“Fiend. I think today we’ll just stick to you washing my back. I need to get home and work. You’ve been a distraction the entire weekend. A good distraction, but I need to catch up before I get to the office tomorrow.”
Gray’s soapy hands rose to my shoulders, and he rubbed. “Can we do that together?”
“What? Work?”
“I have to go to the west coast tomorrow afternoon, and I’m not ready to give you up yet.”
“Sure. But you might get sick of me. We’ve been together all weekend.”
“Sweetheart, I plan on us being together a hell of a lot longer than a weekend.”
Chapter 22
* * *
Layla
Gray: I think you’re turning me soft.
I tossed my glasses on my desk and sat back in my chair with a schoolgirl smile. The text was a welcome break after the Monday I’d had. I’d spent the morning in a tough deposition and early afternoon reading a boring case in my office. What should have taken me a half hour had already taken me almost two. I really needed to finish up because I had a new client coming in soon.
Layla: I hope it isn’t a part I like hard…
Gray: Shit. Don’t say hard. I just landed in L.A., and I’m in a cab on the way to meet a potential business partner. Now I’m going to have to make a stop at my hotel first.
Layla: LOL. What part of you is turning soft, fiend?
Gray: The inside. Is it possible to be pussy-whipped after only being inside said pussy for two days? I just heard a damn Taylor Swift song while walking through LAX and thought of you.
I sighed.
Layla: What song was it?
Gray: Fuck if I know. I said I was pussy-whipped, not a pussy.
Layla: I think you need counseling. What time are your meetings today and tomorrow?
Gray: Tonight at five and the other at eight, L.A. time. It’ll be late your time after my dinner meeting ends, so I’ll call you tomorrow. I moved up tomorrow’s meeting from the afternoon to the morning so I can take an earlier flight home. I want to make it back to take you out to dinner tomorrow night.
Layla: Okay. Any special reason?
He typed back.
Gray: Yes. I miss you.
The man could seriously make me swoon. Just as I went to type back, my secretary buzzed. “Your three o’clock appointment is here.”
I hit the intercom button on my desk phone. “Okay. Thanks. Give her the standard retainer agreement to read over while she waits. I need about ten minutes to clear my desk and run to the ladies’ room.”
“You got it.”
I allowed myself another minute to read back through my text exchange with Gray, treating the messages as fuel to get through the dragging day. For a woman who’d been terrified of a relationship with him not too long ago, it certainly seemed like I’d gotten over it. We’d spent Friday and Saturday evenings together at different parties, then spent Saturday night through Sunday afternoon having sex as many times as humanly possible. Sunday evening we’d both caught up on work while sitting across from each other in my living room. We’d passed takeout containers back and forth and shared silent smiles until we finished at eleven o’clock and turned in together. It felt like the best of both worlds—the excitement of something new, yet the comfort of something familiar. I even kept his dog when he left town this morning, rather than force the sweet little guy into a doggy hotel.
I really needed to get my ass in gear and not keep my appointment waiting too long. My fingers hovered over the keys, debating my response to his text for a few heartbeats. Screw it. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Layla: I miss you, too.
***
Mackenzie Cartwright, my afternoon consultation, entered my office with one of those fancy strollers and a sleeping little girl. Can’t say that had ever happened before. Aside from the fact that eighty percent of my clients were men, the women I occasionally provided services to kept their business and personal lives very separate. I didn’t have a clue whether most of them even had a family.
I extended my hand. “Layla Hutton. It’s nice to meet you, Miss Cartwright.”
She corrected me. “It’s Ms.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.” I waved to the three guest chairs on the other side of my desk. Please, have a seat. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“No, thank you. But if we could please keep our voices down so my daughter doesn’t wake up, that would be great.”
“Sure,” I said, realizing I hadn’t actually lowered my voice at all. “Sorry.” I whispered. “Of course.”
I walked around my desk and waited for Ms. Cartwright to settle in. She wore a light jacket—even though it was probably seventy-five degrees out today—and dark sunglasses. But she took her seat without removing either.
Okay. Whatever.
“So…the paralegal who did your intake and set up the appointment said you have a partnership disagreement you want advice on?”
She seemed to be staring at me. I waited in awkward silence for her to finally answer.
“That’s right.”
“Why don’t you start from the beginning?” I looked down at the client intake form the paralegals complete during a phone interview before we bring on a new client. “It says here that you suspect your partner is misappropriating funds?”
She stared at me some more. This was the oddest initial client meeting ever. Again, I waited for her response through a long, awkward silence.
It gave me the chance to take a good look at her. She was attractive, but a little too thin. Her high cheekbones, which could have looked modelesque with another fifteen or twenty pounds, instead jutted from her pale, grayish skin. Upon closer inspection, I thought her thick dark hair, which covered a good portion of her tiny face with heavy bangs, might actually be a wig. I tried to see her eyes, but they were hidden behind the dark tint of her oversized glasses.
At some point, the waiting and checking each other out just became weird, and I felt the need to prompt her response again. “Have you spoken to your partner about the issue yet?”
“Yes.”
Okey-dokey, then. I was only going to get one-word answers, apparently. Normally these were the types of responses I got from the client of opposing counsel during a deposition, not from my own. Clients seeking help usually couldn’t wait to tell me their stories.
“And what is your partner’s position on the misappropriation? Does she admit to having taken the funds?”
“He.”
“Oh. Okay. Does he admit to having taken the funds?”
“No.”
“Is he still a signatory on the partnership bank accounts?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Well, the first thing we can do is go to court and ask for an injunction that restrains him from being able to withdraw any money or cash any checks without both your signatures. That way, you’re still able to utilize the partnership funds for legitimate business purposes you can agree on, but neither of you will be able to make a unilateral decision to withdraw for personal use.”
“Fine.”
“Do you have an accounting of the funds that you believe were misappropriated?”
“No.”
“How about a rough idea?”
She stared at me some more.
Frustrated, I motioned with my hands for her to speak. “Is it…one thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand? It doesn’t have to be exact. We’ll call it estimated at approximately…”
“Six million.”
I raised my brows. “Six million?”
“Yes.”
I felt like I was being punked. Who comes into a law office to discuss their partner stealing from their business, yet doesn’t want to actually provide any information, and when the estimated theft is dragged out of them…it turns out to be six million dollars?
I put down my pen and stopped taking notes. Something was definitely off. “And these funds…these were taken from business profits?”
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She shook her head. “They were funds we both contributed from a prior business venture we were part of. Transfers from our old firm.”
“Start-up investment capital, then?”
“Yes.”
“You each contributed an equal amount of the start-up funds?”
“I’m not sure.”
I squinted. “Okay. So eventually, if we went to a trial on something like this, we’d have to prove who put in what and where it came from. Would that be a problem?”
A sweet little voice stole both our attention. “Mama.”
With a giant stretch, the sleeping beauty in the stroller came to life. The little girl was gorgeous. A massive head full of dark curls, pert little nose, and pale green eyes. I smiled at her, and she shot me a toothy grin before covering her face with the blanket, playing shy.
Apparently, her mother’s bizarre, curt speech only extended to me. The woman leaned over to her daughter with an ear-to-ear luminous smile and pulled down the blanket a tiny bit to expose the girl’s eyes.
“I see you,” she said in a sing-songy voice.
The little girl shrieked and pushed the blanket down, revealing the same big smile as her mother. I watched the two of them, fascinated by the sudden change in the woman. Her cold had turned off as if her daughter were the sun that warmed her. They played for a minute, and then the woman unlatched the safety belt from the stroller and lifted the little girl out and onto her lap.
Her beautiful pale eyes were framed with the thickest dark black lashes. “Your daughter’s eyes are stunning.” I said.
“She gets them from her father.”
I couldn’t stop looking at the little girl. With pale eyes like Gray and dark hair like me, she looked like a child the two of us could have together someday.
I shook my head at that thought. The fact that my brain had even just gone there unnerved me a little.
“Say hi, Ella.” My strange client had become a different person. It was as if she’d forgotten how to be friendly until she had her daughter’s smile as a reminder.
“Hi!” She waved.
“Hi, Ella,” I said. “How was your nap?”
The little girl smiled and lifted a hand to her chin, almost as if she blew me a kiss.
Her mother pushed one of her unruly curls behind the little girl’s ear, and I noticed she wore a hearing aid. Ah. Sign language. She hadn’t blown me a kiss.
“Well, I should probably be going,” the woman said. “What do you need to get started?”
“The names and addresses of the parties, and the name of the bank and account number where the funds were stolen. That should be enough to at least get us a temporary injunction for the bank.”
She rattled off two bank accounts almost faster than I could jot down the numbers. The one-word woman certainly could machine-gun off information now.
“Great. And your partner’s name and address?” I asked.
She abruptly stood and started to strap the little girl back into her stroller. Once she finished, she adjusted the sunglasses on her face and looked at me. “Aiden Warren.”
Aiden Warren… Why did that name sound so familiar to me?
I tilted my head. “The name is familiar. Would you happen to know if he was ever a client here? I’ll need to check for a potential conflict of interest, if he was.”
“I don’t think so. But I believe we might have a mutual business associate.”
All of a sudden, a memory popped into my head. It was a conversation I’d had with Gray.
“When did you realize it was Max who had set you up?” I’d asked.
“About a month after I started my sentence, a buddy of mine came to visit. He’d been on the subway and happened to see Max, only she didn’t see him. She was too busy sucking face with Aiden Warren.”
“So you got suspicious because she was cheating?”
“Aiden Warren was the guy who we thought set us up.”
I blinked a few times. “You’re…”
Her face remained expressionless. “Mackenzie Cartwright Westbrook. My friends call me Max. And, yes, she is his daughter.”
Chapter 23
* * *
Gray
Where the hell are you?
I’d turned on my phone as soon as we touched down, but still had no response from Layla. After my delayed flight, it was already almost eight o’clock here on the east coast. I’d assumed when she hadn’t responded earlier in the day that she’d been busy with work. But my messages were showing as read, and she must’ve had two minutes to shoot me a quick response by now.
Stepping off the plane with my carry-on luggage, a bad feeling came over me as I headed to the airport exit. I dialed Layla’s number. It rang once and went straight to voicemail—which meant she’d pressed ignore.
I wanted to think the best of the worst—I’d pissed her off somehow, and she was letting me know it. But the protective part of me couldn’t help but worry. What if she’d been walking to lunch and some asshole driver was texting and blew the red light while she was in the crosswalk? Or she got sick in the middle of the day and was sitting in an ER somewhere. My strides ate up the walk out of the airport. Al was picking me up. He’d be idling somewhere nearby since you couldn’t sit outside of JFK waiting for a passenger, so I texted him to pull around to the arrival terminal.
“Layla’s apartment.” I spoke before even slamming the door shut.
“You got it, boss.”
Al looked in the rearview mirror before pulling away, but also checked on me. “Good trip?”
I settled back into the seat. “Yeah. Just a long day.”
Traffic was light, so when we arrived at Layla’s, it was just about nine o’clock.
“Give me about ten minutes, and I’ll let you know what I’m doing.”
“You got it,” Al said.
I looked up at Layla’s window when I got out of the car. It was dark and showed no sign of anyone being home.
Her building had a vestibule with a locked door. A tenant had to buzz you in to unlock it. I pressed the bell and waited for her voice to come over the intercom.
But it never came. Three buzzes and one last-ditch attempt to get her on the phone were all fruitless. I ran my fingers through my hair, the knot in my stomach pulling tighter.
“1275 Broadway, Al.” I slammed the car door shut. “Layla’s office.”
Al glanced back again. “Everything okay?”
“I hope so.”
***
Archibald Pittman walked out the front door with another man just as my car pulled to the curb. The smart thing to do would have been wait until he was gone, but the ride from Layla’s apartment had elevated my anxiety to a whole new level. There was no fucking way I was wasting thirty seconds just to avoid her boss.
Striding to the door, I looked down at my phone to avoid making eye contact. It didn’t stop Pittman from noticing me.
“Grayson?” He stopped his conversation and called to me while I tried to pass.
I looked up. “Archie. Good to see you.”
“Are you heading upstairs at this late hour?”
I pulled an excuse out of my ass. “Time-sensitive contract, has to be sent back to the west coast tonight.”
“Glad to see my staff is looking after your needs.”
“Yes.” I offered a curt nod, anxious to get inside the building. “Well…time’s ticking. You have a good night.”
I was already four steps closer to the building before he could finish reciprocating his goodbye.
The elevator opened to Layla’s floor, and I was relieved to find the double glass doors still open. Of course, the reception desk was empty at 10PM, so I weaved my way into the inner offices. The hallways were lit, but most of the office doors were closed. I made the final turn, a left, and saw that the fourth door down—Layla’s office—was still open, although the lights were off.
I didn’t expect to see anyone, and since it was dark, I almost missed her when
I first entered her office. But the lights suddenly flickered on. They must’ve been on a motion sensor that I’d activated by stepping inside. I found Layla sitting at her desk looking right at me.
My brows drew down. “Were you sleeping?”
“No.”
“What’s the matter?” Papers were scattered all over her desk, which was normally neat and organized. A few were even on the floor.
I took a few steps closer and got a better look at her face. The skin around her eyes was puffy and red. She’d been crying.
“Layla, answer me. Did someone hurt you?” My blood started to pump at what might’ve happened. All the worst thoughts started to run through my mind. She was alone in the office at night sitting in the dark…her desk was a disheveled mess…she’d been crying… Did someone attack her?
She stared, saying nothing. I walked behind her desk and turned her chair to face me. Crouching down, I tried to remain calm and keep my voice steady. “Layla. Talk to me. What happened, sweetheart?”
A page on the edge of her desk caught my eye, and I turned my head, sure I was seeing things. But I wasn’t.
I picked up the paper. The picture was a few years old, but there was no doubt it was Max. I remembered the article well. Kiplinger’s had done a story on the rise of women traders, and Max had been featured, along with a few other industry up-and-comers. The piece had come out a few months before we opened our firm.
My eyes traveled over the rest of her desk.
What the fuck?
I picked up another paper—an article about our partnership.
Another paper—the UCC filing on our partnership.
Another—copies of my criminal court sentencing documents.
The entire desk was covered in papers about me, Max, or our now-defunct firm.
Layla was looking at me when I turned my attention back to her.
“What happened. Why are you researching Max?”
She looked away, staring out her office window into the darkness outside for a minute before turning back. “I met her today.”