This Case Is Gonna Kill Me (14 page)

I must have been standing there longer than I realized, because there was a gentle knock on the door. I quickly shed my panty hose and shrugged into the robe.

“Come in.”

Ryan was swathed in a magnificent dressing gown that brought out the blond highlights in his brown hair. He was very handsome, and he had been an ally and friend at the firm over the past few weeks. This was going to be okay.

“You’re adorable.” He crossed to me and pulled me into his arms. This time when he sought my mouth I smelled toothpaste and mouthwash, and I relaxed into his embrace.

He kissed me, but didn’t push to go past my lips. He dug his hands into my hair and kissed my cheeks, nose, eyes, and ears. He made a conscious effort and breathed so he could allow the breaths to flutter my hair and tickle my ears. I chuckled.

“That’s better. You’re all right,” he murmured.

“I know. It’s not you. It’s just everything. And I worry that I’m using you. Just coming to you for comfort,” I said.

He drew back and his expression was quizzical. “Using
me
,” he repeated. “If I can offer you some comfort I’m happy to do it. Now stop worrying. Let’s just be together.”

He picked me up in his arms, carried me over to the bed, and deposited me gently on the mattress.

“We’re not going to your bedroom?” I asked.

He laughed. “Actually, there isn’t another bedroom. I’ve turned it into my office.” He gave me a comical look. “Not like I sleep.”

“Of course no … ot.” My voice caught on the last word because he slipped his hand into the robe and brushed his fingers across my crotch. Fire raced along my nerve endings.

He pulled back, untied the belt, and threw open the robe. His belly was distended from the amount of blood he’d ingested. It was disturbing. “You have a diabolical look,” I said as he studied my body.

“Just enjoying the view.”

This time when he kissed me he demanded access. His tongue dove between my teeth, thrusting deep into my mouth. He reached down again, flicking his fingers across my clit. There was a sensation like warm honey low in my belly. I gasped and arched against him. He slid down so he could take a breast in his mouth. I cringed a bit, thinking of those long, sharp canines, but he was careful, just running his tongue around the nipple. I hardened and pressed my hips against him while reaching down to cup his penis. He shifted off to the side, and I couldn’t reach him. Then his fingers were probing deep inside, but it felt more like an examination, testing the level of moisture between my legs.

And then he entered me with one hard lunge. I gasped, but it wasn’t from pleasure. I opened my eyes. He hung over me, taking his weight on his forearms. His brow was furrowed with concentration, but his expression was blank. With hard thrusts of his hips, he drove deeper and deeper into me. I tried to match his rhythm, but he made no accommodation for me.

He shuddered and I felt him go limp inside of me. There was no warm flow of ejaculation—of course there wouldn’t be with a vampire, just a loss of tumidity. I realized he had been concentrating to send the blood flow to his penis so he would stay hard. Once he’d banged me, he stopped trying. He pulled out, rolled off me, and swung his legs off the bed.

“I’m going to take a shower. It’s late. You should go home. There’s cab fare on the coffee table in the living room,” he said, and he walked into the bathroom and closed the door.

I pulled the robe around me and got out of bed. My body ached, both from his pounding and from my unspent orgasm. My chest felt tight, and I couldn’t decide whether to scream or cry. I had thought I had a friend. He had played on that to convince me to do this stupid thing.

I pushed back my hair and looked around the room. No clothes. They were in the bathroom. I tried the door. Ryan had locked it against me. I pounded on the wood. The door flew open. He was wet, lather clinging to his body.

“What?”

“I need my clothes.”

“Oh.” He disappeared behind the seeded glass of the shower door.

I grabbed my clothes and rushed out. I didn’t bother with the panty hose. I just threw on my bra and dress, jammed my feet into my sandals, crammed the stockings into my purse, and ran for the front door.

There were bills on the table. My attention was drawn to another door across the living room from me. I went over and opened it.

It was a bedroom. A spectacularly beautiful bedroom featuring a king-sized bed with a carved ebony wood headboard and footboard, flat-screen TV on the wall, exquisite Chinese watercolors of horses on the other three walls, and a small fountain offering its water music to the room.

I fled. I did pause long enough to scoop up the wad of money, carry it into the granite-walled master bathroom, and toss it into the toilet. I didn’t flush. I didn’t want him to think I’d actually taken his money.

I rode the subway home and sat up for the rest of the night, wondering when I’d become so stupid.

*   *   *

The weekend passed in a frenzy of self-flagellation. I couldn’t even talk to anyone. As fond as I was of Ray and Gregory, I didn’t want to discuss my sex life with my gay friends; my mother was right; and fathers never think their daughters are having sex. My best friend from college had gotten married and moved to France, and while I’d had friends in law school, they weren’t the kind of friends you called up to discuss bad sex.

Summer heat lay like an anvil over the city. The floor fan was having no effect in my apartment, so I took myself to the movies. When one feature ended I simply moved down the hall to the next theater. It was summer, so I watched a lot of things explode/collapse/crash. Girls ran screaming from masked knife/saw/ax-wielding killers. Men exchanged fart/bathroom/impotence jokes. Animated animals exchanged wisecracks and songs.

On Sunday afternoon, I finally unpacked the bag containing my riding clothes. The rich smell of horse filled my small bedroom. In addition to everything else, it so totally sucked that Ryan owned such wonderful animals. I fantasized about winning the lottery and buying them so they wouldn’t have to belong to such a total turd.

On Monday morning, I had to make a detour out to Brooklyn to file my petition to practice before the federal bench at the U.S. District Court on Cadman Plaza East. As I was walking back to the subway, the odor of coconut and almond wafted out the door of an Italian bakery and snared me. I bought another box of macaroons to take back to the office.

It was almost 10:00 a.m. before I rode up the elevator and stepped out on the seventieth floor. A weird hush fell over the secretarial bullpen, and my cheerful announcement, “I’ve got cook … ies…” stuttered away into silence in the face of the stares, the smirks, and the guilty looks. The worst was David Sullivan, who glared at me as if I’d crawled out from beneath some particularly slimy and loathsome rock. He entered his office and closed his door with enough force that it almost qualified as a slam.

I had the feeling my weekend amour was now common knowledge, and I wondered if it was possible to shrink down to the size of a dust mite and vanish. Ellery and Bainbridge training took over. I kept my chin up and my back straight as I went into the kitchen to deposit the cookies. I then walked to my office and closed my door. I did it very, very quietly in the hope that maybe everyone would forget I was there, or maybe even that I existed at all.

I pulled papers out of the final box but I couldn’t concentrate. It was going to be painful, and my self-esteem was going to take a big hit, but I had to know what Ryan had said. I keyed the intercom. “Norma, could you come in, please.”

She did and stared down at me with an inscrutable expression.

I clutched a ballpoint pen. “Okay, if there’s one thing I know about you it’s that you’re not overawed by lawyers. I know you’ll level with me. So, level with me,” I said, faking a confidence I didn’t feel.

“You cost me twenty bucks.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Whenever a new female associate comes into the firm we have a betting pool on how long before Ryan has them in bed.”

I had been part of a sick sexual betting pool. Nausea, driven by shame and humiliation, gripped my gut. But Norma wasn’t done kicking me yet.

“I thought you’d last longer.” Disapproval iced the words.

The criticism lit a small fuse of anger that began to gnaw away the shame. “Sorry to disappoint,” I said waspishly.

Norma shrugged. “I guess you were vulnerable because of Chip.”

“Do you think?” A new grievance rose to the surface. “Why the hell doesn’t somebody warn the new hire?”

Another shrug. “We figure you girl lawyers won’t listen to a secretary, and the other associates want the next one to fall just the way they did.”

“Well, that stinks! Whatever happened to female solidarity?”

“In this shark pool?” Norma asked. “Is there anything else?”

“No.”

She left, and I sat frowning at the closed door, flipping a pen over and over while I considered. Good news: I wasn’t the only one. Bad news: I wasn’t the only one. I had been used and tossed aside, and I hadn’t even gotten an orgasm out of it. So, what were my choices? Pretend it had never happened, like every other female associate? Leave the firm and work for a nonprofit? Hang out a shingle and open my own firm? Or get even? I liked choice number four.

9

I skipped lunch, continued to work, and thought about my situation. During the course of the afternoon I ran across a scrawled note in Chip’s big, looping handwriting.
Join the two cases for the arbitration? Marlene
=
ballistic.

Clearly this had something to do with
Abercrombie,
because of the reference to Marlene, but I had never heard of a second case. Maybe it was buried in one of the boxes, but whoever had cleaned out Chip’s office had just thrown stuff into boxes without any effort to categorize. This was in addition to Chip’s file management strategy, of keeping everything in his head. I muttered an expletive, then felt immediately guilty.
Cussing out a dead man—yeah, I’m a real good person. I’m also the idiot who got snookered by a sexual predator and made a fool out of herself.

So stop feeling sorry for yourself and own it!

I straightened in my chair and considered the wisdom imparted by my inner Linnet. The only reason Ryan had gotten away with it for this long was because female associates, isolated and humiliated, had slunk around pretending it hadn’t happened and kept silent. As my dad had reminded me, I was an Ellery. We didn’t back down from fights.

First, I had to make it not okay for the human associates to talk behind my back, and then I had to put Ryan on notice that war had been declared. Even though he was a partner, I wasn’t worried about him having any power to affect my job. I assumed all the partners knew about Ryan’s little sex games, but since no human woman was speaking out they could all pretend it wasn’t happening; since his behavior hadn’t crossed the line into biting, they turned a blind eye.

If I went public, they were going to have to suddenly be (with apologies to Captain Louis Renault in
Casablanca
), and paraphrasing,
shocked—shocked to find that such behavior is going on in here.
Not because sex was happening, but because Ryan was placing himself in close proximity to human women. That meant biting might happen, which could lead to a Making, the ultimate vampire taboo. Ryan was going to be too busy defending himself to the top partners to go after me.

I waited until I heard the bustle of people preparing to leave. Then I picked up the calla lily, opened the door to my office, and emerged into the central office space. As I suspected, conversations stuttered like backfiring cars and several men uttered amused snorts.

“Hi,” I said to the assembled lawyers and secretaries. “Yes, I slept with Ryan, because I’m an idiot.” I pinned the balding Doug with a look, daring him to react. He didn’t have the guts. Instead he looked away.

I continued. “But guess what? It’s not going to happen again because I’m going to warn the next female associate who gets hired at this firm. And you”—I raked the women within sight—“should be ashamed that you didn’t.”

With that, I dropped the calla lily in the nearest trash can and walked back into my office. There was an explosion of conversation behind me and the sound of one lone set of hands clapping. I glanced back. It was Norma. She smiled at me, fished a Hersey’s Kiss out of her jar, and held it out to me. I walked back and took it.

*   *   *

John O’Shea turned up in the early evening. There was a soft tap on my office door, then he stuck his head around the door. I promptly bit it off.

“Well, it took you long enough,” I said, knowing I sounded like a peevish bitch but unable to control myself.

“Hello to you too.” He gave me that smile, and my heart did a little cha-cha, but after what Ryan had pulled I had to wonder if I was actually attracted or if this was just Álfar shit.

I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to push back a headache. “So, tell me you have good news. I could really use some good news.”

“Sorry, no joy in Mudville. The hound’s alive.”

“Damn, that would have been so simple.”

“Life rarely is,” John said. “So, where does that leave you?”

“Back to Securitech since the bickering Mays crapped out.” I tapped my pen against my teeth. “But it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a nuisance case. Chip was never going to win.”

“Maybe he found out something. Something that changed the equation,” John offered.

I laid a hand on the nearest box. “If he did, it’s buried in here.”

“Which puts you at risk if you find it,” John said.

“Yeah, I thought of that, especially when I couldn’t turn up anything questionable in his personal life. Hearing somebody else say it, though…” I shivered, and it felt like ten thousand butterflies had been released in my stomach. “… makes it feel more real somehow.”

“I’ll give you something else to worry about. That hound is stalking his wife.”

That brought me out of my personal funk. “What?”