Page 1 of The Suit

Prologue

Tuesdays will go down in history as the worst day of the week - in the eyes of the Tuesday Club members, anyway. All three of them.

In fairness, they might have been onto something.

Tuesday was the day the Yankees lost six-eight to the Dodgers in game seven of the World Series; Penn refused to get out of bed for a week after that, watching reruns of the game and firing off emails on what they should have done better to anyone who’d listen – not that anyone would.

Tuesday was the day Murray came home to find a baby on his doorstep with a note saying she was his. Although that one turned out good in the end, but it was fairly harrowing for the first week or so.

And Tuesday was the day Rafe understood the true meaning of the word nemesis. The day he stepped into his first class of law school and met Beulah Holmes, who spent the entire hour glaring at him like he still had ketchup on his face from his lunchtime burger, before deliberately baiting him into an argument on raising the tax threshold.

Their club might have evolved since its inception at their Beacon Hill brownstone, but the rules remain the same - no girls, no drama, no injuries.

Which is all very well and good, except the boys have forgotten one key point:

When no one remembers to enforce them, that’s how rules get broken…

1

Rafe

Have you ever met someone who makes your blood boil simply by existing?

Make your notorious calm and icy-cool demeanor erupt uncharacteristically?

Does your body sense them like a motion detector, guaranteed to trip as soon as they come within a hundred feet?

Skin prickle like you brushed past poison ivy?

Jaw lock? Teeth grind? Spine stiffen?

Because that’s exactly what used to happen whenshewalked into any room I was in, and it’s happening once more.

I never thought I’d see her again. Never was too soon for me to see her again.

My name is Rafe Latham, and that someone, that one with the berry red lips I want to throttle to within an inch of her life is currently sitting right in front of me, across the table and screaming at the top of her lungs.

The she-devil herself.

Beulah Holmes.

* * *

Penn was right. These ear plugs are absolutely incredible.

Not that I had any clue why Penn needed noise cancelling ear plugs, but he’d been banging on about them long enough that I decided to give them a spin myself when the opportunity arose. Which was now.

And he was correct, I couldn’t hear a single thing.

It wasn’t because the meeting room was quiet; I knew if I took them out I’d be in danger of my eardrums bursting. I could tell. She’d reached that point in her argument where her otherwise smooth forehead was creased up in frustration, the heels of her palms pressed against her temples for additional dramatic effect, like she couldn’t believe she actually had to tell me whatever it was she was telling me, which I’d know if I could hear what she was saying. Or yelling. But I couldn’t.

Like I said, excellent ear plugs.

She wasn’t really helping matters either. Not losing your cool wasliterallyrule 101 in law school, but she’d never been able to control her temper, at least never around me. Just like I’d never been able to control the desperate urge I had to make it flair, so there we go.

I picked an errant piece of thread from my suit pants as she reached the pinnacle of her argument. I knew she’d gotten there because her body language was exactly the same as it used to be when she subjected me to her points of view for hours on end, and any moment she would stop moving and tilt her head in a way that meant she was coming to the close. As much as I thought I’d erased the memory of her from my brain, it all came hurtling back the second she opened her mouth, like someone wielding a sledgehammer and smashing it into my frontal lobe. But sitting here in blissful silence while I watched her flail about meant I could now actually think.

Top of the list of things I was thinking.

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