Unforgiven Read Online Free PDF Page A

mine.”
    She sighed. “Okay.” She was tired of fighting the inevitable anyway.
    “Great. Do you want me to arrange it?” He sounded suddenly very happy. Obviously he wanted to move on.
    Jill swallowed back a wave of nausea. “You know what? I had a blood test today. I’ll talk to my doctor, see how to arrange it.” She swallowed back the rising bile. “I—”
    She never finished. She dropped the phone and stumbled to the bathroom as she was hit by a strange dizziness, and her vision blurred before she reached the bathroom and lifted the lid on the toilet. She threw up.
    ***

Chapter 5
    “I knew you were going to do this to me, you jerk.” Erin was dogging his heels into his office, chewing his ass out for being ten minutes late for the deposition. She closed the door as Samuel tossed the file on the desk.
    “Look, I’m sorry. I could have run the whole way and walked in all sweaty, but I’m sure none of you would have appreciated that.” No, that kind of thing was frowned on in any sort of professional situation.
    “I told you you’d be late and not to go.” She let out a very unladylike growl. “I didn’t know what to do and wasn’t prepared to lead the deposition. You left me sitting there with my thumb up my ass.”
    Evidently, she still hadn’t calmed down from when he’d hurried in ten minutes late to find the opposing counsel with his client’s husband waiting at the conference table, checking his watch, looking rather annoyed. Thankfully, Erin had kept Samantha in his office.
    “You handled it, so knock it off. It’s done.”
    She was shaking her head. “So, everything okay with your wife?”
    He pulled out his chair and sat down, glancing at the notes he’d made from the husband’s lawyer’s questioning. “Yeah, fine. Good. She has to have some tests, but I’m sure it’s nothing—and she’s not my wife. We’ve been through this.”
    “Oh, yes, you’re just having a baby together. My father would roll over in his grave and have a few choice things to say to you. But then, he was from the old country and believed in traditional values,” she added, as if he hadn’t guessed.
    “Erin, I don’t care what your father would’ve thought. This is the twenty-first century.”
    She widened her eyes behind her glasses. “I’m just saying, you’re having a baby together, so get married, already.”
    Why was he even having this conversation? “It’s not that simple. I asked her, we stood before a justice of the peace. She just didn’t go through with it.”
    “Oh,” she said, glancing away. “Well, that changes things, then, doesn’t it?” She appeared surprised. “What did you do?”
    Why wasn’t she dropping this? “Why do you think it was me?”
    “Oh, your pleasing personality, maybe.” She smiled at him, and he noticed how straight her teeth were.
    “You were right about the husband’s lawyer. Chess Kerkwell really did focus everything he had on the financial issues.” Samuel wondered how he’d missed something so vital that Erin had honed in on.
    “She gave her husband control of the business and financed it. He was selling boats, and she paid no attention to what he was doing, and he pissed it away, made some flaky deals, mismanaged everything. Receivables were questionable. I’d be mad. She trusted him, and he burned her.”
    Samuel was shaking his head, thinking of the young blond their client had married, ten years younger than her. Handsome, a man women fell all over. Samantha had, at forty-eight, what many had lost: she was in great shape, good looking, with dark hair and blue eyes. And she had been composed even when Chess Kerkwell tried to rattle her.
    “So why didn’t you cross examine her husband?” Erin said. “I don’t understand how you could mess up like that.”
    He’d seen Erin’s face when he’d said they had no questions, surprising the hell out of everyone—but he had his reasons. “Need to control the evidence and what was said.