Page 62 of Legal Desire
They both laughed.
“There, that’s better,” he said. And the tightness in his chest eased with the smile on her beautiful face.
She still looked pale, though, but for the dark circles beneath her eyes. She obviously was back to not sleeping well. He stepped closer and leaned over her desk. Then he ran his fingertip along her jaw. “You should have let me stay last night.”
She shook her head. “I had a reason for making you leave. But you blew that by coming here today and talking to those reporters.”
“Someone has to,” he said. “But it should be you. You can clear all this up. If anyone can repair a bad reputation or spin it, it’s you.” Now he came around her desk and twirled her chair. “Spin it!”
She laughed but when her chair stopped and she faced him again, the humor didn’t reach her eyes. She still looked sad. Defeated. And the tightness returned to his chest.
He hadn’t come here just to fire her up again. He’d come here to tell her the truth. But now the words stuck in his throat. He didn’t want to make her angry with him.
But maybe it was better that she get angry than seem so defeated. He opened his mouth to speak but Allison reached out and pressed her fingers across his lips.
“You’ve already said enough,” she told him. “For both of us. You scared Monica.”
“Monica?”
“The reporter,” she said. “She thinks I’m going to sue her.”
“You should,” he said. “Or you should at least get her to tell you her source.”
“It was a man,” she said, and she stared hard at him now as if she wondered if he was that man.
“It wasn’t me,” he assured her. But it could have been one of his partners. He needed to talk to them again and make sure nobody had done anything stupid.
Like he had.
He never should have suspected her of being the mole.
“Does she know who?” he asked.
Allison shook her head.
“We’ll find out,” he assured her.
She shook her head again.
“This mole can’t hide forever,” Trev insisted. “We will figure out who it is.”
“No,” she said. “I will. You will focus on your practice and on running for office.”
“Allison—” He needed to tell her.
But she pressed her fingers over his lips again. “This is my problem,” she said. “Not yours.”
He stepped back and studied her face. “Do you know who it is?”
Doubts creeped back into his head. Was she the mole? Was all of this just a ruse to fool him? He only had her word that the reporter claimed a man was her source. Her source could have been Allison herself.
She was more likely to give press releases than anyone else.
“Do you know?” he asked again when she had been silent for far too long.
Allison shivered from the suspicion on his handsome face. He still didn’t entirely trust her. But then she didn’t trust him, either.
Maybe it was just because of the way they had both been raised—by mothers who didn’t care—that they struggled to trust anyone.
