“Are you finished?” he asked when she finally paused for air.
“Out of breath,” she admitted.
Steve nodded. “Same thing,” he allowed. “For now, why don’t you tell me the problem that has you so worried? We’ll talk about terms and fees later.”
“Okay.” She didn’t let go of the armrests, even as she sank down in the chair. “I’m being sued.” The words felt as if they were sticking to the roof of her mouth, scraping the skin there.
“By who?” he asked.
“By Wade Baker.” Even his name left a bitter taste in her mouth.
“Is that someone you know?” he asked, trying to get a few more details out of Erin.
“Yes.” She took a deep breath, then added, “I fired him.”
His eyes never leaving hers, Steve rocked back slightly in his chair. “I see.”
“I didn’t want to,” she told him, her voice gaining back some of its momentum. “I really hated firing Wade, but he gave me no choice.”
Waiting for her to continue, he coaxed, “I’m listening.”
Did he want background? She could give him that, Erin thought. “Wade was one of the first people I hired. We all go way back.”
“‘All’?” Steve questioned.
“The rest of the people at Imagine That and I.” That sounded awkward to her, so she elaborated a little more. “We all went to college together. When I started the company, I turned to them and we went into business together,” she explained.
“And then you fired Wade,” he supplied.
That made it sound abrupt and whimsical—it was anything but that. “Well, not right away. We worked together for three years, long nights, living on mustard sandwiches, things like that,” she said. “It was pretty tough going and, to be honest, I thought about quitting a couple of times. I think most of us did,” she admitted.
“And then about a year ago, after a reporter ran a story about Tex that got picked up by a national TV newscast, we were finally on our way. Sales jumped, then doubled more than a couple of times. We were having trouble keeping up with the orders.” And it felt like heaven, she couldn’t help thinking.
“Tell me about the suit,” Steve urged. “Why is this Wade Baker person suing you?” he asked.
It upset her to even talk about it, but ignoring it wasn’t going to make the problem go away. “Wade claims that Tex and a couple of the other toys were really his idea.”
“But they weren’t.” It wasn’t an assumption or a question. He was just stating what he assumed she was going to maintain.
“No!” Erin cried. “They weren’t. Like I told you the other day, I came up with Tex when I was ten, maybe closer to eleven years old. I was in the hospital. My mom came to see me every day, but I just wanted a friend, a friend who wasn’t sick, who wasn’t getting treatments but who was there for me all the time. I always liked dinosaurs, so one day I made him out of an old green sports sock. Then my mother got some green felt.
“While I was getting my treatments, she would sit in my room waiting for me to come back, working on Tex and keeping him a surprise. When she was done, I added my own touches. Between my mom and me, we gave ‘birth’ to Tex.”
That sounded plausible enough to him. Which left him with another question. “Why do you think Wade’s suing you?”
Rather than answer him, Erin took out a sealed plastic baggie from her purse and placed it on his desk. Inside was the letter she’d gotten yesterday.
“What’s that?”
“That’s a letter I found in my mailbox yesterday. There’s no return address and there’s only one line written on the page, but I have a feeling that it’s from Wade.”
Steve took possession of the plastic baggie and pulled out a handkerchief before extracting the envelope and then the single sheet inside the envelope.
He skimmed the note, then looked up at Erin. “My first guess is that you’re probably right.” He set the note and envelope aside for the time being. “I have to ask this,” he prefaced, then continued. “Were you and Wade in a relationship?”
“Not the kind that you mean or that he wanted,” Erin told him.
“Could you be a little clearer?”
Not without being nauseated, but then, her comfort wasn’t what was at stake here. “Wade thought that because we spent so much time together every day, putting in long hours at the office, that meant I was willing to sleep with him. I wasn’t,” she said fiercely. She wanted Steve to know that, to know she wasn’t the type to take that sort of thing casually. “I regarded him as a friend, not anything more. I thought he’d back off when I didn’t respond to his advances and suggestions, but that just made him try harder.”
She frowned. “When that didn’t work, he got nasty. He’d start getting into arguments with the other people working with us and it got to be so uncomfortable I finally had to let him go. That just made him angrier.” She had really felt helpless at that time. “He knows the company means everything to me. Suing me and tying up production is his way of getting back at me. He’s going to force me to close the company. Right now I can’t meet my orders, can’t pay the people working with me. This lawsuit is going to make working a living hell,” she lamented.
He’d been nodding thoughtfully at her statements as Erin had quickly filled him in. Now that she’d finished, he offered her a sympathetic smile.
“Let me look into this and see what I can do.” He glanced at the letter she’d brought. He’d tucked it back into the baggie, together with the envelope. “Mind if I keep this for now?” he asked, nodding at the baggie. “The firm keeps a couple of top-notch private investigators on retainer and I can get one of them to have a friend of his run the prints, see if we come up with anything.”
That all sounded wonderful, but she hesitated giving him the go-ahead. “We haven’t discussed your fee yet,” she reminded him, afraid that once they did, this feeling that maybe things could be worked out after all would completely vanish.
His fee might be completely out of her league. But she had never been the type to stick her head in the sand and she couldn’t just pretend that the practical aspect of all this would just fade away because she wanted it to. If she couldn’t afford Steve—and she strongly suspected that she couldn’t—she needed to know right now.
“No, we haven’t,” Steve acknowledged.
Since he wasn’t saying anything further on the subject, she asked him, “Shouldn’t we?”
“Why don’t we just set that aside for the moment?” he suggested.
Erin’s back grew instantly straighter, stiffer, as she said, “I know we’re pretty much a start-up company and there are no assets per se, but that doesn’t mean that I’m looking to accept charity—”
“No one’s offering you charity,” he quickly told her. At least, not exactly, he added silently. “Tell you what. Let me bring this matter up before the firm and I’ll get back to you on their decision. In the meantime,” he urged her, “try not to worry too much. I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
Optimistic lines like that had ordinarily been her domain. But with her trust trampled on and her faith in people blown to bits, she was finding that remaining optimistic was not nearly as easy to do as it used to be a few short months ago.
“That makes one of us,” she murmured in response to his impromptu pep talk.
“Go back to work,” he told her. “Rally your troops and I’ll get back to you as soon as I have any information to pass on.”
She wasn’t nearly as naive as she might appear to be at first. “Is that lawyer-speak for ‘Don’t hold your breath’?” she asked him, actually afraid to allow herself to get hopeful.
“No, that’s lawyer-speak for ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I have any information to pass on,’” he said patiently. Getting up from his
chair, he told her, “I’ll walk you out.”
But Erin shook her head. “That’s okay. I’ve taken up enough of your time. I can find my way out—I had Tex drop bread crumbs,” she said. Then, in a much higher voice, she had Tex say, “And I did—except for the bread crumbs I ate. Hey, I was hungry.”
Steve laughed, delighted. “I guess I should consider myself lucky that Tex didn’t take a bite out of me while he was at it.” Then, sobering just a touch, he asked her, “Are we still on for Sunday and the movie?”
It wasn’t that she’d forgotten about the movie date; it was just that first the note and then the news about getting sued had chased the other thoughts right out of her head.
“Am I allowed to see you after hours?” she asked him.
“I think Jason would insist on it,” Steve told her. “As long as he’s included.”
“Oh, he’s definitely included,” she assured Steve. Even so, she had to ask, just to be perfectly clear, “So there’s no conflict of interest?”
“Not unless you decide you want me to represent this Wade character, too.”
“Not a chance,” she cried.
“Then we’re okay,” he said with a wink. “And like I said, try not to worry.”
“Easier said than done,” she answered, then explained part of the reason she was so anxious. “Wade doesn’t like taking no for an answer.”
“Neither do I,” Steve responded. “But this Wade character is going to have to learn how to do that. By the way, I will get back to you as soon as I know what’s going on,” he promised. “Speaking of which, where can I reach you?”
Erin took out the card that Rhonda had made up for the company with Imagine That’s logo, address and phone number on it. “You can reach me at work most of the time. Once in a while, I do go home, mostly to change my clothes,” she confessed. “You have my home number already.”
He tucked the card into the breast pocket of his smoke-gray suit jacket. “I’ll call you soon,” he told her.
Erin nodded as she left the office.
As he watched her turn down the hall and make her way to the elevator, Steve didn’t turn around and go back to his office again. Instead he went in search of one of his senior partners. Specifically, he wanted to talk to the man who was responsible for his being with the firm in the first place. He had a proposition to make to the man that involved taking on a case pro bono for the first time in a long time.
* * *
“You want us to take a pro bono case?” Gerald Donnal asked, seeming somewhat surprised by the request.
Steve stood in the senior partner’s office, making his case. “It’s either that, sir, or I’m going to have to take some of that vacation time I’ve accrued in the past two years. At this point, I’m not sure just how much time I’m going to need to take.”
Graying at the temples and widening around the waist, Gerald Donnal looked at him.
“Not that I don’t think you richly deserve some time off, Steven, but isn’t this rather sudden? And what does it have to do with a pro bono case?”
“Sudden, yes,” Steve admitted—he was a little surprised at how quickly he’d made up his mind about her. He was the type who didn’t accept half measures as “good enough.” “And if you don’t want to take this case pro bono,” Steve continued, “then I need some time off so I can handle it on my own time.”
“That important to you?” Donnal asked, clearly intrigued.
Steve was about to automatically deny the personal aspect of the question but decided that maybe Donnal had a better take on it than he did. The old man certainly had a keener eye.
“In a word, yes,” he told the senior partner.
“Then by all means, take the case pro bono,” Donnal said. “If it’s that important to you, then it’s that important to us. I trust your judgment, boy,” he assured him. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have an appointment with a grieving widow to determine just how ‘grieving’ this woman actually is.”
“I’ll get out of your hair,” Steve said, already walking toward the door. “And thanks.”
Donnal laughed, waving away the words. “Don’t mention it. You’ve brought in enough business for us to cut you a little slack. Hope this turns out as well as you think it will.”
“Oh, it will, Mr. Donnal,” he promised with enthusiasm. “I have a really good feeling about this and it will.”
Chapter Twelve
Because he’d noted Erin’s discomfort in his office and he wanted her to be at ease, when Steve asked to get together with her, he suggested going back to the café where they’d gone right after their Career Day presentations at Jason’s class.
Rather than feel relaxed in the neutral setting, Erin was tense the moment she walked in and saw Steve already seated at a table.
He waved her over and as she crossed to him, she was convinced he’d chosen this public café as a meeting place because he was afraid she might be one of those women who caused a scene when she didn’t receive the information she wanted.
“I took the liberty of getting the same thing for you that you ordered last time,” he told her, indicating the coffee and turnover at her place setting.
Food was the furthest thing from her mind, despite the fact that she was surprised and touched that he even remembered what she’d had that day.
Taking a seat, she was about to tell him that she understood his deciding not to take the case when Steve told her, “The firm’s agreed to take on your case pro bono.”
Struck speechless for a moment, she managed to get out, “Really?”
He smiled at her. “Really.”
And then she played back his words and apprehension burrowed through her. “The firm,” she repeated. “But not you?”
He was quick to place her misunderstanding to rest. “Oh, definitely me,” he assured her. “I’ll be the one representing this case.”
Before she allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief, she had one last question to put to him. “Pro bono. Doesn’t that mean that there’ll be no charge?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
Erin shook her head. As much as she needed this, she had to turn it down. Her self-esteem dictated it. “Thank you, but no.”
“I don’t understand,” he told her.
“I’m desperate,” she told him honestly, “but not that desperate.” Her eyes met his. “I can’t and won’t accept charity.” She was surprised and touched by his offer. But she didn’t want to be in his debt. Still, the fact that he was actually offering to help gladdened her heart and managed to stir something within her that she told herself had no place here.
It stayed nonetheless.
“It’s not charity, Erin,” Steve insisted.
To her, charity had a very simple definition. “I’m not paying for your services, right?”
“Right,” he was forced to admit. “But—”
She cut Steve off, not allowing him to finish. “If that isn’t the definition of charity, then what would you call it?”
He never hesitated. “A fair trade. You told me that you go to the local hospitals on Christmas Eve and the first day of summer vacation to distribute those dinosaurs of yours, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“My helping you make this suit go away is to pay you back for that.” He wouldn’t be strictly honest with her if he didn’t tell her the second part. “And also to give the firm a write-off.”
That just proved her point. “In other words, charity,” Erin concluded.
“By allowing my firm to represent you and casting us in a good light, you’d be doing us a favor and we in turn would be doing one for you by exposing this blackmailer in sheep’s clothing,” he told her. On the way over here he’d thought of an avenue of strategy to try. “You mentioned that you had gotten
some favorable press from the father of one of the kids in the cancer ward and that was how your career took off, right?”
She looked at him, confused. Where was he going with this? “Yes, but—”
As he spoke, he leaned in over the table and closer to her, shutting out the rest of the world. Even with a table between them, she was acutely aware of him, of the cologne he was wearing. Of the way his eyes crinkled slightly at the edges.
“What do you think about getting in touch with him, letting him know about the case?” Steve proposed.
“Why would I do that?” she asked. “He was nice enough to get me the publicity I needed to make people aware of my product at the time. I don’t want to repay him by asking him for another favor.”
He struggled not to stare at her. Was this woman for real? In the world he lived in, the women he’d encountered of late were all devious and self-serving. She was like the antiversion of those women. She was single-handedly restoring his faith in humanity in general, and women in particular.
“My guess is that he would be more than happy to do something positive for you after you brought joy into his son’s life. Not only that but this is the kind of human-interest story people respond to—altruism versus greed. It’s the stuff that reputations and promotions are made of.
“And in the meantime, I think that I’ll pay this Wade Baker a little visit after I get a few things straightened out first.”
For the first time since Mike had told her about the suit against her company, Erin felt hopeful, which in turn ushered in just the slightest feeling of relief. She was very tempted to throw her arms around his neck and kiss him. But that, she knew, would open a door to a place she realized she was afraid to go.
Dating for Two (Matchmaking Mamas) Page 13
