Blake’s quick laugh was rough-edged. “No, my father wasn’t a cop. He would have been appalled at the very idea.”
Blake’s father hadn’t had a lot of faith in cops. Or in anyone else who represented stability and authority.
“Would have been?” Tara repeated, picking up on the wording.
“He died when I was barely fifteen.” Blake kept his voice light, but his smile had vanished.
“What about your mother? Is she still living?”
“They died together, in an accident.” An accident Blake still felt responsible for, after all this time. An accident that still haunted him at times when he let his guard down, or on those rare occasions when he thought wistfully of someday having a home or family of his own.
“Oh, Blake, how terrible for you. You were so young to lose them both. I’m so sorry.”
“It was almost twenty years ago,” he reminded her, uncomfortable with her sympathy.
“But it still hurts,” she said, a bit too perceptively.
He was silent for a time, then cleared his throat and answered candidly. “Yes. I still hate hospitals. My mom lived a few days after the accident, and I’ll always associate the sounds and smells of hospitals with her death.”
Blake shook off the painful memories. “What about your parents?” he asked, sensing that she wanted to make conversation. Maybe she was fighting a touch of cabin fever, herself.
“Still living in Honoria, Georgia, the little town where I was born. My father’s a small-town attorney, my mother’s a schoolteacher. We’re the respectable branch of the McBride family,” she added wryly.
Respectable. A word that had never been applied to Blake’s family. Which only served as another reminder of how differently he and Tara had been raised. “Is that right?”
“Oh, yes. Mom and Dad haven’t caused any scandals in thirty years. My younger brothers and I were almost perfect children. I went to Harvard. Trevor works for the State Department in Washington, D.C. My youngest brother, Trent, is a senior at the Air Force Academy. All in all, we’re a model of respectability, unlike the rest of the McBrides. Or at least we were—until I managed to get myself fired,” she added, apparently trying without success to keep the bitterness from her voice.
Sounded as though her family could have modeled for those Rockwell paintings she’d asked about at the art gallery. Or starred in one of those TV sitcom families Blake had watched—and sometimes secretly envied—as a child.
He looked at Tara speculatively. “You haven’t told your family yet about what happened at the law firm, have you?”
She looked away
from him. “No.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged.
“Are you afraid they won’t understand? That they’ll be disappointed in you?” He’d have thought a family like the one she’d described would have immediately rallied around one of their own who’d fallen on hard times. At least, that was what he’d always imagined typical families did.
She shook her head. “I know they’d understand, and they would be there for me, even if they were disappointed. I just haven’t been ready to talk about it yet. To anyone.”
She’d talked about it to Blake, a little, he couldn’t help thinking with a touch of satisfaction. He wondered what bothered Tara more—the loss of her position, or the humiliation of feeling as if she’d failed at something. “Did you like your job?” he asked.
She hesitated so long that he suspected she didn’t quite know the answer. “I didn’t dislike it,” she said finally. “It was a job, you know? I was good at it—despite the evidence to the contrary.”
“I never doubted that,” he assured her. “What happened?”
“I refused to sign off on something that a very important client demanded. It was a foreign tax shelter—very iffy. After researching it for months, I decided it was just too risky. I didn’t want anything to do with it. The client pitched a fit, the senior partners tried to pressure me into going along, and I refused. I thought, when it came to the crunch, my associates would back me. They didn’t.”
He scowled. “Even if you were right?”
She shrugged. “Their risk analysis showed that their liability wouldn’t be that great if everything fell apart. The client would take the fall...and there was a slim chance that I would take it with him. The partners would quietly pocket their huge retainers and look the other way. The client would just find some other attorney to do what he wanted, they said, and they intended to make sure that didn’t happen. So, they dumped me and promoted someone with a few less scruples.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I’ll hardly get a glowing recommendation from Carpathy, Dillon and Delacroix.”