Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (38 page)

“I wouldn’t have, either.” Rox turned to Wren. “What else happened at that meeting?”

Wren crunched down farther, almost hugging her knees. “They said that we should cooperate fully with the investigators and that we shouldn’t talk to anyone else who might be asking questions, especially anybody else in the office. They said that anyone asking questions and anyone answering questions for anyone but the investigators would be let go.” She looked up, her short eyelashes nearly touching the epicanthic fold of her eyelids. “I think she meant you two.”

Casimir looked over at Rox and exhaled hard. “Wren, go back to your desk. If anyone asks what we talked about, tell them that you were asking about this scar on my cheek.” He pointed to the small patch of gnarled skin below his cheekbone. “Glass went through my face in the accident.”

Rox flinched and tried to send psychic messages to Wren to not make a big deal about it.

“Oh.” Wren squinted at him. “I guess you do have a scar there.”

He blinked. “Yes.”

“If you grow your beard back out a little, no one will be able to see it at all.” She smiled at him. “You always looked good with a little scruff. Kind of lumbersexual, except that I can’t imagine you in a plaid shirt.”

“I’ll take that under consideration,” he said.

“Okay. That’s what I’ll tell people.” Relief lightened Wren’s voice.

“Go now,” Cash told her, “before you’re in here too long.”

Casimir,
Rox reminded herself.
Not Cash. Casimir.
Jeez, this was not going to be easy.

Wren practically fled the office, her light steps silent on the carpeting. The door clicked shut behind her.

Rox looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap. “So we really can’t talk to anyone else, either.”

“No. It’s almost time for my meeting with Val anyway,” Cash said.

Rox frowned at him. “What do you mean
my
meeting? I’m going in with you.”

“No, you’re not. If this goes badly, I don’t want you to lose your job, too.”

“Yeah, you might end up living with me and the cats in a one-bedroom apartment.”

“You don’t have one of those.”

She smirked at him. “I will totally get one just to see you try to fit in it.”

He laughed. “Don’t forget that we’re going to Amsterdam this weekend, no matter what. If we both lose our jobs, maybe we’ll just stay in Europe.”

Rox rolled her eyes. “I don’t
think
so, buddy. It took me my whole life to get to California. I’m not giving up the beach and the sunshine that easily.”

“The Netherlands is right on the ocean. Scheveningen has a very nice beach, and there’s a beach area even within the city of Amsterdam.”

“I thought Holland was below sea level, and that’s why you have those dikes and windmills and stuff.”

“We still have beaches.”

“You didn’t say anything about sunshine,” she pointed out.

He shrugged. “Sometimes we have sunshine. The weather is notoriously variable.”

“Great.
Variable.”

“With luck, the weather should still be nice enough that we could sit on the beach this weekend. Pack a bathing suit.”

Rox snorted at him. “I will. A beach below sea level. This, I have to see.”

AMSBERG V. ARBEITMAN, ROUND THREE

Rox’s heavy purse, slung over her shoulder, bounced against her back as she strode toward Valerie Arbeitman’s office. Cash walked beside her, his long legs covering the ground so that she had to trot to keep up.

Casimir,
dang it. Not Cash. This was definitely going to take some getting used to.

He carried his briefcase and a few pages that they had printed out from the DiCaprio contract with the damning language in it.

When they passed Wren’s desk, she didn’t even look up at them. Her blonde hair hung like a curtain around her face.

They dodged through the cubicles like a maze, and no one met their eyes. Everyone seemed to be very busy looking at whatever was on their computer screens or their desks or their laps or their feet.

Rox hurried to keep up with Cash. Usually, he was good about waiting for her while she trotted beside him, but when he was riled up, those long legs of his stretched even longer, she could just swear.

At Valerie’s door, Cash stopped and looked back, waiting, with his fist raised to knock.

“I’m here,” Rox said, a little breathless from walking so fast.

He bent down and whispered to her, “If this goes badly, switch sides. Don’t get fired.”

“I’m not going to hang you out to dry.”

“Almost certainly, I’m going to need to take this to the state ethics board. I may need you in here to get documents for me.”

“I don’t like that at all, Casimir.” Hey, she got it right that time. “I don’t want to work someplace where this kind of thing is going on.”

He knocked on the door. “If she threatens to fire me, I’m telling you to switch sides. Indeed, don’t say anything until we see how this is going to play out.”

From inside the office, a woman’s voice called, “Come in.”

Casimir opened the door.

Inside the office, both Valerie and Josie stood around Val’s desk, waiting for them to come in. Rox could see that both senior partners were wearing their resting bitch faces as if they were going into court for a tough hearing.

Uh oh.

Val said, “Come in. We need to talk to both of you.”

Evidently, it was already too late for Rox to switch sides, anyway. She trudged in after Cash and took a chair.

Casimir remained standing and slapped the pages from the DiCaprio contract on Val’s desk. “What is the meaning of this?”

Val glanced down at the pages but didn’t pick them up to read them. “It doesn’t matter what those are. You have been interrogating the paralegals and admins about what you call the ‘irregularities’ in the contracts that the agents submit to us. This is in violation of law firm policy.”

“What you are doing is in ‘violation’ of every ethical standard. If this does not stop immediately, I will have to report this to the state ethics board. All previous contracts must also be amended to make them ethical.”

She wanted to stand up and cheer.
You go get them, Cash.

No.

Wait.

Casimir.

You go get them, Casimir.

Yeah, that was it.

Val said, “Ms. Silverman and I are in agreement. We are terminating your partnership with this law firm, Cash.”

He leaned over the desk at them. “You’re only pushing me out to cover up what you’re doing.”

Val’s voice rose. “We will buy you out at the previously agreed-upon price. Effective immediately, you are no longer employed at this firm and need to leave the premises immediately.”

“This is unethical. It’s illegal. I will make sure that they disbar you.”

“They won’t take
my
license. They may disbar
you.”

“You have been swindling clients.”

“Who do you think they will believe, a junior partner who has only been here for a few years, or
me,
a senior partner who has worked in this industry for decades? I know most of the people on the state ethics board. I went to law school with three of them and have slept with two of the others. Plus, we have ample evidence that you and Ms. Neil here have been swindling clients at the behest of the studios for years.”

“Me?” Rox grabbed the arms of the chair. “I don’t even have the authority to make changes in the documents. I can make notes but not changes.”

When Val looked at her, the attorney’s brown eyes were cold and dark. “You have been checking out the documents for Cash to modify. You’ve been using Wren’s identification codes to smuggle the documents out so that we wouldn’t know that it was you. You may have also been using Cash’s login to change them yourself.”

“I don’t even know—” But of course, Rox did know Wren’s login codes and Cash’s, too. She had helped Wren log into the document control system so many times because she was hopeless at it. Rox did stuff for Cash in his documents all the time, too.

Damn.

Val was still staring at her. “And when you drop them in the cloud, suddenly the words change to our clients’ detriment.”

“That’s not right,” she said. “We haven’t touched DiCaprio’s contract since the meeting with his attorneys. They sent over the new draft last night. But the wording was changed at six o’clock this morning. It had to have been done by someone who was in the office, and we didn’t get here until after ten.”

“I think you did it,” Val said. “I think you came in and logged in as Wren this morning. She never gets here before nine, so it must have been you. I think you two changed all the contracts.”

Casimir said, “We did not have access or editing authority on your contracts after you came back from your leave of absence, but your contracts were the ones with the clauses that swindled our clients.”

“And yet,” Josie chimed in, “we think you did it, and I’ll bet that as soon as we fire you, we will stop discovering these problem clauses.”

Rox didn’t like the way that she had said that at all. Yeah, they would stop
discovering
the problems, all right. “We didn’t do it.”

Val said, “And we think you did, and we both are in agreement that you need to leave the premises now. Do not stop at your desks. Do not speak to anyone. Security should be waiting for you outside my door to escort you out of the building.”

Indignation drove Rox to her feet. “Are you kidding me? You’re having the security guards throw us out of the building?”

“Immediately,” Josie said. The angry set of her jaw infuriated Rox.
 

“I want my rubber plant,” Rox said. “I grew that plant from a little six-inch wilting sapling that Melanie couldn’t keep alive. I want my plant.”

Cash glanced back at her, his green eyes squinting with disbelief, but he didn’t say anything.

Val threw her hands in the air. “Fine. You can go get your plant, but that’s all.”

“It’s a big plant,” Casimir said, “and it’s in a heavy pot. She can’t carry it. I need to carry it for her.”

“Fine. Go with her and get her damn plant, but the security guys are going with you. Don’t give us a reason to add assault charges to anything that we have to tell the ethics board.”

Casimir stepped to the side, and Rox walked out of Val’s office ahead of him. Two security guys were waiting outside of Val’s door, and they both trailed Rox and Casimir to her office.

Rox walked straight in her own office door, and when Casimir stopped in the doorway and held his arms up to lean on the doorjamb, she swiped a thumb drive-sized thing that was sitting on her desk and palmed it, holding it against her leg so that no one could see she had anything there.

Her huge rubber plant was still standing against the window right where she had left it, its leaves spread against the glass, blocking the view of the security guy who tried to look around it.

“Hey!” the guy said. “You aren’t taking anything right?”

“Nope,” Rox called back to him and grabbed her favorite mug. “Nothing important, anyway.”

The cup read
Work Wife.
Casimir had given it to her a few months before with a nice little bouquet stuck in it.

Yeah, she did want to take the mug with her.

Casimir set his briefcase on the carpet by the pot, and he stooped and grabbed the plant’s heavy clay container.

“Wait,” she said. “Are you sure you should be lifting that?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I can carry this. I’ve carried—” he glanced at the two security guys, “—heavier things than this.”

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself. You know what? The plant isn’t worth it. We’ll just leave it here for whomever gets the office.”

The security guy on the left crossed his arms and sighed. “We need to escort you two out of the building.”

“Come on,” she said, picking up her heavy purse and slinging it across her back again. “Let’s get out of here.”

As they crossed the lobby, Melanie ran up to them, holding a manila envelope. “Cash! Rox!” She shoved the envelope into Rox’s hands.

Rox looked at the envelope, but nothing was written on it. “What’s this?”

“The settlement offer from the apartment property management company.” Melanie glanced behind herself like she expected assassins to jump out and grab her. “I’ve got things to do.” She scuttled away.

Rox pulled the documents out and scanned them.

The number written in the first paragraph had a lot of zeroes in it.

A lot of them.

A key slithered out of the envelope and plunked on the carpet at her feet.

She said, “Holy cow! I just wanted my stuff and my deposit back.”

Casimir snagged the key from the floor near her feet and took her elbow to guide her away. “We should go. The security gentlemen are getting nervous.”

Indeed, they were fidgeting with their walkie-talkies, as if the static-crackling communication devices would coerce Rox. “This is enough money to
buy
a house.”

“It’s illegal to put a device on someone’s door without going through the proper eviction procedures, which take months. I pointed that out, including sending pictures of the device and the proper statutes, and the property management company became unnerved, offering settlements. I negotiated a nice settlement for you in exchange for not turning the documents over to the D.A. The key is to a storage unit with your other property in it.”

Rox stared at the enormous sum again. “You blackmailed them?”

Not that she was particularly sorry about it. They were going to lock her out without her cats and do God-knew-what to her cats.

Casimir shrugged. “It’s not blackmail if a lawyer does it on behalf of a client. Then, it’s
negotiation.”

SHOTS FIRED
 

Rox drove on the crowded freeways while Casimir sat in the passenger seat, fuming. Traffic flowed and eddied around them, a rushing river of cars that Rox navigated, slipping from one lane to another.

Casimir said, “Why would Val and Josie do such a thing? Now, I am absolutely going to the state ethics board as soon as I can prepare the case. If they hadn’t fired me, I probably would’ve continued to try to resolve the problems from within the law office.”