Dark Paradise Read Online Free PDF

before he bothered telling Marilee about her
    demotion.
     
    Their relationship had suddenly become null and void in the face of more
    advantageous opportunities. Ms. junior Partner was more in tune with
    him, he said. Ms. Junior Partner shared his goals and his philosophies.
     
    Their parting argument played through her mind like a videotape that had
    been shown and rewound again and again over the course of the past two
    weeks.
     
    "What philosophy is that, Brad?   Screw everybody and bill them for
    double the hours?"
     
    "Jesus, Marilee, what a bitchy thing to say!"
     
    "Well, excuuuse me!   Getting dumped has that effect, you know. It makes
    me cranky."
     
    "It wasn't working, Marilee, you know that. It hasn't been working for
    the last six months."
     
    "Coincidentally, about the same amount of time has passed since the iron
    bun joined your firm."
     
    "Leave Pauline out of this."
     
    "That's kind of hard to do, seeing as how the two of you have been
    playing merger games after hours for how long now?"
     
    "It doesn't matter."
     
    "It matters to me."
     
    "I wasn't getting much here, Marilee. You're always too tired or too
    stressed or-"
     
    "You!   You have the gall to complain to me about our sex life?"
     
    "What are you saying?   Are you saying I didn't satisfy you?"
     
    "I'm saying I've had better orgasms by myself!"
     
    "Fine. Reduce the conversation to a gutter level. The bottom line is we
    don't have a future together, Marilee. We don't want the same things
    professionally or socially. There's no point in going on with it."
     
    "Bottom line. You want to talk bottom line?   Fine.
     
    Here's a bottom line for you, Bradford. You owe me about three thousand
    dollars for services rendered in my professional capacity. Would you
    care to cough that up before you pack your toothbrush, or should I bill
    the firm?"
     
    She would never see a dime of it, not that she cared so much about the
    money. It was the idea that burned her cookies. She felt used. He had
    taken advantage of their relationship while he had been struggling to
    get a toehold at the firm. I have to share a secretary, Marilee. Please,
    can't You just type this up for me. Just this once (twice, three times,
    eighty-five times). Don't you want me to look good?   Couldn't you just
    help out a little with those transcripts?   It would make such a good
    impression if I could have this done . . . He had treated her as if she
    were his personal, free-of-charge legal secretary. Now that he was
    moving up in the world, he wouldn't have to save pennies by literally
    screwing a court reporter out of her fees.
     
    She felt like a fool. How she had ever managed to fall for a lawyer in
    the first place was beyond her. No. That was a lie. In her heart she
    knew what she had been doing with the upwardly mobile Bradford Enright,
    and it was so Freudian, it was depressing. Her family had approved of
    him. They may have seen her career as a court reporter as being a giant
    step down from their expectations for her, but Brad had made a nice
    consolation prize. They could look at him and still hold out some hope
    that she would settle into the life of pleasant snobbery to which they
    were all accustomed.
     
    What a hypocrite she was. In her heart she knew she'd never really loved
    Brad. He was right: they didn't want any of the same things - including
    each other. She had gone through the motions, pretended passion, lied to
    him and to herself time and again by saying she was happy, when the
    truth was a partner at Hawkins and Briggs didn't come close to making
    the list of things she wanted out of life. The time had come to admit
    that.
     
    She'd spent too much of her life as a square peg trying to fit into a
    round hole. She'd spent too much time trying to fit into the lifestyle
    her family thought of as normal.
     
    She wasn't Annaliese or Elisbeth. She was Marilee the Misfit.
     
    She'd spent too much time trying to atone for that. No more.
     
    She