“You know,” he said, “you only really smile when you want something.”
Wow. She hated him.
Never mind being diplomatic. If he was going to make her life miserable anyway, she was at least going to earn it.
She smiled so widely her lips hurt. “Can you guess what I want now? It involves you, my foot, and a particular part of your anatomy.”
“Oh, she’s feisty.” He looked at his watch. “Tick-tock, Tiffani. You wouldn’t want to give the judge even more of a reason to think you’re an airheaded bimbo.”
Well, that took care of her glow.
The line at the dry cleaner’s was long. When she finally made it to the register, she wasn’t surprised out that McMillan hadn’t paid up front. She put it on her already stretched-to-the-breaking-point credit card and made extra-sure to keep the receipt—not that it was easy to imagine presenting it to McMillan and asking for reimbursement. Maybe someone in the steno pool would know a good way of dealing with it.
She was surprised no one had warned her about Bruce the way they’d warned her about McMillan. Maybe he wasn’t always like this. The stress of working for McMillan could be getting to him.
She could understand that, but he didn’t have to take it out on her. Before Martin, she might have just taken it as an unavoidable part of the job, but he’d shown her she could earn people’s respect. So she was going to fight for it.
And she would fight dirty, if necessary.
Luckily, she was much better at her job than either Bruce or McMillan wanted her to be, including the part of her job that was apparently about dealing with passive-aggressive bullshit.
And if Bruce Tompoulidis thought she had spent years as a society wife without knowing how to run the living hell out of some errands, he had another thing coming.
She made it back to the courthouse with time to spare. A sincere plea for help got one of the temporarily unassigned court reporters to agree to distribute the drinks for her. Tiffani held back just one, keeping it in her hand when she headed into the courtroom.
Bruce stopped her. “Where’s my coffee?”
“Oh, shoot,” Tiffani said. “You know, I think they must have forgotten yours.” She raised the cup to her mouth and took a long drink, letting him see the order notation on the side: exactly the specialty drink he’d ordered, right down to the two pumps of caramel.
“It’s a shame, too,” she went on, “because your order sounded so delicious. I liked it so much I got one of my own.” She checked her watch. “Looks like we’re about to start. I’m sorry you’ll have to sit through so many hours of this trial without coffee, Bruce. At least it’s going to be really interesting stuff this afternoon. From what I heard, they’re going to really go in-depth on all those corporate shareholder guidelines from this morning. They’ll even have charts.”
He smirked. “I’m going to be in the judge’s chambers for the rest of the day. But nice try.”
“I thought so,” Tiffani said. She took another long drink of his coffee.
*
It took Tiffani exactly two minutes of being back in the courtroom to improve her mood.
Bruce’s coffee was genuinely delicious, for one thing. When she tasted how good a huge infusion of caramel could make something, she couldn’t believe she’d spent so much time ordering skinny lattes and only ever using fake sugar.
More importantly, being back in the courtroom meant she was back with Martin, and he was even more delicious than the caramel. He smiled when he saw her, his serious face breaking into stunning, real delight at being in the same room with her.
Seeing him made all the stress just disappear. It was like sliding into a hot bubble bath and feeling all her muscles loosen.
She couldn’t believe how lucky she was.
“Ms. Marcus, why are you smiling?” Judge McMillan inquired, his voice dripping acid.
Thank God court wasn’t back in session yet and there weren’t many people there yet to hear him talk to her that way. Even though she was relaxed now, it still burned.
She said, “Because I’m happy, Your Honor,” keeping her tone deliberately mild.
Unfortunately, Judge McMillan reacted to happiness in his general vicinity the way the Grinch reacted to Christmas.
“With everything that’s going on, with everything that we have to contend with to smoothly take this trial to a just conclusion, do you really think you have time to sit there daydreaming to yourself? Don’t you think your concentration should be on the trial?”
She thought she had won him over a little yesterday with her blatant suck-up appeal to his vanity—the jury needs your leadership, Your Honor!—and the fact that when she really hadn’t been paying attention to anything that was going on, she’d covered it up by agreeing with him. But apparently McMillan’s jackass status got reset every morning.