Free One More Time by Deborah Cooke Page A

opportunity to become like my father.” He snorted. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”
    “But it was the one you had to win to permanently join the partnership with your father. You won’t blame me for your not having a high power career. I wouldn’t have stopped you...”
    “But I didn’t want that partnership. I never did.”
    Leslie fought to push her feelings back into their neatly labeled boxes. She never lost her temper, and she wasn’t going to start today. She pulled away the neck of her sweater, reassuring herself with a peek at the silvery Italian bra. “You might have mentioned as much,” she said, then balled the chocolate bar wrapper in her fist and flung it toward the garbage can.
    She missed.
    “Wait a minute. You can’t have really expected me to win.”
    “Why not? You were his defense attorney, and I know you’re neither stupid nor incompetent.”
    His voice rose in anger. “ You expected me to win? ”
    Hers was not an unreasonable expectation. Leslie took a shaking breath. “Matt, you’re a lawyer. Winning court cases would be your job...”
    “I never wanted to be a lawyer.”
    One more time, Leslie was shaken not only by what Matt said but how firmly he said it. How could she not have known this? Her sense that he had become a stranger returned, redoubled. “But you went to law school,” she said more cautiously. “People who go to law school become lawyers. You must have wanted to be a lawyer!”
    “I never wanted to go, but I never had a choice.”
    “But, but, you never told me that!” Leslie was startled to learn that she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been sharing secrets.
    “Do you really think I’m like my brother, James?”
    “No, but most lawyers—most men—aren’t like your brother, James.” Leslie rubbed her temple with her fingertips. Her words faltered. “Matt, you graduated at the top of your class. I thought you loved law.”
    “Well, I don’t. I never did. I did what I had to do to get people off my back.”
    He was so definite, almost accusatory, as if he was disappointed in her for not guessing what he hadn’t told her. And that made Leslie mad. “Funny you never mentioned it.”
    “I thought you must know, on some level, that I wanted to do something else.”
    “How would I have known that without you telling me?” What else had he wanted to do?
    “Why do you think I stayed home with Annette?”
    “You had a home office. Lots of people work at home when they have children: you had a choice to do so and I didn’t.”
    “I had a home-based real estate law practice because I never wanted to play the game.”
    “But if you didn’t want to play the game, what were you doing even taking the Laforini case? Then why didn’t you just say no to your father in the first place?” Leslie found her voice rising. This was not her fault! “Why didn’t you just decline the privilege of being his partner two years ago?”
    Why did you have to give me such hope? she wanted to shout at him, but bit it back.
    “For the same reason I went to law school and wrote the bar exam. My father never took no for an answer when he wanted that answer to be yes. The only way to persuade him that I wasn’t cut out to be his successor and partner was to prove it to him in a courtroom. So, that’s what I did. He always wanted hard evidence, preferably from a court of law, so that’s what he got.”
    It made a treacherous kind of sense.
    Worse, Matt was proud of himself. Leslie spun in her chair, her frustration rising to dangerous levels. She should have hung up, she knew it. She should have just cut the conversation short before she said too much.
    But she couldn’t do it.
    Not today.
    Not when she had hoped for so much and it looked as if she’d get nothing at all. Not when she’d spent two years hoping that he’d win the case, get himself a partnership that would pay a decent wage, and leave her with an option when Dinkelmann got demanding.
    “So, you just