Читать книгу His Pregnant Courthouse Bride - Rachel Lee - Страница 8

Prologue

Circuit Judge Wyatt Carter had just finished a pleasant dinner at home, a too-rare occurrence, because he lived alone and was generally too busy to take the time to indulge in cooking. But this was a quiet Sunday evening after a comfortable day of catching up on his reading, and he’d made the effort to cook chicken Alfredo for himself and enjoyed it with a glass of pinot grigio. He felt somewhat self-indulgent, but considering how little time he had for indulgences, he didn’t feel guilty.

When the phone rang, he assumed it was his father. Earl Carter ran the family law practice, although lately it had shrunk because Earl was getting older and didn’t take as many cases. Earl seemed content enough to let the practice contract even though he’d once said it was his legacy to his son. Then Wyatt had become a circuit court judge, and the plans of a father-son practice had melted away.

But it was not his father, much to his surprise. It was a voice out of the past.

“Wyatt?”

He recognized Amber Towers’s voice. They’d kept in touch over the last decade, mostly by email and occasional phone calls. Amber had moved on from law school to a large firm in St. Louis, then recently to a much bigger firm in Chicago, headed for the heights. Wyatt, who had graduated two years ahead of her, had joined the military and spent three years in the judge advocate general’s office. Then he’d come back to out-of-the-way Conard County to fulfill his father’s dream of a shared practice.

He and Amber had once been very close friends, although nothing more than that, and since then they’d maintained a long-distance friendship, except for dinner or lunch at a bar association conference.

Now he heard her voice with astonishment, since she hadn’t called in ages, and concern popped into his mind. “Amber? What’s wrong?”

“You’re never going to believe it. I’m in a mess. Got an hour or so?”

“Of course.”

His mind dived down the byways of memory, recalling Amber as he had first seen her. She was young for a first-year law student, having gone to college two years early and finishing her bachelor’s degree in three years.

She had, in short, been barely nineteen. He’d been twenty-seven, because he’d taken a couple of years after college to try his hand at other things before going to law school. She’d been very pretty, so pretty that every guy who wasn’t already married—and some who were—chased her. He hadn’t chased. It wasn’t that he hadn’t found her attractive, but facing his tour with the military in exchange for them paying his law school expenses, he felt it was the wrong time to get involved, especially since the direction she wanted to take was far from his path. He’d also felt that given the difference in their ages, it might be close to cradle robbing. Amber had seemed so young to him then.

So they’d become friends over textbooks and in oral arguments. He’d mentored her, having already taken the classes she was in, and she’d challenged him with her sharp mind.

A lovely woman barely emerging from adolescence, with dark hair, a pleasant figure and a face that had been pretty but painfully young. Of one thing he had been sure, though: Amber would rise to the top. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she reached the Supreme Court.

But now she was in trouble?

He poured himself another glass of wine, carried it to his easy chair and prepared to listen.

It didn’t take an hour, either. Amber was indeed in a mess.