COOPER’S FOLLY
Burned-out lawyer Cooper Meredith decides success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Trading his ties for T-shirts, he chucks it all and becomes nanny to a wild pair of four-year-olds ... and the four-year-olds win every time. The kids’ mom, Molly Perrell, a hard-charging and stressed-to-the-max retail executive, just wants someone she can count on. It doesn’t appear to be Cooper, who turns out to be the world’s worst nanny. Their clashes, and their undeniable attraction, turn Cooper’s summer folly into the chance of a lifetime.
Cooper’s Folly is available in print and ebook on Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and more.
An Excerpt from COOPER’S FOLLY
Minneapolis lawyer goes berserk, yells “handle your own freaking cases” at senior partners, grabs fishing pole, and runs into the seventy-five-degree sunshine known as a Minnesota summer. Last seen with a keg of beer and a pickup truck with bumper sticker, I QUIT.
Fantasies. Cooper Meredith had them.
Three o’clock. No, to be precise, it was 3:06. Another endless Friday afternoon.
Cooper leaned back in his burgundy leather chair and scowled at the antique gold clock on his desk. Seeking a second opinion, he turned to his Rolex, then to the grandfather clock in the far corner of his office. No luck. Exactly two and nine-tenths billable hours until he had a hope of slipping away without raising the eyebrows of senior partners. And then only two more working days until Monday—which was more a reality than a joke at the one-hundred-and-eighty-lawyer firm of Pemberton, Smith and Garrison.
Note to the file: Destroy all clocks.
Idly, Cooper imagined his mother’s white-gloved, horrified expression at the vision of her precious Bulova smashed beyond recognition at the hands of a crazed, hammer-wielding junior partner. Sources at the firm said Meredith took off a black wingtip and bashed a Bulova clock on his desk while shouting, “I never wanted to be a lawyer, Mom. I wanted to run a waterski shop on Lake Minnetonka!” Wincing, he admitted certain defeat once again at the hands of Mom’s elegant ambitions for him. Back to the drawing board.
A trial lawyer at Pemberton, Cooper had already argued several cases before the Supreme Court at the ripe old age of thirty-four. That level of success had come at a steep price. His personal life, this thing called a “life” in general, no longer existed, but he still remembered his old life. Leaning back, arms behind his head, legs strewn across the one bare patch of wood on his desk, Cooper drifted back to long-ago summers when the piles were of dirt, when intense negotiations meant convincing Mom that he needed a new bike, when the hardest task he faced every day was skimming barefoot behind a speedboat on Lake Minnetonka without crashing.
“Coop!”
Flinching at the interruption, he looked up to see his best friend, Jake Weaver, slouched in the doorway. Even after all these years, Jake still claimed he could satisfy endless legal issues, women, and other pursuits with time to spare—and he somehow did. But how? By not making partner, for one thing. By settling for just good enough.
“Let’s cut out early and grab a beer at the Blue Saloon.”
“Sorry. I have to put the finishing touches on the brief for the Hadley case. One stray comma and Garrison goes berserk. You know how he is. My weekend is toast.”
“You already made partner, Coop, and the Hadley case will still be here a year from now. Who cares? Live a little. I hear Betsy’s been asking about you. Not many guys would pass up that opportunity.”
“Tell you what. Do us both a favor and seize that opportunity for yourself.”
