Free Stay (Dunham series #2) by Moriah Jovan

work for him, and
no extra legal work to do for Knox, he would have a lighter
schedule than he’d had as executive. Considering his managerial
style and the fact that he’d been managing the prosecutor’s office
since he’d graduated from law school, it should have been a piece
of cake.
    Oh, it was a piece of something, all right.
    Knox had never had any patience with bureaucratic
paperwork and no compunction about tossing everything in the shred
bin; he’d figured if it was that important, someone would come bug
him until it got done. He could afford to do that: Nobody was going
to walk into Knox Hilliard’s office to tell him to sign this or
that or some other thing—except Eric, which was why Knox had hired
him, only . . . after about a year of trying to manage Knox with
one hand tied behind his back, Eric had finally decided he’d had
enough of Knox’s pigheaded bullshit and had started signing Knox’s
name to everything himself, daring Knox to say a word about it.
    Knox had smirked and Eric went about doing his
boss’s job—except for the massive amounts of paperwork Knox hadn’t
bothered to pass along to him at all, thus fell on top of Eric the
minute Knox wasn’t around to field it.
    Eric couldn’t count how many times a day in the last
three months someone had come to him for help or a signature, but
ended the conversation with, “Well, that’s not how Knox did
it.”
    Of course it wasn’t. Knox hadn’t done it at all.
    Eric’s resolve not to allow the office to maintain
its reputation as a trainer of baby litigators proved difficult,
since the law school advisors had disregarded his memo and metro
area attorneys either didn’t believe he wanted to hire experienced
personnel or didn’t believe Knox had not, in fact, been on the
take. More than once he’d heard, “Are you sure there was never
anything crooked going on up there?”
    “Not since Knox ousted Nocek, no. Don’t you pay
attention to the news?”
    As far as Eric could see, the taint of corruption in
Chouteau County might never go away, no matter what he did.
    The Justice McKinley Hilliard test hadn’t worked
completely on the sole attorney he’d managed to hire—a new grad—who
had correctly answered all of Eric’s pointed questions designed to
determine if she could do everything she was given the first day
without help.
    Either Eric’s test was flawed or the woman
misunderstood how much work he expected her to get through the
first day; she hadn’t done badly, really, but she hadn’t performed
the way Justice had. As one of her last duties before she left for
good, Justice made sure Eric knew she found his expectations
unreasonable.
    “You did not assign me that much work my first
day.”
    “I did, too. You have selective amnesia.”
    “If you had lived through my first eight
weeks in this office, wouldn’t you develop amnesia, too?”
    Eric had to concede that point and took a third of
the new attorney’s assigned work off the top. He could breathe a
lot easier when she plowed through it with quality work.
    Which also meant Lesley got to pass the “Whittaker
Problem” off on the new person, too—
    —until Simone had died Sunday, whose funeral Eric
was only too happy to pay for over his mother’s objections.
    “Mom, all the better to plant her as fast as
possible, in a casket she can’t get out of. If I have to hot rivet
that fucker closed myself, I’ll do that, too.”
    Eric suspected it was a revenge killing for one of
the men she’d named in her diary, but he didn’t give a fat rat’s
ass if she’d been stabbed on accident, on purpose, or by whom. It
was the Jackson County prosecutor’s problem and Eric was just glad
she was permanently out of his life.
    He briefly wondered if Simone’s sister would be at
the wake tonight or the funeral tomorrow, but then dismissed that.
If she hadn’t come back before now, she probably never would, which
was fine with him. He didn’t want to look at her or talk to