Page 11 of Legally Mated
“Ha! You jerk.” Laine laughed as Garrick winked at him, and then theyheadedout.
Walking through the front doors at the firm raised the tension that never quite left Garrick’sshoulders.
“Dan wants to see you before you go to court,” his secretary Melanie said as she held out a sheaf of pink message slipstohim.
“Okay, tell him I’ll be right there.” He stepped away from the desk and frowned, wondering what the senior partner wanted him for. Garrick was waiting for him by his office, and he thrust the messages into Garrick’s free hand. “Can you go through these and see if there’s anything I need to deal with before I leave? I have to go talk to Dan for aminute.”
“Sure.” Garrick shouldered through Laine’s door with both their bags, and left Laine to go find out what Danwanted.
Dan’s office was at the other end of their suite. As Laine walked down the hallway, the furnishings and the art on the walls grew more and more luxurious, a signal to anyone entering that this was the territory of the firm’s alpha wolves. Laine’s office was nice, but not anywhere near this level of decadence. He was still only a junior, offered the partnership on the heels of a widely publicized and terrifically successful case. But some day, when Laine had put his time in, this would be his territoryaswell.
If he didn’t get entirely sick of it all and quit beforehand. But no, he was good at biding his time, and the prize at the end was worth any amount ofeffortnow.
Or so he toldhimself.
Dan’s secretary nodded at him, and he knocked briefly on the oak door with its brass nameplate before steppingthrough.
“Laine, good, I was hoping you’d drop in before you went to court. How are you feeling about it?” Dan stood up from his heavilyornatedesk.
“I can’t keep him out of jail. We already talked about that,” Laine said and took the seat Dan gestured toward. “I don’t know why we took him on in the firstplace.”
“Friend of the family,” Dan said, and leaned back in his chair. “I said I’d do what I could tohelphim.”
“I’m already planning for thesentencing.”
“Good, good. But it would be preferable if you could introduce enough doubt to keep him out ofprison.”
“It’s not going to happen. I can show you the evidence if you like. Why didn’t you take the case yourself if you were so worried about it?” Sharp, maybe too sharp a tone to use with the senior partner, but Laine had never been one to pull punches unless he was setting someone up. And it was one of the things that Dan had always said he like about Laine. At least, untiltoday.
Dan drew himself up in all his upper-class lawyer ego. “First of all, I’m the senior partner here. It’s not your place to question my decisions. Second of all, my plate is full. And that’s actually what I wanted to talk toyouabout.”
Laine raised his eyebrows andwaited.
Dan cleared his throat and looked at Laine with the kind of expression that usually came before father-son talks. “Adrian and I were talking the other day and your billablesaredown.”
“You know as well as I do that there’s a cycle in these things. It’ll come back up.” He’d been doing most of the pro bono hours for the firm over the past month too, but he didn’t bring that up. He didn’t want them takenfromhim.
“Yes, the hours will probably come back up, but there are other issues at stake.” Dan clasped his hands in front of him in the middle of the blotter protecting the expensive black walnut desk, every inch the successful lawyer. Not a hair out of place, his suit perfectly pressed and twice as expensive as anything Laineowned.
“What issues would those be?” Laine asked, and tried not to fidget. He was definitely going to be late now getting to court and his attention started to drift toward whether he could discreetly send Garrick on ahead, when he was snapped back to the here-and-now by the words, “…consider the effect of these connections on your billable hours and what it means to your future here withthefirm.”
“Excuse me?” No, he hadn’t just heard that,hadhe?
Apparentlyhehad.
Dan continued in that same fatherly tone. “Laine, you’re a brilliant young lawyer and with a few more years’ experience and a bit more focus on the important things, you could even come to rival me. But you have to stop frittering your time away tilting at windmills. It lowers the tone of yourcaseload.”
“Tilting at windmills?” Laine asked quietly. He wondered if Dan heard the cold anger in his tone, then hoped not. He still needed this place, had hopes of moving up the partnership ladder—one of the other senior partners was due to retire in five years, Dan himself in ten, if not sooner. Once he was a senior partner, he could leverage that power. “I’m sorry, could you clarify?” he asked, his voice smoothly calm, hiding the vain hope that he’d read the manwrong.
Hehadn’t.
“I mean, I understand your instinct to charity, we all do it, a pro bono case here and there in a good cause, our sponsorships in little league and such. But we none of us move our charity cases into our workplaces, or our homes.” Dan raised a finger and smiled that paternal smile. “You thought I didn’t know about that? Yes, he’s pretty, but some morning you’re going to wake up to find him chewing on what’s left of your arm. And while I recognize that he must be an exceptional example of their kind, that’s all he is—an exception. Best to let him stay in the enclave where it’s safer for allinvolved.”
Laine paused to chew on that sentence for a moment. He didn’t think Dan realized just how precisely he’d hit the nail on the head, though it disappointed him to see the man read it so entirely wrongly. Yes, Garrick was exceptional. But so were so many of the packmembers Laine had been privileged to meet. And that difference in understanding struck home like a rock thrown at his head, or his heart. It sat in his chest with all the same mass as a chunk of marble, gleaming with a surface beauty, hard and difficult to wear away at, like this attitude toward theshifters.
He raised his eyes to Dan’s again and looked, really looked at him. When he’d first started with the firm, he’d thought he and Dan were the same, both in it for the thrill of the hunt, the exhilaration of winning. He’d seen Dan as a goal, pictured himself in this same place, and the taste of that fantasy was sweet on histongue.
Or it had been, until the taint of poison had seeped into it today. And as Dan’s words sank in, Laine realized that the thrill of working at one of the highest ranked law firms in the city, of being very nearly the youngest associate to ever make partner there, had lost much of its savor over the past three years. And that left him with a serious problem todealwith.
