Page 32 of A Lesson for Laurel

So far this wasn’t anything major and she had to stop feeling like it was.

“What is it you do in Stamford?”

“I’m an attorney,” he said.

She stared at him. Her mouth opened and closed and she laughed. “No, you’re not. You’re just busting my ass because I said what I had about them yesterday.”

He lifted one eyebrow up at her and she saw another side of him.

Or maybe something that was there the entire time, but she wasn’t seeing beyond what her mind wanted her to.

He was cocky, confident and guarded his words carefully. Just because he didn’t look the part didn’t mean he couldn’t be if she put him in a suit.

Urgh!

“Prove it,” she said. Though she could easily just pull out her phone and do a search on his name. She didn’t bother to do any of that when she would have in the past because she figured she had him pegged.

He had his phone out and turned it around after he unlocked it and there was a picture of him in a navy suit jacket, a light blue shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and no tie. Gone was the light beard he’d had the past two weeks too.

She pulled it closer to look again to make sure it was him.

Not only was he a lawyer, but he was also a freakingpartner.

“I normally have the beard,” he said. “In the winter.”

“I didn’t think lawyers had facial hair.”

“There you go making assumptions,” he said. “You’ve got it in your mind I’m a suit-wearing dick that struts into a courtroom and talks circles around jurors. I’m not. I practice business law and I work remotely. What I’m wearing now is normally what I’ve got on daily unless I need to be on a call with a client and, depending on the client, will just change my shirt.”

She was shaking her head over this.

She felt duped and had no one to blame but herself.

Everything he said was true.

She’d judged and shouldn’t have. She had her head up her butt because of her bad experiences and then lumped everything else in the same category.

He’d even called her out on it last night.

“Why didn’t you tell me last night?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“We got interrupted with dinner. Then I thought you might make a scene. You said your coworker’s family owned the place. I thought it might be best to avoid that.”

She wanted to argue what he’d said, but she had already proven to him she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind in a public setting.

He didn’t live here, he wouldn’t have cared if she made a scene or not.

She supposed she should be thankful at least.

“You could have said something when we came back here,” she argued.

“I could have but made the decision not to. I told you I was absorbing the information at dinner and I still was when we returned here.”

“You were feeling me out,” she said.

“I was. There isn’t anything wrong with that. I wanted to know if what I’d felt the few times we were together was honest. If it was true. If it was worth me upsetting you and telling you the truth knowing you weren’t going to like what you heard.”

“So you would have continued to date me and not told me or just blown me off?” she asked. She wasn’t sure what she was more pissed about.

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