The Devil's Advocate Read Online Free PDF Page A

of whom knew Kevin. Some stopped by to congratulate him. As soon as he and Miriam had a few quiet moments to themselves, he brushed his shoulder up against hers and kissed her cheek.
    Almost a month ago, Miriam had bought the black leather skirt and jacket she wore tonight, but she had kept it hidden at the back of her closet, hoping she soon would have the occasion to bring it out and surprise Kevin. The snugly fitted skirt traced the soft, full curve of her hips and firm buttocks and revealed just enough of her slim, well-shaped legs to make her enticing but not obvious. Under the jacket she wore a white and green knit blouse that seemed to have been constructed directly over her perky breasts and petite shoulders.
    At five feet nine, with rich, thick, wavy dark brown hair that curled up just above her shoulders, Miriam Taylor cut a place for herself in any crowd when she entered a room. She had taken a year's training at Marie Simon's Modeling School in Manhattan, and although she had never had any real modeling experience, she maintained a fashion model's posture and grace.
    Kevin first had fallen in love with her voice—a deep, sexy, Lauren Bacall voice.
    He even had her recite one of his favorite movie lines: "You know how to whistle, don't you, Sam . . . you just put your lips together and blow."
    When she looked at him with her bright hazel eyes and turned her shoulder, substituting "Kevin" for "Sam," it was as if a hand reached inside his stomach, grabbed his heart. He might as well wear a collar around his neck, he thought, and hand her the leash. There was nothing he wouldn't do for her.
    "I'm guilty of uxoriousness," he told her. "The little-known sin of excessive love for one's spouse. From the moment I met you, I violated the First Commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
    They had met at a cocktail party his firm—Boyle, Carlton, and Sessler—had thrown when they had opened their new offices in their recently constructed building in Blithedale. Miriam had come to the party with her parents. Her father, Arthur Morris, was the most prominent dentist in Blithedale. Sanford Boyle introduced Kevin to her and her parents, and from that moment on they orbited each other, pulling on each other with smiles and glances across the room until they came together and talked and talked up until the end of the party. She agreed to go to dinner with him that night, and from then on their romance was fast, hot, and heavy.
    He proposed in less than a month.

    Now as they sat at the bar in the Bramble Inn toasting his success, Miriam considered the changes in him since they had first met.
    How much he has grown, she thought. He looked years older than twenty-eight.
    There was a maturity, a control, a self-confidence in his jade-green eyes and his gestures that suggested a man of much greater experience and years. He wasn't a big man, but at six feet and one hundred seventy-five pounds, he was a trim, athletic-looking person with well-controlled energy. He had his bursts of exuberance when he needed them, but most of the time he paced himself well.
    He was so organized, so healthy, so ambitious and determined that she used to kid him and sing those lines from an old pop song: "And he's oh so healthy in his body and his mind. He's the well-adjusted man about town . . ."
    "So tell me what you really thought today while you sat there in court. Weren't you just a little proud of me?"
    "Oh, Kevin, I'm not saying I wasn't proud of you. You were ... masterful," she replied, but she couldn't expunge the terrified face of that little girl from her mind.
    She couldn't stop herself from reliving the moments of panic in the child's eyes when Kevin threatened to expose what she and her girlfriends had done at her house. "I just wish there had been another way for you to win the case than threaten that child with exposure, don't you?"
    "Of course. But I had to do it," he said. "Besides, don't forget Barbara Stanley was using the