Jessica and Madison are coming to your henna party in two weeks, right?”
Emma smiled. “Yes, they are.”
“What if we have a little revenge after-party? We can’t stage a series of attacks because he’s not using the car regularly, but we could certainly make a point.”
“Oh my God, that’s a wicked but wonderful idea for a pre-wedding party. Let’s do it.”
Courtney smiled. “Yes, let’s. I’ll take care of pulling together everything we need for a midnight raid on August Kopp’s garage. In the meantime, though, don’t tell Laurie. Let’s surprise her, okay?”
“My lips are sealed,” Emma said.
Chapter Eight
Laurie officially hit the panic button on Friday afternoon when she Googled the name of the D.C. dance club where she was scheduled to meet Connor Strickland on Saturday. The Park at Fourteenth was apparently the “in” place for D.C.’s young professionals. Local celebs from sports figures to politicos hung out there on a regular basis, and even more appalling, the club’s event photos showed only drop-dead gorgeous people with killer bodies draped in designer labels.
She definitely needed a new dress, even though she had no money to buy one since Brandon had left her holding the mortgage to run off to Bermuda on a vacation she’d paid for.
But this was an emergency. And really, Brandon had the money. But Laurie no longer trusted him to pay his share of the bills. Maybe tomorrow, if she could pull up her big girl panties and be sure that she wouldn’t cry, she’d call him and make a few demands. She hated to think what might happen if he blew her off. The last thing she wanted to do was to call Dad and ask him to bail her out. Calling Dad was something Mom would do.
She pushed her financial worries out of her mind on Friday night and made the long drive down Route 7 to Tyson’s Corner Center, the biggest mall in the D.C. area. She didn’t mess around but went straight to the dress department at Bloomingdale’s and tried on no less than fifteen different dresses in a rainbow of colors.
In the end, she bought a black sheath dress from a no-name company that was form-fitting and had a daring slit up the side and a sweetheart neck line that showed a modest amount of cleavage. She put the dress on her almost-maxed-out credit card and then went downstairs and let the beauty consultant at the Chanel counter give her a beauty makeover that cost more than her dress.
She could do this thing. She could be beautiful and sexy. She could meet the dress code advice that the club published on its webpage.
Still, she was more than a little anxious when she pulled her ancient Subaru to the curb in front of the club on Saturday evening. She expected the valet to reject her car. People who went to nightclubs like this drove Audis and BMWs. To her relief, the valet didn’t seem to care about the dent in the Subaru’s right fender or the number on the odometer, which read 150,378 miles.
She also made it past the tight security at the door, where one of the doormen/bouncers actually smiled at her. But that may have been because she dropped Connor Strickland’s name. She stepped through the doors and was greeted by the sound of Top 40 music, played just a little too loud for her taste. The music drifted down from the second-floor overlook.
The restaurant on the ground level was classy and elegant with sleek, mid-tone wood paneling and a hand-blown glass chandelier that looked like a fire ball. A stainless steel kitchen opened to the dining room so guests could watch a bevy of white-coated chefs prepare their meals.
The hostess led her to a table near the front windows, where she came face-to-face with Connor Strickland. She recognized him, of course, because she’d checked out his Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles. But the guy at the table gave off a different vibe from the carefully posed person in the corporate head shot on his various online profiles. His public persona was definitely button-down, but the real Connor Strickland looked like a player in a pair of tight faded jeans, a body-hugging black T-shirt, and a pair of Toms canvas shoes with holes in the toes.
He stood up and gave her a wink.
WTF?
Then he smiled and said her name in a deep voice that was the definition of hot and manly. A moment later, he moved forward, grabbed her by the arm, and kissed her. Not on the cheek but right on the mouth. No tongue, thank God, but she felt as if her space had been violated.
He gave her a boyish grin and smoothed his dirty-blond hair with one hand. Laurie had to admit he was kind of attractive…from a certain angle.
She squared her shoulders and took a seat at the table, but before she could say a word, Connor ordered her a Park Margarita. She didn’t want the drink. She’d planned to stay sober tonight because of the sixty-mile drive back to Shenandoah Falls. Also sobriety seemed wise when one was going out on a blind date.
Obviously she was being way too cautious. But what was wrong with that?
Everything. Cautious people didn’t ever live dangerously. They never had adventures. They always followed the straight and narrow.
So when her drink arrived, she threw caution to the wind and took a sip. It was an excellent margarita, perfectly sweet and salty at the same time. And Connor seemed nice. He asked her a few questions about her job and even listened when she launched into a discussion of her research on the behavior of non-party-affiliated voters. But about five minutes into her discussion, he had the temerity to argue with her about her research.
Rather than argue back, because the man knew nothing about voter behavior studies, she turned the conversation back on him and let him order her a second margarita.
By the time she was halfway finished with the second drink, she decided that Connor was a natural-born raconteur. He kept the conversation going all through the appetizers and her main course of Chilean sea bass. He had the rib eye steak. But when the coffee arrived, he looked deeply into Laurie’s eyes and asked, “Do you believe in destiny?”
Oh boy. A girl didn’t have to have a lot of experience to know a lame pickup line when she heard one. She was tempted to launch into a geek girl discussion of free will but decided against it. He didn’t want a conversation with a smart woman. He wanted someone to wink at and impress. Besides, he’d already dismissed her research.
She decided she wasn’t all that down with dancing with the guy. She really wanted to leave.
Unfortunately, she was almost finished with margarita number three, and she didn’t have a backup transportation plan. It wasn’t as if she could afford a taxi to drive the sixty miles back to Shenandoah Falls. Or to book a hotel room in D.C., which would probably cost more than the taxi. Also, calling Daddy and crashing at his apartment was not at the top of her list of options.
Connor forced the issue when
he reached across the table, grabbed her hand, and forcibly interlaced his fingers with hers. “Laurie, you’re an incredibly beautiful and hot woman. And I want to tell you that August Kopp’s son, whatever his name is, is a jerk.”
She ground her teeth. “Did Andrew tell you about Brandon because—”
“No, no, of course not. Andrew didn’t say a word. I did some research on my own. I just want you to know that I understand how life can be really hard sometimes. And also, whatever that guy did, it wasn’t your fault. I want to be your friend, and I think we’ve really hit it off, don’t you? Why don’t we go somewhere quiet where we can really talk? My apartment is in the Watergate.” He squeezed her hand.
Damn. Here it was. The invitation she’d been looking for. And really, who wasn’t curious about the Watergate? But curiosity killed the cat, and suddenly she didn’t want any part of Connor Strickland.
She pulled her hand away. “Uh, Connor, I, uh, I need to—” She didn’t finish the sentence as she stood. She was in full-flight mode, which was complicated by the fact that she was too buzzed to drive. Real escape wasn’t even possible, but the ladies’ room seemed like a reasonable short-term alternative. She turned and headed across the room, which had become wall-to-wall crowded in the hour and a half that she and Connor had been eating.
She didn’t get far before Connor grabbed her from behind. “Hey, what’s the deal? I thought we had an understanding, you know?”
She turned, took one look at his face, and realized she was in way over her head.
For the last two hours, Andrew had occupied a spot at The Park’s ground-floor bar, nursing a single beer and a couple of Diet Cokes. He’d kept an eye on the flat-screen television above the bar, where Michigan was clobbering Penn State on the gridiron. Every so often he’d look over toward the couple at the table nearest the window. And every time his gaze landed on Laurie, his worry mounted.
Laurie had certainly come loaded for bear tonight. Her dress clung to her curves, exposed her legs up to mid-thigh, and revealed mouthwatering cleavage. She’d let her hair down too. It fell below her shoulders in a golden waterfall that dared any man to touch it or bury his nose in it.