Or maybe he just feared for his immortal soul whenever Arthur was around. Rox wondered just how often Arthur felt the need to tempt Maxence, whether with liquor or women or who knew what else Arthur was into. She wandered over to the cabinets and poured herself a bowl of cereal.
“Fine, don’t support my position.” Arthur’s dry drawl suggested that he didn’t believe Maxence for one minute. “But you would still like a lift to London, wouldn’t you?”
Maxence shrugged. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
Arthur’s grin and the squint of his silvery eyes bordered on demonic. “It would be my pleasure.”
SUB MODO
Rox strode through the law firm from her office toward Cash’s, careful to skirt the long way around the cubicle farm to avoid Val’s and Josie’s offices.
Wren discreetly waved at her over the top of her padded walls, but a lot of the other paralegals kept their heads down and their gazes, averted. The mumble and mutter of the office died down as she walked through.
She holed up in her own office for a few minutes before she met with Cash in his. Flipping through the document security system just pissed her off more. Josie and Val had been into everything, all of Cash’s contracts, everything that Rox had worked on, and a bunch of other contracts, too. Obviously, they had been searching for something or trying to hide what they had done.
She skulked around the perimeter of the cubicle farm to get to Cash’s office. Something was definitely going on, and the rabble knew about it. If she asked someone, though, she might get them into trouble.
Cash opened his office door for her. “Meeting time?”
“Eleven,” Rox said. “We’ve got half an hour. Cash, do you want to look at the DiCaprio contract?”
“Casimir,” he said, shutting the door behind her.
Rox looked behind herself. “Pardon me?”
He closed the distance between them and folded her into his arms. “Casimir, not Cash. I’ve never liked that nickname. You started calling me Casimir this morning. Don’t stop.”
“I, well, okay. I might slip sometimes, Casimir,” she said, trying it out. It sounded funny, but it fit him. Calling him by his whole, real name was a little more exotic, a little more formal, and yet intimate.
“That’s all right.” He kissed the top of her head. “Do you want me to call you Roxanne?”
“Ain’t nobody but my daddy called me by my full name, and then only when he was threatening to whup my butt for being sassy.”
“I did not understand a word that you said, but I’ll assume that I’m to continue calling you Rox.”
“You’re not wrong.”
He laughed and released her. “Pull up the revised draft for that DiCaprio contract. It should’ve come in last night.”
Rox pulled her computer out of her purse and logged on. “Yep, there it is.”
Cash moved around behind her to look at the screen. He braced his arms on the desk, one on each side of her, something that he wouldn’t have done a month ago. He rested his chin on her shoulder. “Go to the compensation section, Twelve Point Six.”
Rox skimmed the solid black blocks of text on the screen. “Casimir,” she said carefully, “this says ‘net’ again. They changed it back. They’re trying to give DiCaprio a share of the net profits instead of the gross.”
“What? It can’t. We changed that in the document while we were sitting in the conference room. Are you sure that’s the right file?”
“It was the last file on the list, the most recent.” She flipped back to the screen that listed all the documents. “Yep, look. It came in at eleven-thirty last night.”
“So they changed it back? Why would they do that?”
“I have no idea, and the note on the side says that it was sub modo.”
“We certainly didn’t agree to that,” Cash mused.
Cash? Casimir. Yeah, Casimir.
She asked, “But why would they tag it as sub modo? That’s insane. It’s like they wanted us to catch it.”
“Or they didn’t take care because they assumed that no one would ever look at it. It’s possible that the agents have been conspiring to screw their clients, and we’ve been wrongly accusing Val and Josie of malpractice.”
“I would be dang hard-pressed to believe that it was all of the agents, every single one of them,” Rox said. “And besides, they make a percentage of their clients’ fees. They have no reason to reduce what their clients are paid.”
Casimir scratched his cheek and squinted at the ceiling, thinking.
“Let me check something.” Her fingers rattled over the keyboard. “No, all of these contracts are from different agents and even different agencies. If the agents are the guilty ones, then they’re all psychic because they’re all doing exactly the same thing, exactly at the same time, in exactly the same way.”