Page 9 of The Marriage Playbook

CHAPTER 5

CARA

“Can I get you anything?” Cara asked. “Water, maybe? Coffee?”

“I don’t have time for pleasantries,” Sims snapped. “We need to come up with a plan here. Frankly, I don’t know why I’ve been pawned off on you. Are you new here?”

“No,” Cara said evenly, but she decided not to tell him she had only been with the firm for a year. He would probably insist that that amount of time was being new. She needed him to trust her. “We’re going to have to have a significant conversation here, Mr. Sims…or can I call you Liam?”

He waved a hand. “Liam is fine. It’s not as if you don’t know who I am.”

I don’t. She was tapping his name furiously into her phone, trying to access whatever information she could about what might be going on with him. The one drawback to getting a client dumped on her out of nowhere was that she wasn’t remotely prepared.

Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult to find information about Liam Sims. His face was all over the internet. She stared at her phone screen, startled by the anger she saw there. He had picked a fight with a younger member of his football team in a bar, according to the article. The photo a bystander had captured made it look like he was about to start throwing punches, and Cara knew that if she had been in that room with him, she would have been afraid.

I can’t let him see that, though. He can’t imagine that I’m at all intimidated by him.

She set her phone down. “Liam,” she went on. “I don’t want you to get thirsty while we’re talking. I’m not sure how long we’re going to be in here, but we don’t want to feel rushed. I want to come up with the right solution to help you here. So if you’ll let me, I’ll go and get you something to drink so you’ll be able to relax and settle in.”

“Listen,” he said firmly. “I’m not here to get comfortable. I’m here to get solutions. Are you caught up on the details of my situation?”

“Yes,” Cara fibbed, hoping he wouldn’t realize that she was getting all her information from headlines.

“Then you understand there’s no time to waste,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “I’ve got to make arrangements to be picked up by a new team before things spiral completely out of control. That’s the only way I’ll be able to get the Stingers to take me back.”

“So you’re hoping to return to the Stingers?” she asked.

He slapped a hand against the table. “Obviously I’m going back to the Stingers,” he said. “This whole thing is being done as a public relations measure. It’s the team trying to save face. That’s why I need you. Someone has to rehabilitate my image so that the team will want me again. The best way for us to make that happen is to show them that even if they think they don’t want me, there are plenty of other people—other teams—that do. Do you think you can handle that?”

His tone was so dismissive. This was clearly a man who was used to getting his own way in everything he did. Cara was familiar with his type. She’d had enough experience with bad dates to know how to handle him.

So she leaned forward. “I’ll remind you, Liam, that you’re in my office right now,” she told him. “You’re here because you need my help. I have other clients.” A lie, but he didn’t need to know that. “I don’t need this meeting—you do. So if you don’t want to respect me, you can feel welcome to take your business elsewhere. I’d like to help you out, but I’m afraid I’m just not open to being spoken to like that. So it’s up to you. Are you and I going to work together, or are you going to go find someone else who’s willing to go belly-up and give you everything you want?”

He glared at her for a moment.

She kept her face carefully impassive.

He let out a sigh. “I don’t know where you get the nerve to talk to me like that,” he said. “You might not think you need me, but that just tells me how new you really are to this firm. I should be meeting with Ward.” He raked his fingers through his blond curls. Cara was surprised they didn’t tangle and snag, but he must have had some sort of expensive hair treatment to keep them smooth. “But I don’t have time to argue with you about this,” he went on. “I do need your help—you’re right about that much. So if you have an idea for how you’re going to restore my good name, I suggest you share it with me so that we can get to work as quickly as possible.”

Cara was stuck. The truth of the matter was that she didn’t have any ideas. How could she, she thought in frustration. She hadn’t even known about any of this until five minutes ago. She was all for having a chance to prove herself, but also, it was completely unfair of Alastair to have made this that chance. How was she supposed to succeed going in blind like this?

She swallowed hard. “Okay,” she said. “Well, I think the first thing for us to do is to lay out exactly what happened.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I thought you knew what had happened.”

“I mean from your perspective,” she said quickly. “If I’m going to spin this, I need your side of the story. What’s already in the press…that’s not the part I need to focus on. I need to know what you say happened, so that I can tell people about it in your words. Don’t you think?”

“It’s about time someone wanted to know that,” he agreed with a sanctimonious little nod.

“Okay.” Cara grabbed a notepad and a pen from the stack that was kept at the end of the table. “So you tell me. What went on that night?”

“The whole thing was a setup,” Liam said sharply. “That kid, Garrett Sandusky…he wanted a fight. He went to that club because he knew I was going to be there.”

She raised her eyebrows. “He knew you would be there?”

“He guessed it, at the very least,” Liam said. “He was trying to make trouble.”

“Is it your usual club, then, or something?” She scribbled usual club on her notepad just to have something to do, even though she wasn’t sure that information was going to be of any use.