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“I’d hear if they weren’t. Why?”
“My father just called and while I don’t want to talk to him before the Waters’ meeting, he never calls. It could be about Logan, but I just need to be sure.”
He studies me for a probing moment—seeing too much, I suspect—but I really don’t have it in me to hide my private demons right now. I’m not sure I’d try with Adrian if I did. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he says, “but I need you to call him back in case it affects the meeting in some way.” He pulls his phone from his pocket. “But I’m also shooting a message to our team to confirm all is well with his security detail.”
I inhale an uncomfortably thick breath and wait as he shoots a text to someone. The reply is instant and Adrian looks at me. “The man watching your parents says all clear.”
“All right then,” I say, “I’ll just dial him up and have a little father-daughter chat.” I punch in the auto-dial and my father answers on the first ring.
“Pri,” he says, his voice deep, distinguished, and you almost know he’s a good-looking man without ever seeing him. My father’s a stud. All the women think so, including my mother, who seems to manage him in ways no one else could. “I thought for a moment there you were going to blow me off,” he adds.
“Why would I do that?”
“We both know we haven’t exactly endured the choppy waters we created to find our calmer sea.”
“No,” I agree. “I suppose we haven’t.”
“Logan wants you back. He’s not the only one. I do, too.”
“He wants me back to do damage control.”
“I don’t know what his agenda is, but it fits mine so that works for me and I do believe it works for our family.”
“Why do you want me off the Waters case?”
“I don’t,” he says without hesitation. “And if I might speak outside our little deal to not talk about business?”
“Yes, please do.”
“I want you to stay on it and win and then come on back over here, and bill the hell out of that win.”
I can almost believe him since he’s talking money, but not quite. “Mom and Logan said you wanted me off the case. Or Mom did. Logan spoke for himself.”
“Exactly. Who speaks for me but me?”
“True,” I say. “But Logan—”
“Has an agenda. He wants you back here with that ring on your finger. You two were a real power couple.”
“If you start down this Logan-loving path again, Dad, this call is over.”
“I’m simply stating his motivations. And Mom is worried about you. She was never going to leave town when you might need her, by the way.”
I should have known that, I think. My mother is flawed, but in her own way, she loves me. And I love my parents despite all our conflicts. “I’m not coming back.”
“Let’s have dinner.”
In other words, he’s unfazed by my decline and setting up negotiations. “Not until after the trial,” I say. “And if I lose, what would there be to talk about?”
“You won’t lose. You never lose. But after the trial works. We’ll do Thanksgiving together and talk about the future. Be careful. It’s a different game being on the bad side of the bad guys.” Someone speaks to him. “Gotta run. Win big, my girl.” He disconnects.
I lower the phone and glance at Adrian. “Nothing interesting. Just him wanting to cash in on me winning this case.”
“He wants you to come back to the family biz,” he assumes.
“That’s never going to happen,” I assure him. “But what’s interesting is him being at odds with Logan over the Waters case. He says he wants me to stay on it. Logan wants me off. Somehow Logan made a deal with someone and he’s desperate to get me off this case.”
“And yet, he went to your father for help?”
“He went to my father about getting me back. My father took his own angle on making that happen. Can Lucifer dig around and see what kind of trouble Logan might be in? There feels like there is more going on with him than what’s on the surface.”
“I’ll have him check him out,” he agrees. “And I’ll have him look for ties to Waters outside of Whitaker.”
“With his client list, I’m sure he’ll find some,” I warn. “I’m not sure it will be as easy as that to pin down what’s really going on. And don’t forget to tell him about Ed’s assistant suddenly taking an unplanned vacation during Ed’s reelection and this trial.”
Adrian calls Lucifer and while they talk, I am thinking about that call with my father and the way he twisted my new career, my repenting for my sins, into his money-making opportunity. Unbidden, I drift back into the past, momentarily back to a day when I was still working for my father. I was at lunch in the restaurant on the lower level of the firm’s building with my then-friend Susan, a pretty redhead and up-and-coming attorney in the firm.
