Just the Sexiest Man Alive(82)

“You are a friggin’ genius!” Val shrieked. “Everyone’s going to be talking about you! You are so going to be on the cover of Us Weekly this week!”

Taylor tried to control her friend’s excitement. “Don’t hold your breath, Val. They didn’t get any pictures of me.”

“That’s what you celebs always think. But then you end up topless on the cover of the Enquirer and you suddenly think, hmm . . . maybe it wasn’t such a smart idea to sunbathe nude in Cabo after all, maybe that was a camera stashed underneath the towels that pool boy was carrying . . .”

“So what are you going to do about Jason?” Kate interrupted, getting back to the business at hand.

“Nothing. There’s nothing else to do,” Taylor said. “I wanted to tell him that I’d been wrong about him because I thought it was something I needed to say. That’s all.” She paused. Then she lowered her voice, even though there wasn’t a single other person in the office that Sunday morning.

“Why? Do you think I should do something else?” she whispered.

“You know I can’t say that,” Kate told her.

“I can say it,” Val volunteered.

Taylor spun around in her chair, frustrated. “What am I doing? Seriously—I’ve got way too much work to do. I can’t be worrying about this right now.”

“If all you worry about is work,” Val lectured, “then one day you’ll come home and realize that it’s the only thing you’ve got.”

“It’s better than coming home one night and finding Jason f**king some supermodel on our dining-room table.”

The phone went silent.

Wow—that had flown out of her mouth before she’d even thought about it.

“You’re right, Taylor,” Val said quietly. “If you really think that might happen, then I think you did the right thing in walking away from Jason.”

There wasn’t anything else her friends could say. But a few awkward minutes later, when Taylor ended the call, she realized that she had never felt less victorious in winning an argument.

HATING THE WAY her conversation with Val and Kate had ended, Taylor did what she always did when she felt out of sorts: she threw herself into her work—a tendency that apparently (according to Val) was going to one day render her an angry, lonely old maid who yelled crazy gibberish and threw ratty gray house slippers at neighborhood kids riding bicycles past her house.

Fine—that may not have been word for word what Val had said, but Taylor took the liberty of filling in the implied innuendo of her friend’s “one day you’ll come home and realize that work is the only thing you’ve got” comment.

Taylor Donovan, expected life trajectory:

Associate.

Partner.

Retirement.

Crazy gibberish, ratty slippers.

Pathetic death (alone, of course), thinking of the one time she had almost kissed Jason Andrews.

R.I.P.

Determined to push aside Val’s warning and all accompanying morbid thoughts, Taylor turned back to the files on her desk. The next morning she would be cross-examining the most important witness in the EEOC’s case and she needed to be ready. This witness, the named plaintiff, had always troubled Taylor. She knew the witness planned to testify that she had suffered severe emotional distress because of the alleged harassment she’d been subjected to in her work environment. It was testimony that, if believed by the jury, would help bolster the EEOC’s demand for significant monetary and punitive damages.

Derek chuckled when he dropped by Taylor’s office later that day and found her reviewing the files from the psychologist who had treated the plaintiff for her stress.

“You’re reading those again? We’ve been through those files a million times. Trust me—there isn’t anything we missed.”

Taylor set the file down on her desk, rubbing her temples. “There has to be—there’s no way this woman would’ve become so distraught because of her work environment. Even if everything she says is true, it’s not enough to cause someone severe emotional distress.”

“But the psychologist ran diagnostic tests and found her to be clinically depressed. How do we get around that? Argue that she’s an eggshell plaintiff?”

Taylor sighed, reluctant to go down that route. An “eggshell plaintiff” defensive strategy meant arguing that the plaintiff was “fragile,” that is, more sensitive than the average person on the street. That a more “reasonable” person would not have been bothered by the same conduct the plaintiff claimed caused her depression. Such arguments generally did not go over well with juries—no one liked to see the big-money corporate defense attorney calling the poor distressed plaintiff, in essence, a weak-ass little wimp.

“No, I’ve been trying to come up with some other angle for her cross.” Taylor stopped rubbing her temples and peered over at Derek. “You subpoenaed all her medical files, right?”

Derek nodded. “This the only psychologist she was treated by.”

“How about her general practitioner—do we have any files from him?”

“Yep, and I already checked them. Nothing.”

“What about any other doctors she saw? Her ob-gyn?” Derek made a face. “You want to read her gynecologist’s files?”