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It was her suspicion that the moment she became a potential embarrassment to Tom, her career would be in jeopardy. Maybe they’d have given her time to find another position, but she didn’t want the humiliation. There was already enough of that, knowing she’d had an affair with a married man, and that others knew it as well.
She sighed and returned her attention to Wyatt. “I guess I’ve been trying to ignore it. To deal with the nitty-gritty of quitting my job, packing up my life and heading into the unknown. But I couldn’t have stayed. I couldn’t.”
He nodded slowly. “You could have tried. It certainly would have been miserable, but if you said nothing, maybe they would have gotten past it.”
“You said that. I wasn’t buying it. If I hadn’t just joined the firm last spring, maybe. But my track record was so short...” She wrapped her hands around the glass of milk and stared into the liquid. “See if I ever trust a man again.”
His dark eyes turned suddenly inscrutable. “Ouch,” he said quietly.
She flushed. “I don’t mean you. You’re different.”
He merely gave her a half smile. “Of course, we all know who should be paying for this mess, but unfortunately life isn’t always fair. Kicking up a fuss would probably have bought you more trouble than you’d ever want. You think this guy Tom would have retaliated in some way?”
“Probably,” she said glumly. “Even if I never said a word, I’d have worried him. I’d be hanging there like a threat. I saw how he handled his cases. He’s not a man you want to cross swords with if he feels threatened.”
Wyatt nodded. “I accept your judgment. Never having met the guy, I have no idea what he’s capable of.” He paused. “Did I ever tell you about Ellie?”
She shook her head slowly, grateful for the change of subject. “Who’s she?”
“I dated her for a while about a year ago. Along about the time we started to get serious, she asked me to dismiss a bunch of charges against her cousin.”
Amber gasped, totally diverted from her problems. “No!”
“Oh, yes. That relationship ended instantly. So to get even, she told everyone she knows that I’m gay.”
“Oh! That must have made you angry.”
He grinned suddenly. “Why? I don’t care. That’s my business and nobody else’s. Anyway, it’s old news. I’m just saying, life throws curveballs. It’s what we do about them that matters. I chose the high road and she tried to get even. The point is, I understand why you worried about what Tom might do. He had a job and a marriage to protect. A reputation, even. He’d probably have done everything he could to submarine you. I’m not saying he would have succeeded, but it could have made you miserable for a long time. You decided how you wanted to handle it, and here we are.”
For the first time, she drank some of the milk he’d offered her. “Yes, here we are,” she said after she’d dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin. “Where is that?”
He laughed. “Just take some time to figure out whatever you need to. The only thing I ask is that you get to a proper doctor. Wherever you may be in seven or eight months, you don’t want to be with a baby that could have been healthier if you’d taken care of yourself.”
* * *
Right now, Wyatt thought as he studied her and listened to her, the pregnancy was a major concern whether she was ready to face it or not. While he was no expert and had no personal experience, he seemed to remember hearing that the first few months could be absolutely critical to a fetus. Were vitamins and avoiding coffee enough? He had no idea.
That was the point of doctors, and he had great respect for professionals. Amber needed one, and he was determined she see one before long.
She was a beautiful woman, a very smart woman, and it troubled him to see her in this situation. From all he’d heard from her over the years, he got the feeling that she’d been one of those people for whom everything went right. No major problems, a skyrocketing career, the world on a string.
But of course, nobody got through life without their share of troubles. She’d apparently lumped many of hers into one enormous mistake. And she was devastated. Everything she’d worked for had been taken from her by a lying jackass. He had plenty of questions to ask, basic ones like, hadn’t she been using protection? But it was none of his business.
His only business was to be supportive until she could figure out what she wanted to do. In the meantime, quashing his attraction to her would probably be very wise. She’d been through the 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.
“Anyway,” she said after a minute or so, “sorry for the dump.”
“Don’t be sorry. You needed to dump on someone. And maybe your friends weren’t listening.”
“Friends?” She shook her head and at last returned to sit at the table with him. “I had coworkers, colleagues. People I knew, but no one I was able to get intimate with. I was always on guard. You have to be careful what you tell a coworker.”
There was no arguing that. He went to pour himself some fresh coffee, asking her if she wanted anything.
“I’m full from lunch. Thanks.”
When he faced her across the table again, he was still trying to find something to say to her. She’d been unsparingly honest with him, telling him far more than she had on the phone, and in the process giving him a better view of the dimensions of all she faced. Come here for a few weeks to catch her breath and make a plan?
That’s what he’d thought, but now he wasn’t so sure it was going to work that easily. She was still having trouble believing she was pregnant. Maybe she still hadn’t really started to believe any of this.
If so, it would take more than a few weeks.
“Wyatt? Remember when we first met in law school? We were in the first week and I was already overwhelmed.”
“I remember.” He’d never forget it. He’d seen not only a pretty young woman, but someone who didn’t look old enough to be facing the fire of law school. He’d thought he’d detected a bit of panic in her gaze, so he’d wandered over to the bench where she was sitting beside a pile of books, handouts and notebooks, and introduced himself.
“L-1 is a hard year,” he’d offered. “I’m in my last year.”
Her head had swiveled then, and she’d truly seen him. “I’m scared to death.”
From that moment, they’d become friends. “I remember,” he said again.
“You seemed so calm,” she said. “And friendly. You told me things to pay attention to...oh, you gave me a load of good advice for doing well and getting through it. But I never told you something.”
He waited the way he waited in a courtroom, knowing that important information was coming his way.
“I didn’t want to be there,” she said. “And I don’t just mean the first weeks, or the overwhelmed feeling. I didn’t want to be in law school at all.”
That shocked him. He’d never imagined that law school hadn’t been her choice. He’d spent three years surrounded by people who wanted to be no place else. “Then why did you apply?”
“Because of my parents. I didn’t graduate early because I wanted to. I didn’t go to college at sixteen because I wanted to. And I sure as hell didn’t go to law school because I wanted to. Although I have to admit, I started to like the law. I still enjoy the practice of it. Parts of it, anyway.”
But he saw her in an entirely different way now. So much suddenly became clear: her push for success, her moving up the ladder in firms that could tear the soul out of a person simply through overwork, client demands and the constant threat of losing your job if an important client grew unhappy. And he also understood something else. “So your parents don’t know anything about this...situation?”
“Not a thing. Mom passed away five years ago, but no, my father doesn’t know. I guess he’s going to have to know eventually, but not right now. He’ll be furious.”
Wyatt would have liked to argue with her, but how could he? He’d never met Amber’s father.
She sighed and reached for the napkin she had used to wipe her mouth and smoothed it out with her fingers. “I’ve been a wuss,” she said finally.
“That’s one thing I’d never call you.”
She lifted her head with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I let myself be used to fulfill their dreams for me. It only got worse when Dad told me after Mom’s funeral that she’d be so proud of all I’d accomplished.”
“More pressure.”
“Exactly. Evidently somewhere along the way I failed to grow a spine.”
He doubted that was a fair assessment, but he could understand where it came from. “Well,” he said finally, “you’re here now, you can stay as long as you like and the only thing I’m going to pressure you about is seeing a doctor.”
She nodded. “Fair enough.” After a moment she asked tentatively, “Did you feel pressured because your dad was a lawyer?”
“He didn’t pressure me,” Wyatt said truthfully. “Yeah, we talked about me going into the practice with him, but he didn’t offer a single objection when I took two years after I finished my undergrad degree to see if I liked something else.”
She shook her head a little. “I can’t imagine it.”
“Evidently not. It sounds to me like you never had a chance to take a deep breath.”
She closed her eyes briefly but didn’t answer. “I guess you’re saving my life again.”
Two things struck him in that. Offering her a place to stay was hardly saving her life. Over-the-top. But then... “Again? What do you mean?”
“You saved me that first year in law school. I was totally at sea, totally unprepared to be so much on my own. For the first time in my life, my parents weren’t watching my every move and helping me make every decision. I could have made some really big mistakes. But you were always there to remind me.”
“In short,” he said almost irritably, “I was another parent.”
“No!” That caused her eyes to widen. “No, that isn’t what I meant. I didn’t want to fail. I dreaded failing. I needed every bit of help you gave me. That’s all I meant.”
He wasn’t sure he was buying it. He had thought they were friends, that he was simply helping another student when she ran into trouble with her studies. The idea that he might have been in loco parentis for her didn’t sit well at all with him. He’d helped her with law issues. The most advice he’d given her apart from that was to never let herself fall behind. He’d hashed out legal arguments with her. But never, not once, could he remember giving her advice on how to live her life. Hell, he hadn’t even paid attention to who she was dating, if she dated anyone.
“I guess I said that wrong,” she offered. “I didn’t mean it the way you took it. I liked you as a friend. I admired a lot of things about you. I tried to be a little like you. But I never saw you as a parent figure. Ever.”
He hoped she wasn’t lying, because here they were in his house, her pregnant and unemployed, and if she was looking for a father figure, he wasn’t prepared to apply for the role. No way.
Finally he spoke again, seeking different ground. “In the midst of all this upset, have you had any chance at all to think about what you want to do next? I realize you’re probably still feeling sideswiped, but you must have had some impulses.”
“I have. But can I trust them when I’m so emotionally messed up? I’ve pretty much concluded I’m done with silk-stocking law firms, though. Even if gossip doesn’t get around, I’m not sure that I want to keep living that way. And then there’s this baby. Much as I seem to be in denial, it keeps popping into my head. How could I continue a job like that with a child? Turn it over to someone else to raise?” Her mouth drew down at the corners. “I don’t think I can do that, Wyatt.”
That statement eased some of the tension inside him. Why, he couldn’t say. Her life, her baby, her decision, but somehow he felt better about her knowing that she wasn’t going to dump the child on a full-time nanny.
“A lot of people might put it up for adoption,” he said, hating the words even as he spoke them. But it was his place to be logical, not emotional. Life had drilled that into him.
“No,” she said without hesitation. “I can’t do that. There’s like... I don’t know exactly how to explain it. But there was a moment, absolutely etched into my mind and heart, when I knew there wasn’t going to be an abortion and there wasn’t going to be an adoption. Everything in me clamped into a tight ball of resistance as soon as I thought of those things.”
