Buch lesen: «Legal Desire»

CHAPTER ONE

EXCITEMENT COURSED THROUGH Trevor Sinclair. He’d barely been able to wait out the weekend to tell his friends what he’d figured out. They were all in relationships now, so he’d forced himself to be patient even though it had nearly killed him to keep the news to himself.

Finally, he heard the ding of the elevator as the car arrived at the floor for Street Legal, the law practice he owned with his three best friends—guys with whom he’d survived living on the streets. The rumble of deep voices echoed off the high, open ceiling of the reception area. They were probably complaining about his calling this early Monday morning meeting.

Their usual business meeting was Tuesday morning. But this wasn’t business as usual, and it couldn’t wait any longer.

Along with the voices, he heard the tap of dress shoes against the hardwood floor: Simon. The heavy strike of boots: Stone. And the soft squeak of tennis shoes: Ronan.

They were all here. And within seconds they trudged into his office. Like Simon, who was the managing partner, Trev had a conference table in his. As a class-action-lawsuit attorney, he always had multiple clients. Sometimes even this voluminous space wasn’t big enough for those meetings.

But it was big enough for this one, for the four of them.

Ronan glared at him through narrowed dark eyes. “Why do you look so damn happy?”

“Maybe he finally got some,” Stone suggested. He was equally bleary-eyed.

Simon shook his blond head. “Nope. He would look as exhausted as we do if he was getting any.”

“You all do look like hell,” Trev agreed.

“Jealous?” Ronan said as he dropped onto one of the chairs around the conference table. Then he eagerly reached for the carafe of coffee sitting in the middle of the reclaimed wood table.

Trev felt a pang of something that could have been jealousy. But he dismissed the ridiculous thought. He had no reason—absolutely no reason—to be jealous of these guys. He could have sex any time he wanted. And love? He wanted no part of that mess.

“Disgusted,” he corrected Ronan, and he shook his head to emphasize his point. “How the mighty have fallen.” He made a tsking sound with his tongue against his teeth. How had it happened when they’d all sworn they would never risk their hearts?

Fools...

He really did pity them. Just pity.

Not envy.

“Yup, he’s jealous,” Stone said with a deep chuckle.

Trev snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“Did you call this meeting for dating advice?” Simon asked. Since Simon was the managing partner, he usually called the business meetings. “Do you want to find out if Bette or Muriel or Hillary have a friend that they can set you up with?”

He felt another pang, but he knew what this one was: his pride was stinging.

“I don’t need a setup,” he assured his friend. “I am the only one of us not thinking with his dick nowadays, which is probably why I’m the one who finally figured out who the hell the mole is.”

He had their attention now. Three pairs of eyes widened and focused on him as three jaws fell open in shock.

“You figured it out?” Simon asked. As managing partner, he had considered it his responsibility to find out who the hell the mole was that had been selling information from their case files or passing off forged or real information as coming from their case files.

It wasn’t that Trev hadn’t trusted Simon to find the mole. But he’d had a vested interest. Since Trev had been the first one the mole had hit—during his biggest class-action lawsuit yet—he’d taken it personally. And because he hadn’t been willing to risk the mole compromising his next case, he had put off taking another one until the damn mole was caught.

“Who is it?” Ronan asked.

Trev was surprised the rest of them hadn’t figured it out yet. Now that he knew, it seemed obvious. How had they not suspected her sooner?

“Who?” Stone asked.

All of them were impatient to hear the identity. Maybe they wouldn’t have minded if he had cut their weekends short for this.

“I don’t have proof,” he cautioned them. “Yet. But I’ll get it.” He had already put a plan in motion.

Simon arched a blond brow. “Are you really sure you know who it is? Remember that I once thought Bette was the mole.”

And instead, she’d turned out to be the first woman for whom Simon Kramer had ever fallen. That would not be the case for Trevor.

“Who is it?” Stone asked again, his voice gruff with impatience.

Trev shook his head as he had earlier—with pity—that they hadn’t figured it out like he had. “Allison McCann.”

“No...” Simon shook his head now but in protest. “That’s not possible.”

“It’s not just possible,” Trev replied, “it’s probable. She’s the one thing every one of those cases has in common. She and her public relations firm worked every one of them.” He gestured toward his door. “You’ve even given her an office to use on our floor with access to our computer system that has all our files.”

Simon’s face paled. He was the one who had set up the office for her—the one who’d hired her firm to ramp up their public image years ago, the one who encouraged them all to use her to help sway the public to their side of their cases. He shook his head again, but it wasn’t in protest. It was in self-disgust. He looked sick.

While Simon’s face had paled, Ronan’s flushed with anger, and he cursed.

But Stone was stubborn. He snorted. “C’mon, Trev. You just want to sleep with her, so you’re trying to convince yourself she’s the mole.”

Simon had tried to seduce Bette into admitting she was the mole. Instead, she had seduced him.

Trev had no intention of seducing anyone let alone being seduced. He had a better plan than risking the frostbite having sex with Allison McCann would give him.

“You were there when she admitted she hates lawyers,” Trev reminded him.

And Stone’s face paled. He released a ragged breath.

“If she hates us all so much, why the hell does she do our PR?” Ronan asked. He was clearly on board.

Even though they were all lawyers who loved to argue, none of them could belabor the point that it all made perfect sense. It had to be Allison McCann. She was the one who’d been selling them out and sabotaging them.

“Why?” Simon asked.

“Who cares?” Trev shot back at him.

He didn’t give a damn why she’d done it. He just intended to stop her.

That wasn’t all he planned to do to the mole. He wasn’t going to risk frostbite. But he was intrigued and attracted enough to see if there was any thawing the ice goddess that was Allison McCann.

She had been summoned. She hated that. She had her own business. She was the boss. But if she wanted to keep that business going, she had to have clients. So she worked for them. They were the boss. And she was their bitch.

Allison had learned young how to be a bitch. She’d been taught by the biggest one she’d ever known. But she had no time to think about the past because the elevator bell dinged, announcing her arrival to the floor of Street Legal.

These were her best clients but her least favorite. The things she did for them...

Would have kept her awake had she had a conscience anymore. She’d sold that long ago—along with her soul—in order to have her own business. With a sigh, she stepped off the elevator and headed through the reception area.

The receptionist, a former gang member, watched her approach. She had never understood why they’d chosen his face to be the one clients saw first. No smile curved his lips or warmed his dark eyes. He was not welcoming. At least he had never been welcoming to her.

But then few people—besides the media—were. Reporters waited impatiently for the next press release she issued. They were always happy to see her because they knew she delivered the dirt.

“They’re all in Trev’s office,” Miguel told her as he jerked a thumb in that direction.

So apparently, the partners of Street Legal were waiting impatiently for her, as well. Because the summons had been last-minute, she’d had to move some other appointments around, and Edward, her assistant, had been no help with that. He’d claimed he had a migraine and disappeared into the men’s room, leaving her to make all the calls herself.

She really needed a new assistant. Maybe she should ask Miguel if he had a friend who might be interested in the position. She could use someone less welcoming than Edward. He tended to talk too much to clients and to the press.

She nodded in acknowledgment and headed down the hall that led to Trevor Sinclair’s office. Excitement quickened her pulse with each click of her heels against the hardwood. She wasn’t excited to see him, though. She was just excited because he must have finally taken on a new case.

And of all the partners, his cases were the easiest for which to advocate. Unfortunately, he was not the easiest of the partners for her to be around; he was the one who made her constantly remind herself that she did not like and could not trust lawyers.

When she arrived at the open door to his office, she found them all looking at her the same way, as if they did not like and could not trust her. She shivered at the coldness in their gazes.

Miguel must have alerted Trevor to her arrival. He was the one standing at the door, holding it open for her. He was also the first to shield that initial cold glance and replace it with a grin.

The grin unsettled her more than the coldness and not just because it made him, with his dark auburn hair and deep green eyes, look even more handsome. It unsettled her because her mother had always delivered her most vicious insults with a smile.

Maybe the partners hadn’t called her here to take on a new assignment. Maybe they’d called her here to inform her there would be no new assignments for her at Street Legal.

For the past few months they’d been using her firm less and less even though they’d probably needed her services more. They’d had some bad press after one of them had been reported to the bar association. Word had also gotten out that they had been representing lying clients.

She could have turned that bad press around for them. But they’d been reluctant to involve her and hadn’t even really explained what had happened.

What was going on at Street Legal?

And why did she feel as if it was going to affect her as well now?

“Come in,” Trevor Sinclair urged her.

She hadn’t even realized she’d hesitated in the hallway. But if she stepped inside that room, the odds were not in her favor. There were four of them and only one of her. Maybe she should have let Edward come along as he’d begged at the last moment. But she’d reminded him of his “migraine” and told him to take it easy the rest of the morning. Not that Edward would have been any help to her in this situation.

These four alpha dogs would have eaten him alive had he tried to come to her defense. Not that Allison needed defending from anyone.

She’d learned young to be able to take care of herself. And if they fired her, she would be fine. She had other clients.

But she felt a curious pang in her heart over the thought of losing them. Maybe it was just pride. But then she stepped closer to Trevor Sinclair, and her breath stuck in her lungs at his size and his handsomeness.

And she knew that it wasn’t just pride that caused that pang.

Allison McCann stepped forward as if she was facing a firing squad. Her willowy body was tense, her delicate shoulders pulled back and stiff. As she neared him, Trev caught a flicker of something pass through her pale blue eyes. The guys claimed she had no emotions, but he’d seen something.

Fear?

Regret?

Guilt?

Guilt would have made the most sense—if she had a conscience. But if she had no emotions, she certainly had no conscience, either.

Then she stepped closer to him as she passed through the door he’d been holding open for her. And her hair brushed across his throat. The scent of it—like cool rain—filled his senses while the silky touch of it had his skin tingling. He dragged in a deep breath, and she filled his head.

She was so damn beautiful with her eerily pale blue eyes and deep red hair. She had to be at least half-Irish—like he was—with that hair. It was too rich a color to be dyed, richer even than his, which was more brown than red. Like her eyes, her skin was pale, too, and flawless like porcelain. She didn’t even seem real. She looked like one of those dolls people didn’t dare touch.

His mother had had a doll like that, one she’d never taken out of the box because she hadn’t wanted to devalue it. It was the only thing she’d taken with her when she’d left New York City for the brighter lights of Hollywood. That doll had had red hair and porcelain skin just like Allison’s.

He expelled the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d still been holding. That breath stirred her hair, and she shivered. As cold as she seemed, he would’ve thought she was immune to it. But then his breath would have been hot—not cold.

Trev was hot-blooded and hotheaded. So maybe it was good that he’d had the weekend to cool off, or he wouldn’t have been able to hide his anger from her.

She glanced up at him, those pale eyes narrowed with suspicion. So maybe he wasn’t doing as good a job hiding his emotions—or his attraction to her—as he’d thought. But then she passed him and approached the conference table near the windows of his office.

His partners stood and not particularly out of manners because a lady had entered the room. Stone and Ronan probably didn’t trust themselves to be anywhere near her after what Trev had told them.

The only one of them who truly possessed manners was their managing partner. They were so ingrained in Simon, like his charm, that he held out a chair for her. As she sat down, he said, “We’ll leave you two to your meeting now.”

And Allison’s brow furrowed slightly.

Ronan didn’t even look at her as he passed around the other side of the conference table. He was not good at hiding his emotions. His body fairly vibrated with anger. As he passed Trev on his way out the door, he murmured, “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”

He wasn’t certain that he did. But he forced himself to grin like he had it all under control.

Stone slapped his shoulder as he passed him. Trev wasn’t sure if the slap was encouragement or recrimination, but he nodded at him.

Simon was the one who paused the longest in the doorway and stared up at Trev. He emitted a heavy sigh and murmured, “I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”

And it was killing him that he hadn’t, especially now that it was so obvious.

She had to be the mole.

Knowing it wasn’t enough—they needed to be able to prove it. And Trev had taken it upon himself to do that using whatever means necessary.

“Good luck,” Simon said as he stepped out the door and closed it for Trev.

Allison rose from the chair in which Simon had seated her and pivoted on one high heel, her navy blue dress billowing out around her long, slender legs as she turned toward him. She must not have liked having her back to him.

Trev could relate. As a kid living on the streets, he’d known to always keep his back to the wall, so nobody could sneak up on him.

Somehow Allison McCann had managed to sneak up on all of them. How had they never suspected her?

Was it because she was so gorgeous? Hell, she wasn’t just beautiful. She was damn near perfect. Like a ballerina, her body looked delicate but strong, her muscles defined. She was probably a runner.

But no matter how fast she was, she wasn’t going to outrun him.

Trev was going to catch her. He had the mole, and she was not going to get away from him. She was not going to get away with what she’d done.