Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (42 page)

They watched the token, waiting, until the nine digit number changed with a flash.

Rox scrambled to type her identification number into the computer and then type the security code displayed on the token in the next box.

She tapped the Enter key, and the law firm’s home screen zoomed into view.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “They didn’t disable my security ID, either. Those bastards must’ve really thought that we were dead. I thought that I was going to have to use Wren’s, but I didn’t really want to get her into trouble.”

Rox navigated to the folder with the master client list.

Casimir walked over to the window beside her door and peered through it, watching the dark office.

“See anything?” she asked.

“No.” He kept watching at the window, anyway.

Rox downloaded the entire client list, hundreds of names and email addresses, onto her laptop. “I’ve got the emails. They didn’t add any extra layers of security after they fired us.”

“Good. Go ahead.”

“Are you sure? I was pretty angry when we wrote this.”

“We edited it, and the clients need to know. It sounds professional. I wouldn’t let anything unprofessional go out, and I don’t think you would either. If for any reason we don’t make it to the plane, or if the file doesn’t make it to the ethics committee, the clients need to know.”

That thought chilled her. They—whomever they were—had nearly killed Casimir in that car accident, and they had made two more attempts on both of them within the last day.

Yeah, they needed to send the emails now.

Rox fired up the email management system and pasted in the letter that she and Casimir had written. Under the careful, polite language, the words seethed with rage on their clients’ behalf. The clients, all those actors and singers and musicians and writers, had been bilked out of millions upon millions of dollars, and they damned well deserved to know it.

She imported the email list, doing it manually instead of using the list in the email server to make sure that she got absolutely every client that Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg had ever had. She added her own email address at the bottom so that she could make sure that the email went out.

The email program ground, sending the emails.

Rox’s phone pinged, indicating an email had arrived. She checked it, and it was indeed their message.

Which meant that thousands of other emails had gone out, too, and thousands of clients were going to start calling Val, Josie, and other lawyers as soon as they saw them. Some of those people were on the East Coast, which meant that they were probably already out of bed.

“Okay. I’m done.” She slapped the lid of her laptop closed.

“So that’s it. We burned it all down. Val and Josie will have nothing left after the clients go after them.” Casimir shook his head. “It took Val decades to build this law firm, and it will be gone.”

“It’s chopping down a tree that is rotten to the core. She was screwing over our clients. They deserved her honesty. They deserved her best work for them.”

Casimir sighed. “Yes, they deserved her honesty, and the others at the firm deserve ours.”

“Come on. Let’s go. Arthur’s plane will be waiting for us.”

“I can’t leave,” Casimir said.

Rox huffed up. “I beg your pardon!”

“The other admins and paralegals here—Wren, Melanie, and all the rest—they deserve our honesty. They deserve to know what we’ve done.”

“Val and Josie tried to kill us! Several times!”

“They won’t do it themselves. The rest of them deserve to know the truth.” He sighed again. “I have to stay and tell them what we did and what’s coming.”

“You can’t stand up there and tell them that you just burned down the law firm and got them all fired.”

“I can tell them that Val and Josie have been cheating the clients, and they need to look for other employment. Full disclosure is the most ethical path, here. Also, I’ll be passing out my phone number in case they need a reference.”

Rox rolled her eyes at him. “They’re not going to like it. They-all might try to tear you limb from limb.”

He shrugged. “I doubt it will come to that, but you should go to the plane.”

Rox rolled her eyes harder at him. “I’m not leaving you here with those animals.”

He pushed up his sleeves, baring the dark, fiery tattoos on his left arm and the tatt with the three shields just above the inside of his right wrist. “They should be here in a few hours.”

PLEADING WITH THE ANGELS

Rox and Casimir dozed in her wide office chair for a few hours. They had only slept a little before they had broken into the office in the wee hours of the morning, staying up to write the email and strategize.

Before that, one of Brandy’s husbands had cooked a proper Italian meal that had taken five courses and four hours to eat. Rox had done her best to do justice to the homemade pasta and tender chicken piccata.

Brandy had leaned over to her, gesturing with a glass of red wine toward the solidly built man, who wore jeans and a red tee shirt with the name of some Italian soccer team printed on it. He and Casimir had immediately started talking international football. She said to Rox, “Now you know why I keep Antonio around.”

Rox nodded and slurped a string of spaghetti into her mouth. The subtle herbs and savory meat sauce on it lingered on her tongue, and she hummed with happiness.

Dang, Rox would keep a guy who could cook like that chained to the stove, too.

Maybe not as literally as Brandy did.

She was still dreaming of the lemon sauce on the chicken piccata.

In the chair, dozing on Casimir’s lap, Rox snuggled farther into his arms. He adjusted, wrapping her up more tightly, and he nuzzled her hair for a second before leaning his head back and going to sleep.

It still didn’t feel real, holding him like this. Every now and then, a wisp of jealousy ran through her that other women from the office,
a lot of them,
might have lain in his arms like this, but she stopped herself.

First of all, Rox had been supposedly married and hadn’t wanted to deal with The Randy Tomcat of Los Angeles.

Secondly, the relationships that he had had with other women had just been about the sex and the adventure, and only about the sex and the adventure. She held on tightly to the thought that they had been friends for years.

Thirdly, both Wren and Melanie had said that Casimir wasn’t all lovey-dovey with them. He had been fun and other things, but not affectionate, and he never mentioned the future or pretended like they had had a real relationship.

Casimir sighed in his sleep, his muscular chest rising and falling under her hand.

Maybe
this
time, or maybe with
her,
maybe
he
would be different.

Maybe he wouldn’t ghost on her.

Casimir had been down on one knee and proposed to her with her whole name right before the bomb had gone off.

Maybe he hadn’t been screwing around.

His eyes hadn’t looked like he was screwing around. His brilliant green eyes had looked seriously at her, maybe with just a touch of longing in his breathless voice.

She hadn’t said yes to him yet, and she fully intended to string him along as long as she could. That heartbreaker was going to
suffer.

Her whole body vibrated, hoping, pleading with the angels, that he wasn’t kidding her.

She rested her head against his shoulder, his whole body wrapped around her, and closed her eyes.

SPEECH

Rox and Casimir were standing inside her darkened office, leaning against the wall.

They had stood there, quietly talking, holding hands, out of the lines of sight of the people slowly filling the main floor. His hand wasn’t tight around hers, but his fingers held hers firmly, like he was holding on.

She asked, “What are you going to say?”

“I’m not sure,” he mused.

“Going to let the Blind Spirit of Justice move you?”

“Maybe. And hoping that certain ancestors were also demagogues, in addition to whatever else they did in life, and that it’s genetic.”

“Okay, then.”

“What time is it?” he asked, even though he was holding his phone.

Rox consulted her own phone. “Nine-oh-seven.”

“Is Wren out there?”

“Let me text.” She paused, and her eyebrows rose. “Yeah, she’s early today.”

Casimir looked at his own phone. “All right, we’ve got five minutes. Let’s go.”

“Five minutes to what?” But Casimir had already opened the office door and was walking out into the main floor area.

Rox trotted after him. “Hey! Five minutes to what?”

When she yelled, people turned. A wave of silence propagated through the large center area of the law office. At the disruption, heads popped up over the short upholstered walls like prairie dogs emerging from their holes to look for predators.

Casimir’s stride lengthened. At six-four, he was easily tall enough to see over the cubicle dividers, but he leapt up onto a desk in the center of the room. It swayed under his legs for a moment and he looked down at it, but he kept his balance.

Casimir announced, “May I have everyone’s attention, please?”

Rox almost giggled. Sometimes that British accent of his was jarring.

He snapped his fingers in the air. “Everyone? For just a moment?”

Who snapped their fingers to get people’s attention? Only a Brit. Or a guy who was Dutch but whom everyone thought was a Brit because he didn’t tell anyone anything about himself that he didn’t have to.

Rox clutched her purse more closely to her stomach, suddenly fearful for him.

Casimir said, “I need to talk to you all. The car accident that injured me a few months ago was a murder attempt. After I was fired yesterday, there were two more attempts to kill Rox and myself: a sniper shot at us as we drove home on the freeway—”

A collective gasp withdrew the air from the room, and the muttering amplified as the admins and paralegals remembered seeing the sniper shootings on the news the previous night and discussed it among themselves.

One woman asked, “They were shooting at you guys?”

He said, “We were in the SUV that was initially attacked. Rox was driving.”

The field of faces, hundreds of them, all turned toward Rox, scrutinizing her and her total lack of make-up and too-tight gym clothes that she had borrowed from Brandy.

She waved, swiveling her hand like the Queen. She could feel that her face had scrunched up into an uncomfortable grin that looked more like she was baring her teeth at them. Damn, of all the times that she should have been ready with her resting bitch face plus prim smile.

“Rox was almost killed, too?” Wren shrieked.

Casimir said, “Both by the sniper and when they firebombed the house.”

This time, the mutter swelled into chatter and talking.

Someone yelled, “A
bomb?”

“Yes. Bombs were thrown at my house last night. It burned. The house was entirely destroyed.”

Gasps.

More talking.

Grumbling.

Angry mutters.

“That was
your
house on the news last night?”

“Unfortunately,” Casimir said.

“You should sue the hell out of them!”

Rox almost laughed, and she bowed her head to swing her hair forward around her face.

Wren called out to her, “Rox, are you okay?”

Rox nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Casimir glanced at his phone. “We believe that the reason why these attempts on our lives have been occurring is that there have been some gross irregularities in the contracts that we have been approving for clients. I have found clauses in the contracts that Valerie Arbeitman and Josie Silverman worked on that are egregiously unethical. I have confirmed that these contracts were actually signed by all parties. I believe that Val and Josie were approving these contracts and allowing agents and studios to swindle our clients.”

A mutter cascaded through the room. People looked at each other, squinting and frowning.

A woman’s voice said, “But that’s illegal.”

Someone else yelled, “So is shooting people and burning down houses.”

A nervous giggle rose from the crowd.

Casimir glanced at his phone again. He looked back up at all of their friends and coworkers. “Murder and swindling clients are both illegal. That’s why I have informed all of our current and previous clients that they may have problematic clauses in their contracts and that they may have recourse in the civil and criminal courts.
All
of them.”

This time, no one said anything.

Silence spread over the room as everyone realized that all of the law firm’s clients were going to call the office that morning.
 

Every single one of them.

Except for a few who would go straight to their own lawyers.

“I’m sorry to leave you with this,” Casimir continued, “but I suggest that you all look for new employment. If you need a reference, I will be happy to provide one. I believe that Val and Josie will be too busy with their own legal and civil defenses to write references.” Casimir looked at his phone one more time and thumbed something on the screen. He held out his hand to Rox, and she moved closer to where he stood on the desk. Holding his phone near his mouth, he looked right in her eyes and said into the phone, “Go.”

“What did you do?” Rox asked him.

“One minute.” He looked out over the room, surveying everyone assembled there. He spoke loudly and said, “I regret that this law firm is ending in this manner. Swindling our clients was a criminal and unethical act. I tried to handle the problem in-house. My plan had been to close down the office in stages so that we could find positions for everyone at other firms, but they fired me yesterday, and the problems are too extensive.”

Another woman called out, “Are we going to be arrested?”

“I can’t imagine that would be the case. Val and Josie seem to have inserted these clauses after the paralegals had signed off on them. It appeared to be their actions alone.”

A sigh of relief lifted into the air above the assembled admins and paralegals.