“I don’t know what she expected,” the director said, sounding genuinely bewildered. “She stays at home with the kids. What am I supposed to do? Look, just offer her the house, support money for the kids and some kind of monthly alimony. Make it all go away.”
He handed Connor a piece of paper with some suggested figures. Connor glanced at them and shook his head. Even by his usually conservative standards, these would never fly. Not when this man made millions.
“Look, I’ll do what I can, but it may not be so easy to make this go away. You’ve been married a long time, and this isn’t the first time you’ve strayed. Her lawyer could rip you apart. If she gets a sympathetic judge, you’ll wind up paying three or four times this amount.”
The director leveled a look at him that probably intimidated every actor on his set. “Don’t let that happen,” he said quietly. “Understand?”
Connor nodded. All he could do was offer his best advice. In the end, it was his client’s decision. “I’ll be back in touch as soon as I’ve spoken to your wife’s lawyer.”
“Tell that little weasel I have plenty of dirt of my own I can throw at her,” Wilder told him. “If he wants to get tough, I’ll be tougher, and I’ll walk away with the house and the kids. She’ll wind up with nothing. She was barely one step out of the gutter when I met her, and I can see that she winds up back there.”
Connor felt his blood turn cold at the man’s vicious words. For all of his go-for-the-jugular tactics, he still clung to at least some sense of respect for women. Sadly, though, he had dealt with enough men who thought their own behavior should be exempt from scrutiny to recognize a man willing to play hardball. Usually he liked having the kind of leverage necessary to make the other side squirm. Maybe because of last night’s conversation with Heather, today he was the one squirming. The whole thing suddenly seemed so darn sleazy and cruel.
Ironically, it wasn’t Heather’s face he saw in his head, but Gram’s. He heard her reminding him over and over that Megan deserved his respect, even when he was angriest at what she’d done to the family. Gram would be appalled by Clint Wilder, a man willing to publicly sully his wife’s reputation out of greed.
In the end, though, Connor knew he would win for the director in court, because that’s what he did. But for the first time, at the end of the day, he didn’t feel entirely good about it.
When the firm’s senior partner, Grayson Hudson, walked into his office and asked about the case later, Connor shrugged. “It’ll get a lot of publicity,” he said, as if that were all that mattered.
“Just make sure the firm looks good,” Grayson told him. “You’re very good at what you do, Connor. That’s why I used you myself when Cynthia and I split up. But your tendency to go for broke can stir up sympathy for the other side. You make sure that man’s wife isn’t going to come through this looking like Mother Teresa, you hear?”
Connor thought about Wilder’s veiled references to his wife’s past. “Doubtful, sir,” he said confidently.
“Just do your homework, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Not to worry. I always do.”
After all, Connor reflected, wasn’t he the one who was known in his family for having very little faith in the human race? He left next to nothing to chance. Even though he had Clint Wilder’s word that his wife had skeletons in her closet, he’d put a private detective to work checking her background within five minutes of the man walking out of his office. He wasn’t about to enter a mediation room or a courtroom without knowing everything there was to know about the other side.
Using the dirt, though? That was another matter and one he had no idea how he would handle.
Though he was immersed in work, Connor still wasn’t able to keep Heather out of his head. Every time he drew up a line of attack in another case, he heard her voice questioning his tactics and his motives. It was getting annoying.
In fact, just being unable to get her out of his head was annoying. The only way he could think of to change that was to put his social life on a fast track.
For the next couple of weeks, he spent his evenings hitting every bar in town with various colleagues from his law firm. Though he met plenty of attractive, intelligent professional women, not a one of them held a candle to Heather. Her image haunted him.
He reached for the phone a half-dozen times a day, tempted to call so he could hear the sound of her voice. He even had a built-in excuse, wanting to get updates on their son. It was downright pitiful that he even considered resorting to that.
In the end, he resisted because he knew she’d see through the excuse. Anyone in his family could tell him what was going on with little Mick. It wouldn’t take frequent calls to Heather to learn how his son was doing. Besides, she left him regular messages herself. They were too short, too unsatisfactory. What he needed was a real conversation.
His inability to get on with his life clearly meant that he needed to try harder.
The next woman he met, he asked on a date, then spent an evening in one of Baltimore’s finest restaurants being bored out of his mind. It seemed all she cared about was whether he’d met any of the stars in Clint Wilder’s movie. He repeated the pattern for another couple of weeks, then finally conceded he was wasting his time.
On the Saturday morning of Easter weekend, he got in his car and drove once again to Chesapeake Shores, using the excuse that it had been too long since he’d seen his son. He somehow managed to blame Heather for that, even though several of her messages had included an offer to bring little Mick for a visit.
When he arrived at the house, he found Gram in the kitchen with all of the kids coloring Easter eggs. Though the room was a disaster and Gram looked harried, her eyes were twinkling when she spotted him. She handed off his son, who clung happily to his neck. The boy’s smile of delight at Connor’s arrival immediately improved his mood.
“Get out of those fancy clothes and come in here to help me,” Gram commanded. “If I’m not careful, I’m going to wind up with my hair dyed pink.”
“It would be beautiful,” Caitlyn told her solemnly.
“We can do mine, too,” Carrie said. “But I want blue.” She danced around. “Don’t you think I’d be beautiful?”
“Gorgeous,” Connor agreed, laughing. He felt lighter than he had in days. His twin nieces, with their unexpected observations and uncensored comments, could lift his spirits in a heartbeat. Spending time with them and the rest of the family was exactly what he’d needed.
“I’ll be right back,” he promised his grandmother.
Taking little Mick with him, he changed into an old T-shirt and a pair of cutoff jeans, then hurried back to the kitchen and settled his son in a high chair.
“How’d you get roped into doing this?” he asked Gram.
“Everyone’s working today,” she explained. “It’s a busy weekend in town, so Shanna, Heather, Bree and your mother are all at their shops. Abby went to help Bree deliver flowers. It seems everybody in the universe is sending an Easter bouquet to someone in Chesapeake Shores this weekend.”
“Where’s Dad?”
