Ego Maniac(25)

After she walked away, I spoke to Mrs. Dawson. My voice was low, nonjudgmental, and cautious. “You gonna be okay?”

She briefly looked in my eyes, but quickly diverted hers to the ground. “I’ll be fine. Bill isn’t really a bad guy. Honestly, you just caught him at a bad time.”

“Uh-huh.”

Emerie returned and handed her client a small card. “Talk to you tomorrow?”

She nodded and left.

When the door shut, Emerie sighed loudly. “I’m so sorry about that.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. You can’t help that your client is an asshole. Got plenty of ‘em myself.”

“I think he’s physically abusive to her.”

“I’d tend to agree with you.”

“I also don’t think I’ll ever hear from her again. She’s going to cut me off because I confronted her about what I suspected was going on.”

“You don’t think she’ll call tomorrow or show up at her appointment next week?”

“Nope. He’s not going to let her continue. Now that I know him a little better, I’m really surprised he ever agreed to come here at all. My counseling sessions have been with just her.”

“It’s tough.”

She sighed again. “I hope she calls you.”

“Me?”

“The appointment card reminder I gave her was your business card. Figured she needed a divorce attorney more than relationship counseling.”

My eyebrows jumped. “Nice.”

We walked side by side down the hall.

“I could use a drink,” Emerie said.

“Your office or mine?”

Emerie looked at me. “You have alcohol in the office?”

“I have a lot of shitty days.”

She smiled. “My office.”





“This tastes like turpentine.” Emerie’s entire face twisted.

I sipped. “It’s twenty-five-year-old Glenmorangie. That’s six-hundred-dollar-a-bottle paint thinner you’re drinking there.”

“For that price, they could have added some flavor.”

I chuckled. I sat in a guest chair, and Emerie was behind her desk. She must have unpacked the rest of her box because there were some new personal items on display. I lifted the glass coaster-like base that had gone with the award douchebag Dawson broke.

“You’re gonna need a new weapon.”

“Don’t think I need one with you around to threaten my clients.”

“He deserved it. I should have punched him in the face like he likes to do to his wife.”

“You should have. That guy was a real asshole. A fuckin asshole.”

She was cute working her New York accent, although it still sounded like Oklahoma doing New York.

There were two new frames on her desk, and I reached for one of them. It was a photo of an older couple.

“Help yourself,” she said with sarcasm and a smile.

I looked at her face, then the couple, then back at her. “These your parents?”

“Yep.”

“Who do you look like?”

“My mother, I’m told.”

I studied her mother’s face. They looked nothing alike. “I don’t see it.”

She reached over and slipped the photo from my hands. “I’m adopted. I look like my biological mother.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s not something I’m secretive about.”

I leaned back in my chair, watching her look at the photo. There was reverence on her face when she spoke again. “I may not look like my mom, but we’re a lot alike.”

“Oh yeah? So she’s a pain in the ass, too?”

She pretended to be offended. “I’m not a pain the ass.”

“I’ve known you barely a week. Day one you were stealing office space and tried to kick my ass when I caught you. A few days later you started a fight because I made an innocent comment about some bad advice you were feeding a client, and today, I almost got into a fist fight because of you.”

“My advice wasn’t bad.” She sighed. “But I guess the rest is true. I have been a pain in the ass, haven’t I?”

I finished my drink and poured two fingers more into the tumbler, then topped off Emerie’s glass. “You’re in luck. I like pains in the asses.”

We talked for a while longer. Emerie told me about her parents’ hardware store back in Oklahoma and was in the middle of some story about selling supplies to a guy who was arrested for locking his wife in an underground bunker for two weeks when my office phone rang. I went to grab it, but she reached for it first.

“Mr. Jagger’s office. How may I assist you?” She answered in a sexy, flirty voice.

The two drinks had loosened her up, made her playful. I liked it.

“May I ask who’s calling?” She picked up a ballpoint pen and paused to listen, mindlessly rubbing the top along her bottom lip.

My eyes followed. I bet they taste good. I had the sudden urge to lean over the desk and bite one. Shit. Not a good thought.

Yet I was still staring at her lips when she looked back up at me. I should have stopped, but the way they moved when she started to speak held me captive.