During the limo ride from the airport back to the office, Gina briefed Ross on the latest developments with the German firm Engel Tech, and then they went straight into a meeting with Friedrich Dierdorff, its CEO. It became immediately apparent to Ross that she’d withheld pertinent information from him. Luckily, years in a courtroom had prepared him to think quickly on his feet, but he was infuriated that a team member had deliberately set him up like that in front of a prestigious client. Tattling to Daddy about her was not an option. But after all this time, he had no qualms about letting her have it with both barrels privately after the meeting.
Her eyes grew large in feigned innocence. “How can you accuse me of such things? I am first and foremost a professional. You simply weren’t listening during the briefing in the limo.”
“You never said anything about their expansion plans.”
“I must have. It’s here in my notes.” She made a fuss of straightening her short skirt and looked up at Ross through slitted eyes. “Come on, Ross. Admit to being human. You were simply off your game.”
There was no point in arguing further. He understood her attack methods only too well; he’d dealt with them before, so while she let her arrows fly, he ignored them and stared her down. “Gina, stand warned. Remember the law of the harvest, and remember who your allies in this venture are. Or should be.”
She shook her head and turned to look out the office window. He’d been dismissed.
Things between them professionally were colder and more distant than usual over the next couple of weeks, even with their hands as full as they were. Engel Technologien—or Angel Technologies—was anything but. The principals were insufferable, demanding long hours, sometimes fifteen-hour days, working page after page, bullet by bullet on every aspect of their complex international contractual deal. The meetings and the posturing were endless and unmerciful. The law firm brought in translators, then hired different translators when the first ones quit. Some moments were untranslatable and best left that way.
Ross and Gina went the rounds with Engel Tech and then went the rounds with each other on approach and method and everything and anything.
When Ross finally watched Friedrich Dierdorff climb into his limo for JFK, he breathed for the first time in two weeks. Then he caught the first available flight out of New York, a red-eye, which included a short layover in Chicago. Exhausted and suddenly starving, he headed to the Chinese fast-food place in the concessions triangle at O’Hare, wolfed down his purchase, and reboarded the plane.
But now, back on board, instead of the hunger one joked about feeling shortly after eating Chinese food, Ross felt the acute onset of nausea.
Oh joy.
Shortly after takeoff, Ross was crouched over the toilet in the lavatory, retching violently. And didn’t this just cap off two of the worst weeks of his life? he thought miserably.
Ross had done everything possible to avoid working with Gina on the Engel Tech case but to no avail. He remembered only too well working with Gina shortly after she’d joined the firm five years ago. The darling daughter and heir apparent of LaMonte Rogers, founding partner, and a fresh graduate from Yale, her daddy’s alma mater, she had the brash confidence that money, looks, and an Ivy League education could provide. Men swooned over her, and women immediately felt inferior to her. And her daddy indulged her. Initially, Ross had been intrigued by her too, right along with the rest of the bourgeois masses.
They had been assigned to work together on the Watkins case, with Ross as lead counsel, and he’d found Gina to be a bright, passionate young lawyer, fearless to the point of recklessness, but a little too willing to ride on daddy’s coattails. Ross had chalked up her lack of restraint to youth and thought grooming within the firm would polish her into an asset for the firm.
He had soon discovered that she was passionate in other ways as well. Gina was a woman who had never encountered the word no.
They had been working late on the case one evening after weeks of working closely together. Gina frequently displayed her feminine attractions to her advantage, but this particular evening as they’d worked, Gina had also made opportunities to brush against him, which he’d ignored. She’d frequently flirted with the other men of the firm, including her father, so initially Ross had been unconcerned. As the evening had worn on, however, Gina’s advances had become less subtle, until she was looking at him with eyes that bespoke a frank challenge.
Ross had realized he faced a huge dilemma. First of all, he was a man and would have been lying if he’d said her overtures hadn’t flattered and affected him. She was an extraordinarily attractive woman and, at that moment, an obvious one. He’d considered himself a seasoned professional, a mature man, and he was a Mormon. He was respected within the firm for his professional skills and his integrity, and he would not undermine that respect by behaving unprofessionally toward a colleague, especially if that colleague was also the daughter of a founding partner.
He also knew he was an aberration of the typical New York singleton. He’d been and still was celibate, as dictated by his religious beliefs. He had stopped trying to explain this moral tenet to his friends long ago in law school when they’d invited him to join them on their weekend binges of booze and willing coeds. His explanations had been so foreign to them, their faces so bewildered as they’d tried to wrap their minds around the concepts, that he had frankly given up. Only Bud had cut him any slack. After that, when others had asked Ross to join their partying, he’d simply said he was busy. Busy reading . . . scriptures. Busy not thinking about the other guys’ descriptions of nubile young women. Busy at the gym, working out hard. Busy running cold showers. Just staying busy.
Eventually, he had compartmentalized his personal life, separating it completely from his professional one. Better to be considered a mystery than a throwback to the Middle Ages if he wanted to survive as an attorney. He had to project a tough, confident, alpha-male image, and most of his colleagues automatically presumed that image included as many notches on his belt as possible.
So there he’d been, face-to-face with a huge moral challenge: Gina looking seductive, arrogant, defiant, and formidable all at once. He had tactfully and successfully discouraged unwanted attention from women in the past. He was not inexperienced in the pitfalls of romance. But right then, Ross, with his maturity, his years of professional experience, and his devout religious moral convictions, had faced a young woman who boldly wore the sexual confidence of a pop diva, and he’d known he was outgunned.
He’d looked Gina in the eye as squarely as she’d been eyeing him and had told her they were through working for the evening.
“I hope so,” she’d said.
“That isn’t what I meant,” he’d replied. He’d stood and closed his case file. She’d stood and grabbed the lapels of his suit, pulling herself to him. Placing his hands over hers, he’d gently pried her fingers free and shaken his head. Then, like Joseph of old when faced with Potiphar’s wife, he’d left.
Gina had been stunned. And then she’d become enraged. Ross had known that as an attorney, she accepted the challenges of opposition with aggressiveness, but what he hadn’t known was that in her personal life, she had eons more experience than he did and had honed her combat tactics down to a vicious and cunning art.
Work on the Watkins case had turned into a cold war. Ross had maintained his composure while Gina had missed deadlines, subtly suggesting in subsequent meetings that Ross had dropped the ball—always with her hallmark feminine allure that made otherwise rational men willing to accept her words.
Eventually, Ross had even been called into Monty Rogers’s office, where he had sat silently and listened to Monty’s overblown lecturing. Monty had expressed disappointment in Ross’s lack of chivalry, slapped him on the back, and said he expected Ross to help show Gina the ropes. Ross had clenched his teeth through it all and had then returned to his office. As he’d passed Gina’s desk, she’d shot him a combined victory and warning look.
They said hell had no fury like a woman scorned, but when that woman was also an attorney, even hell needed to watch out.
An office source had informed him that Gina was out to get Saint Ross McConnell, that she was out to teach Mr. High and Mighty a lesson. Ross had prayed mightily that his problems with Gina would eventually blow over. He’d learned otherwise on the Engel Tech case.
Turbulence over the Colorado Rockies sent his already raw stomach back into an uproar. The plane lurched and heaved, and Ross did as well. He was deathly certain the seemingly endless hours he’d spent in the claustrophobic cubicle the airlines referred to as a lavatory were the longest of his life so far, and that was saying something, especially after the last couple of weeks.
He finally arrived in Salt Lake in the wee hours of the morning, gray faced and miserable. It took an interminably long time for his luggage to find its way onto the baggage-claim carousel, but when it finally showed up, he heaved his carry-on bag over his shoulder, grabbed his suitcase and garment bag, and, by sheer force of will, made it to the airport shuttle.
The drive from the terminal to long-term parking was miraculously brief, probably because the moment Ross sat down, he closed his eyes and fell asleep. Fortunately, the shuttle driver, with few passengers at four in the morning, had asked him what section his car was parked in when they’d headed out. When the driver’s voice came over the speaker, announcing their arrival, Ross opened an eye, then the other eye, then hauled himself out of the shuttle and toward his car.
Determined to get home alive and in record time, he lowered the convertible top of his charcoal-gray Mercedes. The crisp October air was a sharp slap to his senses; he needed it to stay awake and keep his dulled, depleted wits focused on his driving.
He eventually pulled into the garage, threw the car into park, dropped his head against the steering wheel, and closed his eyes. His body felt like lead. Driving from the airport to his home had taken a Herculean effort. Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure he would ever move again. He knew if he fell asleep right now, he would be sitting in his car, in the garage, for several days. Maybe years.
He sat up, hit the button for the automatic garage door to close, and rubbed both hands vigorously over his face. He was sorely tempted to recline the seat. He was sure he would sleep like the dead wherever he was, but his big four-poster and its deep, soft mattress called like a siren to him and lured him from his sleep-deprived haze long enough to at least grab the carry-on with his tablet in it and head into the house. Everything else could just stay where it was for now. He dragged himself heavily up the stairs, set the carry-on on a bedroom dresser, stopped long enough to slide out of his shoes, and fell backward onto the thick duvet.
And instantly fell asleep.