Goodbye To All That (32 page)

“—a million times,” she muttered.

“—at least five times,” he corrected her, “your client lost no money due to my client’s business. Zero. Zilch. The ladies buying eighty-dollar bags on a street corner in Flatbush were never going to waltz into Saks Fifth Avenue and buy the eight-hundred-dollar version. My guy’s sales never put a dent in your guy’s sales.”

“But there should be a bigger penalty,” she argued. “Your guy did something wrong.”

“And he’ll say he’s sorry.” O’Leary groaned, tilted his head back until he was staring at the ceiling, then straightened and presented her with an overwhelmingly charming grin. “So. We’ll take this settlement back to our clients and convince them this is the way to go, and Judge Montoya will get her happy ending. Now, what do you say I buy you a drink?”

“You will
not
buy me a drink,” Melissa retorted, although she could think of nothing she’d like more right now than a margarita. Sweet and tart and salty, heavy on the tequila.

“Fine. Then
you
can buy
me
a drink.”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“Then we’ll pay for our own drinks. Come on. If nothing else, we’ve got to go somewhere and exchange gossip about Montoya.”

He had a point. She would love to hear juicy gossip about the judge. Plus she could practically taste the first icy sip of a margarita.

They packed up their notes, the compromises they’d wrestled over. They shut off their laptops and zipped them into their padded laptop bags. She donned her jacket without help from him—a good thing; if he added chivalry to that ridiculously sexy smile of his, she’d probably have to smack him—and he donned his. Then they left the room, she first, only because she’d been seated closer to the door, not because he’d held the door open and waved her through.

The day had slipped away while they’d been shut up inside, and the skyscrapers lining the streets blocked the evening’s faded light from reaching the sidewalk. Melissa felt as if she were wading through a cool river of shadow.

“Let’s head uptown,” O’Leary suggested. “The bars around here are all filled with lawyers.”

“God forbid.” Melissa allowed herself a tiny grin.

They started walking, Melissa once again grateful that her chic shoes were so comfortable. All around them, people filed out of the office towers and government buildings, the first wave of rush hour. Were all these weary workers heading for bars and cafes in search of liquid refreshment, too? Would she and O’Leary wind up in some noisy, crowded place filled with thumping music and twenty-year-olds dressed like hookers?

She decided even that would be preferable to going home. She had no plans with Luc tonight. The last time they’d spoken—by phone—had been two days ago, and neither of them had mentioned getting together. It had been a friendly enough conversation, but Melissa hadn’t been able to ignore her mental image of Luc standing behind his chair at the salon, and Brooke sitting in that chair, and Luc digging his long, skilled fingers through her tresses while they watched each other in his mirror. Remembering that phone conversation and the icky vision Luc’s voice evoked in her mind chilled her in a way the late-October evening couldn’t.

She knew she was being unreasonable. She knew nothing besides hair was going on between Luc and her sister-in-law. She knew jealousy was a petty, worthless emotion.

But she was currently the child of a broken home, and she was allowed to indulge in petty, worthless emotions.

The blocks they walked grew progressively more crowded as workers spilled from the office towers and joined the parade of pedestrians. The growing density of the throngs on the sidewalk spared her the need to talk to O’Leary. He was awfully tall, his strides so long she had to trot to keep up with him. Maybe instead of a margarita, she should order a Gatorade.

Gatorade and tequila. It had possibilities.

Eventually they reached TriBeCa, where the bars would be expensive but filled with artists and bohos instead of lawyers. They entered the first one they came to, a narrow, not-too-busy establishment with soothingly dim lighting and some sort of atonal music playing—the singer sounded as if she was rhythmically hiccupping. At least it wasn’t so loud they’d have to shout to be heard. Spotting an empty table, O’Leary charged ahead of her to claim it.

Pushing her aside and storming across the room was the antithesis of chivalrous. But racing to grab a table
was
chivalrous, kind of. She really wished he didn’t have that dazzling smile. She was not in the mood to be dazzled. Especially not by him, after he’d worn her out arguing about the amount of the good-will settlement money his client would have to pay her client.

A terminally thin waiter with close-cropped green hair that molded to his skull like moss on a rock appeared almost as soon as they were seated. Melissa requested her margarita, O’Leary a Guinness draft.

“Drinking in company is better than drinking alone,” he said once the waiter departed. “Either way, I’d be having a drink right now, but I appreciate your having one with me.”

He appreciated her. She tried to recall the last time she’d been appreciated and came up empty. But she refused take his words as a genuine compliment. He was just saying nice things so she wouldn’t feel so bad about the crappy compensation she was supposed to convince her client to accept.

The bar’s lighting had a blue cast to it, making O’Leary’s hair look unnaturally black. It was a little too long. Okay, not really too long, just not shaped very well. Luc preferred working with women—probably because men didn’t have G-spots—but she’d bet he could do wonders with O’Leary’s hair. It was thick and slightly wavy. A snip here, a snip there, and Luc could turn him model-handsome.

As if he needed to look any better than he already did. “All that winking and smiling at Montoya,” she said. “What was that all about?”

He chuckled. “This is your first time in her courtroom, huh.” At Melissa’s nod, he said, “Mine, too, but one of my partners told me she’s easy to play. So I played her.”

“All I knew about her going in was that she’s partial to Prada bags.”

“How do you know they aren’t fake Pradas?”

“She’s a judge. Do you think she’d buy contraband?”

O’Leary’s response was a cynical smile.

“Okay,” she conceded. “She probably buys them from the same sleazeball who supplies her with fake Rolexes.”

“I don’t get why anyone would spend thousands of dollars on a handbag,” he said. “I mean, come on. There are children starving in Africa.”

“And in China, where your client pays the parents of those starving children pennies a day in a dingy, dirty factory, piecing together counterfeit bags.”

He laughed. Even in the bar’s murky light she could see his dimples. Unlike Judge Montoya, however, she wasn’t easy to play. He could smile and wink at her all he wanted. She refused to melt into a puddle at his feet.

The waiter arrived with their drinks. Hers was lusciously pale, with crystals of salt glinting along the edge of a glass as big as a minivan’s headlight. Just looking at it caused the knotted muscles at the base of her neck to relax.

O’Leary tipped his glass toward hers in a silent toast before drinking. “So,” he said as he lowered the glass. “Come here often?”

She would have scowled, but her first sip of margarita tasted too good. She smiled instead. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Me neither. This isn’t my neighborhood.”

She hated herself for being curious. “Where do you live?”

“Inwood.”

“Inwood? Isn’t that halfway up the Hudson River?”

“It’s as north as you can go and still be in Manhattan,” he confirmed. “I moved there before gentrification hit. Got a cheap rent, and when the building went co-op the insider price was unbelievable. I could easily sell my place for ten times what I paid for it.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Why should I?”

“Because it’s halfway up the Hudson River.”

He shrugged and lounged in his seat, stretching his legs alongside the table so his feet wound up next to her chair. Lucky for him they didn’t wind up under her chair. If they had, she would have had to stomp on his instep. As it was, he was encroaching too much on her space. “If I sold my place, where would I live?” he asked.

“Murray Hill,” she said, then pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. Why had she said that? She’d had only two sips of her drink so far, so she couldn’t blame her statement on alcohol.

O’Leary’s smile grew quizzical. “Murray Hill? Why the hell would I want to live there?”

Screw it. She was tired, she wasn’t drunk but wanted to be, and she’d spent too many hours today fighting with O’Leary. She didn’t want to keep thinking of him as her adversary. And her brain was crammed to overflowing with all sorts of painful thoughts, anyway, so she might as well let one out. “Last night I saw this apartment for sale in Murray Hill. The minute I stepped inside, I wanted it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t breathtaking. It wasn’t spectacular. It was just a bunch of square rooms with decent closet space and a kitchen that could use major updating. But the second bedroom
 . . .
” No, she wasn’t drunk enough to share with him her visions of a nursery in that bedroom. As enormous as her margarita was, she didn’t think there was enough booze in it to get her as drunk as she’d have to be to tell him that.

“The second bedroom
 . . .
” he cued her.

“Really spoke to me,” she said lamely.

“What did it say? ‘Hey, lady, buy me!’”

“Something like that, yes.” She smiled and sipped her drink. Flecks of lime-flavored ice cooled her tongue.

“So, are you going to buy it?”

“If I can scrounge some money from
 . . .
Shit. I can’t scrounge money from anyone. If I could get my year-end bonus tomorrow, I could swing it, but my firm doesn’t calculate the bonuses until the end of December. And I don’t know who to hit up for a loan. My brother’s rich but he’s—I don’t know, in the middle of something he probably doesn’t even know about, but it feels to me like it’s going to be bad, and my parents are in the middle of something that’s definitely bad, and my sister’s trying to budget for her daughter’s bat mitzvah with this inn that jacked up the price on her after she signed the contract.”

O’Leary’s smile grew bemused. Apparently he hadn’t been expecting her to enumerate all the crap going on with her family. She hadn’t been expecting to enumerate it, either. But she had. He’d just have to deal.

“If your bonus is going to cover the shortfall,” he suggested, “maybe you could sign a short-term bridge loan with a bank. They could probably come up with a reasonable rate for a two-month loan on the down payment.”

“On top of a mortgage? In this economy?” Yet she was touched that instead of telling her she was crazy he’d come up with a decent suggestion.

“You might be able to negotiate something. You’re not bad when it comes to negotiating.” He grinned.

She was not going to let him play her. “Sure,” she snorted. “Your guy should be paying my guy a hell of a lot more than we negotiated. Seven figures.”

“Six figures isn’t shabby, considering your guy didn’t suffer any monetary damages.”

“Wait ’til he sees my bill,” she grunted. “That alone will count as monetary damages.”

“He’s shutting my guy down in New York. If that’s not good enough for him, he’s a schmuck.”

Everyone in New York City knew a smattering of Yiddish, and the word
schmuck
was universally understood. Yet hearing a Guinness-drinking guy named Aidan use the term struck her as hilarious. Somehow she managed not to laugh out loud.