Santa, Baby

by Blair Babylon

  “Yeah, the ball and chain holding you in this law firm. If it weren’t for me, you would probably be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by now, writing learned opinions about which of the lawyers arguing the case in front of you was better in bed, the redhead with the fake boobs or the black woman with the low-cut top.”

  He was laughing harder now. “Surely I’m not so bad as all that.”

  “Worse. You’d probably have all the lawyers, the women ones anyway, in your chambers in some sort of a horrible orgy on your huge law desk, and then they’d all kiss and make up and dismiss the case. It would be the only Supreme Court session where absolutely no decisions were handed down, and you would go down in history as the Screw It All Court.”

  Casimir fell backward onto the couch, his long legs splayed, both his arms wrapped over his stomach and giggling helplessly. “Stop.”

  “All right, fine. But seriously, at least with me, you get the work done.”

  “Yes, I can trust you.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and shaking his head. “Now, did Bessie from Universal send us the DiCaprio contract yet?”

  “Yep. Got it this morning.” She waved her phone, indicating email.

  “When can I see it?”

  “Soon as I read it and flag it.”

  “This evening, then?”

  “Not if I’m gonna be pimping Patty for information about Monty.”

  He shrugged, his white shirt sliding over the thick muscles of his chest and arms and straining around his tight waist. “Come back afterward. We can get delivery from that new Thai place around the corner and go over it.”

  Rox waggled her left hand at him, letting the stones in her rings catch the sunlight again and trying to flash the spangles in those brilliant green eyes of his. “I’ve got to see my own husband sometimes. I’ll check out the file before I leave so I can look at it when I get home.”

  The law firm’s draconian security system didn’t let them access files from outside the office unless they had been checked out, a stupid process involving speed-typing security codes.

  “Oh, Grant. Leave him for me, Rox. I’ll take you to Fiji for our honeymoon.”

  They played this game a lot, too, sometimes every day. “Never. He’s six-foot-seven and a blond-bearded Norse god.”

  Cash mused, stroking the soft hairs of his short beard, “Last week, you said he was six-three, two seventy-five of pure muscle, and a Latin lover.”

  “Grant is all things to all women,” Rox said, her chin held high.

  “Is he coming to the office volleyball tournament this weekend? We could use a guard, if he really is that tall.”

  Yet another opportunity for Rox and all the other female staff to view Cash with his shirt off, displaying his rippling abs and black tattoos, always an impressive sight. A tribal-looking tattoo illustrated the left side of his body. A swirl of black fire on his round pectoral muscle spread into flames that reached over his shoulder to his back, trailed down his left arm all the way to his wrist, and slid over his rippled stomach to duck into his waistband.

  Rumor suggested that the ink ran down the cut vee of his belly, over his hip, and to the middle of his thigh, but Rox had not seen that much of his skin.

  “No,” she said, blinking. “He’s busy working on his screenplay, and that’s taking up a lot of his time. One of the series that he does stunts for is going to start shooting next month, so he has to get his script done because choreographing the stunts gets in the way of his writing. He gets really sore from being beaten and blown up all day. And he’s thinking of auditioning for ‘American Obstacle Course Warrior’ this year.”

  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, anyway.

  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 woul
d 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.

  Speedbump and Midnight sprawled in the other beds, stretched to suck up the morning sunlight. Pirate sniffed and poked around before he settled.

  Yep, three cats.

  When you volunteer at an animal shelter, accidentally adopting cats is an occupational hazard.

  It was a good thing that she volunteered at the no-kill shelter the next town over. They needed her help more than the local shelter, and if she had volunteered at the local shelter that euthanized a lot of their strays, Rox would have owned three hundred cats.

  Hiding even these three beasts from the super could be a hassle.

  Behind the cats, her living room was smothered in pearl pink velvet and lace, just how she liked it. Rose potpourri fumed flowery scent from every tabletop.

  Rox might wear dark, tailored suits to work, but she went full-blown girlie-girl when it came to her own space. One of the guys she had dated last year, Robbie, had loved it, saying that it was like being invited into a lady’s bedchamber where no man had ever entered, only to ravish her.

  Robbie had been fun, but it hadn’t quite worked out. They had drifted apart amicably after a few months.

  She went back over to the little table by the entryway and called goodbye to her cats as she fished around her purse for her keys. They thumped their tails, ready for their fully booked day of eating and sleeping while she earned the money for the kibble and cat litter.

  Just before Rox left, she slipped on the wedding ring set that had been lying in a blue bowl on the table beside a larger bowl of lemons and oranges. The cubic zirconia glittered in a stray sunlight shaft, and the thin gold plating shone.

  She had bought the rings for herself during her lunch break on her first day of working at Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg, after hearing that Cash Amsberg the Heartbreaking Superman was repelled not by kryptonite, but by diamonds.

  Cash might be a maleslut, but he didn’t touch married women. He didn’t even flirt with them. It was like he shut it all down. His flirting with Rox was just friendly banter, like girls do with their gay guy friends. It’s just all in good fun.

  He didn’t mean anything by it.

  She didn’t want to have her heart broken like all the other women in the office. They had all assured her that Cash would come for her and that she would love every minute of it, until suddenly, he wasn’t there anymore.

  Rox fell apart when people left her like that, like they didn’t give a crap about her and just walked into oblivion.

  She wasn’t going to go through that again.

  And so, since her husband “Grant Neil” had not existed, Rox had invented him.

  She had assured Cash and anyone else who would listen, yes, she was married. Her husband was a stuntman for several of the television studios, but he wanted to get into screenwriting and directing. He did a little modeling on the side. And maybe his music would take off for him.

  So, yeah, “Grant” was a ridiculous mashup of all the Hollywood wannabe clichés and thus utterly believable. No one had even questioned his existence for three whole years.

  Despite the fact that no one had ever seen him.

  A friend of hers, an agent, had found a suitable headshot of a hot model/stuntman for Rox to use.

  Really hot.

  You could see ripply abs under his tight, black tee shirt. She had folded under his real name, Lancaster Knox, and wedged it into a frame for her desk.

  Rox liked to stare at pretend-Grant and imagine that he was, indeed, her lawfully wedded husband. Sometimes she drooled.

  And for three years, Cash hadn’t turned that sexy glower on her.

  Yeah, thank goodness. She certainly didn’t want the hot, ripped British lawyer coming on to her.

  She slid the cheap rings onto her left hand, scratched her cats on the head one last time, and opened the front door to leave the apartment.

  Three cats.

  She was twenty-seven and unmarried, not even dating anyone, and enmeshed in a workaholic office so she couldn’t even meet any guys who might be prospects.

  Yep, it was official.

  At what point had Rox turned into a crazy cat lady?

  She was pivoting on her heel away from her door as it was slamming toward her, when a piece of paper taped under the door’s knocker fluttered in the breeze.

  The two words at the top, bold and in all-caps, read: EVICTION NOTICE.

  Oh, shit.

  A box was bolted over the doorknob.

  If that door shut, she couldn’t get back in.

  Her cats.

  Rox kicked the crap out of the swinging door. It banged back against the wall, and she threw herself through the doorway.

  The door bounced and punched her in the arm, but she shoved it and rolled inside before it could slam shut.

  The door closed, but she was inside the apartment.

  She sat up, panting.

  Her three cats looked over at her from their beds, vaguely amused at her antics. Pirate yawned, showing three long fangs.

  “Oh, my God,” Rox said. “What am I going to do?”

  She couldn’t leave them there. That lock was bolted on. Once that door shut one more time, she wouldn’t be able to get back in. They would be trapped until the super came and—

  Rox didn’t know what he would do. Toss them out into the landslide-prone hill behind the building? Throw them in the pool?

  Take them to the local animal shelter where they would be considered unadoptable because they were old and ugly, where they would be immediately slated for a lethal injection?

  At least they were all healthy now. They might have a week or two before they were put down for overcrowding. Or maybe three days.

  Fuck, no. She would not, could not, abandon them like that.

  Okay, it was only six-thirty. She needed to plan. Rox needed to calm down and plan.

  First of all, she wasn’t behind on her rent at all. She had automatic withdrawal set up for the first of the month, and the rent had been deducted on schedule on the first. She had checked. She always checked.

  Rox needed that eviction notice. She needed to know why.

  She just had to make sure the door didn’t close while she did it.

  From growing up in the South, Rox understood that the solution to any engineering problem lay in shoe glue, bailing wire, or duct tape.

  A fat roll of extra-strength, silver tape was wedged in her kitchen junk drawer. She pried it loose and marched to the door.

  Like Hell she was going to get locked out of her own apartment.

  Rox might be a paralegal, but her daddy was an engineer. Anything that is worth engineering is worth over-engineering.

  The duct tape cracked as she ripped a long length off the roll, and she wadded it into a sticky ball before she shoved it against the side of the door, binding the bulge in place against the latch by winding layers and layers of duct tape around the knobs on both sides of the door. She did the same with the hole in the strike plate, mashing the gluey tape to the wall. So what if it peeled off some paint? If she was getting evicted, she probably wasn’t getting her deposit back, the thieves.

  Luckily, Rox knew a few lawyers. She would take those jerks to court and get her damn deposit back later. Right now, she had to get everything she could out of this trap, starting with her cats.

  She glanced behind herself.

  Pirate, Speedbump, and Midnight were limp in their beds, basking in the morning sunlight, oblivious to the fact that they had almost ended up back in kitty jail.

  And maybe death row.

  Rox bound the du
ct tape more tightly around all the parts of the door lock, wedging the door open with her feet and yet still standing back inside the apartment. The door looked like it had grown a silver tumor by the time she was done with that part.

  She stood inside her apartment in the entryway and let the door slam closed.

  The heavy security door bounced off the duct tape, and sunlight shone off the mound of tape through the open crack.

  Good.

  Rox wedged the door all the way open by jamming a butcher knife under the bottom of it and proceeded to secure another ball of duct tape into the hinges so that it couldn’t swing even partway closed. Winding the duct tape around and around the hinges, gumming them up but good, calmed her down a little.

  When there was no way that damn door could possibly swing shut, she swiped the eviction notice off it.

  Animals was written in the box for Violations. No pets policy was scrawled underneath. Boxes for lease violation and deposit forfeited and endangerment of other residents and immediate eviction were checked below.

  Legal action was written in uneven letters, and authorities called.

  All for three damn cats?

  That was ridiculous. Rox wasn’t hoarding goddamned cobras.

  Pirate stretched and extended one paw, his claws gleaming in the morning sunlight like vampire fangs or hypodermic needles or something.

  Seriously. How the hell were three geriatric cats endangering anyone? They’d had all their shots.

  Even if they did look a little ragged.

  Okay, she couldn’t fight this right now. Cash or Josie would slap the apartment management company upside the head with a lawsuit for her soon.

  But in the meantime, she couldn’t leave her cats here, not with a permanent lock on her door stymied only by duct tape. Even a small knife would make quick work of it.

  So she couldn’t stay, and the cats couldn’t stay.

  Which meant that they all had to go together.

  This part had to be done carefully.

  Rox sidled over to her bedroom and violently shook the treats bag, nearly powdering the shrimp-flavored bits inside.

  The cats ambled in after her, checking out each other, unsuspecting but more than okay with an unscheduled shrimp-treat break.