~an excerpt from Legal Trouble~
“United Flight 1037 to Cancún is now boarding.”
Emma Morgan didn’t quite spring from her seat in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport, but she made a close facsimile. In less than four hours, she’d be on the beach, and dang it, she’d earned this vacation. For the next two weeks, she was getting away from work, stress, the never-ending drama of office politics, but mostly, from the tragedies that followed her like stalkers.
She secured her Kindle and cell phone in the front pouch of her messenger bag before stepping from the carpeted lounge to the hard tiles of the central breezeway, her skirt dancing around her ankles. She tried not to fidget and tug the bottom of her off-the-shoulder white top down just a little further than it was meant to go.
“It’s supposed to show your midriff,” she mumbled, parroting her best friend’s words from when they’d been shopping the previous weekend. As much as Emma had hated every minute of the experience, the shopping trip had been a necessity. She’d needed some beach attire, and even she’d had to admit that suits, yoga pants, gardening shorts, and oversized T-shirts just wouldn’t cut it at the—
Her feet rooted to the spot. Above the walkway between Jack in the Box and the Houston! store, a TV monitor arrested her attention. The chyron scrolling across the bottom of Channel 11’s mid-day news broadcast had her heart rate kicking up several beats per minute.
Turmoil and Tragedy in Court for Whitlow Group.
Emma latched on to a single word—tragedy. Whitlow Group was her law firm’s oldest and most prestigious client. David Reynolds, the firm’s managing partner, was scheduled to be in court with Whitlow Group right now.
She forced her feet to carry her forward.
When she reached the monitor, the anchor’s voice barely rose over the shuffle of feet and the ping-ponging voices bouncing around the terminal. “The hearing had just begun when Whitlow Group’s attorney collapsed. It is unknown at this time what happened. Questions to Reynolds & Clark’s public relations department, as well as Whitlow Group’s, have gone unanswered. All we know at this time is that the Whitlow Group attorney was transported via ambulance to the hospital.”
The screen split into a side-by-side view. The left portion stayed on the anchor while the right switched to an exterior shot of the courthouse as paramedics pushed a gurney into an ambulance. Emma could just make out the face of the man being loaded.
David.
She pressed a palm to her suddenly breaking heart. She’d learned so much from him since he’d hired her fresh-faced and barely out of law school. He’d taken the time to shape her, mold her, teach her, especially in the past year. If he didn’t make it—
No, she wouldn’t go there. David would be okay. He had to be. She’d already lost too many people close to her. She couldn’t lose him, too.
~an excerpt from Legal Trouble~
Staci Warren 