Read Online Objection Overruled by J.K. O'Hanlon - Free Book Online

You have to do this.”
    Her stomach ached with emptiness, but it wasn’t from hunger. She was thirteen again. Her new pink watch was proudly strapped on her wrist as she came down from her room to go to school. Her mom sat in a powder-blue bathrobe at the kitchen table. Her mother’s hands shielded her face but didn’t muffle the sounds of her cries. Jackie’s daddy was gone. Again. They would be bankrupt. Again.
    Jackie vowed that day to do anything, to make herself into something, so she’d never go through that humiliation again. Now she stood at the precipice of financial ruin unless she won this case. She prayed that once it was over, and she’d won, she’d finally be happy with herself because for almost twenty years, she lived by the story that being a “success” was all that mattered. Until that night with Brandon, not even a flicker of doubt penetrated her wall.
    Jackie squared her shoulders, palms flat on the conference room table, and sucked in a lungful of air, then set her mind to work. At this point, she had no choice. Getting through today was all she could handle. She called Marilyn to have lunch delivered and then opened the green file folder. “Brandon Marshfield, who are you, and what the hell are you doing in bed with Ashe Investments?”
    The information in the folder was dated within the last few years. Nothing indicated a link between Marshfield and the Ashe empire. Robert Ashe, the reigning patriarch of the company, was in his seventies. A blue-blooded Baltimorean, the elder Ashe had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Except for a stint in New York with Merrill Lynch early in his career, the patriarch had lived his entire life at his family’s palatial horse farm in Baltimore County.
    The elder Ashe’s son, Robert Ashe, Jr., ostensibly worked at the company. He lived a lavish lifestyle commensurate with the paycheck he drew. He had been charming, egotistical, spoiled, and very clever in his deposition. Unlike his father and most of the other men in the family, he had not attended the Wharton School. Instead, he’d matriculated from Towson University, near the family’s estate.
    Matriculated—that was Ashe’s word. When she had asked him where he attended college, he had said he matriculated from Towson. Could he have “attended” college someplace else? Was that his link to Marshfield?
    Jackie squeezed her eyes tight, thinking back to Ashe’s deposition. Although she didn’t have a photographic memory, Jackie often could “see” words where they appeared on a page. Like a computer scanning through documents, her mind flipped pages as she searched for the place where they had discussed education. She was almost certain he had said nothing about another college. She hadn’t asked either.
    Jackie opened her eyes to jot down a note to follow up on Ashe’s education. Brandon stood across the table from her. She hadn’t heard him come in. To avoid looking, or worse, staring at him, she focused on the vase on the credenza behind him.
    “What is going on, Jackie? Or should I call you Ms. North? Or would Mata Hari suffice?” He leaned over the table toward her with his hands flattened against the table’s mirrored surface.
    Jackie stood up and pushed back her chair to put some distance between them. “We shouldn’t be talking.”
    Brandon pounded his fist on the table. “That’s where you’re wrong. We should be talking. But not like this. I thought we actually enjoyed each other’s company.”
    Jackie looked down at the table, silent.
    Brandon pushed off from the table and turned to look away from her and out the window. He ran his fingers through his hair and laced them together behind his head.
    He turned to face her again. “I wasn’t exactly surprised when you didn’t call right away. I got it that you were busy with your life. Or, I don’t know, maybe you had another guy. Then you show up here, claws sharpened and fangs