Santa, Baby

by Blair Babylon

  At least they were there.

  Peyton took one last look over the body of the piano at Raji, standing in the wings. Her thrilled grin and hands clasped under her chin in excitement made each day of his life worthwhile.

  Every step of his shooting-star rise to fame had been detailed on one of her spreadsheets, from polishing a defined number of songs via intermediate goals, to capitalizing on his classical contacts, to working his connections in the rock world, to the initial club dates, and finally to uploading his music to the streaming services with advertising already in place.

  Raji’s spreadsheets and then project management software files were organized, so precise and detailed that Georgie had dragged Killer Valentine’s A&R VP Jonas all the way to California during another one-month band hiatus. Raji had given them both a crash course in how to use the software.

  Peyton had cracked up as both Jonas’s and Georgie’s eyes had lit up at the possibilities for long-term career planning and management team organizational structure. So much planning.

  Now, at the apex of Raji’s planning, seconds before the beginning of his first stadium-sized concert, Peyton drew a deep breath and laid his hands on the piano. The cool ivory calmed him.

  Voices broke the silence of the crowd beyond the apron of the stage.

  One Mississippi, two Mississippi, he counted in his head.

  In the darkness, the few wails swelled to screams, which expanded into a roar.

  Three.

  Peyton shouted into the darkness, “One, two, one-two-three-four—”

  His hands slammed the piano keys.

  Spotlights blasted through the Hollywood Bowl. The clamshell brimmed with light, and the glow flowed over the restless audience along with his music.

  Peyton opened his throat and his soul and sang.

  He had been born to do this.

  In the floodlights on the wings of the stage, Raji laughed and beamed at him, thrilled.

  Peyton poured his heart onto the stage in the form of love songs, all of them written for her.

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  Working Stiff

  (Runaway Billionaires: Casimir)

  By Blair Babylon

  Red Flags

  Rox was standing in Cash Amsberg’s corner office in the law firm again, listening to him rant, again.

  If he hadn’t been so damn sexy, she might have had to put a stop to this. But he was, so she just ranted along with him.

  It was kind of their thing.

  At least Rox wouldn’t get fired from this law firm for being a “hothead.” She wasn’t a hothead. She was a Southern belle with a fiery temper, a tradition harkening back to the founding of Virginia. She would have done well in bygone eras, stamping her foot beneath her flowing hoop skirts and cursing like “Fiddle-dee-dee!”

  Except for maybe that last part. Rox enjoyed a good cussin’ when the situation called for it. Not that the situation called for it too often. But sometimes, she went biblical on people who desperately needed to be told that she would smite them and salt the Earth.

  Cash Amsberg pointed to a sentence in the contract, stabbing at the thick sheaf of paper with his finger. “What the bloody hell could Monty mean by this section? He must have known we would strike it off. It’s not even a negotiating point. There’s no way we would let Gina Watson sign this. Why would he even suggest such a thing?”

  They were standing on the same side of Cash’s mahogany desk. He leaned over the contract, bracing both hands on the edge. Windows broke open the walls on two sides of the room. The afternoon California sun blazed in, glaring on the scarlet design of the Oriental rug covering most of the floor. Cash’s enormous diploma from Yale Law School hung above the couches at the back end of the office.

  Dark bookcases packed with leather-bound books lined the other two walls. The books were mostly for show because the law firm had done all their research via LexisNexis for years, but Rox had caught Cash reading the hard copies late at night sometimes, rubbing his eyes.

  He ran his hand through his hair, a sign that he was perilously close to losing his cool. She’d only seen him do that a few times, once when a Taiwanese film director had insisted that Cash play golf with him. Cash had appeared to be in good humor and had shot a perfectly respectable ninety-two, but he had returned to their hotel and ranted about The Damned Scottish Game for half an hour. Rox had laughed at his tantrum until he started chuckling about how his ball had gone into the water three times on the seventh hole.

  Rox flapped her hands at her sides, narrowly missing Cash’s broad shoulder. “I cannot believe that he would even try such a dick move. That’s why I put a red flag sticky on it, so you would see that part first. Does he think we’re redneck idiots?” She emphasized redneck with her Southern accent to camp it up.

  Cash scowled. “He must think we’re idiots. He must think we’re all idiots, every one of us, if he thought no one here would catch this.” Cash’s upper-crust British accent made them sound like the King of England conversing with a redneck colonist.

  When Cash got all heated up like this, he literally got hot under the collar, and the subtle cologne that he wore—sandalwood and cinnamon and vanilla—crept out of his sharp designer suit and crisp white shirt. She tried not to lean in to catch a whiff, but she could just smell it when he was having a good rant. She could almost taste the vanilla on her tongue, as if she had her mouth pressed to his neck.

  “This is one of Valerie’s contracts,” Rox reminded him.

  Cash ran a hand through his hair. “Surely Monty doesn’t think that Valerie wouldn’t have caught this. Was he counting on her illness throwing us in such disarray?”

  “This came in the very morning that Val had her stroke. I don’t see how Monty could have known that that was gonna happen. He’s still an asshole of the first degree, both for thinking that Valerie and her paralegals would miss this and for trying to do this to Watson. I mean, these frickin’ autobiography rights have nothing to do with the movie. It’s just a jackass rights grab.”

  “This is egregious,” Cash muttered, his British accent turning more clipped. “Monty has gone senile or something. Call Patty. Mention it in passing. See what you can get out of her.”

  Patty was Monty’s paralegal at his law firm. She was in Rox’s lunch bunch of girls who ate meals and went to movies together sometimes, mostly chick flicks. Rox went with them when she could escape from workaholic Cash, who liked to work through meals, and nights, and other appointments.

  He shook his head. “Perhaps she can give us some insight into his thought processes, such that they are.”

  Rox refrained from rolling her eyes and nearly sprained an eyebrow from the effort. “I don’t think Patty is going to do any industrial spying for us, not after you didn’t call her the next day, or ever again.”

  “She didn’t care,” he said, waving his hand to dismiss that.

  “Oh, I assure you, she cared,” Rox told him.

  Cash raised an eyebrow at her. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Did she?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Rox had heard from Patty about what an asswipe her boss was for weeks, and Rox hadn’t disagreed, not when she knew that ghosting was Cash’s favorite modus operandi to end relationships. He took women out on a couple of dates, screwed them a few times, maybe kept up the appearance of something that was becoming substantial for a few weeks, and then dissipated into thin air, poof. He became unreachable, untextable, untouchable. As far as the women could figure out, he might as well have turned into a ghost, even if they worked in the same office and saw him every day.

  Which was one of the many, many reasons why Rox would never date him.

  One of many, many, many reasons.

  Other women looked far, far up at Cash’s brilliant, intense green eyes, the dark blond streaks in his au
burn hair and his pale scruff of beard, and the hard lines of his cheekbones and jaw line.

  They dropped their panties even before he took off his perfectly cut suit and silk shirt to reveal his broad, rounded shoulders, those chiseled abs like cobblestones on his flat stomach, and the deep vee of his obliques that pointed below his tight boxer-briefs.

  They were lost before he whispered to them in that cultured, sexy accent and far before they saw the top-of-the-line Mercedes Maybach that he drove to his rumored enormous, manicured estate in the foothills. No one had ever been there, but everyone said that his house was huge without any evidence whatsoever.

  Yep, Cash was several inches over six feet tall, emerald-eyed, ripped, gorgeous, his tailored suit clinging to his athletic body, sporting a British accent, and loaded.

  Shockingly, women swooned over him.

  Even after he ghosted on them, every admin and paralegal and client in the office still flirted with him. When he walked by their desks, they pushed their boobs together with their elbows and smiled up at him, blinking rapidly.

  The one time he got a little bit of road rash on an elbow playing basketball on the roof of the parking structure, they fawned over him and brought him cookies the next day to raise his spirits, even though he had laughed the whole thing off at the time.

  But not Rox. Never.

  The afternoon sun heated the corner office, and Cash had already taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, baring the strong ropes of muscle on his forearms, the rough hairs on his tanned skin, and his tattoos. On his right forearm, above his wrist on the inside, three shields surrounded some kind of a triangular Celtic knot thing. It was small, maybe three inches across. The orange shield that pointed down at his hand had a white figure on it like a stylized lion rearing up with extended claws. The other shields were blue with three crowns and a red and white diamond checkerboard.

  On his left arm, ink trailed tendrils of black fire all the way to his wrist.

  He glared at the Watson contract as if the paper had offended him.

  Other women might fall across his desk, hike up their suit skirts, and let Cash screw them face-down on the green blotter.

  But three years ago, the other women in the office had warned Rox about Cash.

  Manwhore.

  Ladykiller.

  Heartbreaker.

  He was a walking, waving cluster of red flags.

  And Rox had been fresh meat.

  At first, she had assumed that he wouldn’t be interested in a chubby, dumpy, short, brunette Southern belle such as herself, not in an office swarming with slim California blondes.

  When he had walked by her desk at ten o’clock that first morning, Rox had suppressed the gasp that had sucked into her mouth and through her body.

  When he turned his head, gazing into her soul and her heating chest and her very cells, she gripped her mouse like she might fall off her office chair.

  She had wiped beads of sweat off the mouse afterward where she had clutched it.

  Stunning, she thought later, when her brain had rebooted. He was stunning. Looking at him made the world stop.

  No wonder he could get away with loving ‘em and leaving ‘em.

  “Why?” Rox had finally asked Melanie, one of the beautiful-blonde admins. Rox could tell Melanie apart from the rest of the herd of golden beauties by the strawberry highlights in her hair. “Why would women have casual sex with him if he’s just going to dump them like that?”

  “Well,” Melanie had mused, and her smile turned sentimental and vague. “He’s never a jerk about it. There’s never a fight. There’s no drama. He never calls a woman a slut afterward, ever, or says anything bad about her to anyone, as far as we can tell, and we all talk a lot. He won’t even confirm or deny anything. And he’s,” she cleared her throat, “attentive.”

  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?

&n
bsp; 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.

  He saw the glitter on his arm, tracked the points of light to her wedding rings, and shifted his weight away from her.

  There was only one type of woman that Cash Amsberg was not interested in.

  He did not hit on married women, not even once, not even a little.

  Rox said, “Fine. I’ll call Patty and see if she wants to grab a drink after work today.”

  Cash said, “We appreciate you taking one for the team.”

  And that was the only way that Rox was going to take one for the team of Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg. “Yeah, whatevs.”

  Cash smiled at her, his lush lips sliding apart over his straight, white teeth, and his green eyes sparkled with humor. “Thanks, work-wife. Have I told you that I love you today?”

  That time, Rox let it happen, and the muscles at the corners of her eyes strained from her epic eye-rolling. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

  He laughed, his broad shoulders lifting. “Only you, Rox. You’re my rock.”