Page 29 of Legal Desire
“I had to,” he said. Despite all the auditions she’d gone on, his mother hadn’t landed very many acting jobs. He’d had to work or they would have starved. “I had no choice.”
Allison studied him quietly for a long moment, which made him uneasy. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking now. Then she asked, “How did you wind up on the streets?”
For the first time since walking down memory lane, he felt a real twinge of pain over the past. He flinched. “Wally died,” he said. “All the chemicals he’d been using on those floors had destroyed his lungs.”
That was the first big corporation he’d taken on, the one that had killed his old friend.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She hadn’t apologized about his mother abandoning him as if she’d known that hadn’t really bothered him. It had been easier in some ways to not have to worry about her; she’d never been a practical woman. But Wally...
Losing him had hurt. Trev was the only one who’d felt the pain. Wally’s kids hadn’t had anything to do with him for years. They hadn’t even come to see him when he’d gotten sick. But they had certainly showed up to see what they’d inherited once he’d died.
None of them had wanted the gangly fourteen-year-old kid. Instead of letting any of them turn him over to foster care, he’d taken off. Fortunately, he’d found his friends or he probably wouldn’t have survived.
“So that’s how I wound up living on the streets,” he said, and he jumped up from the chair. Restless, he paced near the tall windows of her office. “Will you be able to spin that the way you need to?”
“No spin required,” she said. “It’s a good story. The public will love it.”
What about her? Did sheloveit?
“But it’s not enough,” she said. “You’re going to have to make some changes.”
“To my past?” he asked. Despite how hard it had been, there wasn’t a thing he would have changed. He wouldn’t have wound up where he was if anything had been different.
“To your present,” she said.
“What do you want me to change?” he asked, and he neared her desk again. “My single status? Do I need a first lady?”
She gasped, and her face got even paler than it had been. She shook her head.
If he needed one, she obviously didn’t want the position.
“No,” she said. “You need to distance yourself from Street Legal. You need to leave the practice.”
“What!” Just the thought struck him like a bullet in the heart. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“There’s no way you’re going to win anything with them as your partners or even as your friends.”
The wound in his heart got bigger, leaving a gaping hole at just the thought of no longer being involved in Street Legal. “You want me to stop being friends with them?”
“That’s the only way you’re going to convince voters you’re trustworthy,” she said. “Your partners have had too much bad press the past few months.”
“I wonder why...” he muttered. That was her fault; the damn mole was tearing down Street Legal. Was that why she wanted him to leave, to destroy the practice all together?
He wouldn’t let her get away with it. But at the moment he was so angry he didn’t trust himself. It was almost as if she’d set out to deliberately infuriate him, to push him into losing control.
But before that happened, he strode toward the door and pulled it open.
“You wanted me to help you,” she called after him.
“I don’t need your kind of help,” he shot back at her before slamming the door behind him. Edward stood in the hall, just a short distance from her office.
He must have been listening, just as she had apparently suspected. The assistant smirked as Trev passed him. “Goodbye, Mr. Sinclair,” he called after him as if he thought he’d never see Trev again.
But Trev wasn’t giving up. His perseverance was one of the reasons he’d survived growing up as he had. Friendship was the other.
Wally’s and his partners’.
He wasn’t giving up on Street Legal. And he was damn well not giving up on proving Allison was the mole and punishing her for all the trouble she’d caused.
But now when he thought of punishing her, it wasn’t with criminal prosecution. It was with his hand slapping her sweet ass. And that was why he’d had to leave, because no matter how badly she infuriated him, he still wanted her.
Too much...
