Take My Breath Away Read Online Free

case!’
    ‘Ms Glass,’ the chairman said in a warning tone. ‘Mr Yarrow is merely doing his job.’
    Roxanne felt an emptiness in her stomach. The case was haemorrhaging in front of her eyes. She’d been so fired up with the injustice of what they had done to Tara, so determined to make the company pay. Meanwhile Ben Yarrow had been doing what Ali Khan paid him handsomely to do. Digging deep.
    ‘Easy, isn’t it,’ Ben said coldly, ‘making loadsamoney out of rich businessmen? But you graduated in more ways than one, didn’t you? You moved from working for those sad punters in Bloomsbury to taking a post with Ali Khan’s company. A colourful figure, isn’t he? Ideal for your purposes, I suggest.’
    ‘I had no purposes!’
    Ben’s face darkened. Roxanne thought he lookedlike something small and nasty out of
Peer
Gynt
. ‘You had the prospect of a quick buck if you claimed your boss couldn’t keep his fingers out of the till, smeared him as corrupt and dishonest. Very useful for someone with an expensive habit to feed.’
    ‘He did those things! It’s true, everything I said is true.’
    Ben shook his head. ‘We’ve already established your difficulties with the truth, Ms Glass.’
    Tara Glass ran out of the courtroom in tears. All her fight was gone. Roxanne caught up with her in the corridor. She didn’t have the heart to ask why Tara had never mentioned the heroin. Tara said she was withdrawing her claim. She wished she’d never been born, she sobbed, as she fled from the building.
    Roxanne’s instinct was to hate Ben Yarrow for the ease with which he’d destroyed the woman. She still felt sure that Tara had been telling the truth about the brown envelopes. Yet a still small voice of calm told her he was only doing his job. On the way out, she had to share the lift with him. To her surprise, he didn’t gloat the way most company lawyers did after a crushing victory. When he asked if she’d ever contemplated working in private practice, she found herself feeling oddly flattered. Disappointed, too, that having raised the subject, he said goodbye without making any attempt to take it further.
    A month later, he’d called out of the blue and asked if she was interested in joining Creed. At first she’d played for time, said she needed to think it over. She didn’t regard herself as street-wise, but she knew enough about career moves to realise it was a mistake to sound too eager. Inside, she’d always known that she would say yes. Creed was a firm which had itsheart in the right place and Ben Yarrow was offering her the opportunity to make the new start of which she’d dreamed. The biggest gamble of her life, but a risk she had to take.
    The department needed an extra pair of hands at a busy time. The firm had more work than it could handle and employment lawyers with advocacy experience were in short supply. She’d won most of the cases she’d handled at Hengist Street. A two-in-three success rate was worth shouting about, given the number of no-hopers with which she’d been lumbered. He interviewed her along with his junior partner, Joel Anthony. An old-fashioned question and answer session. No psychometric tests, thank God. She didn’t want anyone exploring the secrets of her personality. When they offered her the job, Roxanne’s only qualm was that perhaps she should have come out up front and told them everything. She was so much more of a phoney than poor Tara Glass. But did it matter? She’d earned the offer on merit, on the strength of her own performance before Tara’s case fell apart. She might be a novice joining the ranks of a renowned human rights practice, but that proved that the firm’s commitment to its equal opportunities recruitment policy was more than skin deep. Besides, it was too late to tell them who she really was.
    ‘You needn’t worry,’ she said. ‘I went on a crusade for Tara Glass but that doesn’t mean I won’t fight to win for Ali Khan’s companies.