Page 3 of One Night Collision

“Not from you.”

“Maggie, just talk to me for a minute. I know we got off on the wrong foot, and I will own that it was completely my fault,” he says. “I was in a shitty mood and acted like an ass. But I’m a damn good lawyer and if your landlord is screwing you over, there’s nobody else in this town who can handle it better than me.”

I whirl around. “Is that supposed to make it okay?”

“I’ll handle it for free,” he says. “I will take your case, sight unseen, and I will do it for free.”

I don’t like him. But I’m not an idiot. “Like no retainer free or just free free?”

“Free free,” he says, drawing an X over his heart. “Troy wouldn’t have sent you to me if he didn’t think you needed someone good. I can help you, Maggie.”

—-

Ten minutes later, we’re back in his office. I’m filling out paperwork. There’s a big line drawn through his fee schedule. A fee schedule that makes my stomach hurt. If he wasn’t doing this for free, I couldn’t afford him. There are very few people in Bellehaven who know how little I walked away from my marriage with. Troy is one of them. He wouldn’t have sent me here if he didn’t think this guy could actually help me.

“This is a pretty steep price point for a small-town lawyer.”

He grins. “I practice in a small town, Maggie. That doesn’t make me a small-town lawyer. I still have some clients from Lexington, Louisville, even Indianapolis and some a bit further beyond. I was on track to be a partner in a national firm but… we had an ethical conflict.”

“What was that?”

He shrugged. “You might find it hard to believe, but I had ethics and they didn’t.”

I sign the contract and pass it back to him. “My landlord is definitely familiar with that whole lack of ethics thing. I renovated my storefront, but now there are structural repairs on the building as a whole that he says I’m responsible for. I don’t know how I’m responsible for replacing the roof on a building with three other tenants in it.”

He looks at the address and grins. “Well, the good news is, you’re not. Those tenants—one is his brother-in-law, one is his mistress, and the other—the apartment upstairs? That’s his poker buddy. And he’s a shit poker player. I’ll handle this. It won’t take more than a phone call.”

“Seriously? He’s been hounding me about this since my grand opening!”

“That’s Shawn for you,” he says with a shrug. “He was selling papers in high school, and the poor dumbasses who bought them still flunked the classes because he’d just copied it all straight from Wikipedia. He’s gotten shadier, but he’s not gotten smarter.”

I can’t stop the laugh that bubbles out of me at that. “I know a few of those.”

“I’ll come by your shop tomorrow and have all this lined out,” he says. “And when I do, that makes me officially not your lawyer anymore.”

“Yeah. I can’t afford you.”

“Have dinner with me tomorrow night and that makes you eligible for the friends and family discount,” he says.

“You’re already working for free,” I point out. “You can’t discount it any more than that.”

“Sure I can. I’ll pay for dinner,” he offers. “And don’t say it’s too much. There’s not a place in Bellehaven where dinner costs more than a tank of gas.”

Clearly, he’s not been feeling the pinch at the pump like the rest of us. “I don’t typically date lawyers.”

“I don’t typically date clients,” he says with a shrug. “I owe you, Maggie. I was a dick the day we met.”

“We didn’t meet. You ran into me,” I remind him. I’m being a hard-ass about it because I need to see what kind of guy he is when he gets pushback. Fool me once and all that.

“I did. And I’m sorry. So let me make it up to you.”

I want to say yes. That’s the strangest part of it all. And that… that is the very reason I say no. “I’m sorry. I can’t. But I do appreciate your help. Now, I need to get to work. Thank you, Mr. Sizmore.”

“Damien,” he corrects me.

“You’re still my lawyer, Mr. Sizamore.”

“Just for today,Miss Sloan. Just for today.”

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