Travis's Appeal

“It cost you Adrianne,” Bryan reminded his son quietly.

Travis paused and took a breath. Adrianne and he had been engaged for approximately two months—until she’d thrown the ring at him. “Adrianne and I weren’t a match. I’m lucky it ended the way it did. I actually dodged a bullet.” Better to break up before a wedding than after one.

Bryan thought of it from his son’s fiancée’s point of view. Living with Kate had taught him to see things from perspectives other than his own. “It would have been easy enough for a bullet to find you. You were always at your desk—or in court.”

Travis didn’t want to talk about the issue. It was in the past and just reinforced his initial feelings about relationships. Very few turned out and they weren’t worth the risk.

“Dad, things usually work out for the best. We weren’t right for each other. According to the grapevine, Adrianne’s with some guy now who can give her all the attention she wants.”

Travis was more his son than the boy realized, Bryan thought.

“You know, after your mother died,” Bryan said, referring to Jill, his first wife and the biological mother of his four sons, “I tried to bury myself in my work because I felt guilty. Guilty that I was alive when she wasn’t, guilty that there might have been something I could have done to save her, to keep her from going on that trip. And I was afraid to commit to anyone else—even you boys—for fear of feeling that awful, awful pain of being abandoned again. It took Kate to make me see that loving someone, leaving yourself open to love, was worth every risk you can take.”

Travis began to nod his head and stopped abruptly when the motion sent a dozen arrows flying to his temples. This was going to be one hell of a day, he thought. Still, he dug in stubbornly.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Travis promised. “Now, I really would like to take that shower.”

Bryan stepped to the side, out of his son’s way. “Turn the hot water all the way up. The steam might help your head.”

“Gotcha,” Travis said, heading toward the executive shower.

Not about to get into another discussion, Travis was just humoring his father. He knew from experience that with these headaches, the only thing that could help immediately was if someone gave him a new head. Short of that, it was a storm he just needed to ride out. Preferably in a room where the blinds were drawn.

Reaching the executive bathroom, Travis locked the door behind him and quickly stripped off his clothes. It took him less than a minute to adjust the water temperature. In the stall, he sighed, allowing the water to hit his back full force.

He appreciated his father’s concern about the direction his life was taking, he really did, and in the privacy of his own mind, he might be willing to acknowledge a germ of truth in his father’s supposition that he had a phobia about commitments. He was even willing to concede that it might be remotely rooted in his mother’s demise.

But he really did like his work a great deal and Adrianne, it turned out, just liked the prestige of saying that her significant other, soon-to-be-husband, was a lawyer. Not that Adrianne wanted him doing any lawyering on her time, and her time was anytime she decided she needed to see him.

He was better off without her. When he saw his brothers, who had all paired up this last year, if he felt a little isolated, like the odd man out, he gave no indication. He was happy for his brothers, happy each had apparently found the one person who completed their world.

But for him, it wouldn’t be that easy. Not because he wasn’t looking but because he felt it was far too early to be thinking of being with someone on a permanent basis. Someone who, if the whim hit, could leave. Granted, Adrianne had turned out to be an unfortunate choice, but she just proved his theory. He was better off on his own. Better off working, doing what he was good at.

But analyzing deep-rooted feelings and subconscious ones, that was Trent’s domain, not his. Trent was a child psychologist, like Kate. Trent was accustomed to multilayered thinking and digging deep. Travis liked things to be in black and white.

Like the law.

Travis stood beneath the showerhead a bit longer, letting the hot water hit him and the steam build up within the black, onyx-tiled stall. Slowly, some of the tension began to leave his shoulders. It helped. A tiny bit.

He got out before he turned pruney.

“Your hair’s damp.”

Travis’s secretary, Bea Bennett, made the note. A small, thin, angular woman, she favored long skirts, sensible shoes and long, penetrating looks in lieu of arguing with her boss. She stepped into his office not ten minutes after he’d returned to it himself.

“The hair dryer died,” Travis told her.

The device had given up the ghost midway through drying his sandy blond hair, making it appear a little darker. With the hair dryer refusing to rise up from the dead, he’d run his fingers through his hair a couple of times, getting rid of any excess water. Travis figured the air would take care of the rest eventually.

Thin, carefully penciled-in eyebrows rose in mild surprise. “The one in the executive bathroom?”

About to nod, Travis refrained. The headache was still very much a part of him, the tiny respite in the shower a thing of the past the moment he stepped away from the hazy warmth of the stall.

“That’s the one.”

Bea frowned, shaking her head, a head mistress trying to decipher the mystery that was her student. “Don’t know what you people do with them. The one I’ve got at home’s lasted going on seven years now.”

Like everyone else at the firm, Travis was accustomed to the woman’s outspoken manner. Most of the time, he actually got a kick out of it. This was not one of those times. Migraine headaches made him less tolerant of eccentricities.

“Good for you, Bea.” He dug into his side drawer for the bottle of extra-strength aspirin. The aspirin that was powerless to relieve his headache. He took a couple of pills anyway. He had heard that if you believed something worked, it helped. He did his best to believe. Swallowing, he continued talking to her. “Now, did you come in here for a reason, Bea, or did you just want to bedevil me with your rapier wit and your arousing physical presence?”

Bea narrowed her eyes until the black marbles disappeared behind tiny slits. He didn’t know if she was doing it for effect, or if she was myopic.

“When I’m bedeviling you, Mr. Marlowe, you won’t have to ask if that’s what I’m doing. You’ll know it,” the woman informed him. Then, with a toss of her head, she switched persona, becoming the perennial secretary. “Your ten o’clock appointment is here.”

His ten o’clock. For a second, Travis drew a blank. He glanced at his calendar. He’d written a name beside the ten o’clock space, but it was now completely illegible to him.

“And he would be?” he asked, leaving the rest up in the air, waiting for Bea to fill in the blank.

“They,” Bea corrected. “And they’re outside in the reception area.” She gestured behind her toward the common area where all but the most elite of the firm’s clients waited.

Travis looked at the calendar again. It made less sense to him than before. He was really going to have to do something about his handwriting. “I need a name, Bea.”

She eyed him, a small, thin face behind dark-rimmed glasses someone had once said she wore for effect rather than necessity. “Any particular one?” she asked glibly.

They were going to play the game her way, or not at all, Travis thought. Again, he might have enjoyed it if not for the civil war going on right behind his eyes. “The potential client’s would be nice.”

She crossed to his desk and made a show of examining his calendar. “What the hell is that?” she asked, pointing to the writing beside the number “10.” “It looks like you dipped a chicken in ink and had it walk across your page.” She looked at him again. “Didn’t your parents teach you how to write?”

“They had more important things to teach me,” he told her lightly. “Like how to fire an insubordinate secretary.”

With a haughty little noise, she informed him, “I can’t be fired.”

His sense of humor was valiantly trying to claw its way back among the living. He was game. “And why’s that?”

He fully expected her to say something about having tenure, since she had worked here longer than anyone could remember. But then, since this was Bea, he realized he should have known better. Conventional arguments were not for her.

“Slaves have to be sold,” she informed him with a smart toss of her head. “And their name’s O’Reilly.” Bea paused to tap the calendar, as if that could somehow transform his handwriting into legible letters. “Shawn and Shana,” she added.

“Married couple?” he guessed absently. The borders of family law were wide, taking in a myriad of subjects. There were twelve attorneys in the firm, each with a specialty although their work did encompass many fields within the heading.

A short laugh escaped like a burst of air. “Not hardly,” she cackled before becoming serious again. “Not unless the old man’s into cradle robbing.” She considered her own observation and commented on it. “‘Course, a man with money these days thinks he could buy himself anything he wants.”

“How about a secretary who doesn’t give her own narrative to everything?” Travis suggested with a touch of wistfulness.

“Too boring.” A wave of the hand accompanied her dismissive shake of the head. Her eyes swept over his desk just before she crossed to the doorway again. “By the way, those’ll burn a hole in your stomach,” she told him with a disapproving frown, referring to the bottle of extra-strength aspirin on his desk. “If you went home at a decent hour, like everyone else around here, maybe you wouldn’t get those damn headaches of yours.”

Bea knew everything that was going on in the office. She was better than a private investigator. He returned the bottle to the side drawer.