Law of Attraction Read Online Free PDF

twins started shouting, too, their little voices full of excitement and fear. Laprea sat on the toilet, put her head in her hands, and cried.
    •  •  •
    The phone’s insistent ringing tore Anna’s attention from the brief she was writing. She looked at the clock: 8:30 p.m. Grace had gone home hours ago. Anna picked up, wondering who’d be calling now.
    It was Rose Johnson, and she was furious.
    “D’marco called Laprea from jail tonight, Ms. Curtis! I thought you got a stay-away order. What kind of system you running, where a man with a restraining order can call the woman he beat up?”
    Anna tried to calm her enough to get the details. As Rose told the story, Anna heard the fear in her voice—the real emotion under her fury. She assured Rose that she would contact the jail and have D’marco’s phone privileges revoked. She’d also get a recording of the call. Maybe they could use it against him at trial. In the meantime, D’marco would be stuck in jail with no way to contact Laprea.
    “Thank God.” Rose sighed in relief. “If he gets through to her, she gonna let him off, just like before.”
    As she hung up, Anna considered calling Nick and demanding that he instruct his client not to contact Laprea anymore. Would she do that with another defense attorney, or was she just looking for an excuse to call him? She hadn’t spoken to him since their dinner two weeks ago. Although he’d called and left her a couple of friendly business-related voice messages, she’d responded with short e-mails addressingbusiness and nothing more. She cringed remembering that she’d almost kissed him outside her apartment. She was a professional, not some tart. Professionally, she didn’t need to call him now.
    Instead, Anna spent the next hour sending e-mails and faxes to the D.C. Jail, working through the bureaucracy to cut D’marco off from the world. By tomorrow morning, he wouldn’t be allowed to use the jail’s phones or Internet services any longer. Would Nick be annoyed? Too bad.
    When she finally left the office, Anna tried to push her work out of her mind. Grace was always telling her to take a few minutes a day to think about normal, fun, girl things, so Anna read the celebrity section of the Express during her subway ride home and tried to concentrate on which actresses had recently adopted children from abroad. When she emerged from the Metro, she made herself window-shop, skimming the fiction titles propped in the window of Kramerbooks and admiring the low riders displayed in the darkened Lucky Brand Jeans store.
    But she couldn’t stop thinking about D’marco’s phone call to Laprea that night. Prosecuting this case, Anna wasn’t just up against D’marco, or his lawyer, or the challenges in the legal system. She was in a very real way trying to protect Laprea from herself. Laprea had a history of taking D’marco back and refusing to press charges against him. If she did it again, a conviction would be nearly impossible.
    As Anna pushed her apartment door open, her cat ran over and threw himself against her legs, meowing and purring ecstatically. She scooped up the orange tabby and buried her face in his soft fur. The creature purred even louder. Raffles had been a neighborhood stray that Anna occasionally fed. He’d started meowing outside her door every night until she eventually relented, took him for a thorough deworming, and let him move in. Now she was glad for the company at night.
    Most of the time, Anna loved having her own little place, but tonight she felt a wave of loneliness as she turned on the lights. She’d cheered up the basement apartment as much as possible. The small living room was decorated with a bright red couch, colorful Kandinsky prints, and a row of bookshelves sagging under the weight of her books. All the furniture was IKEA; Anna was proud of the fact that she’d put the pieces together herself. A few plants struggled to live in the stingy sunlight of the high half