The Best Laid Plans Read online

  “Listen. I know you’re pissed with Adam. I know you want to take him to the cleaners and punish him, but my job isn’t to make Adam hurt. My job is to help set up you and your kids so that you can move on and start living your life again. Scoring points is meaningless at this stage. It’s not going to change anything, and it’s only going to make things uglier, more drawn out and more expensive. We have much more control if we settle out of court. If we leave this in the hands of the judge, anything could happen.”

  And usually did. He knew a number of family court judges who prided themselves on ensuring that no one walked away a winner from their courtroom. They considered their job well and fairly done if neither party were satisfied or happy at the end of the trial.

  Jolie frowned. Then she began ranting about her ex. Adam was a cheat, a liar. He’d never been a good husband, she didn’t know why she’d married him. He said he loved his kids but he was hardly around to spend time with them—and that was when they were married. Now they were separated, the kids could barely remember what he looked like….

  Ethan sat back and waited. There’d be no talking to Jolie until she’d vented her spleen. He had plenty of clients who couldn’t engage the rational part of their brain until they’d off-loaded their anger. Something about divorce seemed to short-circuit otherwise sensible human beings and turn them into muddled, emotional messes. And he was often the dumping ground for their rage and confusion. As much as he told himself it was part of the job, it took its toll. So much anger, so much disappointment and bitterness… Most of the time he tried to let it wash over him, but there were days when it got to him. Definitely.

  It wasn’t as though he hadn’t been there himself. He knew what it was like to be so filled with hurt and injustice that he’d felt as though his skin would split with the force of it. He knew what it was like to want to punish the person who had once been the center of his world. And he absolutely knew what it was like to look back over the years together and wonder what it had all been worth and if it had ever meant anything.

  When Jolie had finally run herself down, he offered her a cup of coffee and a cookie then began to outline what he hoped to gain from tomorrow’s round table.

  He sent her home with instructions to get a good night’s sleep, then lost himself in the sea of emails and other paperwork on his desk. Then he went home and did more work.

  Alex and the conversation they’d had over lunch was never far from his thoughts, always hovering in the background, ready to slip to the fore when his concentration lapsed.

  If things went well, they might have a child together. He might have a chance to become a father, without the attendant risks of embarking on another doomed-to-failure relationship.

  It was enough to keep him awake, staring at the ceiling for hours.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ALEX PRACTICED HER SERVE while she waited for Ethan to join her on the racquetball court after work the following day.

  He was late and she was beginning to wonder if something had come up at the office. They hadn’t spoken since yesterday’s lunch and she’d been with a client all day. But surely if he couldn’t make their game, he would have called or emailed or something. Unless, of course, he was regretting his offer and didn’t know how to face her.

  She dismissed the notion immediately. Ethan’s offer hadn’t been made impulsively. He’d gone to his doctor. He’d had his sperm checked out, for Pete’s sake. And if he had changed his mind, he’d look her in the eye and tell her. She knew that much about him.

  She felt a cool breeze on the back of her neck as the door to the court swung open behind her.

  “Latecomers forfeit first serve,” she said without turning around.

  “Sorry. Road work near the Art Center,” Ethan said.

  “You used that excuse last time you were late.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, determined to treat this like any other Tuesday night despite the important question sitting between them. Then she saw Ethan’s face and every other consideration went out the window.

  “Ethan! My God, what happened?” She took an involuntary step toward him.

  His left eye was bruised and painful looking, not quite black but heading that way. She fought the absurd, utterly inappropriate urge to touch him to reassure herself that he was okay.

  “Don’t worry, it’s worse than it looks.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “It was an accident. Things got a little out of hand during my settlement conference this afternoon and I got in the way of the wrong person.” He shrugged as if to say it was no big deal but she could see he was angry.

  “This happened in a settlement conference? I hope you had the guy up on assault charges?”

  “It was a woman, and I figured it might be difficult having her charged since she’s my client. Not to mention what it would do to my reputation if it got out.”

  “Your client did this?”

  “Great, huh? Nothing like a good settlement conference to bring out the love.” He sounded bitter.

  She’d often wondered how he handled all the acrimony and bad energy that came with divorce and custody cases. Apparently, sometimes, not so well.

  He glanced at her and shook his head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump on you. It gets to me sometimes.”

  “It’d get to me, too. There’s a reason I chose corporate law. All that conflict…” She shuddered theatrically. “Give me a nice, complicated contract any day.”

  “Yeah. There are days I wonder why I chose this specialty, too.”

  “Why did you?” She’d always wanted to know. Why volunteer for an area of the law that was so personal and painful?

  “I thought I could help people, believe it or not. But sometimes I wonder. I really do….” He ran a hand over his head and gripped the nape of his neck, visibly making an effort to calm down.

  He was silent for a long moment, then he shook his head.

  “You know what I don’t get? Why we even go through the pretense of getting married anymore. I get the historical reasons—primogeniture, keeping power within families, property acquisition, blah, blah. But none of that matters these days. The world has moved on. Yet we still cling to the completely unrealistic idea that men and women can make a bunch of pretty vows to one another and stand by them for the rest of their lives.”

  “I know you probably don’t want to hear this right now, but there are some good marriages out there. What are the stats—one in three marriages end in divorce? That means two-thirds don’t,” she said. “Ever stop to think that you’re seeing the worst of marriage because of your profession?”

  “Just because two-thirds of marriages don’t end up before the divorce courts doesn’t mean they’re happy marriages, Alex. Believe me.”

  Was he talking about his own marriage? Was that what this was about?

  “I guess some people are prepared to make tradeoffs,” she said carefully.

  “To gain what? Companionship? Security? Children? Is it really worth it? Lying in bed next to someone who is at best indifferent to you or at worst actively hates your guts?”

  Wow. He was really feeling the pain today.

  “Is that what happened for you and your wife? You didn’t want to live with the compromise?”

  He stared at her for a long beat and for a moment she thought she’d stepped over the line.

  “Let’s just say that there wasn’t enough love to go around. Which is exactly my point. Once the hormones wear off, love’s a thin foundation to build a lifetime on. Take this couple today—married four years, two kids under three, and this afternoon they couldn’t even tolerate being in the same room as one another.”

  Alex looked away from the bleak cynicism in his eyes. She understood that something had happened to Ethan to make him lose faith in people, but she believed in love. She’d seen firsthand how strong it was. The doctors had claimed her mother should have died in the car accident that had damaged her brain irretrievably, but
she hadn’t. Rachel Knight had known that she was the only thing her daughter had and she’d hung on to life tenaciously because she refused to leave Alex to the tender mercies of social services.

  “What about children?” she said. “If we have a child together, you’ll love him or her, won’t you?”

  “That’s different,” Ethan said.

  “Is it?”

  “You don’t choose to love your children. It just happens.”

  “You think people choose to love each other or not? That you can choose to fall in or out of love with someone?”

  “I think that human beings are unreliable and fickle and childish and selfish and ultimately unknowable,” he said.

  “And yet you want to make a baby with me?”

  He looked blank for a moment, then he smiled self-mockingly. “Which only proves my point, right? People are unreliable.”

  She understood what he meant. Jacob had let her down, hadn’t he? He’d proven to be all the things Ethan described. And yet her relationship with him hadn’t turned her into a cynic. It hadn’t destroyed her faith in love.

  She looked at Ethan, wondering. What would it take to do that to a person? What had gone wrong between him and his wife?

  She forced herself to swallow the questions crowding her throat. He didn’t want to talk about it. That much was obvious.

  She leaned down and picked up one of the balls she’d been practicing with. “Think you can play with a dodgy eye?”

  He didn’t immediately shift gears, but when he did he came out with all guns blazing. “Better still, I think I can beat you, slowpoke. Again.”

  “Again? I won the last two matches in a row.”

  “Are we counting last week? Because I believe I was up on points before we called it a night.”

  “No, we’re not counting last week and you’re full of it, you know that?”

  He smiled, and it felt like an achievement. As though she’d given him a small moment of lightness in an otherwise dark day.

  “It’s been said before. Usually when I’ve got a game or two over you,” he countered.

  “Don’t bank on that happening tonight.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “And don’t go thinking that I’m going to go easy on you because you smeared a little axle grease under your eye,” she added.

  Ethan laughed, the sound loud in the enclosed court. “Them’s fighting words, Ms. Knight.”

  “And talk is cheap, Mr. Stone.”

  She watched him as he moved into position on the court. There was still a grim cast to his features but she could tell he was making an effort to shake off his mood. She felt as though she was seeing two people—the man she’d always thought Ethan was, and the man he truly was. The charming, slightly shallow, witty playboy, and the complex, damaged man.

  He must have loved his wife a great deal once upon a time.

  Because great disappointment was almost always preceded by great hope and great happiness, wasn’t it?

  “Haven’t got all night, slowpoke. Clock’s ticking.”

  He was watching her, one eyebrow cocked in challenge. She shook off her thoughts and bounced the ball.

  “Buckle up, big guy. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

  The trash talking continued as they played the first game. Despite what she’d said about not giving him special treatment because of his injury, she kept a close watch on him and when he winced and rubbed his temple when he thought she wasn’t looking she walked straight to the corner and grabbed her towel.

  “Don’t tell me you’re admitting defeat after one game?” Ethan asked.

  “You’ve got a headache. Time to go home, Rocky.”

  She started zipping the cover over her racquet.

  “I don’t suppose it would make any difference if I said I was fine?”

  “Nope. Go home and take an aspirin.”

  Ethan joined her in the corner, crouching to collect his racquet cover.

  “Worried about me, slowpoke?” He glanced at her, his head tilted to one side, a playful, warm light in his deep blue eyes.

  They were close, a few feet apart, and for a moment she was flustered, unable to tear her gaze from his. Then she rallied.

  “Of course I am. I’ve got a vested interest now, remember. Unless you’ve come to your senses and changed your mind?” She could hear the note of uncertainty in her voice and she winced inwardly. Hadn’t she already decided that Ethan wasn’t the kind of man to offer something so important on impulse?

  He stood. “I’m not going anywhere, Alex.”

  “Then you’d better get home and rest that pretty head of yours.” She knelt and fussed pointlessly with her gym bag, feeling ridiculously self-conscious.

  Over the past week she’d revealed an enormous amount of herself to this man and it seemed she revealed more with every conversation. She didn’t like feeling at a disadvantage.

  Better get used to it. If you’re going to make a baby with him, it’s only going to get worse.

  She saw him bend to collect his bag out of the corner of her eye.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” he said.

  “Sure thing.”

  She threw him a quick smile but her shoulders didn’t relax until he’d left the court.

  You’re an idiot.

  Despite having had a night and a day to process Ethan’s offer, she was still trying to get her head around the concept that he wanted to be the father of her child. It was too, too surreal. In the space of a few days they’d leapfrogged about a gazillion intimacy levels and she simply couldn’t get the idea to stick in her head.

  Saturday night ought to go a long away to helping on that score. A whole evening of hashing out the details of their proposed arrangement would surely make this about as real as it could get.

  She checked the time. There was still twenty minutes left of their hour on the court. She unzipped her racquet and stood.

  Perhaps if she ran herself ragged she’d sleep tonight.

  ALEX WOKE EARLY on Saturday morning and spent the bulk of the day fretting—double-thinking everything, conjuring all the many, many things that could go wrong with what Ethan was proposing. She exorcised her demons by dusting, then she broke out her mosaic-tile supplies and spent a messy but satisfying few hours on the balcony making progress on a decorative tabletop that would never see the light of day.

  By the time she was finished she was feeling calmer and more settled within herself. She cleaned up, then sat at the kitchen table with a pad and pen and composed a list of questions for Ethan. She started with the basics—questions about his family, his parents, his siblings. Then she started thinking about the things she needed to know about the man who might be the father of her child. By the time she’d finished, she had two pages. She stared at all her questions, a little embarrassed by how many there were. How was she going to remember them all? She couldn’t simply pull them out in front of Ethan and put him through his paces. Could she? Then she remembered what this was all about and decided that she owed it to herself and to him and to their potential child to be as nosy and intrusive as necessary to be comfortable with this arrangement.

  She dressed carefully in a pair of tailored chocolate-brown pants and a soft beige silk blouse with a cowl-neck, brushed her hair until it behaved itself, then selected a bottle of wine and headed for the door.

  He’d emailed her his address during the week and she’d learned he lived five minutes away from her Queens Road apartment. She smiled to herself as she pulled up in front of his building. Her own much more modest building had been built before the Second World War and would probably disappear inside the foyer of the sleek, stylish residential tower looming above her. But then she’d hardly expected Ethan to live in a hovel—the man spent thousands on his suits. It stood to reason that his residence would be equally stylish and exclusive.

  She grabbed the wine, locked the car and approached the formidable front doors. It took her a moment to find his a
partment number amongst the cluster on the door panel.

  His voice sounded very deep when it came over the intercom. “Alex?”

  “Hi,” she said. “Want to beam me up, Scotty?”

  “Up you come.”

  The door opened automatically—far classier than her own building where the door made a loud buzzing noise and visitors had to push the door to enter—and she took the elevator to the tenth floor.

  There were four doors leading off the hallway she stepped out into but only one of them was open, light spilling onto the plush carpeted hall. She walked toward it as Ethan appeared in the doorway, wiping his hands on a tea towel.

  “Hey. Come on in,” he said with a smile.

  He was wearing a pair of faded jeans and a V-neck long-sleeved T-shirt in gunmetal gray. His hair was ruffled and his feet were bare and she could see a few crisp, dark curls peeking over the neckline of his top.

  She stared at his long, strong feet and wondered if they wouldn’t have been better off doing this on more neutral territory. Then she gave herself a mental slap. They were here to talk about an incredibly intimate, incredibly private subject. Where better to do it than at his place or hers?

  The problem was—and this was something she should have considered earlier—Ethan was a compelling, charismatic man. She’d deliberately treated him like a buddy and not a man for that very reason. It had helped that he dated a lot and was clearly not the kind of man she was looking for. But now they were about to talk about joining forces to create a new life. A child that would be half him and half her. Even if the act of conception itself occurred via a clinical procedure, she and Ethan would be connected, bound together for life. He would become a mainstay of her world.

  She glanced at him as he gestured for her to precede him into his apartment. His bruised eye had faded to a mottled yellow and blue, yet he was easily the best-looking, sexiest man she knew.

  You’re going to have to be very careful if you do this.

  She made an effort to pull herself together as Ethan led her through a small entrance hall and into a large, spacious living room with huge floor-to-ceiling windows. She stepped closer to the glass to admire the breathtaking view of the Alexandra Gardens and the Yarra River.