Fringe Benefits

by Christine Pope

  I’d never really thought of it that way. Not that I wanted to feel sympathetic toward Jonah, but my dust-ups with my mother over the whole Miss Billings thing had taught me it wasn’t always easy dealing with the weight of parental expectation.

  “No, probably not,” I said. “But he should be glad I didn’t mention his name to Ms. Silva. I know Jonah Freeman’s got way deeper pockets than I do.”

  “That’s an understatement.” Again he lifted his shoulders. “I’ll have Frank look this over, but it seems fairly straightforward. Pieter Van Rijn wants me to make this problem go away, so I will.”

  “Just like that?” My voice sounded a little shaky.

  “Just like that.” Rafe grinned. I didn’t know if he was Mexican or Spanish or South American or what, but I found myself wondering if there were any more like him wherever he did come from. Not for myself, of course, but just as a general favor to the girls of Los Angeles. “In case you hadn’t noticed, Pieter has a habit of getting what he wants.”

  And pushing away what he doesn’t want, I thought. But I only said, “I’m starting to figure that out. Anyway, it was very generous of him to help me out with this stupid mess.”

  Rafe nodded. “There’s a long list of charities here in L.A. that sing his praises. And he must think pretty highly of you. You’re the first assistant he’s given any legal help.”

  God, how I wanted to ask him how much he knew about all those secretaries and whether he’d ever had to defend Pieter in a sexual-harassment suit or a wrongful termination case. But that was out of the question, of course. Attorney/client privilege and all that. Even from my brief acquaintance with Rafael Santiago, I didn’t get the impression that he was the type to spill personal details about one of his top clients. The remark about Pieter’s generosity with charities was probably about the most I could hope for, and that didn’t surprise me at all. Even Jonah had mentioned how much money Pieter gave away to worthy causes.

  “Maybe I’m the first one who’s gotten herself into hot water,” I replied.

  I thought I caught a flicker of amusement in Rafe’s dark eyes. “Maybe,” he said, but he sounded skeptical.

  It was probably better to let it go. “So what happens next?” I asked.

  “We’ll make contact with Ms. Silva, let her know that it would be worthwhile for all parties involved to have the matter dropped. They may require some small compensation. Pieter has already told me to handle it, which means he doesn’t much care what it costs.” Another one of those quick grins. “As his lawyer, I wouldn’t forgive myself if I let them take a nickel more than what the law requires. And don’t you worry, either,” he added, as I made some small movement in protest. “Trust me, with the sort of numbers we’re looking at here, Pieter will never miss it. He probably spends more on dry cleaning each month.”

  What other argument could I possibly make? I was out of my depth here. I didn’t know anything about copyright law or electronic licensing. For all I knew, the mention of fines had just been a threat. That way Chrysalis could make me pony up the amount I should have paid in the beginning if I’d been a little bit smarter and had looked into the ramifications of recording covers of songs that were still protected under copyright. Rafael had made the amount involved sound fairly insignificant. Then again, these were people who threw around the kinds of money I couldn’t even begin to imagine. I thought of Pieter’s perfectly tailored suits and ever-changing shirts and ties, and guessed that his dry cleaning bill was probably higher than a lot of people’s car payments.

  “If you say so.” I tried to sound demure, but I didn’t know how successful I was.

  Not very, apparently. Rafe laughed, then said, “I don’t blame you for being skeptical. But really, you have nothing to worry about. All the record company cares about is getting its money. We’re going to take care of that. Everything else is just bluster and threats, and I guarantee you that will end the second they get a phone call from me. So just go home, put your feet up, pour yourself a glass of wine, and be thankful you’ve got someone like Pieter Van Rijn in your corner.”

  His words seemed to neatly wrap up the interview. And really, he was right. Where would I have been if I didn’t have Pieter looking out for me? Maybe I would have had enough to cover the fees from the music company, thanks to my now-generous salary and the chunk I’d already managed to save…and maybe I wouldn’t. The point was, I really didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

  I stood. “Thank you so much, Rafael. I really appreciate you taking the time to handle this.”

  “No problem.” He paused, then added, “If you weren’t a client, I’d be offering to buy you that drink myself.”

  Despite myself, I was flattered. What better way to make myself forget about Pieter than by going out with someone attractive, available, and apparently interested? But I knew I wouldn’t have taken Rafe up on his offer even if he weren’t technically my attorney. Although I didn’t make a habit of chasing after unattainable men (up until now, anyway), I also wasn’t really the type to go out with one man if I was attracted to someone else. Too bad I hadn’t followed my own rules and stayed far away from Jonah Freeman. Even back then I’d known I had a weird attraction for Pieter Van Rijn.

  Keeping my tone light, I remarked, “You know, this may be the first time someone’s actually regretted getting free legal help.”

  Rafe didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Instead, he extended his hand and said, “It was very nice to meet you, Katherine. I’ll be sure to contact you when I hear anything from Chrysalis.”

  I thanked him for his time and let him escort me back to the elevators. As the doors closed, I found myself thinking that Pieter really had done a number on me. Rafael Santiago was awfully good-looking, much more conventionally handsome than Pieter. But the idea that Rafe wanted to buy me a drink didn’t get me nearly as excited as it might have once upon a time. No, all I could think about was the thoughtful way Pieter had looked at me earlier, and wonder if our conversation had done anything to help him see me as Katherine, not just another in a long line of assistants of varying usefulness.

  Somehow I doubted it.

  Fourteen

  To my surprise, the next few days passed without incident. I thanked Pieter for sending me to talk with Rafe, he said it was no problem, and after that I did everything I could to focus on business. Butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth, as Scarlett O’Hara might have said. All right, so I went to bed every night hearing the sound of Pieter’s warm baritone with its clipped Dutch accent, or seeing the intense azure of his eyes even as I shut my own and willed myself to sleep. The important thing was that I hoped I’d managed to rebuild the fragile trust which existed between us. How I thought all this was going to end, I really couldn’t say. It just seemed vitally important to me to extend my tenure at Pyramid Imports for as long as possible.

  Friday rolled around at last. I greeted its arrival with more than the usual relief—as much as I craved Pieter’s company, I also felt drained by having to continually maintain a posture of cool friendliness whenever he was around. It also didn’t help that I’d taken to surreptitiously watching him out of the corner of my eye. I suppose I hoped I might catch a single unguarded look, an unconscious gesture that might indicate he thought of me as something more than just his assistant.

  But of course I saw nothing.

  It was a little after eleven. The FedEx man had just come and gone. I sat back down at my desk and began to reach for my mouse. Then the ground started to shake.

  My first impression was that one of the delivery trucks had somehow backed into the rear of the building. But then the shaking continued, almost jolting me from my chair. I heard the vase in the bathroom crash to the tiled floor.

  I didn’t stop to think. Some lower brain function kicked in, and I dropped to my knees and scuttled under the desk. It was a heavy mahogany piece. It should be sturdy enough to protect me if the ceiling fell in. That sometimes happened during earthquakes, didn’t it?


  But what if the ground opened up? It could swallow me and the desk, couldn’t it?

  From underneath the desk I heard more objects falling, but nothing seemed to break. At least, I didn’t hear anything like the sharp, splintery sounds of shattering glass. And what about Pieter? Had he gotten to safety?

  The shaking eased, then died away. I remained where I was, conscious only then of a dull throbbing in my right knee. I must have banged it when I dropped to the floor.

  A few more seconds, and then, blessedly, Pieter’s voice. “Katherine? Are you all right?”

  “Under here,” I replied. Damn, I sounded shaky.

  A pair of glossy Italian lace-ups paused a few inches from my face. “It’s quite safe now. You can come out.”

  For some reason my legs didn’t want to cooperate. “Are you sure? What about aftershocks?”

  “Well, yes, we may get some of those, but the vast majority of the time they’re considerably weaker than the main shock.” I was treated to the incongruous sight of Pieter squatting down next to me. He reached out a hand.

  Still I hesitated. Oh, I suppose I had known on an intellectual level that earthquakes were a hazard of living in Southern California, but it’s one thing to have the notion floating around in the back of your head and quite another to be confronted with it in all its terrifying reality.

  The blue eyes took on an amused glint. “Don’t you have tornadoes in Montana? I’d imagine those would be equally disconcerting.”

  “Not really,” I replied, and shifted my weight. My knee was telling me that although I might feel safe under the desk, it wanted me to get the hell out of there so I could put a cold compress on it. “You get warnings with tornadoes. Besides, we didn’t get many tornadoes in Billings, and the ones we did were pretty wimpy. You need to go to Kansas or Oklahoma to get the really big ones.”

  “Ah,” he said, and his gaze shifted from my face to my legs. At first I thought he’d somehow guessed that I’d hurt my knee, but then I realized the object of his interest was a bit less altruistic. Sometime during my precipitous retreat under the desk I’d managed to split the seam of my skirt up to mid-thigh.

  Blood rushed to my face, and I grabbed for his hand. At least if I were standing I’d be able to let my arm slide down to cover the torn seam. Or maybe I could grab the stapler and try mending the damn skirt that way.

  He stood, pulling me up with him. My legs were shakier than I had thought, or maybe it was simply a bad combination of sudden forward movement and three-inch heels. Whatever the case, I pitched forward and stumbled against Pieter. It could have been just a reflex, but his arms went around me at once, pulling me against him. For one breathless moment I stayed that way, feeling the strength of his body, the beating of his heart against mine. If it took an earthquake to get Pieter Van Rijn to hold me in his arms, I’d be happy if the San Andreas tore itself apart.

  But then he grasped my shoulders and righted me. After that he let go. His eyes would not meet mine.

  “The hazards of heels,” he remarked.

  What? I thought stupidly, and looked down at my feet. Oh, right. Those damn stilettos. “Not exactly recommended earthquake gear, I guess,” I said. That downward glance had also revealed the extent of the damage to my skirt, and I reached down with my left hand to hold the torn edges together.

  He affected not to notice. My comment seemed to ease some of the strain in his face, and he nodded. “It was a good shake. Probably the strongest I’ve felt since I moved here. Is there anyone you need to call to let them know you’re all right?”

  I thought of Leslie first. She worked about five miles away, and although her job was to run the front office, sometimes she did go back into the stock room if one of the plumbers was running late and needed her to fetch a part for him. I had a nightmarish vision of her buried beneath piles of copper pipe. “My friend Leslie—”

  In reply he lifted the handset of the phone and gave it to me. I put it to my ear, but all I heard was a frenetic-sounding busy signal.

  “I don’t think it’s working,” I said. Oddly enough, I was beginning to feel a little calmer. Maybe Pieter had suggested I make the phone call as a way of defusing the tension between us.

  “The circuits are probably busy,” he said, after taking the handset from me and holding it up to his own ear before he replaced it in its cradle. He sounded cool and dispassionate, as if this sort of thing happened to him every day…as if he hadn’t just held me in his arms the minute before. “Perhaps your cell phone?”

  I started to bend down to retrieve my purse and winced. Pieter must have caught the involuntary grimace, because he said, “Did you injure yourself?”

  “Just a bumped knee,” I replied.

  “We have a first aid kit in the restroom. Sit down, and I’ll get it.”

  Arguing would have been useless, so I did as he said and settled myself into my chair. It did feel awfully good to sit down. Besides, from that angle it was a lot easier to reach down and fish the cell phone out of my bag. I hit the speed dial for Leslie’s office number, but again all I got was that angry-sounding dial tone. I had just set the cell down on the desk when Pieter reappeared, holding an instant cold compress.

  “Try this,” he instructed, and handed it to me.

  Much as I would have liked to have him put it on my knee himself, I knew that was asking for too much. So I took it from him and pressed it against my bruised flesh. As I shifted my weight, my skirt gapped a little. Again I caught a quick flicker of his eyes toward the length of thigh my movement exposed before he glanced away.

  “Cell phones don’t work, either,” I said, more to cover the awkward silence than anything else.

  “No doubt everyone is trying to reach family and friends. Perhaps the Internet?” He stepped away from me, then leaned down and brought up the browser on my computer. “Well, that seems to be intact, at any rate.” He typed in a URL and waited as the page loaded. “Magnitude 5.9, centered along the Whittier Narrows fault.”

  “How did you find that out?” I asked. My nerves still jangled, and I was trying with limited success to ignore the increased throbbing of my knee. Focusing on our conversation instead of the pain helped a little.

  He shifted slightly so I could get a clearer look at the screen. “USGS website. Usually the best place to check in the event of an earthquake.”

  I thought he sounded awfully nonchalant, considering the shake we’d just gotten. “Have there been that many since you moved to L.A.?”

  “No, there has been quite a gap since then. We did have a decent-sized quake the summer after I relocated here.” A negligent shrug. “The price one pays for palm trees, I suppose.”

  Hell of a price, I thought, giving the office a quick look-’round. Actually, the place wasn’t too bad off. The objects I’d heard falling had been some of the books on the cases at the far end of the room, but since it was pretty hard to break a book and they’d fallen on carpet anyway, there was no permanent damage. Just a mess that needed to be cleaned up.

  “At any rate,” Pieter continued, “I would suggest emailing your friend Leslie and your family. News of these things travels fast. I want to take a look in the warehouse, make sure nothing was damaged.” He paused and finally looked me full in the face. I could feel my brow creased with pain—that knee hurt like a bitch, cold compress or no—but I thought I’d settled down enough that he shouldn’t see any other betraying emotions in my expression. “Will you be all right here alone?”

  What was I supposed to say? “Don’t leave me”? “Hold me again, because I’m still afraid another quake is going to hit while you’re gone and you’ll end up buried under packing crates”?

  Instead I looked at him steadily and said, “I’ll be fine here alone.”

  What else was I supposed to do?

  He seemed to be gone a long time. During that interval I let go of the compress on my knee long enough to send an email off to Leslie, who luckily replied within the minute. No, s
he hadn’t been crushed by U-bends, but the back storeroom was a disaster, and she was probably going to have to come in over the weekend and help put it back together, and wasn’t that a bitch?

  I agreed with her and then told her we could check on each other again in a few hours. Her boss needed her more than I did. Then I one-hand typed a quick email to Alex, since I knew he checked his messages far more often than anyone else in my family did. I figured he could pass on the information that I was all right.

  As I was typing I could feel the pain in my knee starting to radiate outward, sort of like shockwaves from a bomb blast. I pressed the compress against my leg more firmly and began to wonder if maybe I should go to the emergency room. Then again, it seemed kind of silly to go to the hospital for a bumped knee. There were probably lots of people who needed medical assistance more than I did. I thought of the broken glass in the bathroom and imagined people cutting themselves on shattered windows or being crushed under falling masonry…you know, all the gruesome images cheerfully supplied by Hollywood’s steady stream of disaster movies.

  The ground shook again, much more gently this time. I let out a little yelp and then gave a shamefaced look around. Luckily, I was still alone.

  Since I didn’t know what else to do, I grasped my mouse and clicked back to the USGS website. It had a handy link for recent earthquakes, and I was able to maneuver to a page that told me the latest aftershock was a 4.1. In other words, nothing that should get my panties in a bunch.

  Too bad my nerves didn’t seem to agree. That little tremor was enough to get my hands shaking again. I abandoned the mouse and went back to holding the compress against my knee.

  Pieter reappeared. I noticed a dusty smudge against the front of his otherwise immaculate white shirt, but besides that he seemed to be fine. “You felt that, I suppose,” he said.