Page 24 of The Rules Of Attraction
“I was with Emily. You know Emily. We went to Princeton together.” She was the only woman I had for a friend,andshe was getting married. We were never bed buddies either, despite everyone’s beliefs. “We were with her sister who is in college.”
“And what were you doing with Emilyandher sister?” My father scowled heavily.
I knew exactly what he thought we were doing but since I was done with this one on one I decided to give him a cheeky smile and allow him to believe what he wanted.
“What do you think I was doing dad? I’ll give you a clue, we weren’t playing with her dog.” I taunted.
He gave me that look he used to when I was a child. A look that told me he actually didn’t know what to do with me.
It was one of frustration, and of being completely fed up.
Good, that was how I felt when the angel escaped this morning because I had to answer the fucking phone. It was how I felt now because instead of being here beingtold offlike a child I should have been searching the city to find her.
Instead I had to deal with this shit.
“You don’t take anything seriously do you?” He folded his arms and glared at me.
“Well you wouldn’t believe me if I told you we were rescuing her sister’s cat from a tree so why would I bother to say that?” I smirked.
His nostrils flared and eyes blazed but he just looked at me.
The cat story was the truth.
The paparazzi had on this occasion managed to make me look like the playboy I was trying to step away from.
The other truth was, until last night I hadn’t hooked up with anyone for over ten months. The reason for that was the damn case, and me trying to put on my best self and presentation for the public so that it could be known by the one person who mattered that I too was ready to join the senior partnership at Sullivan’s.
Everything went to hell yesterday when dad called me completely enraged. He’d gotten the complaint from Judge Pederson after the case closed off–the man was probably scared I was going to spread the news of his fetish.
And in the same day Celebrity Gossip magazine chose to put me on their front page with Emily’s sister climbing up my body while Emily was squatted in front of me, looking like she was giving me a blowjob.
The picture was made to look that way and cut out the fact that I’d lifted her sister into the tree to retrieve her cat, and Emily was squatting to get a better look up the damn tree. Emily and I met up on Monday. While we caught up on her upcoming wedding, her sister called panicked that her cat had gone missing.
That was the honest truth.
This kind of shit always happened to me when Marc was away. If he was around I would have at least gotten a heads up on the picture before my father saw it. Marc and I had been friends since high school and he always seemed to stop things like that from getting out. Like my mother, he too would be away for months. Marc was in Hong Kong setting up the training program for the Sullivan’s branch there.
The two people I had to back me up would be out of the picture for what I knew would feel like forever.
“I don’t know what to do with you.” Finally he said it.
“You do know what to do with me, you just don’t want to.”
“You think I don’t want to make you senior partner? Really?” He balked. “Alex you’re a talented lawyer, better than me. You just don’t know how to be professional.”
“Dad, you’re just looking for any excuse.”
He shook his head. “I’m not. You’re my son Alex and this is business. I’ve turned the blind eye for far too long and allowed you to get up to all manner of shit. People aren’t receptive to your blasé, bootleg ways of doing things. So you leave me no alternative but to lay down some terms.”
I pressed my lips together and glowered at him. “Terms?”
The way he looked, tense with his eyes dead set on me told me this was something I wasn’t going to like.
“Terms. I have three. You get one more big case to work on. I checked your work in progress and you currently have ten run of the mill clients, so you can work around it.”
“And what case is this?”
“Devon’s company is being sued for mismanagement. We’re taking the case and you’re going to represent him. You do good and I’ll consider making you senior partner.”
