Practice Makes Perfect - By Julie James Page 0,1

Payton.”

Payton’s pulse skyrocketed. She couldn’t help it, merely hearing his voice had that effect on her. She turned around and there he stood.

J. D. Jameson.

Payton paused to look him over. He looked so quintessentially J.D. right then, with his suit jacket already off and his classically cut navy pinstripe pants and yes, that perfectly styled rakish light brown hair of his. He looked tan—probably out playing tennis or golf over the weekend—and he gave her one of his perfect-white-teeth smiles as he leaned casually against the credenza behind him.

“I said, ‘Good morning,’ ” he repeated. And so Payton did what she always did when she saw J. D. Jameson.

She scowled.

The shithead had beaten her into work.

Again.

“Good morning, J.D.,” she replied with that sarcastic tone she reserved just for him.

Noting her arrival, he checked his watch, then glanced up and down the hallway with deliberate exaggeration. “Wow—did I miss the lunch cart? Is it noon already?”

She really hated this guy.

I hardly get in at noon, Payton nearly retorted, then bit her tongue. No. She wouldn’t stoop to his level and defend herself.

“Perhaps if you spent a little less time keeping track of my comings and goings, J.D., and a little more time working, it wouldn’t take you fifteen hours to bill ten.”

She watched with satisfaction as her reply wiped the smirk right off of his face. Touché. With a well-practiced cool and calm demeanor, she turned in her heels and headed across the hall to her own office.

Such a silly thing, Payton thought. This endless competition J.D. had with her. The man clearly spent far too much time focusing on what she was up to. It had been that way since . . . well, since as long as she could remember. Thank goodness she was above such petty nonsense.

Payton got to her office and closed her door behind her. She set her briefcase down on top of her desk and took a seat in the well-worn leather chair. How many hours had she logged in that chair? How many all-nighters had she pulled? How many weekends had she sacrificed? All in her quest to show the firm that she was partnership material—that she was the top associate in her class.

Through the glass on her door, she could see across the hall to J.D.’s office. He was already back at his own desk, in front of his computer, working. Oh, sure, like he had such important matters to tend to.

Payton pulled her laptop out of her briefcase and turned it on, ready to start her day. After all, she had very important things to focus on, too.

For starters, like how the hell she was ever going to get up at 4:30 tomorrow morning.

Two

“I SEE YOU broke your own record.”

Payton peered up from her computer as Irma walked into her office, waving the time sheets Payton had given her earlier that morning.

“I get depressed just logging in these hours,” her secretary continued in an exasperated tone. “Seriously, I need to be assigned to a different associate. Someone whose weekly time sheets aren’t as long as Anna Karenina.”

Payton raised an eyebrow as she took the stack of time sheets from her secretary. “Let me guess—another recommendation from Oprah?”

Irma gave Payton a look that said she was treading on seriously dangerous ground. “That sounds like mocking.”

“No, never,” Payton assured her, trying not to grin. “I’m sure it’s a wonderful book.”

At least four times a year Irma made the pilgrimage out to the West Loop to sit in the audience at Harpo Studios and be in the presence of Her Holiness the Winfrey. Irma took all recommendations from the TV maven—lifestyle, literary, and otherwise—as gospel. Any comments in the negative by Payton or anyone else were strictly taboo.

Irma took a seat in front of the desk as she waited for Payton to sign off on the completed time sheets. “You’d like it. It’s about a woman who’s progressive for her time.”

“Sounds promising,” Payton said distractedly as she skimmed the printout of the hours her secretary had entered.

“Then she falls for the wrong man,” Irma continued.

“That’s a bit cliché, isn’t it? They call this Tolstoy guy a writer?” Payton quickly scrawled her signature across the bottom of the last time sheet and handed them back to Irma.

“This ‘Tolstoy guy’ knows about relationships. Perhaps you could learn a thing or two from him.”

Payton pretended not to hear the comment. After years of working with Irma, the two of them had developed a comfortable, familiar relationship, and she