Page 47 of The Marriage Playbook

But if he took it, it would cost him Cara. For good this time. There would be no getting her back.

And that price might be too high to pay.

CHAPTER 23

CARA

The fact that Alastair was calling her at all was shocking. He had been freezing Cara out for the last few days, not returning her emails or her texts. She had itched to tell him about the way she’d reached out to the Lions and the response she had gotten, but apparently he didn’t want to hear anything from her.

And after a surprisingly short amount of time, she’d gotten over it. She hadn’t done it for him. He was going to fire her anyway, probably, she’d just wanted to be the one to initiate the conversation as a point of pride. But it didn’t matter, really.

Maybe that’s what this call is. Maybe he found out what I did and he’s ready to tear me apart for it. At least it would be over.

She answered the call. “Alastair.”

“Why are you and Liam having a press conference today?” he demanded without preamble.

She frowned. “What are you talking about? I didn’t schedule a press conference.”

“Well, someone did,” he snapped. “I just got sent the link for the livestream. Apparently it’s happening at a hotel conference room downtown. Do you mean to tell me you aren’t even with him?”

“Alastair, I don’t know anything about this,” she said. “Send me the address of the hotel.”

He scoffed. “Frankly, I can’t think of a single reason why I should help you, Cara. You’ve made an absolute mess of this whole business. I trusted you to handle it, and for a while I thought you were going to, but I can see now that trusting you was a mistake.”

“You didn’t trust me,” Cara countered. “This was never about trust, Alastair, admit it. You didn’t want to handle Liam yourself. You didn’t want anything to do with him while his reputation was in the gutter, and you thought you’d pawn him off on the lowest-level employee you could find. I know that, and so do you, so I don’t see any reason for us to pretend otherwise. Just admit it.”

She could practically hear him scowling through the phone. “I don’t know when you got so arrogant that you think you can speak to your superior that way.”

“We both know I’m not going to be working for you much longer, Alastair,” Cara told him. “If there’s one thing you’ve got right, it’s that I did make a mess of all this. I’m doing what I can to clean it up, but I don’t see a world in which you let me take another client under your name. So that means I can say whatever I want to you now, and it won’t make things any worse for me than they already are.”

There was silence over the phone line as Alastair took that in. He didn’t seem to know how to respond.

“You don’t have to help me,” Cara said. “You’re right. And if you don’t want to, I’ll figure it out myself. I’m sure this press conference has been publicized enough that I can just look up the location. But just so you’re aware, you’re not doing anything but stalling me by keeping this to yourself. You’re not going to prevent me from showing up there. I don’t think you even want to do that. So why don’t you just tell me where he is?”

There was a long pause. “I’ll send you the information,” Alastair conceded.

“Thank you.”

“You know,” he said, “I really did believe in you for a while, Cara. Maybe not all the time, definitely not when it started, but when I saw how far you were willing to go for this campaign, I thought I’d actually been right to choose you. I thought, here’s a woman with more passion for this work than I’ve seen in a very long time. I saw you leapfrogging over other people at the firm. In my mind, you were on the fast track to success. And then you threw it all away.”

“I couldn’t have foreseen what would happen,” Cara pointed out. “I had no way of knowing that woman would break her nondisclosure agreement. The firm has a pretty strong case against her, by the way, if you feel like pursuing it.”

“I don’t know about that. She must have seen a way out of the document she signed.”

“No, those papers were good,” Cara said. “I drew them up myself.” She had sat down and gone over them the other night, searching for a mistake like what Alastair was describing. Some way to tell herself that this was her fault after all. But she couldn’t find it. Her papers had been good. “Show them to any lawyer you want,” she said. “They’ll tell you the same thing.”

“Why are you helping me?” His voice was suspicious. “I thought you were so sure I was going to fire you.”

“Oh, you’re definitely going to fire me.” There was nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise. “That doesn’t mean I don’t take pride in my work. And I don’t wish harm on the firm. Technically, you were betrayed too, and you have a right to do something about it.” She took a breath. “And I wouldn’t know about this press conference if you hadn’t made me aware. So for that, I do owe you a favor.”

She owed him for a whole lot more. If it hadn’t been for Alastair, she would never have gotten to know Liam. Even though things had ended terribly between them, Cara couldn’t regret the time they had spent together. It had been brief but beautiful, like a firework, and someday—after the pain faded—she was sure she would look back on it fondly.

So she was grateful.

Grateful that Alastair had introduced them. Grateful that Liam had trusted her, and that she had given in and allowed herself to be unprofessional with him, even if only for a short time. It had been worth it. It had all been worth it.

“I’ll text you the address of the hotel,” Alastair said. “But I don’t know what you think you’re going to do about it, Cara. If you run over there right now, you might make it in time, but he clearly set up this whole thing without consulting me or you. Do you even know what he’s going to say?”