Rox frowned. “Like, he listens to you?”
“Yeah, that, too.” Melanie twiddled with a piece of paper on her desk and wouldn’t look at Rox.
“You mean that he told you that he loved you?”
“Oh, no. He’s not mushy at all. A good time is had by all, but he doesn’t lie about what’s going on. He doesn’t talk about ‘love’ at all.”
“But there’s something else,” Rox prompted. “He’s attentive—”
Mel cleared her throat. “In bed. I mean, you know. He’s good in bed.”
Rox shrugged, wanting to reach over and snatch that shredded paper away from the blonde. “A lot of guys are good in bed.”
Mel glanced up at Rox, her blue eyes serious and direct. “Not like him.”
Rox had tugged her sundress lower on her thighs the whole afternoon that first day, but after that, Rox had worn professional-class suits, either skirts or pants, but definitely suits, and wedding rings.
Since then, in the three years that Rox had worked with Cash as his paralegal, he had humped and dumped at least fifty women, and those were just the ones she knew about for sure. The actual number was probably higher.
He didn’t seem to have a “type,” either. He liked the skinny-willowy ones and the shortie-curvy ones, the pale redheads and the delicate blondes and the gorgeous raven-haired, the porcelain-skinned and the golden-tanned and the cocoa-dusted, the nubile nineteen-year-old interns and the silver-fox lady partners, and all the women in between.
Cash even sent out discreet, non-threatening sexual feelers to the seven lesbians who worked at the law office, just in case any of them were actually a little more toward the center of Kinsey scale than they had previously thought themselves. One was. For two and a half weeks, Ginger declared herself bi-for-a-guy, which is not the usual meaning of that term but she owned it. She got along with Cash better than any of the other women, afterward.
Rox had watched them all traipse into Cash’s bed and then out of his life.
All the admins stared at Cash with weepy doe eyes. All the other paralegals teared up or blushed when they saw him stride through the office. The women attorneys were businesslike and courteous to him, but their glances turned sharp when he wasn’t looking.
The clients, however, still flocked to him, flirted with him, and went for round two in record numbers.
And then he ghosted them again.
The actresses didn’t seem to care much about his retreats. They were used to ninety-day shoots, so to speak.
The models probably didn’t have the attention span to notice his absence.
And, for some unholy reason, the guys in the office loved him. You would think that, with Cash sopping up all the available women, that the men would be competitive or derogatory, but they were all bestest buds with him. He was a great guy, always up to go have a beer with, or to watch a game with, or to be on a league team with.
He charmed them, too.
But Rox was the only person in the office who could work with him.
Now, after three years, every time Rox went in for quarterly evaluations with the senior partners, her paycheck fattened, just by her suggesting that she might be looking at other, less tempestuous law firms. They couldn’t let her leave, not with just about everyone else emotionally unable to work with Cash.
Some of the women threw themselves at him, hoping for another taste. He usually accepted their offers, but the ghosting came sooner the second time or the third. Some of them stared at the floor and mumbled around him, stealing glances at his chest or lower, but dodged when he came too close, unwilling to go through it again.
It was a matter of concentration and efficiency, really. The women imagined his hands taking the sheaves of paper from their fingers for hours, imagining a brush or a touch, and failed to get the damn work done.
And so Rox made out like a proverbial bandit.
She had bought herself an awesome sports car last month even though she knew she should be saving for a down payment on a house, and she grinned just thinking about the drive back to her apartment.
But sleep with beautiful, brilliant Cash Amsberg?
Never.
And he had never hit on her, anyway. Not even once. Not even a little bit.
Not in any serious way. He joked around a lot.
But she could tell that he was just joking. It was pretty obvious.
Cash wasn’t particularly a chubby chaser, anyway. Not only could he have any woman whom he wanted, he actually had them all, one after another.
“Well, talk to Patty anyway,” he said, poking the Watson contract again. “See if she’ll do it for you.”
Rox flicked the red plastic tag hanging onto the margin of the page. The sparkling stones in her wedding rings caught the afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows and threw spangles over the office for a moment, illuminating the heavy desk and running down Cash’s bare arms.