Estate. Compound. Mansion. It wasn't just a house.
The first time he took her walking around the house, he showed her the dining room, where carved chairs upholstered in maroon and gold tapestry surrounded a long, dark wood table that looked like something out of a medieval castle. The wrought iron chandeliers above looked like they could double as Inquisition torture devices. The effect, however, was beautiful and very masculine.
The second time that he sauntered around the house, only occasionally leaning on walls, he showed her the other guest bedrooms, which had carved dark wood four-poster beds, too.
"Do you have a lot of guests?" she asked after the fourth guest bedroom.
"Sometimes," he said, "and they tend to arrive several at a time. My sister and her family have visited, so there must be enough space for her and her entourage."
"Lots of kids, huh?" Rox closed the door to the last bedroom.
Cash leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment. "Four. She likes children and is breeding them as fast as she can. Luckily, her husband is more than amenable."
Rox walked slowly with him, looking at the art they passed.
If those several paintings which hung in every room and lined every hallway were worth anything at all, the fact that there were so many of them must mean that Cash had a lot of money tied up in art. If the lawyer thing ever fell through, he could open a gallery.
He walked a little farther through the house every time, but he mostly slept for several days, healing.
When he was awake, he got into his laptop and read through contracts, mumbling, annotating, and then sending them to Rox for her comments.
He might be wounded, but the crash hadn't cured his workaholism.
SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES, SQUANDERED
A few days after she had gotten Cash situated at home, Rox drove down into Los Angeles, meaning to stop in for two minutes at Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg just to drop off some insurance paperwork that Cash had signed. HR wanted it in hard copy, of course, because signing it online like every other time would be too damn easy.
Plus, she had to navigate the damn document security system to dump a bunch of contracts in the cloud so that they could work on them at Cash's house.
Dealing with that damn thing was such a pain in the ass.
First, she had to input her damn secret security code, and then she had to find one of the damn tokens with the secret, randomly generated passcodes on it and wait for it to change, then type in the nine-digit number really fast so that it would validate her access before the token changed again in eight seconds.
Some people couldn't do it. Daffodil was always begging Rox to do the token for her. Melanie was competent, but Wren was absolutely hopeless. Rox was pretty sure that Wren hadn't ever successfully navigated the document security system.
As soon as Rox walked in the office, the admins and paras rushed her like a pack of rabid possums, demanding information about Cash.
"All right, all right!" Rox called out and retreated to the larger common area because people were climbing on desks and prairie-dogging over cubicle dividers to stare at her. It was like being in the middle of a mob of meerkats, all staring at her with their wild little eyes. She announced, "He's fine! He's beat up as all heck. He's sore and sleeping a lot to heal. But he's going to be fine."
People called out questions, and she answered them. "His spleen. It's an organ thingee that's part of the immune system and does something that I don't know. He's going to be fine without one, though. It's a tough way to lose six ounces."
She listened to another question from the back, her hand cupped behind her ear. "I don't know. Maybe a month until he's back in the office? He demanded his laptop while he was still in the hospital and has already begun working, but he's going to be slow for a while. He's sleeping a lot. At least Valerie should be back soon, so it'll probably be only a few more days with one partner on the floor."
More questions. "I don't know when he's going to be up to playing volleyball, you letch."
After everyone drifted away, satisfied that Cash would survive and that Rox really didn't know much more, Josie Silverman tugged Rox's arm, whispering, "We need to talk."
Cash had probably told Josie about the Watson contract. This wasn't Rox's responsibility, but Josie would probably want a full briefing. She was kind of surprised that he had let the proverbial cat out of the bag so soon.
Rox followed and kept mum until Josie closed her office door behind them. "If it's about that autobiography clause in the Watson contract-"
Josie demanded, "Are you sleeping with him?"
"I beg your pardon?" Rox's voice squeaked at the end.
"Are you sleeping with Cash Amsberg?"
"What? No!" Rox covered her heart with her hand. "Good Lord, Josie. No, of course not."
"You're staying at his place." Josie's dark eyes were wide, serious, not squinty and jealous.
Rox relaxed a little. She didn't think that Josie would start a slap flight over Cash, but he inspired some sort of weird mania in women. "He needs someone to take care of him. He just had surgery. He's as weak as a blind kitten."
Josie pressed her palms flat together in front of her chest like she was praying. "So you guys aren't involved."
"Not at all. That's how I've stayed his paralegal this long."
Josie nodded. "Okay, because if you're going to be there for him, to take care of him, then you need to stay out of his bed. Otherwise, he might push you away when he really shouldn't."
Rox scrutinized Josie, watching for all the little tells that Cash had taught her to figure out when someone was lying their butt off. "Josie, were you involved with him, too?"
She rolled her eyes. "Look, it was a while ago, and I can still work with the man."
"I knew Valerie had a fling with him, but I didn't know about you."
"Well, I never talked about it, and he's a British clam."
"Dutch," Rox said. "He's not British. He's Dutch."
Josie raised her eyebrows, her manicured, lined arches rising as high as the Botox would allow. "His accent is Royal Shakespearean Company British."
"He's Dutch." Rox nodded.
"Well, don't go Dutch with him, so to speak." Josie turned and elbowed Rox in the side.
"Really?" Rox sighed. "Is that really the best dirty joke you could come up with? You can usually do so much better than that."
"I know. I think they shot this last round of filler directly into my brain and it all calcified in there." Josie patted her prominent cheekbones. She looked about forty from the tiny lines around her eyes, but you could never tell in Los Angeles.
"Something about tu-lips, maybe?" Rox asked.
"Yeah, two lips. That would have worked. Or Cash on delivery."
"Yep. So many opportunities, squandered." Rox shook her head. "I expected better from you."
Josie shrugged. "I'm not always on my toes. This is why I'm not a litigator."
"But seriously, no. I have no interest whatsoever in getting involved with Cash. I'm a married woman," she flashed her fake rings around to prove her point, "and I want a long, fruitful, lucrative career working with Cash Amsberg and this law firm. I will never get involved with him. I have fruit flies flitting around my office that have been around longer than most of his girlfriends."
IRREGULARITIES
"Look at this," Rox said to Cash. "I'm dumping one of Valerie's contracts from my account into your LAN for you. Look at what I've highlighted. Section four point two point three point one."
A week had passed since he had been discharged from the hospital, and they were sitting out on the deck in the cool ocean breeze. Rox was lying in the sun, dressed in shorts and a tank top, while Cash lounged by the house in the shade, reading the contracts on his laptop. He had been awake for several hours, puttering around the house, slowly beginning to make his way back.
The ocean breeze filtered salt scents through the air, carrying the sounds of children playing on the beach far below. A gust whipped Rox's long hair around her head, the brown locks flying and obscuring her view of the house and sunlit wood.
The three cats slept just inside the closed French door. Even though they and Rox had lived in Cash's house for nearly two weeks now, they were still insecure Velcro kitties, following Rox around constantly and padding after Cash in a small herd when she ran to the law office or to grab supplies. When she came back, they were usually sleeping around his chair or on a couch beside him.