LITMIR.BIZ

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wringer; she’d said she wouldn’t trust men again. Having her place him in a separate category meant she didn’t see him as an eligible man. Which was fine by him. Neither of them needed any complications, and she’d probably be moving on in a month or two.

      Given Amber’s dreams, he couldn’t see her hanging around here for long.

      But still, there was an errant part of him that had belonged to Amber ever since the first day they had talked. Friendship? Of course. Something more? No point in thinking about it, even though over the years he’d occasionally daydreamed about what life would have been like with her. Pointless fantasy, reawakened by phone calls and running into her at the convention. Fantasies he’d put aside again every time they rose.

      She finished her milk and rose to rinse the glass at the sink. Standing there with her back to him, she began to speak. “I need to wake up,” she said.

      “Wake up?” Curious, he twisted in his chair to better see her, even if it was only her back.

      “Wake up,” she repeated. “This has been like a nightmare. Do you know how it started?”

      “Which part?”

      She shook her head, and a heavy sigh escaped her. “Which part? Good question. You know working for a firm like that doesn’t leave any room for a social life.”

      “I’ve heard.” Not that being a judge was a whole lot better, unless he put his foot down as he had this week.

      “Two thousand billable hours a year is forty hours a week for fifty weeks. Which doesn’t sound all that awful until you add all the hours that aren’t billable. I didn’t get a day off and I didn’t expect one. Not for many years to come. Your friends, such as they are, are people you work with. If you have a family, you might see them for a few minutes as you’re falling into bed or running out the door in the morning. I loved most of it.”

      “Okay,” he said to show he was listening, but unsure if she was looking for a particular response from him.

      “In a few more years, if I’d been lucky and continued to rise, I’d have reached the level where I could get out of the office to go golfing with clients. I might even have been able to take an occasional weekend. The point is, though, that your whole life revolves around the firm. They even arrange the social occasions. Dinner with the partner, a party at a partner’s house, where in theory you’d win some new clients. All business.”

      For those who wanted to get ahead in that game, he thought. Plenty of others chose an easier path, but Amber had always been driven. Law school at nineteen?

      “Human nature will have its way eventually,” she said. “Tom started to express interest. He was attractive, and considering we were pretty much working all the time, he was what was available. Office romances are dangerous. I knew it, but I took the chance anyway. He was in the middle of a messy divorce, he said. And I believed him.”

      “Why wouldn’t you?”

      She turned slowly to face him and folded her arms tightly. “I think that from working all the time I let parts of my development become stunted. The practice of law gave me a view of a lot of ugliness in life, but that ugliness didn’t include a coworker deliberately lying to me to get me into his bed. Regardless, in the last ten years I haven’t had time for a boyfriend. I only dated a couple of times, but my schedule blew everything up. So there I was, missing a massive part of life, and this coworker was suddenly pursuing me. I was flattered. I was stupid.”

      “You’re not stupid. Some very smart people get conned, Amber.”

      She smiled crookedly, without humor. “Well, I got conned. Funny, it never seemed odd to me that the only time we got together was in a hotel over our lunch hour. When we had a lunch hour. It’s not like I couldn’t have escaped the office sometimes just for dinner. There should have been red flags all over it.”

      He couldn’t disagree. “I imagine you really liked him.”

      “Of course. I thought I was falling in love. Maybe I was. But then I found out. God, that was awful. I caught one of the clerks drinking in the bathroom, and when I started to tell her she couldn’t do that, she stopped me dead in my tracks. It seems I wasn’t the first newbie Tom had taken advantage of, and if she hadn’t been drunk she probably wouldn’t have told me. Everyone kept quiet about it because they didn’t want to get fired.”

      She shook her head, then held out one arm, almost a pleading gesture. “I broke it off immediately, of course. He started giving me a hard time, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could do except make me uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable enough that all my coworkers probably knew what had been happening. I felt so humiliated!”

      “I’m sure your coworkers knew you had been used,” he offered quietly.

      “I’m sure. At least that’s what I kept telling myself. Until I found out I was pregnant.” A bitter laugh escaped her. “Birth control fails sometimes. I was one of the minuscule percentage of failures. Ironic, huh?”

      “I think it stinks. I don’t find it ironic at all.” He wished he could hug her, but he wasn’t sure that would help. If she needed to talk, the best thing he could do was listen.

      “Anyway, that’s when I called you. I could stick out the knowing looks. I figured the whispers would go away. But a pregnancy? Everyone would know. And I have no doubt Tom would have used every bit of influence he had to get rid of me if he knew, because he could deny everything except a paternity test.”

      As a lawyer and then a judge, Wyatt had learned to separate his emotions from his thinking. He had to. He was the one who had to remain objective as much as possible. He’d be no good to a client if feelings clouded his judgment, and that hadn’t changed much on the bench. He might dispense mercy when he could, but he still had to have an unemotional, clear grasp of the situation, the facts and the law.

      He was finding that objectivity very difficult to achieve right now. In fact, damn near impossible. He looked at the young woman, his friend, nearly curled up on herself as she relived her nightmare, and he would have dearly loved to get his hands on this guy Tom. His fists had clenched, and he had to make an effort to relax them. He didn’t want to frighten Amber with the impulse to violence that was building in him now.

      “Anyway,” she said presently, “it’s been a nightmare, especially since I found out I was pregnant. I couldn’t believe that on top of everything else. Maybe I still can’t believe it. It’s almost like if I close my eyes and pull the blankets over my head, the bad things will go away.” She shook her head. “I know better than that. And you’re right, whether I’m ready to accept it or not, I need to take care of the child growing inside me. That’s one thing I can still do right.”

      His chest felt as if a steel band wrapped around it, and it tightened at those words. One thing she could do right?

      “Amber...” Maybe he was wrong, but he remembered the woman he used to know. Had she entirely given up because of this? He wouldn’t have expected it.

      Maybe she just needed time and space to get used to so much. It sure as hell had been a huge, shocking change.

      It had been a month since she first phoned him. Back then the emotionless delivery he’d heard from her had been understandable. He’d believed she’d been merely discussing her options, ways to deal with an untenable situation. But now she seemed to be in some kind of shock. Maybe she had been when she first called, and her clinical attitude had been some kind of an emotional withdrawal. Did this mean it was now becoming emotionally real to her?

      He’d thought he’d been offering refuge to a friend, a safe place where she could rest and decide what to do. Now he was wondering just exactly what she needed, and if he could even begin to help her deal with what was clearly a bigger trauma than he’d imagined.

      A friend quitting her job because a relationship failed and she was pregnant hadn’t sounded so bad. Now that he was getting the dimensions of all this, he didn’t think nightmare was too strong a description.

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