Laws of Attraction by Sarah Title (20)

Chapter Twenty-Two

Foster was a coward.

Only cowards ate their lunch at their desk instead of trying to work things out with their girlfriends. Sure Becky had called him on Sunday to make sure Maddie was OK—physically OK, pissed as hell at him—and to say that she’d give him some space while he dealt with his family stuff. Which wasn’t what he wanted, and he told her so.

So instead of answering his mother’s calls and going out to see his sister, he spent all day Sunday in the office, just like the soulless workaholic Madison had accused him of being.

And now he was sending Kevin out for his lunch. He tried to tell himself that that didn’t make him like his father. There was a big difference between doing business on Thanksgiving and asking someone to bring you lunch.

Right?

“Come in,” he said to the sound of the knock on his door. “Just put it on the conference table, Kevin. I’ll get to it in a minute. Thanks.”

“Who’s Kevin?”

He looked up. That wasn’t Kevin.

It was Becky’s sister. The genius one, Miranda.

“Foster, right?”

“Yeah, hi. We met a while back at Razor. Nice to see you again, Miranda.”

“You’re working on that case for Goliath, right? The one about the glyphosate herbicides?”

He’d filed the documents, so it was a matter of public record. Still. Why was Becky’s sister in his office talking to him about it?

She worked with chromosomes, right? He tried to remember their conversation at Razor. Then he remembered that she’d said it was too complicated for him to understand.

“You know, finding an effective herbicide that’s apian-friendly will have ripples of benefit throughout the entire ecosystem.”

Foster felt a headache coming on.

“So it’s for the public good, to be able to study Goliath’s chemistry.”

“Miranda, I really can’t discuss the case with you.”

“Why not? I’m the one who headed up the project at CoLabs.”

Forget a headache. Foster felt like his whole brain had just exploded.

“Miranda, you really can’t be in here.” He stood up to usher her out, but she didn’t budge from her chair. Instead, she looked around his office, as if noticing for the first time that the room had walls.

“Doesn’t my sister work here?”

He was going to have to call Security. Except if he called Security, there would be no way to sneak her out of the building without anybody knowing.

Stupid geniuses.

Miranda turned in her chair and looked at his closed office door.

“I didn’t see her when I walked in.”

“Becky? She doesn’t sit out there. Her office is in the library.”

“Her office? Oh.”

“Did you think she was my secretary?”

Miranda just shrugged. How gross must she think he was, bringing over a bottle of wine to his secretary’s family dinner?

Come to think of it, he’d seen his father do exactly that.

His headache was back.

“You’re dating her, right?”

Miranda wasn’t saying much, but he was still having trouble keeping up with her. At least she wasn’t talking about herbicides.

“Am I dating Becky?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you guys didn’t speak.”

“We don’t, really. We don’t, like, hate each other. We just . . . we’re on different planes.”

Foster did his very best not to roll his eyes.

“Hm. I’ve never met anyone Becky’s dated before.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be meeting me now.”

She squinted her eyes and tilted her head. He knew that look. Starr gave him that look when she was trying to figure out what the hell he was doing.

“You know, my sister’s pretty great.”

That wasn’t what he was expecting. But he wasn’t too shocked to agree. “I know.”

“We have a weird family.”

“I know that, too.”

“Becky doesn’t fit in, but I think that’s because she’s the only one of us who’s not a shitty person.”

Whoa. Something else he wasn’t expecting.

“I’m sure you’re not—”

Miranda held up her hand, and he was pretty grateful he didn’t have to finish his lie. “I’m a scientific genius, but I’m not unaware of my shortcomings as a sister.”

Foster leaned back in his chair, conflict of interest forgotten. This was going to be interesting.

“Do you think I didn’t know how much it hurt her growing up as ‘Miranda’s big sister’? Well, I didn’t. I was the smartest kid in my class; who wouldn’t want to be associated with me? And she didn’t have a problem being ‘Astrid’s little sister.’ At least I don’t think she did. I don’t know, nobody ever called me that. I was always just Miranda.”

“What’s your point, Miranda?”

“Well, it turns out she did hate it. She told me once. She shouted it in my face, and then we never talked about it again. It took me a while to figure out why. I think it’s because it made her feel like she had to be competitive when she isn’t a competitive person at all.”

He knew that. She’d let him win every argument they’d ever had. Including the one when he was a total ass and told her to butt out of his business.

“I also know that the only time she ever got in trouble in school was when she gave Brad Prescott a black eye for saying I was weird.”

Foster couldn’t picture Becky punching anyone. Then he thought about her defending something she loved and he could sort of see it.

“Anyway, I hope you guys are really happy. She deserves it.”

“Thanks. You’re right.”

“And if you hurt her, I’ll give you a Prescott.”

“Noted. You should probably leave my office.”

She did, but it didn’t make what he had to do any easier.

* * *

It was almost a relief to be back at work. That was how chaotic her weekend had been.

Not the whole weekend. Just Sunday. Spending the day with Dakota had given her emotional whiplash. First Dakota was angry at Maddie and her stunt, then Becky would comfort her and Dakota would transfer her anger to Foster, who’d left Becky in some kind of limbo between a fight and a breakup. It didn’t help that her brief text conversation with him seemed to indicate that he’d spent all of Sunday at work.

Becky tried to be understanding. His family situation was a big thing, and the case was a big thing. He had a lot of big things to juggle.

Bullhorn offered to kick his ass, which made Dakota feel better, but Becky didn’t see how adding physical injury to Foster’s list of things to juggle was going to help her in any way.

So, yeah. Work was much less complicated.

“Ugh, Monday, amirite?”

Will sauntered into her office and plopped, uninvited, into the chair across from her desk. He tilted it back on two legs and pulled a fluffy pom-pom pen out of the front pocket of his shirt.

“Why is the weekend so short?” Will asked her. She didn’t have an answer for that. This weekend had felt like the longest of her life. “Oh, hey, I heard some kids broke into the New Hope shelter over the weekend.”

Great. Work was supposed to be a refuge from her personal life.

Wait, was it? That didn’t feel right. Ugh, she’d make a terrible workaholic.

Her phone pinged. A text message from Foster, asking her to dinner. She wished her heart didn’t give a little leap of hope at that. He was probably going to break up with her or something.

She needed to call Dakota.

Dakota had enough on her plate.

“Whoa, who’s that?”

Will and his pom-pom pen got up to talk to whoever had just entered the library. “Yeah, her office is back there,” she heard him say, but she was too busy trying to decide if she could bother Dakota with her concerns about dinner to pay much attention.

“The lawyers’ offices are much nicer.”

If Becky didn’t have such a headache, she would have had to pinch herself to make sure she was awake. What was Miranda doing in her office?

“Hi.” She stood up and offered Miranda Will’s now-vacated chair. “What are you doing here?”

“This is pretty nice. I wasn’t expecting you to have an office.”

“Miranda . . .”

“Did you know your boyfriend is suing me?”

“He is? What?”

“Well, he’s representing Goliath, who’s trying to block my work on making glyphosate herbicides safe for bees.”

Becky’s first reaction was ugh, that was the big intellectual property case everyone was so worked up about? But then what Miranda said sank in.

“Miranda, are you trying to get me to influence the case in some way?”

“What? No! Can you even do that? I thought you were just a librarian.”

Well, that was a nice vote of confidence.

“We were talking to the CoLabs lawyers about our research—they didn’t get it—when someone mentioned they were going to have a tough case against Foster Deacon at Polak and Glassmeyer, and I was like, I know that name.”

“Oh God.”

“So I stopped by to see if I could talk to him about it. The CoLabs counsel didn’t seem to care about the science, only the particular formula of herbicide we were testing. I tried to explain that glyphosate is fairly generic but the Goliath brand—”

“Miranda. Stop.” Becky took a deep breath. “You need to stop talking to me about this.”

“Oh, so you do have influence?” There was no venom behind Miranda’s question, just genuine curiosity. Oh, you’re a productive member of society? That’s kind of surprising, given your far inferior intellectual abilities.

Ha. And Foster said she couldn’t deal with her own family stuff.

“No, Miranda, I don’t have influence. But there’s such a thing as ethics.”

“You guys have ethics, too?”

Becky let out a slow, calming breath. “I don’t work on the actual cases per se. I’m not privy to the specifics.”

“Huh.”

“It’s not my job to argue the case. I’m not a lawyer.”

But she had an idea of what Foster wanted to talk to her about over dinner. It probably wasn’t that he’d had a change of heart and wanted her to be a part of every aspect of his life, and also that he was buying a house with a white picket fence and would she consider moving in there with him?

She should have stuck to her rules. No lawyers. Nothing but hot lumberjack sex. And definitely don’t get to know them afterward because where had that ever gotten her?

“Becky?”

Miranda was still there. What was Miranda doing there? Oh right, potentially sabotaging Foster’s case and marveling at how little work her sister actually did.

“I’m sorry, Becky.”

Before she could ask Miranda what she meant, she was out the door.

Becky had been waiting a long time for someone in her family to acknowledge the way they belittled her and devalued her and messed with her self-esteem. She supposed this was the best she was going to get.

That was okay, she decided. The power of her righteous indignation would help her be strong when she let Foster off the hook.