An Imperfect Process (3 page)

Kate studied her face, but said only, "You mentioned that you just got some good news from Rainey?"

"It's one of those good news/bad news things, actually. The good news is that Rainey gave me a profit point for my work on
The Centurion
, and now it's worth a surprising amount of money." Val swallowed the last of her sandwich. "The bad news is that Rainey informs me that if I don't use the money to change my life, I can't complain about my job anymore."

Kate whistled softly. "So—what are you going to do?"

"Darned if I know." Val couldn't quite manage a light tone.

"Okay, let's start with basics." Kate wiped her hands clean as she thought. "I think you must love the law, or you wouldn't be so good at it. But this silk stocking corporate law firm isn't really your style. Just because your father..."

"Spare me comments about my father. Rainey already went there." Val gestured at her tablet. "I've been listing the pros and cons of this job and I'm not getting anywhere."

Kate snagged the tablet and skimmed the entries, then pulled off the top page and ripped it to pieces. "This is not a question that will be solved by rational analysis. If you want to figure out what kind of work you'll love, get your head out of the loop and go with your heart. For example, you always seem to enjoy your
pro bono
work, which is usually more involved with people than corporations. Why not open your own office and let the windfall subsidize cases that interest you?"

Val paused in the middle of her mango lassi. "Now there's a thought. The law does fascinate me, but too often justice is measured by the size of a client's wallet. It would be hard to run a practice doing only
pro bono
work, though."

"If you leave, some of your paying clients would go with you. Enough to keep money coining in." Eyes sparkling, Kate leaned on the desk with crossed arms. "Imagine a life where you could decide how many hours you want to work. Where you can take cases that really interest you. Where you can say no to clients you don't like. That's the luxury that money gives, Val. Choices."

Kate's vision was enticing—and darned scary. "It's an intriguing possibility, but where would I start? We're talking major, major changes. As a sole practitioner I wouldn't be able to take on the big, complicated cases I handle now."

"I'm going to pretend that question wasn't rhetorical. You need a sharp assistant like Kendra to run the office. If you give her the right bait, maybe she'll go with you. As to not being able to handle large cases, didn't you tell me once that it's possible to hire contract lawyers when more help is needed? You could create work for some of your lawyer friends who quit the corporate world to raise their kids."

"You've got this all thought through while I'm still blinking at the possibilities!"

Kate grinned. "It's easy for me, it's not my life. You'll need physical office space, of course, unless you want to work out of your house."

"I don't want an office invading my home," Val said. "If I'm going for do-gooder law, I should avoid the high- priced offices downtown and pick a neighborhood location. Some place with parking."

"What about the Hamilton area? That's pleasant and affordable and an easy drive from your house."

Val thought about Hamilton. A working-class neighborhood in Baltimore's northeastern quadrant, it was unpretentious and safe. "Does the area have any office space apart from the storefronts on Harford Road? I don't want to handle walk-in divorce clients. That's painful work "

"As a matter of fact..." Kate dug her cell phone from her handbag and hit several keys. "Donovan has a friend called Rob Smith who he met on one of those charitable weekend fix-up projects. They bonded over the Sheetrock. Rob's a nice guy who does carpentry and remodeling. He bought a vacant church on Old Harford Road and fixed it up as commercial space, but he's been having trouble renting it" Kate jotted a phone number and address on a tablet. "Take a look and see if it speaks to you."

Val gazed down at the address. "You're making this seem... possible."

"That's the whole point. You've proved that you can do the uptown lawyer thing, but you don't want to spend the rest of your life here. That I'm sure of." Kate glanced at her watch. "Have to run—it's later than I thought."

She swallowed the last of her coffee and stood. "You're in a position where you have lots of choices, Val. Maybe you want to throw the law over and get certified to teach kindergarten. Or become a veterinarian and set up an all-cat practice. Explore the possibilities. Find what makes you laugh. You haven't done a lot of laughing in the last few years. Change is scary, but it beats dying inside."

Kate scooped up her briefcase and departed as quickly as she'd arrived. In the suddenly silent office, Val drew a shaky breath, feeling as if she had been beaten by pillows. Nothing like having friends who gave good advice whether it was wanted or not.

A fat portfolio is not the cure for what ails you.
Rainey's quick, perceptive words had made her recognize how much she had come to seek her security in money. Blindly she gazed from the window and wondered where she had gone wrong. Not by choosing law school, though her reasons had been a spaghetti tangle of good and bad.

Yes, she'd wanted to impress her father, but she had also loved the challenges and discipline required by the law, and her talents suited the work well. She enjoyed analyzing cases, researching precedents, devising ingenious strategies, and performing in the courtroom. Her law firm was a decent employer, and every day was different.

Yet somewhere along the line, she'd lost her course.
A fat portfolio is not the cure for what ails you.
Her instinctive desire to save the movie money was odd considering that financially she was in fine shape, with a good job, a nice home, and a healthy amount of savings. But she had clutched at that million dollars—less massive taxes—as if saving the money was vital to keep her from destitution.

Her mind skipped to an emotionally needy boyfriend who had lived on the edge of financial disaster because he tried to fill the holes in his spirit with extravagant spending. It never worked. The satisfaction that came with buying was gone in hours while the bills stayed around forever.

Val had broken up with him regretfully, unable to deal with his chronic money problems, yet she hadn't recognized the similarities between them. They both put too much faith in material things—he by spending, she by saving. Somewhere along the line she had turned into Ebenezer Scrooge without noticing it.

Had Val ever known inner peace? Yes, as a girl there had been times when she had felt centered and content. But now she was restless and unhappy, running so hard there was never time to stop and think about her life. She needed to slow down and find a way to heal her tattered spirit before it became frayed beyond repair.

The question was—how?

Chapter 2

Val turned south on Old Harford Road from Northern Parkway. Unlike nearby Harford Road, a busy through street, this older route was a quiet residential road. The address Kate had given her was a couple of blocks down. Turning on to a cross street, she parked her car and studied the stone structure on the corner.

Petite and well-proportioned, the church was dangerously charming. Leave it to Kate, an architect by training, to know about such an interesting possibility.

That didn't mean the building would work for Val even if she did decide to set up her own office—a very big if. Though small for a church, the structure would be large for a sole practitioner law firm. Probably built in the early twentieth century, it had Gothic arched windows containing roundels of stained glass at the top. The clear lower panels allowed lots of light in. From here, the interior looked white and empty.

She climbed from her car and went to explore. A
For Rent
sign in the front window looked weathered, and she wondered how long Rob Smith had been trying to find a tenant. This was a big project for a carpenter. If he had all his money tied up in the church, he might be hurting.

Reminding herself that she shouldn't rent an office simply to make a stranger's life easier, she circled around behind the building. Neat shrubs lined the foundations, and well-grown trees shaded the corner lot. This close, she could see that the back of the structure had a second floor. Still more space that she wouldn't need.

Behind the church was a parking lot that might hold eight or ten cars. A wheelchair ramp, which was good—the carpenter knew the law. There was street parking, too, which was much nicer than the claustrophobic parking garage Val used downtown.

She was touching a glossy magnolia leaf when a voice asked, "Can I help you?"

Almost jumping from her skin, she spun around to see a powerfully built man in jeans and a worn blue work shirt standing an arm's length away. His shaggy light brown hair and beard were sun-bleached, and his eyes were startlingly light against tanned skin. The faintest tint of blue kept them from being the color of ice. Her mind made a swift association with the frontier mountain men: strong, craggy, utterly competent.

And gorgeous. Mustn't overlook the fact that he was gorgeous.

"Sorry." His voice was deep and pleasant. "I didn't mean to sneak up on you. I was doing some pruning on the other side of the building."

He seemed vaguely familiar, but she couldn't place him. His accent wasn't Baltimore, though. Western, maybe. "Are you Rob Smith?"

"Yes." His brows arched inquiringly. Again she felt a flicker of recognition, but no sense that they had met before. Maybe she had seen him in passing somewhere. For a big city, Baltimore could be a pretty small town. But no, surely she would remember seeing a man who made her nerve endings tingle just looking at him.

Reminding herself that she was here on business, she held out her hand. "Hi, I'm Val Covington. My friend Kate Corsi, Patrick Donovan's wife, said you had remodeled an old church for commercial use, so I thought I'd take a look. I'm considering setting up my own office."

His warm, strong hand was callused and marked by minor scars. A working man's hand. Maybe he seemed familiar not as an individual, but because of his general resemblance to numerous workmen she had hired over the years—strong, at ease in his body. Whether carpenters, roofers, electricians, or landscapers, they tended to have the kind of confidence that came with physical mastery of the world around them.

The workmen she knew tended to be beer-drinking, sports-watching, guy-type guys, but they were also fun, reliable, and had an innate courtesy she enjoyed. The man who had done the tile work in her new kitchen was so attractive that she might have jumped him if he weren't happily married with two children. So instead she made brownies and sent them home to his kids.

"Do you want to see the inside?"

"That would be nice, Mr. Smith." There, she sounded collected and professional.

"Call me Rob." The faintest of smiles showed in his eyes. "
Mr. Smith
sounds so generic."

And he had a sophisticated sense of humor. She was doomed. "Okay, Rob. I'm Val. What kind of church was this?"

"Originally Methodist." He unsnapped a key ring from his belt and climbed three steps to the back entrance. Arched and made of heavy oak, the door had the huge, vine-like hammered iron hinges often seen on English churches.

Rob unlocked the door and held it open for her. "They outgrew the space and built a larger church out in Parkville. A gospel church was here for a while, but they outgrew it and moved on, too."

She stepped across the threshold into a small reception hall. The interior was completely unfurnished, with warm white walls, handsome moldings, and floors of beautifully polished oak. "I suppose this area was offices for the minister and church secretary and that sort of thing?"

"Yes, with a kitchen and church hall below. There are four rooms here in the back for offices, supplies, storage, whatever."

She opened a door on the right and found herself in a sizable room with oak wainscoting. "The builders really liked oak."

"American church Gothic, circa 1910." Rob stroked the wainscoting with his fingertips. "This place needed a lot of work. The shell was solid, but the roof was crumbling and most of the larger stained-glass panels had been stolen. Luckily I was able to salvage some smaller pieces and incorporate them into the new windows."