“Maybe you need a Plan B,” Ford said.

“Cut back on my hours?” Brooke shook her head. “Not possible right now. With this sports and entertainment division I’m helping to build at Sterling, there’s too much going on.”

“Actually, I was thinking that maybe you should stop trying to shoehorn a relationship into your life. Especially since you’re only halfway into these guys, anyway.”

“Hey, that’s not fair.”

“Oh, right. The Hot OB was the love of your life.”

Well . . . okay. Maybe not. But she’d enjoyed being with those guys in her downtime. All thirty minutes a week she had of it.

With a sigh, Brooke leaned her head back against the chair. “I think I need to go on a relationship sabbatical.”

“It worked for me,” Ford said.

That got a slight smile out of her. Ford, the king of casual dating, had been on a relationship “sabbatical” for years. Hopefully, hers wouldn’t last quite that long. But after three breakups, it was time to face facts: in light of the demands of her job, relationships simply weren’t a good fit for her right now.

And, come to think of it, she was tired of feeling like she needed to apologize for that.

She worked hard; she didn’t deny that. Frankly, she’d worked hard her whole life—and she was proud of where that had gotten her. She and Ford had grown up in Glenwood, an affluent Chicago suburb that, with its elegant tree-lined streets and big, fancy houses with wide, beautifully landscaped lawns, looked like something out of a John Hughes movie.

Except, that is, for the part of town where she and Ford had lived, which was slightly more modest.

Actually, a lot more modest.

Nicknamed “the Quads” because each building contained four townhomes per unit, Brooke’s childhood subdivision was considered a “hidden gem” because of the fact that it offered very affordable housing within Glenwood’s school districts, which consistently ranked among the top in the state. Brooke’s father, a butcher, and her mother, a day care instructor, had made the decision to leave the city of Chicago after the public school Brooke had been attending slipped to the bottom quartile in Illinois school rankings.

Brooke had always done well in school, had always wanted to do well in school—and, frankly, at the Chicago public school she’d previously attended, it hadn’t taken a lot of effort for her to be at the top. But that all changed when she moved to Glenwood.

In Glenwood, the kids had private tutors. And nannies and stay-at-home moms who could help them with projects after school. Her classmates in Glenwood took piano lessons and dance lessons and every other kind of lesson imaginable from the top instructors in the area, and they learned foreign languages like German and Japanese in summer-break immersion programs.

When Brooke got to high school, things turned even crazier. She heard stories about parents who hired the most popular teachers in school to work with their children over summer vacation, and by her sophomore year all the parents and students had begun focusing on college, and the fact that the Harvards and Yales of the world would likely only take one or two students from Glenwood—the guidance counselors had repeatedly reminded them of that—no matter how accomplished they all were.

Brooke realized early on that, in many aspects, she couldn’t compete with her far-wealthier classmates. Her parents couldn’t afford a private tutor or a bazillion lessons in things that would look good on her college applications; in fact, at times they struggled to make their mortgage payments on their townhome. And, unlike many of the other students, her parents didn’t have any “connections” with the top universities, or alumnae in the family who could help grease a few wheels. Which meant that if Brooke wanted to be a contender for those top university spots, she needed to do it the old-fashioned way.

By working her butt off.

As a result, she studied a lot in school. Her parents had given her the opportunity to attend one of the best high schools in the state, and she’d be darned if she didn’t do her best to capitalize on that.

Fortunately, all her hard work had paid off, and to this day she could still remember the look of pride on her parents’ faces when she’d received her acceptance packet from the University of Chicago. But what stuck with Brooke even more was the pride that she, personally, felt in knowing that she’d done it all by herself.

She was a competitive person, and that pride, that feeling of achievement, similarly pushed her to do well in undergrad and law school. By the time she’d graduated from University of Chicago Law School and began her legal career, that was simply a part of who she was. She gave one hundred and ten percent to whatever it was she was doing, and basically had one speed when it came to her career: full speed. And since she genuinely enjoyed working at Sterling Restaurants, she’d never minded that.

Her three ex-boyfriends, on the other hand, obviously had been less enthralled with the situation.

“You know, I’m not sure I’m feeling the proper level of sympathy here,” she told Ford. “I think we need a little more rallying around the dumpee. If you were a woman and I’d told you that the third guy in eighteen months had broken up with me, right now we’d be drinking lemon drop martinis and giving each other female empowerment pep talks about how we don’t need a man in our lives to feel complete. And then we’d watch The Notebook and drool over Ryan Gosling.”

Ford flashed her a grin as he stretched an arm across the back of his chair. “Sorry, babe. But when they handed out best friends, you drew the straw with a penis attached. That means no Ryan Gosling.”