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“Not a single one of them wants to be married to a public servant,” I reminded him. “They want to be able to shop and go to Pilates while the nanny takes care of the kids. We’d have nothing in common.” And frankly, I wasn’t even interested in them enough to put in the effort to make it seem like we did.
“Don’t be naive. They’d be more than happy to be a mayor’s wife, and then, the governors, and who knows after that.”
I grumbled under my breath. Marcel wasn’t wrong. Hell, he rarely was. But I wasn’t Manhattan’s youngest D.A. because I looked great in a suit. I’d been formulating my argument since before this morning. “None of this is going to play well on camera. I’m not that good at faking it, and when people start diving too deep, they are going to realize that something doesn’t add up. Since my personal life is apparently of such importance, I can’t be caught with a fake girlfriend.”
I knew Marcel hadn’t missed the way I omitted the word wife. The jury was still out on how far I would actually be taking this. Winning the mayoral election was the first step to what I envisioned to be a political dynasty, one that I would use to bring down the mob in Manhattan, but I wasn’t sure how much of myself I’d be willing to lose in the process.
“Do you have another suggestion?” Marcel asked. “And don’t even say that you’ll use one of the girls you are currently screwing because they aren’t going to pass the test.”
I rolled my eyes at Marcel’s response. He was one to talk about my bedmates, considering the people that he normally brought home. Men or women, it didn’t matter, as long as they enjoyed snorting coke off of his two thousand dollar living room.
“I’ll give the binder another look.” I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to find any woman who was going to be tolerable enough for me to pretend with.
“Just keep your mind open and remember the larger picture. After you become mayor, you can make sure that the Blanchi’s and Petrov never darken the city again.”
I said nothing as we hung up the phone, but I couldn’t ignore Marcel’s words. A great deal of people were going to think that I was just another rich hotshot looking to make a name for themselves, but there was more to it than that.
Almost a year ago, I’d gone against the Blanchi family. It had been the first chance I’d had to fight against the mafia. I’d been told by my colleagues that fighting the Blanchis was going to either kill my career or kill me.
Though I’d been unsuccessful, I’d made a name for myself, and though I knew that the Blanchis thought that I was going away, I wasn’t, and when I became mayor, I would make sure that the Blanchi’s and Petrov’s would never hurt another family again.
A knock on the door brought my attention back to the fact that I was still in the office. “Come in,” I hollered.
Tommy walked into the office. He was my first hire, and because I saved him from ending up one of Maggie’s girls and wrote him a recommendation letter for law school. He was incredibly loyal to me because of that, which came in handy.
“Sorry, to bother you,” he said, as he walked in and took a seat. We’d worked together long enough that he felt comfortable around me. “But I wanted to talk about the Turner case.”
“What about it?” I asked. “It’s cut and dry. He was caught at the scene with the shit he stole.”
Tommy sighed, and I knew that whatever he was going to say was going to piss me off. Unfortunately, Tommy’s job often left him delivering bad news. I tried to remember that during times like this.
“Sawyer O’Connor is his lawyer,” Tommy told me.
“Fuck,” I muttered. I hadn’t spent much time on the Turner case because it had felt like a slam dunk.
“O’Connor is a dick, but he’s won worse cases.”
He had. He was also a fucking criminal who wasn’t above paying off juries and judges to make sure that his clients stayed out of jail. “What’s his connection to Turner?” O’Connor didn’t just take any cases, and one this small seemed below his paygrade.
“Not sure, but he’s also on the Lewis and Brown cases.”
“Fuck me.” I ran a hand through my hair. My caseload was piling high, and with a run for mayor in the works, I didn’t have time to have a dick measuring contest with Sawyer O’Connor, especially when I was short staffed. My last secretary had tried to suck my dick, so I’d had to let her go, and my two other paralegals had gotten jobs as lawyers. I was proud that my office was making the next movers and shakers, but I fucking needed help.
“Who can we pull to help us with these cases?”
Tommy’s frown deepened. “No one. Everyone’s teams are overworked as it is. They can’t take on anymore.”
“What about the blonde?” I asked, as my mind remembered the hot blonde who’d spilled her coffee all over one of my favorite suits. She’d been the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Tall and tiny with large blue eyes that made her look doll-like. She wasn’t my normal type––too dowdy in some ways––but there had been something about her that had been unforgettable.
“Annie?” Tommy asked, a knowing smile on his lips.
“Is that her name? She dumped hot coffee all over me, so we didn’t exchange names.”
Tommy winced. “Maggie sent her up to help me with the filing. Took a week for her to get here.”
“You know how Maggie is. She hates me, which explains our current predicament.” Maggie had hated me since I started. She saw me as nothing more than a pretty boy who was looking to get after her girls. An unfair assumption since I had a very strict policy of not hooking up at work.
“Tell Maggie that we are keeping the girl, at least for the time being.” A thrill went up my spine as I thought about Annie belonging to me. Plus, it wasn’t bad that I was going to be able to make Maggie’s day a little bit shitter. It served the old hag well to be one upped every once in a while.
