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EXCERPT
CHAPTER ONE
“I need to talk to you.”
Asking anyone for help made Natalie Pritchard uncomfortable.
Asking this guy made her downright twitchy.
Spencer Donovan stopped in the middle of shrugging out of his
overcoat. “What are you doing here?”
She would have been offended at his tone except she asked the
same question about forty times on her walk from the courthouse
to Spence’s office. Her current sorry situation kept her
distracted and off balance, which explained why she stood in
the middle of the room with melting snow dripping down her chin
and not a clue about how to begin her story.
“I followed you,” she said just jumping in instead
of over-thinking the situation.
“From the garage downstairs?”
“From the courthouse.” Over several blocks, through
security in lobby, up fourteen floors, past his assistant Sue,
and into the private office suite. She now knew Spence was not
an easy man to stalk.
“That’s almost two miles,”
He acted as if the feat were impossible. And, since it felt
more like ten miles, all of them straight uphill with ice blocks
for feet, she could understand his confusion.
“A bit more than two actually.”
“That explains the shoes.”
She glanced down at the hiking boots making her feet look like
she wore a size fifteen or whatever size a giant wore. “They
don’t match the outfit but they kept me from falling down
on the way over here.”
“It’s snowing.”
His comment was not exactly news. “Mixing with freezing
rain. Yeah.”
She lost feeling in her face ten minutes earlier. The freezing
temperatures in Washington, D.C. wiped out all of her nerve endings
and left behind only a wet, shivering mess. At that moment she
felt strands of her hair sticking to her face and counted the
lack of a mirror in the room as a small mercy.
“Did Charlie send you in to talk to me?” Spence’s
dark brown eyes glanced past her and out into the empty hallway
of the flashy office behind her.
Charlie Adams. The very big, very nasty and very annoying reason
she now stood in a puddle in front of Spence’s desk.
“Why would you think that?”
“Charlie’s tried everything else to piss me off
during the last two weeks. It was only a matter of time until
he used you.” Spence sat back in his oversized black leather
chair.
“No one uses me...” His words sunk into her brain. “And
why would my coming here tick you off?”
“Yeah, I wonder.”
She ignored the slam. “Are you and Charlie fighting?”
“That’s an interesting way to put it.”
Lawyers and their control issues. “Fine. How do you think
I should say it?”
Spence leaned back as he let out a long exhale. “We’re
dissolving our law partnership. Charlie wants the office space
and most of our clients. I want him to have neither of those.”
“Sounds like a fight to me.”
Spence motioned for her to take a seat after she closed the
door. “It’s fair to say we passed from a simple fight
to a probable court case weeks ago.”
“Ohhh.”
More like ugh. She needed Spence to reason with Charlie. Hard
for that to happen if the knuckleheads were busy trying to destroy
each other.
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