ALEX: I’ve got to finish these case files for Naomi, but I’ll try and come by your office!
It wasn’t entirely promising, but I supposed it was the best that I was going to get. I tried to look at the documents in front of me, HR records from the last five years on Hunter, but nothing was sinking in. I threw it back down onto the desk with a scoff. “I can’t concentrate.”
Thomas looked up from his own stack of papers. There was a highlighter stuck in his mouth that he put behind his ear. “Because it’s clear this guy is a piece of shit who probably deserves what he got?”
“No onedeservesto be wrongfully terminated,” Zach pointed out from behind his own files. “But he is a piece of shit.”
That was precisely the problem. While he might be right in saying that he was wrongfully terminated for defrauding the company—nothing we could find indicated that he’d ever mismanaged things financially—he could have been fired for any number of HR violations. The production company had overlookeda lotbecause of the money his movies brought in.
What I couldn’t figure out was how it had all changed. Why fire him now? Did he finally rub the wrong person the wrong way?
“I think we should get Alex in here,” Thomas said, interrupting my thoughts. I looked at him from across the table, and he sighed. “What? Imissher. I feel like I’m going to come out of my skin if I can’t get a look at her. It’s been ages.”
“Three days at the most,” Zach said.
“Three days too long,” Thomas said, and although I felt the same, I almost kicked him for whining. It was even more annoying than my own frustration. “Go rescue her from Naomi’s office.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “Wecan’t do that. If we’re seen cherry-picking her too often, it’s going to start rumors.”
The words sobered both of them, and for the next half hour, we kept our focus. Then, my phone buzzed.
ALEX: Finished! Headed your way!
My heart leapt in my chest, but I tried to keep myself from grinning like an idiot. I was in my forties, dammit. I could handle seeing my girlfriend. “Alex is on her way,” I threw out as casually as I could manage.
Thomas’s eyes lit up. “Finally!”
I threw an empty Chinese takeout container at him, but he was able to bat it away without much difficulty. “Calm down,” I told him. “You’ll end up scaring her away.”
“I don’t think so,” Thomas said. “She’s stuck with us through her first semester at law school and polyandry... I don’t think I could do anything that would scare her.”
“She’d probably be flattered,” Zach pointed out. “She likes it when we think about her.”
Thomas snorted. “Think about her,” he said with a shrug. “Jack myself off daily to the memories of her naked and moaning my name in my ear?”
Zach and I both threw things at him now. “Don’t be disgusting,” Zach chided.
“What?” Thomas shrugged. “You do it too.”
“Do what?”
We all turned around, and Alex was in the doorway. She smiled behind her at Natalia, and then she was closing the door behind her. She was like a breath of fresh air after being held down in a puddle. Her hair was piled into a messy top-knot, but she wore a fitted dress with some kind of chunky necklace around her throat.
She was beautiful. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” I said.
Alex crossed the room and wrapped her arms around my neck. “You are too,” she said and pressed a kiss to the corner of my mouth. “Working on Hunter’s case?”
I groaned and thumped my head against her collarbone. “He’s a scumbag,” I told her. “I can definitely see why someone would fire him.”
“But is there any evidence that he would defraud the production company?”
I shook my head. “Not even a little,” he said. “Is it bad that I want him to have done it? He’s my client, but I want him to lose this case.”
Alex shook her head. “You don’t want to lose,” she said, “or you wouldn’t have brought in Thomas and Zach.” She shrugged. “You just want to see some justice for the people he’s hurt, however legally he hurt them.”
I pecked her forehead. “Right again,” I said. “Are you hungry? We ordered Chinese.”
“Crab rangoons?”