“Where’s it pulling?” Dean asks, voice just barely louder than a whisper. “You need more?”
I’m struggling to breathe. I can smell him now, sweat mingling with something that might be pine. The longer the stretch lasts the closer he comes, the stronger the smell is, the more of his body presses against mine.
“I’m okay,” I lie.
“Bullshit. You’re fit. You should be able to move more than this.”
“You said it yourself—I’m uptight,” I counter. I struggle slightly and Dean leans back and lets me sit up, though he doesn’t move away. This leaves me sitting with one leg extended and one bent, Dean tucked in right between, a foot of space between our faces, and then only because I’m resting back on my arms. I can’t help but picture him leaning in, closing that distance, pinning me to the grass and wedging his hips against mine. I bite my lip against the sudden surge of unwanted arousal.
As ever, Dean’s face is a contrast of hot and cold; even as his lips twitch, his eyes remain untouched, that strong jaw unmoving, the dark slashes of his eyebrows tugging together just slightly.
“Let me help you loosen up,” he says. I barely have time to see him reach for me before I’m turned around, my back to his front. “Knees bent, legs together,” he murmurs in my ear, wrapping those big arms around me and moving my limbs into said position.
I look on helplessly as those battered hands reach under my thighs, tugging them up to my chest. My breath catches at the scratchy feel of his palms sliding up to my knees, forcing them out so I’m sitting in a very basic cross-legged position, feet pressed together.
“Hands on the grass,” Dean orders. My hands ignore my brain’s instruction to wave him away and say I’m done for the day, and instead plant themselves on the grass in front of me.
I hold back a groan as Dean rests the firm—fine, they’re bulging—muscles of his chest against my upper back and leans into me, bending me forward. My inner thighs start to burn and when my face is about six inches from the ground I have to stop him before something snaps.
“That’s enough,” I gasp.
The pressure doesn’t disappear, but it doesn’t increase, either. Instead we stay in this too-close, too-intimate position, Dean’s breath hot against the back of my ear. “Thirty seconds,” he says.
I squeeze my eyes shut tight and try to count slowly to thirty.
“What are your plans for the rest of the day?” he asks casually.
“Work,” I say through gritted teeth.
“You work every day?”
“Almost.”
“That doesn’t sound fun.”
“I like my job.”
“And your life?”
“What about it?”
“You like that too?”
My eyes fly open, struggling to focus on the gleaming blades of grass in front of me. It’s unnerving how he’s managed to ask the one question I’ve been avoiding asking myself these past few months.
“Of course,” I lie.
“What do you do for fun?”
“I don’t have a lot of free time.”
“Humor me.”
I turn the question around. “What do you do for fun?”
I feel him shrug, muscles shifting against my back. “Box. Run. Hang out. Fuck.”
My breath stops altogether. He did not just say that. Dean Barclay did not just say that, lips brushing against my ear like a combined threat/promise.
“You fucking anyone, Rachel?”
Okay, maybe he did just say that. And despite the fact that I should be crawling out from under his massive body and running all the way home, I squirm slightly, bitterly enjoying the way the word reaches right under my shorts and circles my clit.
I think of Todd, and how I wouldn’t describe what we’d done as fucking. Or making love. It had been sex, competent, successful, respectable sex. In fact, I’m not even sure I’d ever heard him say the word fuck. I rarely say it. And neither do the people in my office. I can’t imagine how awkward it would be if someone just started dropping f-bombs on the thirty-second floor. And yet, coming from Dean, it sounds like something I desperately want. No, need. No, do not want and do not need.
“I think the thirty seconds are up,” I say on an inhale.
There’s a pause, then a faintly dirty chuckle as Dean backs away. I unfold my tired legs and bury my face in my shoulder to smother a moan.
“You talk to anyone from home?” he asks, jarring me with the sudden change of subject.
“From Riverside?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“You know about your mom?”
I nod. It’s weird, him sitting behind me, not touching while we talk, and yet it’s better too. I can’t look at him right now. I don’t know what he’d see in my face.
“You didn’t come back.” It’s a statement, not an accusation.
Someone from the hospital had gotten in touch the day they’d found my mother’s body, three years after I’d taken off. She’d long given her life over to vodka, and her liver had finally had enough. They told me she’d passed away in her sleep and had probably been uncomfortable in the months before. But I knew better. My mother hadn’t been meant for this world. She’d numbed every feeling she’d ever had with bottle after bottle, and death had been her only ambition. She’d gotten what she’d been waiting for, and, as per her lonely wish for me, I hadn’t returned for the funeral.
“I knew.”
“Ally and Kurt got married.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. Three kids.”
“Wow.”
“Triplets.”
I stand up cautiously, shaking out my legs. “That’s a surprise. I thought she hated him.”
Dean stands too. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Like what?”
“Like me heading home from the gym one day, only to spot a woman walking into a convenience store and realizing I used to know her, without the fancy suits and high heels. That I used to do her.” He reaches down and swats grass off my ass.
“That was a long time ago,” I say.
“I know.”
He lets the moment linger, never shifting, never looking uncomfortable. But I’m the opposite. I can’t seem to stop fidgeting, tugging at the hem of my T-shirt, readjusting my hat, glancing around as families and dog-walkers fill the park.
“Well,” I begin, ready to make my escape.
“Hang on.”
I blink in surprise as Dean walks over to a young man sketching in a notepad, borrows a pen and paper, scribbles something down and jogs back over to me. “Here.”
I look down at the hastily scrawled words, enough to recognize it as an address.
“Come over Wednesday night.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ll catch you up on what’s been happening at Riverside.”
“How would you know?”
A muscle ticks in Dean’s jaw at my impolite and indirect mention of his time in prison. “I went back. For Ally and Kurt’s wedding. It was last year.”
“Sorry.”
“Whatever. You going to come over?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not going to clean up if you aren’t coming.”
I glance at Dean, but as ever, his expression is unreadable. Or maybe I’ve just lost the knack for interpreting his thoughts. I don’t know why it seems so important that I come to his house to take a walk down memory lane, but if my increased blood pressure is any clue, my body wants him to do more than simply reminisce.
“Okay,” I say, not sure if I’m telling the truth. “Wednesday.”
He nods, as though to himself. “Good. Eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock,” I repeat. “See you then.”
“My number’s on there too,” he says, backing away, tucking his hands into his pockets. “Call me if something changes.”
I nod and turn away, striding in the direction
of my apartment, mind reeling. What just happened? We had a semi-civil conversation, Dean got some things off his chest, and yet somehow I don’t feel as though we’ve resolved much. If anything, I feel like some new questions have been posed—namely, why does my body seem to think fucking Dean Barclay is a swell idea, when my overstuffed brain knows much, much better?
Chapter Four
The offices of Sterling, Morgan & Haines take up three floors of the gleaming King Building in downtown Chicago. The partners, fourth-year associates, and assigned secretaries and paralegals work on the thirty-second floor; junior associates and legal support staff are on the thirty-first; and accounting, IT and the rest are down on the seventeenth for reasons I’ve never been made privy to.
We have amazing views of the city, and since every office is walled-in glass—with the exception of the partners, who have actual privacy—it feels as if we have access to all things, all the time. Everything money can buy.
It’s Wednesday—the Wednesday—and Parker and I are returning from another day in Camden in time for a five thirty progress report meeting with the partners to compare our findings with the interviews being conducted in seven other states.
We climb into one of the dozen shiny elevators that whisk us upstairs in record time. Since breaking up with Todd I’d been fortunate enough not to share an elevator with him, but today my lucky streak ends as the elevator slows at the seventeenth floor and he steps on. He holds my gaze for a moment, then nods at Parker and murmurs a polite, “Afternoon,” before turning to face the door.
Parker shoots me a sidelong glance and tries not to smile. I do my best not to kick him. And maybe it’s my weakened mental state or Dean pointing out that I don’t “relax” enough, but Todd looks good today. Maybe he just looks good when he’s not talking about golf. He’s several inches taller than my five-seven, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders and trim waist. His hair is shiny, his cologne is expensive and delicious, and—
What the hell am I thinking? The time to have sex with Todd Varner was two weeks ago, before I broke up with him. Not now, not while Parker is in the elevator.
We reach the thirty-second floor and both Parker and Todd move aside to let me exit first, as though I’m most excited about this meeting with the partners. When I step out, the back of my hand accidentally brushes across Todd’s hip and he glances at me, one sandy eyebrow raised in silent inquiry.
I want to be honest and shake my head no, but the way my hormones are suddenly raging makes me hesitate. Instead I shrug slightly, helplessly, and Todd’s look lingers an extra second before he exits the elevator, offers us another polite nod and moves off to do whatever it is he came up here to do.
“You two broke up, right?” Parker asks in a low voice as we head down the hall to the conference room.
“Yes.”
“You think he might help you relax?”
That snaps me out of my daze. Earlier in the day Parker had commented on how tense I looked, and I’d confessed my recent trouble “relaxing,” without going into detail. I certainly wasn’t any more or less relaxed when I was with Todd than without him. I’m just in a weird place because of this purported meeting with Dean. The one I keep meaning to cancel but somehow haven’t. The one I know I can’t keep. I can’t go out to Camden to meet a dead sexy ex-convict at his apartment tonight. The very reason I never returned to Riverside, never kept in touch with anyone, was so I wouldn’t get pulled back into that world. Meeting with Dean would be a huge step backward when I have committed so many years to looking anywhere but.
“Rachel. Parker.”
The three partners are already in the conference room when we enter, Don Sterling, Joseph Morgan and Lee Haines. The three men, two white, one black, all dressed in handmade suits and Italian loafers, make a powerful impression when they stand in unison, hands extended. We shake and murmur polite nothings before Parker and I take a seat on the opposite side of the table in front of matching collated and color-coded reports.
God, they’re close to two hundred pages long. Single spaced.
“As you know,” Sterling begins, flipping open his report to page one, “we have twenty-six associates working in thirteen cities in eight states to conduct the interviews for this suit. In nearly a month we’ve collected data on over a thousand victims and we have—” He glances at Morgan and Haines as though it’s necessary to explain the “we,” “concluded that there is, without question, a substantial case here.”
Parker and I studiously avoid each other’s eyes. No kidding, there’s a case here. Meet one ravaged family and you’d know there was a case here.
“Now,” Morgan takes over, “you two have been working from a list of preapproved questions and have completed ninety-one interviews. Any observations not included in your reports?”
Parker and I shake our heads. “It’s all in there,” I say for both of us. “Everyone we’ve spoken to has reported similar working conditions, an exposure to the Harco-99 cleaner containing significant amounts of perchlorodibenzene, and similar side effects. To date seventy-nine of our interviews have been with families whose exposure resulted in the death of at least one family member. Twelve have been with those otherwise severely impacted by the exposure.”
“All right, excellent,” Morgan says, tapping his pen against the back of his hand. “As you know, Caitlin and Wallace are in North Carolina, a town called...”
Marlowe.
“...Marlowe, and in three and a half weeks they’ve completed...”
Ninety-five.
“One hundred and sixty interviews.”
My eyes nearly bulge out of my head. Next to me, I feel Parker stiffen. We don’t need to look at each other to know we’re thinking the same thing: Caitlin Dufresne. That bitch.
“Now,” Haines picks up his report and flips to a blue-tabbed page near the middle. “Caitlin has been reviewing your interview notes—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupt, “my notes?”
“Yes.” Haines nods, big fingers still trying to turn the page, failing to note the suddenly tense set of my shoulders. “And she has been kind enough to make some adjustments to the questions you’re asking, which will hopefully result in an improved interview pace, allowing everyone to catch up to her rate of progress.”
Haines folds his hands in front of him and peers at Parker and me over his gold-framed glasses, apparently waiting for some sort of response.
“That’s very...helpful,” Parker offers in a strange voice.
Haines nods, satisfied. “Yes, we thought so. Now...”
The meeting lasts two hours, but covers nothing new. It’s just another depressing series of minutes in a day of bad news, and not even its tediousness can distract me from my renewed hatred for Caitlin Dufresne. Well, renewed might not be the right word. It’s not like my hatred for her ever faded, it had just been shuttled to the background while she worked out of town.
Hired at the same time as Parker and me, Caitlin Dufresne was top of her class at Yale, the only daughter of a bigwig lawyer at a New York firm who had opted to strike out on her own so as not to take advantage of her father’s connections. Eye roll, please. As much as I hate to admit it, if the law hadn’t worked out, she could have been a supermodel. With her long blond hair, huge blue eyes, mile-long legs and breasts that have distracted many a male colleague, Caitlin is gorgeous. She’s also a huge whore. But despite her whorishness, she’s irritatingly smart, devoted to the law, and is always one of the first in and last to leave at the end of the day.
She’s basically a Disney villain, as heartbreakingly beautiful as she is selfish and shallow. Unfortunately for us, she’s very much real and entirely three-dimensional, scaling the ladder at Sterling, Morgan & Haines in four-inch heels and making life miserable for anyone who crosses her path.
While Parker and I had to wait until we were officially fourth-year associates to make the move up to the thirty-second floor, Caitlin is the only person in Sterling, Morgan & Haines’s
illustrious history to get a prime location on the upper level at the beginning of her third year. This was no doubt helped along by the fact that she’s sleeping with Sterling, Morgan or Haines—or some combination thereof—but the fact remains: we’re equals, but we’re not.
Before setting out on these interviews everyone agreed that we would conduct four interviews a day, six days a week. A hundred and sixty interviews done in three and a half weeks works out to... Seven? Eight, interviews a day? Well, math isn’t my strong suit. But it’s considerably more than we agreed upon, and her motivations have less to do with helping the clients than making herself look good.
Unlike Caitlin, I actually care about these people. More than I should. More than I want to. They remind me of the people I grew up with, the ones I left behind.
Sometimes I think this is the wrong case for me. If I can’t do my job without my emotions getting in the way, then maybe Caitlin, with her coldly ruthless ambition, is the right person, after all. But then I think of her smug face as she jots down notes, thrilled with every gory personal detail because they make her case stronger and not because she cares, and I think, God no. I’m the one who should do this. I can keep my heart and my head separate. I can win this case on its merits, and for the right reasons. I’m not a saint, but I’m a damn good lawyer.
The meeting ends at five to eight, and Parker and I stand and force smiles as we shake hands with the partners and thank them for their time before heading back to my office. Parker goes to grab dinner and I review the report as I wait. Despite the late hour, most of the lights are still on and I can see dozens of people at their desks or on the phone. See? I think. Everybody works this much. It’s not just me. Why don’t you tell them to relax?
I’m 10 percent through when my cell phone buzzes. I dig it out of my bag and stare at the unfamiliar number. Except I do know whose number it is.
My guilty eyes flicker to the time: eight-oh-three.
Well, he’s certainly a stickler for punctuality.
I hit Ignore and return to the report. A minute later it rings again. Again I hit Ignore. He calls one more time and when I don’t answer, he gives up. A minute later my phone vibrates to indicate I’ve got messages. I look around: no one cares what I’m doing. They’ve got their own problems.
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