Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (29 page)

“I’m
ready,” Val said.

“Are you?” Cash’s voice dropped. “Are you ready to explain what
all
of the clauses mean, even Section Twelve point Six?”

Rox stared at the computer in her arms. That section dealt with DiCaprio’s compensation, and the studio had slipped in that he would get a percentage of the
net
profits from the film, where they had already negotiated for the
gross
profits. With all the deductions and depreciations that studios can claim, movies never, ever make
net
profits. They were trying to screw him out of millions with that one word.

“Of course,” Valerie said, her magenta lips pursing.

Cash turned to the legal team sitting on the other side of the table. “Is it on the agenda?”

The lawyer in the middle picked up a piece of paper. Not a brown hair on her sleek, short hair waved as she bent and examined the paper. “No. It’s not.”

“The studio changed his compensation to
net
profits,” Cash said.

The other lawyers gasped and bobbled in their chairs. Rox tried not to smile at their reaction.

“You still want her to advise you?” Cash asked them.

They fidgeted. Rox stepped back and grabbed the door’s handle.

“We could hold the meeting with both of you,” the lawyer in the middle said.

Valerie stood and swept her tablet and paper into her hands. “You take this meeting. I’ll see you later.”

Rox opened the door for her. Valerie’s hands were full, and it seemed like a slight courtesy to allow her to save some face.

Cash leaned toward Valerie as she passed him. “We’ve read all your contracts. There are a lot of clauses you have missed that we need to discuss.”

Valerie stalked out, silent rage pouring out of her.

He smiled at the lawyers on the other side of the table. “Ladies, may I present my associate, Roxanne Neil. We may now proceed with the meeting.”

Cash pulled out a chair for Rox, as usual. She sat and handed out the agenda.

“Net
profits?” the lead lawyer asked Rox.

“Oh, yes,” Rox told her, “and there’s a lot more than that to discuss.”

THREE YEARS

Rox stood in her office, leaning on her desk and breathing after finishing the DiCaprio meeting.

The three ashen-faced lawyers had left the conference room quickly after the meeting wrapped up and didn’t even glance at Valerie’s closed office door as they hurried through the office.

Rox had fled, too. After her temper tantrum with Cash before the meeting, she hadn’t wanted to deal with him.

They had never had a fight with each other in the three years that they had been working together. Sure, they mutually and cooperatively shouted about contracts. That was part of the scene and the game.

But actually fight with each other? They hadn’t had to. Nothing mattered enough. They were just colleagues and buddies.

He had never been able to hurt her before.

Rox wished her cats were hiding under her desk. Cuddling something furry would be calming right now.

A knock rattled her door. Cash peeked through the window that cut the wall beside the door. His chin was lowered, and his green eyes serious.

Rox nodded to him.

He opened the door and leaned into her office. “Can we talk?”

“Yeah. Come on in.”

He stepped through her door and closed it behind himself. “You were right. You belonged in that meeting.”

She nodded. “This is weird. I don’t like fighting with you.”

“I don’t like it either.”

“So let’s stop. Let’s just, don’t.”

He nodded and walked around her desk. “You were right about another thing, too. You are my paralegal first. I need you to work with me. Whatever happens, I don’t want you to resign your position.”

“I don’t want to quit. I love my job. Are we going to be able to travel together after this?”

“We’ve been friends for three years. Surely, we can figure it out.” He looked down, staring at his shoes. “Is this just a superficial affair for you?”

“It never is, with me. And it sure isn’t now, especially because it’s
you.
That’s why I made up the whole Grant thing. I’ve always known that I’m the one who’s going to end up with a broken heart.”

“But what if you don’t?” he asked.

“Right. Maybe I won’t.” Her flat voice sounded sarcastic, which she hadn’t meant. She couldn’t even look up from her hands.

Soft footsteps padded on the carpet. He stood beside her, and he lifted her hand off the desk and held it in his warm, strong fingers. She let him hold onto her hand, but she still couldn’t look at him. Foreboding ran through her, darkening every outcome she could think of.

Cash lifted her hand. His soft lips just brushed her fingertips. He said, “Maybe I’ll be the one with a broken heart.”

Her gulping laugh sounded more like a sob, and she covered her mouth with her other hand.

He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her to him. “No matter what happens, we will be friends afterward. You can’t go through all the things that we have together and not remain friends. You’ve helped me escape from the Russian prostitute delivered to my room, and I’ve cock-blocked Italians with eight hands who were accosting you. We’ll always have that, and we had that first. I owe you greatly for getting us out of that traffic situation in Argentina.”

“I just unbuttoned my blouse a little and flirted with the soldier,” she demurred.

“I would probably still be in prison down there.”

“Yeah, and I’ve heard that their prisons suck. They don’t even have WiFi.”

“Indeed. And that time in Egypt, when you wore hijab and sneaked in to talk to opposing counsel’s mother and told her that she could meet Harrison Ford if the deal went through? We would have never finished that negotiation without her demanding that her son arrange for her to meet Harrison.”

“Yeah, that was fun. She was so excited when she was on the set that day.”

“And that other time when we were in New Jersey and took a wrong turn in Camden.”

“You wanted to pull over and ask somebody for directions because we couldn’t get a cell phone signal to use the GPS. Those guys were drug dealers. You’re so naive.”

He stroked her hair. “I think I owe my life to you on more than one occasion. That time in Hong Kong?”

“I had to undo
three
buttons to get you away from those guys. Maybe Arthur was right and you do need security.”

He chuckled, and his deep laugh reverberated through his chest under her cheek. “We will always be friends, and I need you as my paralegal. Are we clear?”

“Yeah,” she said, and she felt a little stupid. “You probably would actually die without me to bail you out of trouble.”

He stroked her hair and down her back to her waist, and his arms tightened around her. “I think I would.”

AMSBERG V. ARBEITMAN, ROUND TWO

Casimir leaned against the closed door to his office, his arms crossed tightly over his chest. The afternoon sun was dipping toward the western horizon near the corner of the windows, and the glass darkened to compensate for the glare.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen.

When Rox finally left Grant—or whatever the hell had happened when Grant had ceased to exist—Casimir was supposed to swoop in and make Rox smile again. He was supposed to show her the wonderful life that she could have with a man who valued her. They were supposed to travel and have adventures and laugh together.

She had laughed all the time when they were just office colleagues.

She wasn’t supposed to cry.

Rox was right about one thing, though. He had said many of those things to other girls. Not all of them, but many.

He had known Rox for three long years. All during that time, she had given him no sign that she would ever leave Grant, Casimir’s fictional competition, so Casimir had indulged in affair after affair, waiting. None of the other women had satisfied him, each more superficial than the last, none of them as smart or reliable or personable or sensible as Rox—or as beautiful—and no matter how much he had tried to invest himself into each relationship, the time came in each affair when he just couldn’t pretend any longer.

Every time, when he had realized that each woman was not and would never be Roxanne, the guilt had overwhelmed him.

That was when, as Rox had said, he had
ghosted
them.

When he took a deep breath, he could still smell her perfume on his skin.

Casimir walked to his desk. A notepad with his own handwriting—odd and with violent vertical slashes, he had been told—lay on top of his myriad other papers. The name
Valerie Arbeitman
was written across the top.

His meeting with Valerie was due to start in five minutes.

He must focus on that. He must forget this insanity concerning Rox and concentrate on this meeting with Valerie.

Much hinged on his meeting with Valerie.

Her side of the story.

The state ethics panel.

Possible criminal prosecutions.

He wished that Rox could attend the meeting with him, but if it went very, very badly, he didn’t want her to lose her job, too.

He picked up the notepad and, setting his jaw, walked through the cubicle maze to the senior partners’ offices.

Valerie was waiting for him at her door. “I’m glad to see that you’re back and you’re all right,” she said. “I don’t think I said that, earlier.”

“And I’m glad to see that you’ve made a full recovery,” he said.

She shrugged. “Nearly. My left side is a little weak, and my cheek feels weird.” She pushed at the side of her face.

“No one could ever tell,” he said, keeping his voice low.

Valerie’s smile was rueful, perhaps even angry. “Always the gentleman, aren’t you?”

“I try.”

They walked inside Val’s office, and she kicked the door shut behind them. “And yet you requested this meeting to discuss my incompetence.”

Valerie was a senior partner, and she and Josie could agree to buy him out of the partnership and kick his butt to the curb with a memo. “I said that there were irregularities in your contracts that we needed to discuss, such as the net profits rather than the gross profits for DiCaprio this afternoon.”

Valerie brushed her hand in the air as if their client being potentially swindled out of millions of dollars didn’t matter to her. “We would have caught it on the next draft.”

“There isn’t supposed to be a next draft. Who did you have working on it?”

“Wren Sishi.”

Casimir shook his head. Wren was stellar. She wouldn’t have missed that. “I’ll ask her about it. You know that she saves all her drafts.”

“You’re implying that I’m lying.”

“While I was recovering from the car accident, I looked over many contracts from this law office. I found many irregularities in every contract that you had final approval on.
Many.
It seems that you were acting contrary to our clients’ interests.”

“I’m not acting contrary to their interests. I’m doing the best that I can for
everyone’s
interests.”

“The current rules for professional conduct don’t allow you to advocate for
everyone’s
interests. Just
our clients’
interests. You cannot act contrary to those. Anything else is unethical.”

“It’s important that I act in everyone’s best interests. When I say
everyone,
I mean me, and Josie, and our associates, and you.”

“This is not in
my
best interest, I assure you. I would never condone betraying even one of our clients.”

Valerie leaned on her desk and stared straight at him. “Just because you don’t know why doesn’t mean that I’m wrong, and I am absolutely right on this. I’m the senior partner, and you need to back off.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“I heard that you and Rox wouldn’t back off when you headed into the Watson negotiation with Monty Evans. I heard
all
about it.”

“We’re supposed to advocate for our clients. We must act on their behalf and do our best for them.”

“I can’t tell you everything, Cash. You’ll just have to trust me and stop pushing people.”

“I can’t trust you if you betray our clients.”

“You need to stop pushing people now. It’s getting dangerous. You were almost killed.”

“That was an accident. It has nothing to do with it.”

“Of course, it was an accident. You need to stop pushing people.”

“Tell me why.”

“Hell, no.”

“You have betrayed so many of our clients. How could I trust a word you say?”

Casimir stopped, and a tremor started in his hands. He played that back in his head.
You have betrayed so many of our clients. How could I trust a word you say?

He shook it off. This meeting was paramount.

Valerie said, “As senior partner, I’m telling you to back off. You will stop reviewing any contract that is not for one of your own clients. I don’t want to hear another damn word about any of this, and you won’t talk to Monty Evans again. Do you hear me?”

He stood. “You haven’t heard the last of this, Valerie.”

“For your sake, for all our sakes, and for the sake of this firm, I hope you’ll change your mind.” She looked straight at him, her brown eyes wide. “And for the love of God, if you are going to challenge Monty Evans again, leave Rox Neil out of it.”

“Rox is my paralegal. She goes into all meetings with me.”

“You’re fucking her.”

“She’s my paralegal first and foremost. She’s a professional woman, and I respect her.”

“I am telling you, if you feel the need to go tilting at windmills again, leave her in the office.”

“I’m not tilting at windmills. These are unethical actions. These contracts would swindle our clients.”

“Oh, that’s just your opinion.”

“I assure you that it’s fact.”

“Take the rest of the day off. You’re overwrought from coming into the office so soon after your accident.”

“I am not,” he growled.

“I have another appointment. Thank you for stopping by.” She picked up some papers from her desk and pointedly began reading them. “And be careful driving home, Cash.”

“Thank you for your time,” Casimir said, measuring out his words.