Page 7 of When I Fall In Love

“Gutsy move, Hunter.”

“Meh, I have nothing to lose.” Except time messing around in San Francisco. “I just need to get in there before the tsunami of offers from developers comes in.”

“Okay. It’s worth a shot. I’ll speak to Jessie and keep you posted.”

“Thanks, Derek. You’re in charge until I come back.”

“Sure thing.”

We ring off and I reach for my laptop bag. At least Derek is as solid as a rock. My oldest cousin is my right hand, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

3

BETH

I check my phone as the rest of the team stands and files out of the boardroom. Two messages from my PA stare back at me. They’re about a new meeting and I’m already ten minutes late. The last time I checked, I didn’t have any meetings planned for after five this afternoon.

One early night. That’s all I want. Clearly it’s too much to ask with so many balls in the air. The meeting that just adjourned didn’t bode well for my working hours either—we’re back on a new job already and it looks like another hostile takeover. We just wrapped up our work on the merger and acquisition of HarperFynnFoods by the much bigger, much nastier, very global HTL Enterprises. The past four months of due diligence work gutted me, and that’s because I couldn’t save the owners of HarperFynnFoods from losing their company in a hostile takeover. It’s soul-destroying.

Then there is the Federal Trade Commission’s competition bureau case we submitted for another merger that’s hanging in the balance, eating at my nerves for more than three weeks now. Half of me wishes we would lose the case, but the money our company stands to make… the whole process has become very mercenary.

I’m not sure when corporate greed infiltrated my life like this. When I picked law as a career, my intention hadn’t been to end up in mergers and acquisitions. I suppress a groan. My career path has veered away from the direction I wanted to take and now it seems impossible to retrace my steps and go back to what I wanted to do in the first place: help people who couldn’t afford legal representation.

“Beth?” Jana pauses where she’s gathering her laptop and I look up to meet my boss’s gaze. She’s a senior partner and I am her shadow, up for promotion to junior partner within a year if all goes as planned.

Getting in at McCarthy, Smith, and O’Keeffe Corporate wasn’t only hard work and luck. It was pure, thirsty ambition to change the odds in my life that got me here. Yep, I couldn’t have done anything without this company’s scholarship, but more than ten years down the line, my original goal of doing mostly pro-bono work has left the building permanently. I’m cornered here and with a promotion always looming anybody would call me an idiot for giving up such a lucrative career to go represent single mothers and other humans the system just keeps on screwing over.

“Beth?” Jana says again. “Are you even here?”

“Yes.” My eyes must have glazed over in exhaustion. “I’m here. Mostly.”

“Are you okay?” Jana’s tone says everything—she is worried about me. In the past two years, she’s been more a friend than a boss to me. We’ve grown closer since we went through our divorces at the same time, often being each other’s sounding board. “You’re very pale.”

“I think I skipped lunch. Between the staff evaluations and half the people having breakdowns during them because of our failure with HarperFynn, and now this new merger meeting—”

“Everyone took the HarperFynn takeover too personally.”

“It’s because the company is run by the nicest people and the sharks just ate them.”

Jana sighs as she pulls on her power suit jacket. Today it’s bright red and with the rest of her outfit all black, it makes quite a statement. “Yes. And you didn’t eat lunch.”

“I had coffee.”

Jana chuckles but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m worried about you. You never took time off after your mom passed away. I know you maxed out your leave to look after her those last few weeks, but sometimes we need time for ourselves to recoup.”

I drop my gaze as I close my laptop. The pain of loss sits raw in my chest, and the six months that have passed since Mom died of cervical cancer have done nothing to alleviate my grief. “I’m okay. Work is the one thing I can rely on to stay constant, and I really need that right now.” And that’s the reason why I’m still at McCarthy, Smith, and O’Keeffe Corporate Law and not doing pro-bono work on a permanent basis. My life seems to always be on the verge of falling apart and I need at least one constant to keep sane and keep things ticking over.

“You do? Constant work? At the pace we’ve been going at? You’re going to be burnt out by the time you’re thirty-two.”

I laugh. “You know that’s next year, right?”

“My point exactly,” Jana says with a smile, but her tone is serious. “You’ve accumulated some days by now. Don’t you think it’s time to take a break? Even just a short one?”

Can she stop pushing? “Christmas. I’ll take some time then.” The loneliest time of year. It’s going to be worse this December with Mom gone and Kyle already committed to spending the holiday season in France with his latest arm candy, skiing somewhere spectacular, expensive, and exclusive. “I have a meeting,” I say, hoping to stop further interrogation.

“With another client?”

“Actually, I have no idea. It wasn’t scheduled this morning and Melanie couldn’t get hold of me because I’ve been stuck in staff evaluations all day and then this meeting.” Instead of going to my online calendar to check for details, I gather my things as Jana’s gaze burns holes into me.

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