A Case for Love (5 page)

“Are you going to talk to her?” Meredith sidled up beside Forbes at the kitchen island.

He continued layering the thinly sliced prime rib onto the sourdough roll. “I’m waiting until tomorrow to call her.”

Meredith frowned. “Who are you talking about?”

He paused. “Who are
you
talking about?”

“Evelyn,” Meredith whispered, leaning around him to look through the kitchen door. “You’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring her since you walked in the door.”

“Oh, right.” The annoyance he’d felt when he walked in and saw a stranger seated in Meredith’s living room resurfaced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to ignore her. Tell me what she’s doing at B-G again.”

“She’s an executive with the development company Mom and Dad are working with on the Warehouse Row project. She doesn’t know anyone here, and when we had lunch earlier this week, she mentioned how lonely she gets when she has these temporary assignments she has to relocate for....” Meredith’s voice drifted off. Forbes glanced at her, then followed her smiling gaze to the door to see Major walking into the kitchen.

Forbes sighed. By no means unhappy that his sister had married one of his closest friends, he simply had not accustomed himself to how the dynamics of his own relationship with Meredith would change.

Quickly putting his sandwich together, he carried his plate into the living room, leaving Meredith and Major alone in the kitchen. He crossed to the Stickley club chair near the fireplace—and closest to where Evelyn Mackenzie sat on the sofa.

He gave her a few examining glances as he settled into the chair—shoulder-length dark hair, dark eyes, and legs that went on for miles, modestly displayed by the knee-length shorts she wore. She graced him with a smile, then returned her attention to George’s story of how he and Anne had met and fallen in love.

Evelyn set her plate on the coffee table. “Wait. Let me get this straight. Anne, you didn’t know that George was filling in for his boss? And George, you didn’t know that Anne had once been engaged to your boss?”

“Precisely. But there was one person, who happens to be in this very room, who knew the truth about everyone—and chose not to reveal it to us.” George’s clipped accent poked at Forbes’s conscience.

He smiled at his cousin’s husband. “Just as you were bound by the contract you signed, George, I was bound by attorney-client privilege.” He really hoped they wouldn’t decide to air family laundry in front of a total stranger.

Anne
humphed,
but left it alone and continued the story. Forbes ate his sandwich in peace. Though used to being blamed by his younger siblings—and Anne—of trying to control their lives, they all eventually realized it was for their own good. After all, things had turned out more than all right for Anne and George.

Major and Meredith rejoined them, sitting a respectable distance from each other on the love seat across from Forbes.

“You know so much about all of us now”—Anne shifted her still-full plate on her lap—“why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, Evelyn?”

Forbes’s eyes snapped to Evelyn’s legs as she shifted position. He quickly glanced away, berating himself for such a juvenile reaction.

“Well, I’m originally from Boston, but we lived all over as my father built his business. I went to Columbia for my undergraduate work, then to Harvard Law.” She tilted her head and slew her coppery brown gaze at Forbes.

He nodded in acknowledgment at the prestigious pedigree.

“Since then, I’ve been working for my father’s company.”

“And what do you do?” Forbes set his empty plate on the table and relaxed into the buttery leather chair.

“I’m the retail development director. Whenever Mackenzie and Son partners with a local company to develop an area, as we have with Boudreaux-Guidry Enterprises, I come in to handle all the details—from the broad legal questions to finalizing the acquisition of the real estate to the day-to-day tasks, such as working with contractors, surveyors, materials wholesalers, and all those sort that the investors don’t need to be bothered with.”

Frowning, Forbes leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Mackenzie and
Son?
You’re not a named partner in the firm?”

Though Evelyn laughed, a slight tenseness showed around her eyes. “It’s not like a law firm where it’s named after the partners. When my father incorporated the company, my brother and I were just kids. He assumed that my brother would enter the family business and I would pursue something else—like marriage and a family, or teaching, like my mother did before she got married. I guess he just didn’t realize that things would be a lot different for women in the new millennium.”

Forbes opened his mouth to remind her that her father could easily file an amendment to his business license to change the name—but a wide-eyed look of warning from Meredith stopped him. He resumed his former, relaxed posture in the chair. He’d taken up for Meredith with their parents a few months ago when she’d admitted to him that she felt like their parents didn’t respect her position as an executive director in charge of two of B-G’s largest departments—facilities and events—but her unspoken reminder that it wasn’t his business to get involved in how Evelyn’s father ran his company was correct.

“Evelyn, how do you feel about old movies?” Meredith asked. Major took that as a cue to clear everyone’s empty plates from the coffee table.

“Are we talking stuff from the ’80s or what?”

“Oh, no. We’re talking old. Black-and-white.” Meredith skirted the table and grabbed the game box off the top of the built-in cabinet behind Forbes.

George rubbed his hands together. “Brilliant. I love this game.”

“That’s because you’ve seen every old movie known to man,” Forbes groused. Over the last year, he’d become more familiar with Anne’s and Meredith’s—and their husbands’—favorite kinds of movies, mostly because either that’s what they watched whenever they all got together or because they now loved to play this game, which he’d bought in self-defense to keep from having to actually
watch
the old movies.

“Uh ... I think I have a classic movie channel in my digital cable package, but I’m never home long enough to watch any of them.”

“Oh, it’ll be fun. I think you’ll be surprised at how many you probably know and just don’t realize it. Isn’t that right, Forbes?” Meredith dug her knuckle into his shoulder.

“Sure.”

“Tell you what. Evelyn, why don’t you team up with Anne. Forbes, you can partner with George. And Major and I’ll be a team.”

Like there would be any thought of splitting up the newlyweds. “Sounds fair.” He moved onto the sofa beside George while Anne went around to sit with Evelyn.

As the game progressed, Forbes heard many of his own sardonic remarks about some of the questions and the corresponding film clips on the DVD-based game coming out of Evelyn’s mouth at the same time. For the first time, he started to enjoy playing this game because, for once, he finally had someone else in the room who felt the same way he did about old movies—better off forgotten.

He did get a couple of answers no one else did. Though they came as no shock to his relatives, Evelyn gave him a quizzical look.

He shrugged. “I’ve tried to see every film version ever made of my favorite author’s work.”

“Your favorite author?”

“Charles Dickens.”

She scrunched up her face. “Dickens? Dickens is your favorite author? How did that happen? You don’t strike me as the dusty-books-in-library type.”

No. He kept his complete Dickens collection well dusted. “I minored in English in college. Rhetoric, but I had to take several literature classes. We read excerpts of
Bleak House
in one of them, and I was hooked. Had to read the whole book—which was not an easy task the first time, I’ll tell you. But he had so much to say about the legal system in England in the mid-nineteenth century. I ended up writing my senior thesis on it.”

Anne, Meredith, and Major stared at him.

“You never told me that.” Meredith looked hurt. “I knew he was your favorite, but I just figured it was for the same reason that John Wayne movies are my favorite. Just because.”

He clapped his hands to his knees. “Well, now you know. Shall we continue with the game? I believe George and I just moved into the lead.”

“Alaine, come on. You’ve got promos to do.” Pricilla stood in the doorway of Alaine’s cubicle Monday morning, tapping her foot.

“Hold on just a second.” Alaine bookmarked the Web page on class-action lawsuits in real-estate and eminent-domain cases. “Okay. I’m coming.” She shrugged into the cropped red blazer the sponsoring clothing shop had dropped off last week. It pulled a bit in the shoulders, but she only had to wear it for ninety minutes.

As soon as she hit the studio, she got wired up with her lapel microphone, then hooked her interruptible feedback box onto the back of her waistband, turned it on, and plugged in her earpiece just in case someone from the control room needed her. The printout of the show rundown was on her chair on the set.

“Hey, Lainey!” Brent Douglas, the daytime meteorologist, gave her his standard, cocky grin when he entered the studio a few seconds later.

Not only did she hate that nickname, but now every time she looked at him, she couldn’t help but remember Meredith Guidry’s confession that she’d been in love with him in college, he knew it, and he’d dated and then married her roommate. “Hey, Brent.”

“Alaine, fifteen second promo in six ... five ... four...”

She pasted on a smile and looked into the glass in front of the camera lens that reflected the teleprompter feed. “Tomorrow on Inside Bonneterre, go green with energy saving ideas for the home from a local contractor. Veterinarian Andrew Blakeley will be here to take your calls and answer questions about keeping your pets healthy in this heat. Plus, LeShon Murphy, founder of Let’s Do Coffee, will be here to talk about relationships and dating. See you at noon.”

After recording a five-second spot and a “Today on Inside Bonneterre” spot that would run the next morning, Alaine went around behind the backdrop and gave her hair, makeup, and wardrobe one final check in the full-length mirror.

Pricilla entered the studio with two interns on her heels. “Guests are all here, and the remote that Jeff did for us this morning just came out of editing and is ready to roll after the third break.”

“I think we need to start doing a regular legal-advice segment. We already have a pediatrician and a veterinarian coming in regularly.”

“Because they’re married to people who work here.”

“That’s beside the point.” Alaine applied a little more lipstick, then checked her teeth to make sure none had transferred. “I would imagine someone here is related or married to a lawyer who could come in and take calls.” Forbes Guidry would send her viewers into a frenzy. But she couldn’t allow herself to think about him; she had a show to do and couldn’t afford the distraction.

An hour later, Alaine fought frustration at the near-flubs and minor mistakes she’d made all through the program because her concentration kept lapsing. A virus named Forbes Guidry had infected her brain.

When she tossed to the news anchor for a quick update at five minutes till one o’clock, Alaine took several deep breaths to try to compose herself before giving the tease for the next day’s show and the bye-bye.

As soon as she was clear, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m sorry, everyone. I don’t know where my brain is today.” She looked around at the three cameramen, Rebekka Blakeley, and Brent, knowing everyone in the control room could hear her as well. “I promise I’ll be back on form tomorrow.”

Bekka shrugged and gave her an understanding smile. “It’s a Monday. We all have those kinds of days.” She crossed the small studio, carefully avoiding tripping over the thick cables snaking all over the floor, and perched on the edge of the chair beside Alaine’s. “Is everything okay? Anything I can do?”

Alaine could have hugged the newscaster. Bekka Blakeley had been one of the sports reporters when Alaine first started at the station. In fact, watching Bekka rise from reporter to weekend sports anchor to morning news anchor to her current position as the sole anchor of the noon news updates and the five o’clock news hour encouraged Alaine’s dreams to move into real news reporting, too.

And Bekka was the only person at the station who was shorter than Alaine ... by a whole inch. That thought brought her a genuine smile for the first time in twenty-four hours. “Like you said—it’s just one of those days.” She stood and removed her microphone and IFB box and earpiece. “Bekka, since you were kind enough to let us use your husband for the veterinarian Q&A segment, you don’t happen to have a relative who’s a lawyer, do you?”

“I do—a cousin—but she lives in Tennessee. I’ll ask around for you, if you want me to.”

“No, I need to work out the idea for the segment before I start looking for someone, I guess.”

“Okay, just let me know if—” Her eyes went vague for a second, a sure indication someone was talking to her from the control room. “Oops, they’re calling me to do my teasers.” She scurried back over to the main news desk.

Alaine sat and watched the woman only five or six years older than herself record her first promo spot. Bekka—petite with looks that could still pass for a teenager when she didn’t have her makeup on and hair done—had managed to climb the ladder due, in part, to her connections but also in large part because she was good at her job. Alaine still struggled to figure out how to get the executives to realize that she, too, had the potential to become an anchor.

She let the whine reverberate in her head as a prayer, begging God to make them give her a chance to prove herself.

Back at her desk, though tempted to get online again and do more research on legal recourse for her parents, Alaine applied herself to her work. First order of business: calling tomorrow’s guests, confirming their arrival time, and answering any last-minute questions.

The call to Bekka’s husband was quick. He’d done his segment once a month for the past two years. The contractor wanted to know what kinds of things he could bring in for demos, so she invited him to come half an hour early to see what would work and what wouldn’t. She saved the call to LeShon Murphy until last.