Page 16 of Dirty Rival
“He wanted us to invest in a shopping development in Japan. I was against it, and he said I thought I knew it all because I was an Ivy League attorney fresh out of school and he’s not an attorney at all.”
“Why isn’t he Ivy League?”
“He didn’t do the work. I did, but it didn’t matter in this case. In the end, I convinced my father to pull out.”
“And?”
“And it turned into a great investment,” I admit. “I was wrong.”
“No,” he says. “The only wrong move is one where you lose money.”
“We could have made a lot of money. We lost money.”
“If you beat yourself up for every time you missed out on money,” he says, “then you will be afraid to say no to anything. Were you afraid after that? Are you still?”
“That was seven years ago,” I say. “I was twenty-five, fresh out of law school.”
“How hard did you push your father to say no to the duet of failures that got us here?”
He’s hit ten nerves and I swallow hard. “Not hard enough, obviously.”
“Is that what you believe?”
Anger comes at me from a deep, overflowing pit that has nothing to do with Reid. “I pushed. He shut me out.”
“Because your brother convinced him he was right again and you were wrong.”
“My brother works for a tech giant in Japan. He’s been out of this for years. I don’t know why he’d be advising my father about anything.”
“But he is. He’s still at your father’s ear.”
“Maybe.”
“He is. And for the record, your distance from your brother was one of the only reasons I said yes to you staying on board. Keep that distance.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I say, my words acid on my tongue. “I told you—”
“You like me better than him. I heard you. I have to be in court at two. What time is our staff meeting?”
“Six.”
“I’ll be back by five. Go through the data with me between now and then.”
“How can you run this place and still manage a caseload?”
“I have me and you. We’re an army. Go through the data with me.”
“You’ve already been through it. That’s obvious.”
His eyes meet mine, his penetrating in a way that is wholly personal, and yet, his words are seemingly all business. “I’ve seen the reports, but they only tell me the end result, not how you got there. Tell me your story.”
This place is my story, it’s all I’ve ever let be my story, which means this man already owns all of me, he controls my future, my life, my everything, but I won’t say that to him. I don’t trust him not to use it against me. I cut my gaze and plan to start reading the data. His phone rings again and he glances at the number. His jaw sets hard and he answers. “A call from the district attorney himself,” he answers. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
The district attorney, I think. Of course. This man is all about power.
“Let me be clear,” he says, his tone harder than steel. “People not only died, but you let it happen. You went after an innocent man, and then let his conviction stand in the public eye. Not only was another woman killed while the real killer ran loose, the brother of one of the victims attacked one of my clients.”
My eyes go wide. My God.