Love Proof (Laws of Attraction) (7 page)

She passed it across to Mickey and took a sip of pale ale.  “Which side
do you want to take?” she asked him.  “Petitioner or respondent?”

He didn’t bother reading the sheet.  “Whatever you say.  I’m just your
dog, Sarah.  Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“Huh-uh,” she said, setting down her glass.  “First of all, I hate
group work, because someone—me—always ends up doing most of it.  Second, you
need to decide right now if you’re willing to work as hard as I am.  Because if
you’re not, let’s just enjoy our beer and part friends.  No harm, no foul,
we’ll just go find other partners.”

“Don’t be so touchy,” he said, smiling.  “Of course I’m going to work. 
I just meant I’m not going to fight you on anything.  I know how good you are
at this, and I’m not one of those guys who can’t take their woman showing them
up every now and then.”

“
Their woman
?” Sarah repeated, her voice thick with sarcasm.

“Okay, ‘moot court partner’—you like that better?” Mickey asked.

Sarah sipped her beer and took a few more moments to consider.  Her
partner the year before had been an older woman who was an excellent writer,
and had done a great job on her portion of the brief, but who began to fall
apart the moment they argued their case in front of the judges.  Catherine had
barely gotten out two sentences of her prepared statement before the judges began
firing questions at her, one after another.

That was how Moot Court was supposed to go—it was an imitation of
arguing an appellate case in front of a panel of judges primed to interrupt and
ask questions, and generally to overwhelm and challenge the lawyers.  And for
the past two months Sarah and Catherine and everyone else in Moot Court had
been rehearsing exactly how to deal with that.

But suddenly Catherine seemed very tired.  She rested her arms against
the podium and her head started to droop.  The next thing Sarah knew, Catherine
was swaying to the side, and both Sarah and one of her opponents from the other
team leapt up just in time to catch the woman before she fainted.  They helped
her back to her seat, and Catherine folded her arms on top of the counsel table
and laid her head there.  Her breathing sounded ragged.  Sarah hoped her
partner wasn’t going to throw up.

“You’ll have two minutes, counsel,” the chief judge informed her.  “If
you don’t resume by then, you forfeit.”

Sarah wasn’t sure her partner would recover in time.  Her face—what
Sarah could see of it—was still deathly pale, and Sarah could hear a soft moan.

“Catherine?” she whispered.  “Are you going to be all right?”

Catherine gave a slight nod.

Sarah glanced at the timer ticking away in front of them.  What a
disaster.  If only the rules allowed her to take over for Catherine, it would
have been all right.  But as it was, all Sarah could do was rub the woman’s
back and say soothing things to her, like, “You can do this.  It’s almost
over.  You only have to argue a few more minutes.”

When the chief judge warned of the last ten seconds, Catherine slowly
rose to her feet.  Sarah helped steady her back to the podium.  Then Catherine
made a valiant—and successful—effort to remain on her feet until the allotted
time was over.  Then she sank back into her chair and laid her head on the
table again.

Needless to say, they lost.

But Mickey Hughes didn’t seem the fainting type.  If anything, he
looked like he’d enjoy the spotlight while judges tried to hammer holes in his
argument.

“You’ll have to make time for this,” Sarah warned him.  “I don’t care
what your class load is, I want to meet at least three times a week.”

“Sounds good,” Mickey said.

“We’ll divide up the briefing and decide who researches and writes
which part.”

“Great,” he said.

“And before you start saying yes to everything,” Sarah added, “let me
tell you this is strictly professional.  This isn’t you getting into my pants.”

“All right,” Mickey said with a grin, “I’ll deal with that separately,
on my own time.”

“I’m serious, Hughes, it ain’t happening.  I’m here to work.”

He gave her a salute and downed the rest of his beer.  “Want another?”
he asked, getting up.  “I have the feeling you’re more fun when you’re drunk.”

Just to prove her point, Sarah pushed away her still mostly-full
glass.  “Time to go study,” she said, also rising to her feet.  “See you tomorrow. 
We’ll divide up the work then.”

“See you, beautiful,” he said.

“That’s the last time you say that or we’re done right now.”

Mickey chuckled.  “I meant see you, scrawny, high-strung girl with the
big brain.”

Sarah smiled at that.  “I’m never high-strung,” she said.  “You’ll
see.  And you’d better be a lot cooler in court than you are trying to pick me
up.”

“I definitely am,” Mickey assured her.

She held out her hand for him to shake.  “Guess you’ll do for now.”

***

The next time Sarah checked the sign-up sheet, she could see Joe Burke
and his partner Ellen Kiptar were the other team working on the same case. 
They had signed up to represent the respondent—the hospital which had failed to
protect sensitive patient information from someone who hacked into the computer
database—whereas Sarah and Mickey represented the petitioner, a woman whose
medical records had been exposed.  The question was whether the patient had a
constitutional right to privacy that the hospital violated by being so lax with
its computer security.  Sarah liked the patient’s side of the argument better
than the hospital’s.  She thought she could do a lot with that.

She knew Joe Burke only by name and sight.  And all she knew about his
partner Ellen was that she was on the Moot Court board and acted as treasurer. 
Even though they were all third years, UCLA’s law school was big enough that students
only got to know the people in their smaller classes, and so far Sarah hadn’t
had any of those with either Joe or Ellen.

Although Sarah did remember one incident involving Joe in her second
year, when they were both in the same Federal Tax Law class.  He always sat in
the back of the large, theater-style classroom, on the opposite side of the
room from Sarah.  On this particular day he looked like he was sleeping.

Which was exactly why the professor called on him.  But instead of
proving the professor’s suspicions that he was another one of those lazy
students caught partying too much instead of studying, Joe completely nailed
the question the professor threw at him.  Then he kept on going and gave the
professor case law that hadn’t even been cited in the textbook to back up what
he was saying.

Sarah, along with most of her classmates, had a good laugh at the whole
exchange.  Then Joe Burke went back to slouching into his seat like a slacker, even
though his cover had just been blown.

Sarah had also seen him around school with a variety of different
female companions.  And that right there crossed him off whatever list she
might have had.  She didn’t like players—never had.  Like she told Mickey
Hughes, she was there at the school to work.

She would make time for a personal life later.  Once she had gotten
everything she came for.

***

The first time she watched Joe Burke argue his side of the case during
one of the practices, she should have known.

He was that good.

That electrifying, that charismatic, that smart.

Trouble.

“Wonder if any of the other teams have thought of that argument,” Sarah
murmured to Mickey, who sat beside her in the audience watching.

Even though the two teams were dealing with the same case, they
wouldn’t argue against each other at the competition.  Each of them would be
matched with a team from another school.

And Sarah had to admit she was grateful.

Burke was that good.

Maybe even better than she was.

“He’s not that great,” Mickey muttered back.  “We could take him.”

“His partner, for sure,” Sarah said.  Ellen underwhelmed them both.

But Burke . . .

When the guest judges were finished questioning him, Joe thanked them
all and headed back to his table.

But not before looking straight at Sarah.  And smiling.

She looked away as if she’d been caught at something.  Because she had.

Mickey nudged her with his elbow.  “Let’s go grab a beer.”

Sarah stared at the back of Joe’s head a moment longer before
answering, “Not tonight.”

And maybe that was the start of it, she thought later.  The moment when
she might have faintly written Joe’s name down on her imaginary list.

Like the
Flourish
list:  things she might want but didn’t
necessarily need.

Maybe, Sarah thought as she watched him walk out of the room—saw him
once again glance her way and deliberately look her in the eye—a guy like Joe
Burke could be interesting to know.

But not now.  Maybe later.

After she beat him and everyone else in the competition.

Nine

The October depositions rolled past, one by one:  the northern
California ones—San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, San Jose—most of them
places Sarah had never visited before.  Then on to Las Vegas and Reno.  Denver
and Colorado Springs.  Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson—the airports and hotels all
became a blur, each one interchangeable as she checked into a new one every
night, sat in a conference room all the next day, then flew out again to a new
city where she would rinse, repeat, ask her same list of questions.

By mid-November, Sarah spent a weekend compiling some of the
information she had gathered:  a range of dates for when the product had been
purchased, a list of stores or Internet sites where the plaintiffs bought the
hair iron, and a spreadsheet detailing how long they used it before it set fire
to their hair.

Not a pretty picture.

She e-mailed the information to Mickey’s boss, Calvin, and asked him to
forward it to the client.

And then asked for some information in return.

Sarah noticed a pattern:  the only claims were for hair irons bought
within a specific time period.  It was something any lawyer on the case should
have noticed already if they had taken the time to read all the complaints
Joe’s firm had filed, or if they’d read the interrogatory answers the
plaintiffs had sent back.

But Sarah had seen this kind of waste before.  It was easier
sometimes—and definitely more lucrative, since it meant more billable hours—to
have an attorney take a series of depositions in person, rather than ask
questions on paper.  If Sarah had been hired to work the case from a desk, she
might have gathered all this same information more easily and cheaply than
having to fly from city to city and stay in hotels and eat bad food on the
road.

But she wasn’t in charge of any of that.  And, she reminded herself,
she never would have been able to negotiate the salary she was getting if she
just sat at a spare desk in the law firm offices and typed up interrogatories and
reviewed documents all day.

So she was on a plane to Salt Lake City the Sunday before Thanksgiving,
and would see Boise and Pocatello, Idaho before heading home Wednesday night. 
Then she would have four long days all to herself, to drive home to see her
parents and sleep in her childhood bed.

If she could make it that long.

She had been feeling a little tired.  More tired than usual.  When she
saw Angie on Saturday for their now once-weekly workout sessions, Sarah dragged
from one exercise to the next.  Finally Angie called a halt to the whole thing
and told Sarah to stretch.

“You need a break,” Angie said.  “Fifteen hours of sleep.  A bad-TV
marathon.  Something.”

Sarah had dutifully kept up with her exercise on the road, running on
the hotel treadmills every morning, then doing pushups and lunges and squats in
the privacy of her own room.

Now she lay sprawled on the padded mat while Angie stretched her aching
limbs.

“I think you’re right,” Sarah told her.  “I need to turn off my brain for
four days.  Just sit in a chair and stare at the wall.  Or read all the trashy
magazines my mom saves up for me.”

“How’s Joe been?” Angie asked.

Sarah shrugged.  “You know.”  Then she grimaced as Angie angled her leg
into a brutal hip stretch Sarah always both loved and hated.

She had kept saga of Sarah and Joe to herself for a few weeks, but
finally she couldn’t resist telling Angie about their history.  The trainer
approved of Sarah’s overall plan to make the man suffer.

“Glad you’ll get a little break from him next week?” Angie asked as she
pushed Sarah’s straightened leg practically over her head.

“Yes,” Sarah grunted.  “Definitely.  And that other guy—Chapman.  I
can’t wait to not hear his voice for four long days.  What a luxury.”

Before leaving the gym, Sarah pulled a stack of bills out of her
wallet.