by Libby Rice
“Giving in.”
She leaned her cheek into his palm and closed her eyes. “Giving up.”
“Call it what you want. This is exactly what you demanded.”
“Right before I un-demanded it.”
He pulled away. “And you have such a way with words.”
She’d wondered how long he’d play civil. The back of her hand drifted to one cheek and then the other, preserving his fleeting caress.
“Like I said,” he went on, “call me next time you feel like doling out that kind of convincing.”
She flinched but forced her tongue to barb up. “Why bother? It didn’t work.”
“It worked,” he murmured so softly she strained to her. “Only not the way you’d hoped.” This time he was the one to look away.
Chapter 21
September—New York City
Law firm hallways sucked in general, not just Scarlet’s. They made it impossible to get around without being subjected to either crappy, yet inoffensive, artwork or a fellow lawyer on the colossal-blowhard list.
And any lawyer who doesn’t own up to such a list, lies.
C-Blow One on Scarlet’s list swaggered down the hall, past a boxy, tan pedestal supporting a bronze statue of the scales of justice. Dreadful, both of them.
She slowed, glancing to a point ahead where the hall veered in three directions, wondering which route he’d choose. She hated to lose forty minutes to his vision of the business and how others simply lacked his drive and enviable ambition. He labored longer, thought more strategically, and earned more money than her little mind could comprehend. Obviously.
A door opened and Brian stepped into her path on the right, his body blocking a table of colleagues deep in discussion. No nameless client in sight. She lurched to a standstill, eager to use her friend as a human shield. Peeking around his shoulder, she wondered if she’d missed the memo. “Did we have a department meeting? Don’t tell me I’m supposed to be in there.”
Embarrassment flitted across his features. It fled fast, but she pegged it.
“No,” he insisted, pulling the door shut and obstructing her view of the action. “Not this time.”
A rare legal breed, Brian hadn’t learned to lie. He couldn’t even muster a convincing evasion.
Innate curiosity urged her to dig, but the distance she’d felt from everyone but Brian since her return from Denmark shut her up. She couldn’t afford to piss him off. “Busy lately?”
She shot fidgeting hands into the pockets of her skirt and beat back an eye roll. At herself. “The busy” was a standard water-cooler question for lawyers, and one she fervently avoided. Inundated lawyers were good lawyers. They worked twelve-hour days, pulled all-nighters, and had a strong physical reaction to setting their mobiles aside.
Lawyers with time on their hands were bad lawyers. The ability to maintain a family or hobbies or friends meant they couldn’t find enough work to fill the many, many six-minute billing increments in the day. Those attorneys found themselves out in the cold.
A colossal blowhard never failed to work “the busy” into casual conversation. Simply mouthing the question provided the asker with an opportunity to wax poetic about how buried with work he or she had been. So many daughters’ dance recitals missed and spouses’ birthdays forgotten, all because the asker was clearly a big fucking deal.
Guess she could add herself to her own list, even though recent weeks had seen Scarlet leaving the office earlier and earlier. Yesterday, she’d gone to a movie in the middle of the afternoon. She’d returned after, hoping to find a message from a colleague or a client in need of her oh-so-capable assistance. The work gods hadn’t smiled on her.
Brian shifted on his feet. “Yeah, pretty busy. I’m stepping out for a client call.”
An uneasy feeling took hold. Overlapping meetings went beyond “pretty busy,” which meant the work dearth didn’t apply to everyone. “Need a hand? I’ve got some bandwidth.”
His fingers clenched around the doorknob brushing his hip. “We need to talk, Scar.”
A lump of dread rose at the base of her throat. Too many small signs sent a big message. Management had expressed disappointment with the Copenhagen fiasco. She’d gritted her teeth through more than one “joke” about the “talent” it took to lose a corporate client within a month of signing the engagement letter. Usually, they said, such a feat took years. Ha. Ha. She also didn’t have enough work to fill her days despite the fact that her colleagues were drowning and couldn’t keep up. And now? She’d been excluded from a department meeting, and Brian looked ready to give her a hug over what must not have been an oversight.
Crossing her arms over her chest, she inclined her head toward the room he blocked with his body. “Is that meeting what I think it is?” Out with Scarlet and in with a lawyer who either wouldn’t screw her clients or would do it well enough to keep them.
He nodded at the floor. “Give me time, Scarlet. Their search isn’t going well. How could it? They’ve gotta find a young, vibrant personality with the mind and experience of a seasoned gray hair.” The phone in his pocket buzzed, and he reached for it. “Fuck. I’m late for this call.” He shuffled sideways down the hall, half in her world and half in his client’s. “Don’t panic. I’m thwarting them at every turn.” He answered the phone and disappeared.
She stared after him, apparently too long, because as soon as Brian vanished, C-Blow took his place. Trapped, she endured a conversation made for one. He talked. She nodded, doing her best to suppress the worry that prowled out from the walls of her stomach.
“A law firm’s money is made on the margin,” he told her, “primarily when attorneys greatly exceed their billable hour requirements. Busy lawyers pay the bills.”
Yep. She inclined her head slightly, enough to show she hadn’t slipped into a coma. That little mathematical reality contributed to his immense, self-inflated value. It might be the death of hers.
Insomnia hit hard that night. After hours of silent, sleepless brooding, Scarlet caved to the sinking feeling Brian’s words had left in their wake. She slipped from the bed, reluctantly making her way to one of the wooden stools she kept tucked beneath the overhang of her kitchen counter. Firing up her laptop, she navigated to JTS’s “join us” page, full of flattering information about the firm and its people and policies. At the bottom, she clicked on a link that said “open positions.”
The darkness of her kitchen only enhanced the glowing list that popped into view. Minutes fell away while she stared at it, unseeing, mentally instructing her sweating palm to return to the mouse. All those knowing-is-half-the-battle people were wrong. Knowing what she’d find didn’t make finding it any easier.
Her hand curled into an ineffectual fist. Do it.
There, last on the list, was an entry for a “senior M&A associate.” She jerked forward and clicked the title, her eyes speeding over the small print. The selected attorney would be based in New York City. He or she would represent JTS’s business clients in “complex commercial and corporate transactions involving both negotiated and unsolicited tender offers, mergers, minority investments, leveraged buyouts, and proxy contests.” The lucky winner’s primary responsibilities would include working with in-house business teams to assess corporate valuation and negotiate contractual terms.
The time bomb ticking away in her skull exploded, and her forehead sagged over the keyboard. JTS’s job posting represented everything she’d sought to avoid in her ill-fated attempt to pull away from Ethan.
Work had dwindled to a trickle. Efforts to rake in hours weren’t panning out. And now, at a time when she had little to do, when she wasn’t busy, the firm had officially launched a talent search for a lawyer with her same experience and skills.
Her replacement.
Wave upon wave of impending doom crashed over her. Another life lesson about carelessness. She didn’t want to believe Ethan had planned this all along. That kind of betrayal would render his every caring word and touch an act, and pa
int her a gullible fool.
But wanting wasn’t doing. “I’ll destroy you. I’ll exploit every weakness you have…”
Ethan was keeping his promise.
******
Ethan barely knew where he was going. In a bleary daze, he made his way through his darkened penthouse. “Scarlet,” he growled, her name a benediction and a curse.
He ended up in his private gym, among the benches scattered between rows of free weights. Though the space was his alone, it could accommodate several men. Prowling past the heavy bag suspended from the ceiling, he approached a smaller speed bag hanging beneath a flat, circular plate. On the nights when life lingered too close to the surface, killing all thoughts of sleep, he sought out the rhythmic beat of the speed bag to silence the chaos in his mind.
Three strikes in, he let the ball fall still. For once, the sharp staccato of the bag rebounding against its backboard repelled rather than soothed. It wasn’t a honeyed voice or a gasping laugh. Instead of cracked leather, his hands ached to touch soft skin, gently rounded hips and thighs.
Scarlet, dammit, where are you?
Abandoning the speed bag, he knelt before a mini fridge. His fingers closed around a half-empty bottle of gin he kept handy for guests. Skipping the mixers, he drank directly from the source, all the tang of a pine forest flowing down his throat.
The liquor burned a path to his stomach, but the anticipated feelings of warmth and escape eluded him. Life remained a bleak, faded version of the existence he’d inhabited with her.
His demand that Scarlet get out of his life hadn’t touched her. That, or her relief at the opportunity to save face in front of her colleagues had consumed her regret. She’d collected her clothing with cool efficiency and left him falling apart on the couch in his suite, staring after her.
Alone in the cab after the deal had gone sour, she hadn’t railed at him over the injustice of her firm’s firing or pointed out that with him out of the picture as a client, the coast was clear for romance. On the plane, she’d moved—actually asked the attendant to shuffle her seat assignment—when he’d sat next to her. “I really do need an aisle,” she’d said in a dire tone, as though she’d get leg clots if she couldn’t easily pace the walkways during the flight.
After weeks, there hadn’t been a single call. No e-mails. Not even a handwritten letter telling him off in style.
The forced separation killed him, but she wouldn’t have carried through on her own. He should have let her thwart herself, let her destroy her credibility by seeing him right under their noses after swearing she’d ended the affair. He hadn’t been able to let her do herself that kind of harm.
“Lawyers,” he said on a sterile laugh before swigging more gin. “Fuck you when they show, and fuck you worse when they don’t.”
He sat heavily on a nearby weight bench, acknowledging he much preferred it when they—or at least she—showed.
Surely she’d saved face at the firm by now. Drink. Proven her eagerness to sacrifice. Big drink. How long did the woman need? Fuck, bottle empty.
He rolled back against the bench and examined the ceiling. No floating sensation. Not even a decent case of the spins. The booze might as well have doused a brick wall.
The weight bench and dry bottle kept him company for the rest of the night. His old plan obviously sucked. Minute-by-minute, a new one took shape. The next morning, he marched to the helm of a meeting at Atavos’s headquarters, determination weighing heavy.
On his way in, he’d heard Susan whisper to Billboard conspiratorially. “Ethan’s on the brink.”
She had no idea.
The team gathered to discuss more optics, this time from South Korea. Twenty-five of his best and brightest bellied up to a massive birch conference table. He looked them over, barely concealing his disgust. Each person appeared engaged. Some studied computer screens. Others contemplated charts or spreadsheets.
Multiple failed deals and here they were, a veritable beehive of activity without the parts or the capability needed to manufacture One. And whose fault was that? Fuck if he knew. Probably his.
Atavos’s head of procurement looked particularly busy reviewing page after page from a ream of data. “Mr. Mertoy,” he began, “You know we’re here about a role-based, multiple application device—One. We’ve been in talks to purchase two different optics companies. Both times, negotiations have failed. Now? We can’t acquire an optics company prior to One’s release. We’ll purchase what we need from an autonomous supplier. I need to know whether other Atavos components come from South Korea, which components, from which suppliers, and the pros and cons of working with those companies.”
Mertoy brushed a hand over his balding head and cleared his throat. “Of course.” After shuffling his papers into a neat stack, he began sifting through the sheets, setting one after another aside.
“Is the answer in those documents?” Of course not.
The man had the decency to look embarrassed. “Unfortunately, no.”
“Off the top of your head?” If Mertoy had one to speak of.
His target offered up a placating smile. “I haven’t been involved in direct purchasing for the past few years, but I can speak with our procurement specialists and include their experiences in a report to you later today.”
Ethan locked a sharp retort between his teeth. They’d morphed into one of those upside-down pyramids with too many chefs and too few cooks in the kitchen. He’d gathered his top brass to make a clearly-defined decision, and he couldn’t get any valuable information until they interviewed their underlings and readied reports.
Only Susan had arrived prepared. Looking inordinately pleased with herself, she sat still behind an untouched binder, a smile threatening but, of course, held in check. He knew the binder contained a host of her uncanny character studies.
In an alternate universe, outside counsel would have run this initial analysis. But Atavos no longer had outside counsel. He’d traded the old guard for a blond minx, and he’d fired her in a last-ditch attempt to keep her for himself.
He stilled at the thought. In one stroke of retrospective stupidity, he’d lost his counsel and the girl. Perhaps he’d get them back the same way, minus the stupid bit.
“Clear the room,” he ground out, sending Ron a look that said, don’t even think about it. Employees from the rank and file scattered like he’d thrown a grenade on the table. “You, too, Susan.”
She huffed, clasping the binder to her chest as she rose from her seat.
“Leave your report, please,” he told her blandly. He needed her intel, not her attitude, while he took the next step toward clinical insanity.
“You don’t want to hear what I have to say?” Displeasure oozed behind her frigid tone.
He sat up straight and looked around the edge of the table at her bare legs. Usually, he got a kick out of letting her boss him around. And he’d been unspeakably relieved to discover her quirky habits hadn’t morphed into something more sinister in Denmark, but enough was enough.
“Why, Susan, I do believe there is a run in your pantyhose.” His devious gaze shifted to Billboard, shutting her out as he continued. “She’s always missing the little details, don’t you think?” Back to Susan with a smirk. “Might wanna run along and fix that. Such an unprofessional display might take me from the brink to over the edge.”
Her eyes flared, and a mottled red climbed from beneath her cardigan, flooding her cheeks. In an invisible cloud of smoke and eau de sugar cookie, she slapped the binder in front of him and marched away, never pointing out that she’d kicked her tan-nylon addiction post-Copenhagen.
Scarlet would be so proud of The Minion’s legwear reformation. He smiled at the apt nickname he still couldn’t get over.
With the cavernous conference room emptied save he and Ron, he clipped the two words he’d been holding back. “Rehire JTS.”
Billboard didn’t budge. True to his namesake, his face looked exactly the same before and after hearing the
startling demand. Then, “You’re an idiot.”
He’d probably get used to the title before this was over.
“Get Brian Wentworth.” The empty table reflected the sun streaming in through the windows, calling his attention to the so-called meeting he’d been forced to disband for incompetence. Palm up, he motioned to the vast expanse of wood that stretched away from his and Billboard’s perch at table’s end. Brows arched, he issued a challenge. “Unless you feel we don’t need the help.”
His longtime right hand nodded, but without fervor or even real agreement. “I’m sorry about what happened with Scarlet.”
So was he. But Ron talked like she was gone for good. “Make sure Brian understands Scarlet isn’t to touch us.”
All rules would be strictly observed. She wouldn’t get anywhere near him as his lawyer. But meetings with Brian at her offices would legitimately land him at her side. Repeatedly. He intended to be very demanding.
From there, nature would take its course.
Ron frowned. “What’s your game?”
“Chicken.” He hoped she didn’t veer off a cliff when she saw him coming.
Chapter 22
Midnight had come and gone when Scarlet decided she’d had enough. Each night¸ she stayed at the tiny East Village apartment a little longer. A gradual weaning. In a month, she’d vacate her fortress and spend her first full night in the grimy studio she could actually afford.
With a thump, she plunked a scrub brush down on the side of the tub and sat back on her heels. An hour ago, the grout and tile of her shower had been furry. It would never look new, but the worst of the stains had faded.
On a slow roll, she rose to her feet, stretching through each cramped vertebra. A mountain of plastic bags sat on the kitchen counter. One held the final touch to her serviceable—yes, she told herself, perfectly workable—bathroom. Crossing to the sacks, she routed out a clear shower curtain. No design to obstruct her view from within.
Curtain installed, she surveyed her progress. Over the last week, she’d scrubbed every surface, from the linoleum covering the floor to the chrome rusting on the faucet. Between the shower-tub combo, the toilet, and the pedestal sink, she barely had room to maneuver. Yet she’d managed a fresh coat of taupe paint after grudgingly accepting the super’s promise that the veins of brackish mold stretching upward from the water basin didn’t present a health issue. A new chain lock gleamed against the back of the door.
