He shot straight up, looked down, blushed and covered himself with the sheet. “Eight-thirty? Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”
“Because I had to get showered and dressed. Now you’ve got to get out of here right now.”
His eyes were bloodshot and his hair tousled and he looked as thoroughly hungover as Drue still felt. “Okay, okay, I’m going.” He found his briefs on the floor and put them on.
Of course, she thought, they were Ralph Lauren underpants.
“Shit.” He looked up at her. “I can’t go to work like this.” He held up the shirt and shorts he’d worn the previous night. “Everybody will know I didn’t go home last night. And I don’t even have my car here. I took Lyft last night.”
She was digging around in the tiny closet for a pair of shoes, any pair of shoes. Finally she found a pair of Gap navy espadrilles she hadn’t worn in years.
“So?”
He pulled on his shorts. “So, everybody saw me leaving Sharky’s with you last night. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out I must have spent the night with you.”
She sank down onto the bed. “Oh God.”
He turned puppy dog eyes toward her. “I told you this was a bad idea.”
“Shut up,” she snapped, shoving her feet into the shoes, which were, predictably, too tight.
“Look, you’re right. It was a bad idea. The worst idea ever.” She narrowed her eyes. “So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m leaving here right now to go to work. You’re leaving too. Call in sick or dead or whatever you want. But if you ever, ever breathe a word about last night to anybody, I will hurt you. Do you understand?”
“It’s not my proudest moment either, you know,” he said. He reached into his pocket and found his phone and billfold. “Look. Can you at least give me a ride up to Gulf Boulevard? It’ll be easier to call a Lyft from there.”
“Oh hell no,” she said. “Brice and Wendy live three miles down the beach. What if they’re passing by on the way to work and see me dropping you off? No way. You can either call for a ride from here or walk up there on your own.”
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’m going.”
“Yes. You are.” She poked him in the chest for emphasis. “And remember. This never happened. And it will never happen again.”
* * *
Drue sat very still in the driver’s seat of the Bronco. “Please, OJ,” she whispered. “Please in the name of all that’s holy, please start.”
She turned the key in the ignition and gently pumped the accelerator. “Please start. Please start. Please start.”
The motor caught! She gave it a little more gas, nodding in encouragement. “Attaway, baby. Attaway.”
As she pulled out of the motel parking lot she glanced to the left and spotted Jonah, head down, shirt untucked, slinking toward the motel’s coffee shop, phone in hand. The walk of shame. She knew it well.
6
Drue slipped into the bullpen at 9:55 on Friday. She went directly to her cubicle, donned the sweater she kept draped across the back of her chair and reached for her headset, congratulating herself on three days of avoiding eye contact with Jonah Kelleher. If she was careful, she could make today four days in a row.
Ben, whose cubicle was closest to hers, was on a call, his fingers racing across his computer’s keyboard as he listened. He nodded at her, then glanced meaningfully up at the clock on the wall of the bullpen.
Drue shrugged and sat down. Now Ben jerked his head toward the bullpen door. Incoming, he mouthed.
She heard the distinctive click of Wendy’s spike-heeled Louboutins on the wood floor as her tormentor approached.
Quickly, she powered up her computer and switched on her phone, praying that the next call into the firm’s twenty-four-hour-a-day phone bank would be routed to her.
“Drue?” Wendy had wasted no time in hunting her down. Her voice was low and sultry. Jonah swore that Wendy’s résumé included a stint doing phone sex. Now her pronounced Southern drawl drew out the vowels to three syllables.
Drue glanced up. “Hi. What’s up?”
“We need to talk,” Wendy said. Her voice frowned, even if her forehead, freshly Botoxed, could not. “You’re an hour late … again. I can’t cut you slack just because you’re the boss’s daughter, you know—”
The phone icon miraculously flashed yellow on Drue’s computer screen.
“Can’t talk right now,” she said, pointing at the screen. “Got a call.”
Without waiting, she launched into the scripted greeting she’d easily memorized.
“Campbell, Coxe and Kramner,” she said crisply. “You’ve reached the Justice Line. This is Drue. How can I help?”
Wendy didn’t budge.
Drue’s caller was a white male. Early twenties, she guessed.
“Yeah, uh, look here. I got hurt, pretty bad, actually, got hit by a taxi, you know? And I saw your television commercial this morning, and, uh, my leg is hurting pretty bad—”
“Sir?” Drue broke in. “Can we back up for a moment? I’m going to need your name and address, date of birth, all that information?”
She’d pulled up the firm’s questionnaire on her desktop computer, filling in the blanks and then working down the rest of the list of questions.
He said his name was Martin Sommers. “But you just call me Marty, okay?”
“When, exactly, did this accident occur?”
“I guess it’s been a couple weeks. I kinda lost track of time.”
The call was a loser, she already knew. Another time, without Wendy the Step-Witch breathing down her neck, she would have cut this potential client loose without another thought. He couldn’t tell her when his accident had occurred, and if he’d been hit by one of the local independent cab companies, whose insurance companies were notoriously shady, they’d have no case. But Wendy didn’t need to know that. For now, she just needed to get Wendy off her back. The way to do that was to keep Marty Sommers talking.
“I see,” Drue said, nodding her head encouragingly. “Head-on collision? What were your injuries?”
“Well, uh, I banged up my knee, busted my lip. Smashed the hell out of my cell phone. And it was only a year old, ya know? If nothing else, that taxi company needs to buy me a new phone…”
Wendy showed no sign of retreating to her office, so Drue kept going, winging it. She clicked yes on the boxes of the referral form, the one that would be forwarded to the big man himself, if enough yeses were checked. In reality, the box she’d just checked should have been a no. A hell, no.
“Oh wow.” Drue clucked her tongue sympathetically. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Sommers. That sounds incredibly painful. And the emergency room noted all those injuries on your discharge forms?”
“Call me Marty, okay? Now, what was that you asked about the hospital?”
She repeated herself, speaking even more slowly this time. “When you were released from the emergency room, were your injuries noted on the discharge papers? Did you keep those documents?”
“Oh yeah. That piece of paper they give me? See, I don’t think anybody wrote that on anything. Like I told the nurse there, I just needed something for the pain. Like, a prescription for Oxy? My knee was swole up something awful.”
“Do you think you can find your discharge papers, Marty? It’s kind of important.”
Wendy made a show of tapping her shoe. Tap. Tap. Tap. She poked Drue’s shoulder with a long pink acrylic nail, then twirled her forefinger in the air, the signal that Drue should wrap up this call.
“Oh my gosh!” Drue’s eyes widened in feigned horror. “Shattered pelvis? Broken clavicle? Concussion? Have you regained vision in that eye yet?”
“Nobody said nothin’ about a shattered pelvis,” Marty said. “And I can see pretty good. My head does still hurt, though. Like I said, I really think some Oxy would help a lot. I mighta thrown the emergency room paper away. They treated me like I was some kinda drug addict or something.”
; “Very disturbing,” Drue said, clicking all the yes boxes on the intake form. “And you’ve been out of work for how long?”
“Well, I’m actually not working right at the moment. See, my tools got stolen outta my truck a couple months ago…”
Wendy, finally sensing that Drue had a live one on the line, sighed loudly.
“Come see me when you’re done with this call,” she hissed, turning and walking rapidly toward her office, her hips, encased in a short, ultra-tight skirt, swaying gently.
Drue glanced over and saw Ben appreciatively following the office manager’s retreat.
Marty was still talking. “So, that television commercial I seen, it says Brice can get me a check. Like, when can he come see me?”
“See you?” Drue’s mind was already racing toward her inevitable confrontation with Wendy.
“That’s what I said,” he said, sounding peeved. “That cab come out of nowhere, right when I was leaving the club. I coulda been killed.”
Drue sighed. “Which club was that?”
Marty coughed delicately. “It was one of those clubs in Tampa, over there on Dale Mabry. I can’t think of the name of it right now. Kinda over near McDill?”
“A strip club? You were leaving a strip club?”
“Gentleman’s club,” he corrected.
“I see,” Drue said. “And the police were called at the time you were hit by the cab, is that correct?”
“Huh? No way. I mean, we didn’t think the cops needed to get involved.” He lowered his voice. “My friend, he mighta had some weed on him. Strictly for medical reasons. He gets seizures sometimes, you understand.”
Drue looked at the big whiteboard at the front of the room. It had a hand-scrawled scoreboard, listing each of the cube rats, calls taken and cases signed for the week and month to date. She was already dead last.
“I do understand,” she told Marty. “You don’t know the date of your accident. Don’t have any kind of hospital records, and the police were not called at the time because you and your friend were holding. You’re not currently employed, and the only thing that’s broken is your iPhone. Is that about the size of it?”
“Hey now,” Marty said. “You can’t talk to me like that. I’m gonna need you to go get Brice on the line now.”
“Hold please,” Drue said, as she terminated the call.
She sat back in her chair and let out a strangled-sounding sigh. Ben looked over. “Bad morning?”
“The worst. My car wouldn’t start. Again.”
“You should have called me,” Ben said. “I could have given you a ride in.”
“All the way from Sunset Beach? That’s, like, twenty minutes out of your way. And I was already running late as it was. But thanks anyway.”
She pushed back from her desk and stood up. “Enough stalling. Wendy needs to yell at me.”
Ben stood too. “But first, coffee.”
“Good thinking,” Drue said.
* * *
She really should have called Ben Fentress for a ride this morning, she thought, following him toward the break room.
But she had a long-standing aversion to asking anybody, especially a man, for favors. Raised by a single mom, she’d had it drummed into her head from an early age that the only person she could count on was herself.
Ben Fentress was skinny, with long arms and legs that never seemed to move in any kind of coordinated fashion. He owned an impressive array of concert T-shirts for obscure eighties grunge bands, and from the first day she’d shown up at work at the law firm, Ben had gone out of his way to be kind to her. He was a true Boy Scout. No, an Eagle Scout, probably.
He was younger than Drue, only twenty-nine. Over sandwiches at the coffee shop across the street from the law office, on her second day of work, he’d told her all about himself.
“I’m your typical data bro,” he’d said, munching on the potato chips he’d filched from her plate. “Undergrad degree from Colorado State. I started work on my master’s, but then I ran out of money. And motivation too, if you want the truth.”
“St. Pete’s a long way from Colorado,” Drue said. “How did you end up here?”
A bright pink flush crept over his freckled face. “Followed my girlfriend. She had a job with Honeywell. Three weeks after I got here, she dumped me for some dude she met at her gym.”
“You didn’t want to go back to Colorado after that?”
“No,” he said succinctly. “It took moving to Florida before I figured out I don’t really like winter. I don’t ski. Don’t snowboard either.”
“I loved snowboarding,” Drue said dreamily. Then, she asked, “Are you interested in the law?”
“I’m not un-interested in it. And besides, Brice Campbell isn’t just a good lawyer, he’s a genius at business. I can learn a lot from him. And I’m getting paid at the same time. It’s not a bad gig.”
Drue rolled her eyes. “Just what I always dreamed of becoming. A cubicle monkey.” She leaned forward. “So, if you’re not interested in becoming a lawyer, what are you doing working here?”
Ben’s smile was enigmatic. “I’m working on something. A side hustle, I guess you’d call it. You ever play video games?”
“My ex-boyfriend was big into Call of Duty, but I don’t really see the point,” Drue said.
“Ex? Why’d you break up?”
“Lots of reasons. Including too much Call of Duty.”
* * *
When they got to the break room they found Jonah already standing in front of the coffeemaker. He nodded a greeting, then reached into his pocket and brought out one of his special coffee pods. He slotted it into the machine, poured in a beaker of water and stood, waiting, his back to the counter.
“Hey y’all,” he said, looking over Drue’s and Ben’s shoulders. “If the dragon lady sees all three of us in here with the phones unattended, she’ll ream us a new one.”
“I’m already on her shit list for being late,” Drue said. “So I’m not too worried.”
“Yeah, what’s she gonna do? Fire her stepdaughter?” Jonah taunted.
Drue felt herself flush. “I’m not her stepdaughter.”
“Let’s see now. Wendy is married to Brice Campbell. Brice Campbell is your daddy. Doesn’t that make Wendy your stepmother? Or is there some technicality that I’m overlooking here?”
“Wicked stepmother,” Ben corrected. “World’s biggest cliché.”
“Just brew your stupid coffee and get out of our way, okay?” Drue snapped. She went to the refrigerator, got out the container of half-and-half and found her mug in the cabinet while Ben unwrapped a granola bar, which he managed to wolf down in two bites.
Drue watched Jonah watching the coffeepot, silently loathing him.
She loathed his looks: his unruly, sun-bleached hair, his wide-spaced hazel eyes, his rangy, athletic build. She loathed his casually expensive-looking clothes and the perfectly polished penny loafers he wore, sockless, as if to show the world he could get away with that kind of thing. She loathed the class ring he wore on his right hand, she loathed his alma mater, the University of Florida, loathed that he’d finished college and law school, and was only working here because he was killing time, waiting to take his bar exam again.
Most of all she loathed the fact that Jonah Kelleher was aware that she hated him and didn’t give a rat’s ass.
Jonah took his obnoxious orange and blue mug and flashed Drue a mocking smile. “Guess I’ll head back to the salt mines. Coffee machine is all yours, gorgeous.”
* * *
Wendy had turned her chair toward the wall of windows in her office, her back to the doorway, where Drue now stood. She was on the phone, her voice low, strained. “You’re sure? Maybe we should get a second opinion?”
Princess, Wendy’s French bulldog, poked her snout from under her mistress’s desk and eyed Drue suspiciously. “Grrrrrr.”
The desk chair spun around. “What?” Wendy demanded when she saw who her visitor was.
“Hang on a sec,” she said, speaking into the phone before placing it facedown on her desktop.
“You said we needed to talk,” Drue said, her face and affect deliberately flat.
“Not now, for God’s sake. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Okay. It’s just, the phones are pretty busy. This is the first time I’ve been able to get away from my cubicle.”
Wendy gave a long, martyred sigh. “Okay fine. I’ll come right to the point. You need to get to work on time, Drue. You know perfectly well we started running the new ad campaign last night, which means all the lines were jammed, last night and this morning. As I explained during your training, we run a small, tight ship here. Everybody has a job to do and nobody else has time to do yours. If you want to work here, you have to pull your own weight.”
“I understand that. But my car wouldn’t start—”
Wendy held up her hand, palm out. “I don’t care. Your car is not my problem. I don’t care if you have to walk to work. Just get here on time. Or we’ll find somebody else who can. Understood?”
“Perfectly. Are we done?”
Princess crawled out from beneath the desk and jumped onto Wendy’s lap. She placed her front paws on the lip of the desk and stared at Drue, her tiny body quivering like a tuning fork, snout lifted, her teeth bared, ears pricked.
Wendy kissed the top of the dog’s head and Princess instantly calmed, her pronounced underbite curling into what Drue would swear was a smile.
“Sweet girl,” Wendy murmured, her chin resting atop the dog’s head. “Mommy’s bestest, sweetest girl.” She looked up at Drue and picked up the phone again. “Okay. Yes, I need to take this call. We’re done here. For now.”
Drue nodded.
“One more thing,” Wendy called. “Your dad wanted me to ask if you have dinner plans tonight.”
“Sorry,” Drue said, shrugging. “I’m moving into the cottage. Can’t make it.”
7
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