“You have the floor to yourself?” Dreamy Tyler asked.
“About a third of it. My neighbor has the rest of the floor, and a private elevator on the other side of the building.”
“Damn.”
They were at her door, and Honor turned and leaned back on it. She was drunk, but she wasn’t stupid or reckless, not even now, and she had to try to think clearly for a second or two before she let a veritable stranger into her apartment. It had been months since she’d had sex, and the thought of scratching that itch with this very hot hipster had all kinds of appeal, but letting him into her home? She was smarter than that, right? Even with champagne, and appletinis, and those blue shot things, and the daiquiris—oh, and the tequila shooters—she was still smart enough not to let a stranger into her home. Right?
All her friends were home already. The last one home always called to confirm she’d gotten in safely, but everybody was extra drunk tonight and probably passed out. No one would be worried about her for hours. That was a lot of time for a stranger to do bad things before anyone wondered if she was okay.
Tyler stepped close—closer than casual—and set a hand on her hip. “You’re at your door. That makes me off duty. Now, I’m flirting.”
Oh, he was so damn hot. And she was so damn horny.
Moving slowly, giving her plenty of time to push him away, Tyler bent his head, bringing his lips to hers. Honor watched him, trying to think. He’d been sweet all night, a good sport as they’d all gotten drunker and drunker, as they’d all objectified the hell out of him, and as Liz had engaged in rather a lot of sexual harassment. Honor chuckled softly at the thought of defending her friend in court.
Then his lips landed, and his tongue slid into her mouth, and Honor had no thoughts at all.
“Mmm,” he purred, pulling back after a few gentle seconds. “You are beautiful and sweet, Ms. Honor Babinot. You told me all about your friends. What is it you do?”
Do? Oh, for work. That she didn’t have. She stared at him, her mouth open, ready to speak but empty of words.
He stood up straight and tucked a hand into his suit coat. “I tell you what.” A business card emerged from an inner pocket, pinched between long, strong fingers. “I’d like to see you, sometime when you’re not partying with the MILF crew and too drunk to remember where you live. Give me a call.”
Honor took the card. She glanced at it but didn’t try to read—too much work to focus right now. “We’re not moms,” she said.
“Hm?” Tyler brushed a hair from her cheek and pushed the mass behind her shoulder.
“You called us MILFs. None of us has kids. How old do you think I am?” She was thirty-four. Hardly geriatric. Or old enough to be called a MILF. Right?
“I’m not stupid enough to guess. Old enough to afford a place like this, so older than me. It’s hot. You’re hot. But I want you sober, so call me.”
He kissed her again, letting it go on long enough that Honor began again to consider the pros and cons of inviting him in. Then he backed off.
“Good night, Ms. Babinot. I’m glad you took my car tonight.”
“Good night, Dreamy Tyler. Thank you for not being a jerk.”
Tipping an imaginary cap, he pressed the call button for the elevator—which opened at once.
He turned in the car and faced her, smiling, and she watched him until the door closed.
*****
Honor rubbed at the vexing spot between her eyes, where the day’s stress and disappointment had merged with the remnants of her worst hangover since law school and made a little fire in her frontal lobe. She stared at the gloomy, industrial grey carpet under her sensible, court-day pumps. The carpeting was clean enough, but faded where the dusty streaks of sun came through the plate-glass window. Clean enough but faded described the whole place, in fact.
‘The whole place.’ Wasn’t that a laugh. Two hundred square feet.
Sighing, she looked up, out the streaky window, beyond the painted letters stubbornly declaring this space the offices of MARTY HIBBERT, CPA, though Marty had moved out some time ago, to the parking lot. The afternoon sun glinted off the windshields of the parked cars. Her Porsche was parked between a rusting mid-Seventies Ford pickup and a blue Chevy Cruze with a white hood.
How long would she be able to afford the payments on the Cayenne? Should she trade it in for something cheaper?
It had taken her all of fifteen minutes online this morning, while her eyes were still bleary and her stomach hadn’t yet committed to its coffee contents, to understand that there was no way, under any circumstances, not even with her parents’ help—an offer she was really trying not to take—that she’d be renting office space in a downtown or midtown office building. Or anywhere near the criminal courts. Not even the teeniest available space. She couldn’t afford a storage closet downtown.
She’d given up that dream before she’d contacted a realtor. But she’d had higher hopes than this. All day long, her hopes had been circling the drain, sliding down the pipes, until they’d reached this: a strip mall on the Bench.
“Is there anything going in next door?” she asked the disaffected woman who’d been on phone duty at the real estate brokerage when Honor had called. The storefront next door was also empty. Its windows were covered with white paper stenciled with the word AVAILABLE at regular intervals.
Without looking up from her phone, the woman answered, “I’m not sure. I can check. If you wanted to rent both spaces and combine them, I’m sure the landlord would be open to negotiating.”
“No. I’m just not sure I want a vacant space next door.”
The agent didn’t respond. Honor looked over and saw that she was engrossed once more in social media.
Simply by virtue of being clean and relatively well kept, this was the best place they’d seen today that she could afford. No dead rat in the toilet, like the place they’d viewed before this. Windows intact, carpet and paint aged but in decent shape. It was a crappy little strip mall, with a tobacco shop, a little take-out pho restaurant, a laundromat, and a shoe repair shop, and two empty sites. One, if she took this one.
She could pass, and keep looking, hope for something better, but every day she spent trying to set up a practice was a day she wasn’t practicing.
At every level of her life, she’d been a success. High school class president and valedictorian. Summa cum laude for her B.A., her M.A., and her J.D. Aced the shit out of the bar exam. Fielded several offers from high-powered firms. Before she’d ever heard of Bellamy, White and Cohn, she’d seen her career path leading her to a corner office at just such a firm, with her name on the wall and on the letterhead. She’d worked hard. She was smart and committed. She lived for her work. She’d done everything right.
And yet here she stood, in a vacant office in a dingy strip mall on a rundown street. Homeless, unless she claimed this sad space for her own.
Well, her name would be on the wall.
Or the window, anyway.
*****
On the way home from signing the lease papers, Honor decided she needed to get ahold of herself and turn the past few days into a good thing. None of this had happened to her. She had chosen to give Silas and the other partners an ultimatum. She had decided to make the bold statement, and to follow it through. These were her choices, and wandering around all day like she was down on her luck was bullshit.
Her success had been buffed by lots of advantages and privilege, yes, but she’d worked her ass off and been smart as hell, too. Besides, all those advantages were still in play. She had the ivy-covered education. She had the comfortably-off parents who’d offered to lend her seed money. And her reputation in the courtroom had been fucking earned. She would make this work.
This wasn’t a crisis; it was just the next challenge. She’d start in a strip mall, but she’d wind up in a penthouse corner office, and when she did, her name would be the first one on that wall, and she wouldn’t have to deal with good-old-boy sexist fuckery
to put it there.
Last night, her friends had toasted her for her bravery. Well, they were fucking right.
Full of righteous vigor, she stopped at the market and filled a cart for the first time in months. She could cook, and enjoyed it, but she worked six or seven days a week, often until nine or ten at night, or later, and when she finally stumbled into her apartment, she barely had the energy to press the buttons on the microwave. For the most part, unless the girls were coming over, her kitchen was stocked with coffee, half and half, wine, vodka, and a freezer full of Stouffer’s frozen dinners. Sometimes, she didn’t even have the time or energy for that.
What she had now was time. Oceans of it, if she wanted to take it. So she bought herself a nice grass-fed filet and some fresh vegetables for a salad, and she picked up a single slice of turtle cheesecake at the market’s bakery section. While she was there, she selected a loaf of fresh bread, too. From the dairy section, she took a half-carton of eggs, butter, and cheese. Omelet and toast in the morning sounded nice. Ooh—and juice. Pineapple orange—no. Pineapple orange banana. Yum.
At the checkout, she tossed a stupidly expensive organic chocolate bar in there, too. What the hell.
Once home, Honor changed into a long t-shirt and wound her hair up off her face. Singing along to Melissa Etheridge, she bopped around her kitchen, drinking a merlot and making herself a real meal.
Beyond her wall of windows, the last traces of sunset painted the mountains with rosy gilt. Honor paused, captured by a sight she’d seen countless times in the years she’d lived in Boise. It never grew old, that beauty. Boise would never be named in the same breath as cities like New York, or San Francisco, or Chicago. It didn’t have a dramatic cityscape. It was just a town, growing far too fast for its roots to hold it up. There wasn’t a lot of high culture or haute couture. But it was a lovely place, and no skyscraper made by human hands could rival the view she had.
She’d never wanted to live in Boise, but here was where she’d made her life.
Now she had to start that life over. Starting from scratch wouldn’t be easy, but she would do it, and she would do it well. Someday, on her terms, she’d have everything she wanted.
Someday started now.
Chapter Four
Not surprisingly, there was a lot Honor didn’t know about how a law office worked, or how a small business worked. There had always been people to do the work of keeping things running. Even as an intern, she hadn’t had to attend to the minutiae of the business itself. Now, she was getting a crash course in the terrifying truth of independence.
It wasn’t just a matter of putting a desk in her crappy new office and finding clients. She’d known that, of course, but what she hadn’t known was how very much had to happen before she could even legally have the window repainted and call the place her office.
She’d applied for a small business loan, and her parents had lent her some money for start-up expenses, so Honor spent the first week studying up on all the legal forms she had to complete, inspections she had to pass, and fees she had to pay to become an LLC and open her doors. While she worked on all that, she ordered office furniture—inexpensive but not embarrassingly obviously so—and paper products like letterhead stationery and business cards. She designed the letterhead and her office sign herself, using Photoshop, and found a sign painter to do the work.
And she figured out a budget. That was terrifying, and the clearest indication of how much her circumstances had changed—because the very nature of her work had changed. No longer could she simply be a criminal defense attorney. Working out of a strip-mall office, with a client list of exactly one name so far, Honor would have to take all comers until she had her feet under her again. Personally, she’d have to economize quite a lot so she could be sure to keep her apartment, and hopefully her car, too.
She also figured out how much she could afford to pay an assistant, and when she called Debbie and told her what she could offer, there was a long, long, painful silence on the other end before Debbie said she had to think it through and asked for a day to give her answer.
That was yesterday. Today, while Honor waited to find out if she’d have to place an ad and hire someone she didn’t know to manage her office and hopefully do some research and case prep, too, she was at the courthouse to file all her paperwork and become an official business owner.
It was disorienting to be in a courthouse she would have said she knew well and yet wander around unsure, because she’d never had to find the offices one went to to file papers.
Her phone rang while she stood in line for the third time, after being sent back for more information twice, to register her business license. She’d been scrolling Twitter to keep her mind occupied, so she saw it was Debbie right away, and her stomach leapt up and slapped her heart. “Hey, Debbie.”
“Hi. I’m not calling with an answer. I need a little more time for that.”
It was Friday. Honor had been out of work for more than two weeks now, spending money but not earning it. She had savings, and her parents, but she didn’t want to deplete either any more than she had to. “Okay, how much time?”
“Just the weekend. I’ll know one way or the other by Monday.”
“Okay.” Over the weekend, she’d draft an ad and be ready to post it widely online Monday, if Debbie said no.
“That’s not why I’m calling, though.”
“Oh. What’s up?” The line inched forward as a broad-shouldered man with thick, longish salt-and-pepper hair stepped to the counter and leaned on it—seeing only his back and his posture, Honor, who read people for a living, knew him to be the kind of overly confident man who flirted with every woman he met and was quite certain they all responded to him.
That made her think of the driver from her last night out with the girls. Tyler. He’d been broad-shouldered and long-haired, and that kind of confident. Drunk, she’d been totally into him. Sober, she’d been mercilessly ashamed of herself and deeply suspicious of his smug cockiness.
He hadn’t tried to take advantage of her drunkenness, however. That was nice. She’d never called him—she’d been too mortified the day after, and anyway, she had far too much going on to start dating anyone right now.
She always had too much going on for that.
Debbie had just said something that Honor had totally missed. “I’m sorry, what? I’m in line at the courthouse. It’s hard to focus.”
“Judith called this morning, looking for you.”
“Judith Jones? Is she okay?” The girl had been free for less than three weeks. Honor had arranged for a placement for her at a woman’s shelter after the verdict, but honestly, everything in her life had gone topsy-turvy immediately after that case, so she hadn’t thought much about her since.
“I don’t think so. It’s not legal trouble, but she sounds bad, Honor. She says she needs to talk to you. When I told her you weren’t with the firm anymore, she burst into tears. I didn’t know what else to do, so I’m seeing her this afternoon, but it’s you she wants.”
The line inched forward as another clerk opened up. Cocky Wonderhair was still chatting up his clerk. Honor stared daggers at his broad back, encased in a tailored, obviously expensive, dark grey suit coat, which topped fashionably faded jeans.
The sign painter was scheduled to be at her crappy new office that afternoon, and there was nobody but Honor to let him in. At this rate, she wouldn’t make it.
She did not have the time—or, now, the resources—to rescue Judith Jones. She’d done all she could for her already. “I don’t know what to do, Debbie. My office isn’t ready, and I can’t go to the firm. There’s nothing I can do.”
“She trusts you, Honor. She’s overwhelmed and scared, and she needs somebody who understands her. You’re her only friend.”
“I’m not her friend, Debbie. I was her lawyer.”
“Honor. Why’d you leave BWC? Was it just money?”
“No. It was …” She stopped. Why had she lef
t? Money hadn’t even been a factor. She’d earned well there. It was respect. Worth. Justice.
None of those things had monetary value. They all should be the foundation of anything she did in the future. Which was, of course, Debbie’s point. “The sign painter is coming to the office this afternoon, so I have to be there, and I’ve got the Mayor’s Civic Awards banquet tonight.” An event she’d have preferred to bail on, but it was one of the biggest events Emily planned, and she had to be there to provide support and panic-abatement. Besides, it was a great opportunity for networking, and Honor needed all the networking she could manage. Already she’d had to get control of a rumor that she’d been ‘let go’ from the firm.
Judith Jones couldn’t be much help to her career, but Honor could spare some time to see if there was something she could do to help this poor girl who’d been thrown into an adulthood alone, without any preparation whatsoever. “Can you bring her to me on the Bench? Say three o’clock? It’s on La Cassia.” When she gave Debbie the address, embarrassment brushed over her tongue.
“We’ll be there. Thank you, Honor.”
As she ended the call, the line moved forward again, and Honor saw Cocky Wonderhair heading toward her, finally finished hogging the clerk. His head was down as he scanned through his papers, but a bolt of recognition hit her. She knew him. From where?
Then he looked up, and she knew exactly who he was. At the same time, he saw, and recognized, her, and he smiled. “Honor! Hey!”
Logan Cahill, older brother of Heath Cahill, the man she’d defended against a first-degree murder charge six months ago. Salt-and-pepper beard to match his salt-and-pepper Wonderhair. Blue-grey eyes, framed with crinkles. Cocky, white-toothed grin. A white, tailored dress shirt under his expensive blazer, two buttons open at the throat. The pewter rodeo charm he wore on a leather cord around his neck peeked out from under the placket of his shirt, resting on his bare skin.
Someday (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 2) Page 4
