Cash frowned. “I saw one of their contracts. It was reprehensible. Don’t let him sign anything unless we look at it first.”
“Josie Silverman always looks over his contracts.”
He nodded. “Josie is good. All right, then. But come back to the office tonight.”
And spend yet another long night curled up on those couches under Cash’s diploma, feeding each other with chopsticks or plastic forks, battling legal wits and cracking jokes, while she watched that beautiful man harmlessly flirt with her, that gorgeous man who was so delicious on the outside but poison when tasted?
Not if she could get out of it.
Rox said, “I need to spend a little time with my actual husband instead of my work-husband.”
Cash laughed. “Tomorrow morning, then?”
“You’ll get it when it’s done. You know that Bessie will try at least one thing like this,” she tapped the red flag in Watson’s contract, “for her studio. Maybe she’ll try to tie Leo down to a fifty-year right-of-first-refusal clause or something.”
Cash shook his head. “Why do we always play these games? It’s going to end the same way.”
Rox glanced at him, wary, but the seriousness in his green eyes meant that he was talking about the movie studios’ contract shenanigans. She said, “I couldn’t say, Cash.”
He pushed off the desk, his biceps pumping under his shirt, and ran a hand through his gold and bronze hair. “Until tomorrow, then. What would I do without you?”
Rox lifted her nose in the air as she walked away. “Wither away and die, I s’pose. Good night, Cash.”
She went back to her own office, a much smaller, interior room. The only window was beside the door and looked down a corridor between cubicle dividers. None of the other paralegals had a separate office, instead working in the cubicle farm in the center room, but Rox got whatever she wanted from HR. She sucked in a deep breath.
It was exhausting, sometimes, being around him, knowing that she shouldn’t, knowing that she must not, and waiting for a touch or a glance from him that never came.
THE CRAZY CAT LADY
After an entirely non-enlightening supper with Patty the night before, Rox went home, slept, and was getting ready to leave for the office the next morning, standing in the entryway of her single-bedroom apartment.
Yes, nine hundred square feet of shag carpet and Craigslist furniture were all hers.
Well, hers and her three fuzzy roommates’.
She had uploaded the DiCaprio contract to the office cloud, ready to print it out and hand it to Cash when she got there after flagging it last night. For some reason, Cash liked to go over a contract at least once in hard copy, reading the actual pieces of paper with her notes typed in little bubbles in the margins. Pointing and yelling at the contract was easier to do with a stack of paper.
Paper was much more dramatic when thrown against a wall, too. A thumb drive just went plink on the plaster and dropped to the carpet. So unsatisfying.
Rox trotted over to the door, adjusting her blouse and suit jacket, which she was of course wearing even though it was almost eighty degrees Fahrenheit out there already. Suits hid her lumpy pudge a lot better than some of the slim sundresses that the other girls wore.
Luckily, her new car had fantastic air conditioning and that new-car smell.
On the table near the door, one of her cats had squeezed himself into Rox’s purse. His long, ginger-blond fur and sumptuous gut overflowed her bag, and he swished his bushy tail and blinked his one good eye up at her. His chewed-up ears, long since healed, swiveled toward her while he purred, thrilled with himself that he had wedged himself inside it once again.
She scratched his head, feeling the lumpy scar tissue, and ran her hand down his back, careful to go easy on the hard pebble where someone had shot him with a BB during his homeless kittenhood. “Pirate, we have discussed this. I need my purse.”
He purred more loudly and blinked his yellow eye at her.
“Come on.” She slipped her hands around him—her fingers running through his cottony fur—and grunted when she lifted him out of the bag. “You need to diet, mister. You and me, both.”
She had been working a lot the last few years, staying late and getting into the office early, and working through meals. Back home in Georgia, she would have been considered a little plump. In body-obsessed Los Angeles, Rox was constantly aware that she was always the chubbiest one in the room.
Rox carried Pirate over to one of the three cat beds in the middle of the room where the sunlight shone most brightly during the day and lowered him into the nest. Hand-crocheted kitty afghans lined each bed. The one in Pirate’s bed looked a little shredded. She should buy some yarn and whip him up a new one.