“You like him.” Rosanna took great pleasure in goading Casey. “Want me to pass him a note?”
“Seriously?”
Rosanna shrugged. “You just going to leave without saying goodbye?”
“No. You can give him a message for me though.” The limo rolled to a stop just feet away from Casey. “Tell him that just like Cinderella, Bonnie has a curfew.” Casey loosened her silk scarf. “I don’t have a glass slipper to leave him with, but maybe this will suffice.” She shoved the scarf into Rosanna’s hand just as her driver opened the car door. Casey slipped inside, ready to make her getaway.
The driver closed the door without another word from Rosanna, and Casey blew her relief out in a soft sigh. She didn’t need or want the humiliation of unmasking herself at the end of the evening in front of Chase Hamilton.
It was official. Casey Roberts was the unluckiest girl in the whole world.
CHAPTER 3
REMASKED AND BACK INSIDE Leslie’s, Rosanna scouted the crowd for Jase, finding him on the outskirts, chatting with Niko and Veronica.
“Where’s Bonnie and Clyde?” Veronica asked, eyeing the silk scarf in Rosanna’s hand.
Jase glanced around. “Casey leave?”
“She wasn’t feeling well.” Rosanna shrugged.
“Is that right?” Veronica finally lifted her gaze away from the scarf and met Rosanna’s eyes. “Did she leave you with a parting gift?” One would think Veronica was the lawyer, asking all these questions. Rosanna supposed there was a fine line between talk show host and attorney.
But she had other matters to attend to. “Have any of you seen...Clyde?” She used his masquerade persona in lieu of his true identity. She wasn’t sure anyone knew he was her cousin Chase.
Niko shook his head. “Can’t say that I’m familiar with Clyde.” He glanced at Veronica. “She keeps talking about him, but I’ve yet to see him.”
“You seem awfully interested in Clyde.” Jase looked at Rosanna and laughed. “Should I be worried?”
Rosanna rolled her eyes behind her mask and shook her head.
Veronica stepped forward. “Are you sure Casey’s okay?”
Rosanna scanned the crowd. “She’s fine.” Right now Rosanna needed to find Chase. She wanted to know what had possessed him to play such childish games with Casey.
This wasn’t like Chase at all. His whole life he’d always been so serious. Why the change now?
Why, indeed?
“I’ll talk to you in a bit. Right now, I really need to find my cousin.”
“Have you tried the bar?” Jase asked.
The bar? Why hadn’t she thought of that? She looked at Jase. “Walk me in?”
He gave her a sweet smile as he laid his hand at the small of her back and nudged her inside. As suggested, Rosanna found Clyde at the bar. She stopped a few feet behind him and looked at Jase. “Can you give us a minute? My cousin and I need to set some things straight.”
“Sure, love. You check on your family and I’ll go check on mine. I need to make sure my father and uncle aren’t strangling each other.”
* * *
Chase Hamilton felt the delicate elbow, most probably of a woman, jab into his side. Turning toward the intruder, he hoped it was Bonnie but alas it was only his cousin Rosanna. He felt a twinge of disappointment.
“Why are you assaulting me?” He took a drink of his bourbon and water, and looked at Rosanna. “Say, what happened to my partner in crime?”
“She left.” Rosanna’s quick, aloof reply chilled the space around him.
Damn. He was hoping to get Bonnie’s number—not to mention her real name.
“Disappointed?” Rosanna asked, almost goading.
“Well, yeah.”
“So why’d you stand her up?”
“What?” Chase struggled to keep his mouth from falling open.
“Yeah, okay. I guess stand up isn’t quite the right term. Why’d you blow her off is a more accurate depiction.” Rosanna’s tone was hard, cold even. Chase wasn’t sure what she thought he’d done, but whatever it was, she was pissed.
“Stand her up? I don’t even know who she is.” Chase couldn’t figure Rosanna’s angle, but she wasn’t hanging jerk on him.
“Her name is Casey Roberts. And you damn well know who she is.”
“Casey Roberts?” He chased the familiarity of her name around in his mind.
The attorney? Was she Rosanna’s friend? And hadn’t he had a run-in with her at Mario’s a few weeks ago? She’d dumped peanuts in his beer. Why, he had no idea.
A knowing smile tipped the corners of Rosanna’s mouth. “Ringing a bell, huh?” She laughed. “How could you do that to her? She’s my friend.”
Chase knew Rosanna had a friend named Casey. Even though they’d been introduced several years ago, she was so young that Chase hadn’t given her much thought. Truth was, with a ten-year age difference between him and Rosanna, they rarely traveled in the same social circles.
These days, he’d never put it together that Rosanna’s friend and the attorney who often appeared in his courtroom were one and the same—even though she oftentimes felt oddly familiar.
“I had no idea that Counselor Roberts was your friend Casey.” Maybe now, Chase could get to the bottom of that mysterious encounter. “I had a run-in with her a few weeks back. Do you know anything about that?”
Rosanna gave Chase a hard stare. “What the hell do you think I’m bitchin’ about?”
“Well then...maybe you can tell me why she did that.”
Rosanna raised her eyebrows and glared at Chase. “I thought it was an appropriate response to you blowing her off.”
There it was again, that term, blowing her off. “Why do you keep saying that? How exactly did I blow her off?”
“Well let’s see...you asked her to meet you for a late lunch at Mario’s, then you didn’t show up. And, to make matters worse, you decided to stop in for drinks in the bar at Mario’s. When she confronted you, you acted like you didn’t even know who she was.” Rosanna sucked in a deep breath and steadied her hands on her hips. “She’s in your courtroom several times a month, for God’s sake.”
Rosanna had said a lot, but everything after ‘you asked her to meet you for a late lunch’ had a hard time registering with Chase. He hadn’t asked her to meet him for lunch or anything else for that matter. Not that he wouldn’t like to, but he’d only ever seen Casey Roberts in a professional capacity—outside that one time—and he couldn’t very well ask her out after he’d made his ruling. “She said that I called her up and specially asked her to meet me for lunch?”
Rosanna shook her head. “You sent her an email.”
“I have never asked her to meet me. Not in person. Not on the phone. And certainly not otherwise.” The thought to send her a written invitation hadn’t occurred to him. Now he wished he’d thought of it.
But somebody had, and on his behalf. Too bad they forgot to mention it to him.
“In that case...it can mean only one thing.” Rosanna sipped her cocktail, and after a brief interlude her expression tightened. “You pissed anybody off lately?”
Chase snorted. “Daily.” But that didn’t explain why Casey Roberts—a person he’d had zero contact with outside the courtroom—had been involved. Was she simply in the wrong place at the right time? Chase moved his gaze to meet Rosanna’s. “I should apologize. Care to share her number?”
“Apologize?” Rosanna studied Chase’s face. Shaking her head, she said, “Why don’t you just leave her alone. She’s already embarrassed enough.”
“I’d like to explain...”
“Explain what? That you didn’t stand her up or blow her off, much less ask her out in the first place?”
“Well I wouldn’t exactly put it like that,” Chase said.
“No matter how you put it, that’s the way she’s going to take it.”
“I’d like to explain that it wasn’t me.” He cleared his throat. “If I’d had the courage
to ask her out, and then been fortunate enough for her to say yes...I would’ve never stood her up, much less blown her off.”
Rosanna giggled. “Like she’s going to believe that.” She turned and began strolling away.
Chase followed her. “But surely with your endorsement...”
“My endorsement?” She balked and kept walking. “Why on Earth would I champion your cause? What proof do you have that you didn’t do this?”
“You know me better than that.”
Rosanna stopped. “Yeah, but she doesn’t. You’re going to have to find out who did this before you try to make amends with Casey.”
CHAPTER 4
CASEY TRIED TO IGNORE the ringing phone on her bedside table by pulling the covers over her head. The barrier had little effect over the droning noise.
Sticking out one arm, Casey groaned and fumbled for the phone. She pulled the receiver under the covers. “What?”
“You awake?” Rosanna’s voice was way too chirpy to suit Casey.
“I am now,” she said with a little less enthusiasm than she felt like mustering.
“Good,” Rosanna said, as if she hadn’t caught Casey’s sarcasm. “We need to talk.”
“So long as it isn’t about last night or your cousin.” Casey laid out her stipulations, although she doubted it’d do much good.
“He wants your number.”
Casey was right. “Why? Nothing good can come from it.”
“He wants to apologize.”
“Apologize…for what?” Casey’s voice trembled. “You told him it was me?”
“Calm down.” Rosanna’s light laughter reached through the phone and snatched what little dignity Casey had left. “I gave him a good raking over the coals for what he did.”
Now it was Casey’s turn for the sarcastic laughter. “Well, gee, that makes me feel better.”
“He didn’t do it.” A measure of silence lingered between them, just long enough for Casey to feel unimportant. “He’s not the one who arranged to meet you at the restaurant that day.”
Casey’s insignificant feeling was swallowed up by annoyance. “Right. There’s another Chase Hamilton in L.A., who’s also a judge.”
“No. Just the one.” Rosanna paused. “He did not send you the email.”
“Yeah, right.” Casey threw the bedcovers down around her waist. “Why would someone else want to do that?”
“Practical joke maybe? Oh, who knows? The point is he didn’t stand you up or blow you off as you’d originally thought.”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?” Casey’s voice hardened. “Either way, I turn out the same…looking like an idiot.”
“So…you won’t let him apologize?”
“I don’t see any future in it. The only thing I’m really interested in is…if he didn’t send me the email, who did? And why?”
* * *
Just after she disconnected the call from Casey, Rosanna’s Bowling For Soup ringtone started singing about 1985, announcing a call. She looked at the display on her cell phone. Veronica.
“Hey...what’s up?” Rosanna said into her phone.
“I’m curious. What’s the deal with Casey and your cousin?”
After Rosanna delivered the particulars about the so-called date between Casey and Chase, she stopped to catch her breath and wait to see what Veronica thought.
“That’s very odd,” was all Veronica said.
“Tell me about it. And the bad part is that Chase is truly interested in Casey, but you know she’s got a head as hard as a brick wall...and a barrier to match.”
“He’ll have to get crafty if he expects to actually date her now.”
“Yeah, his best bet is to go in through the back door.”
“He should find out who set them up.”
“I told him that,” Rosanna said. “I don’t know how well that’ll go though. Who knows even where to start looking?”
“I know where to start looking.” Veronica’s tone was one of certainty.
“Since when?”
“Since I got divorced.”
“You think Ray would do something like that?”
“Damn straight, he would.” Veronica’s edgy laughter confirmed her position. “That’s exactly the kind of thing Ray would do.”
“But why?” said the sane voice of Rosanna’s reason.
“Because Ray’s nuts. He probably thinks they’re indirectly responsible for me cleaning out the community property since Casey represented me and Chase handed down the divorce decree.”
Rosanna’s thoughts hadn’t really gone there, but she had to agree that Ray was quite capable of setting up Chase and Casey if he thought he’d been wronged. Nothing too overtly criminal, just a little something to make them both appear foolish, yet wouldn’t get him in too much trouble.
And Ray definitely believed he’d been wronged. The way he probably saw it, Casey and Chase had helped.
CHAPTER 5
CASEY GLANCED AT HER WATCH. 1:30. Rosanna should be here any minute. They’d both been busy since the masquerade party and now, two weeks later, Casey was looking forward to their lunch date.
She glanced at the entrance. Oh, Jesus. Chase Hamilton in the flesh. Casey dipped her head away from him and fished her cell phone out of her purse, using it as a pretense for preoccupation.
Sensing someone’s stare, she reluctantly lifted her gaze from her phone. Chase was standing over her, his briefcase in hand.
Oh, God. She tried to give him her blankest stare possible. One that said, who are you and what do you want? She wasn’t sure if it worked.
“Counselor Roberts.” He looked at the empty seat across from her. “May I?”
Okay, so it hadn’t worked. “Well, I am waiting for someone...” she said, trying to give him the brush-off before he got the chance to zing her twice.
“Yeah, I heard something about that.” Chase slid into the booth opposite Casey and laid his briefcase on the table.
“Excuse me...!” She shot him a glare. “You can’t sit there.”
“Why not?” He opened his briefcase, blocking her view.
“Because I have a lunch date.”
“With who?” He peeked over the top of his briefcase and gave her a wink.
“Not you.” Casey fought hard to contain the irritation bubbling up inside her. “So if you’d just leave. Please.”
“Sorry. No can do.” He pulled out a file and placed it on the table.
Glancing at the folder and then back to Chase, Casey saw her scarf peeking out from the top edge of the briefcase. “Is that my scarf?”
“Might I remind you that possession is nine-tenths of the law. This is no longer your scarf.” He closed the briefcase and set it at his side on the seat, then slid the manila folder directly in front of him and laced his fingers together over it. Looking up at her, he gave her a smug grin.
Casey sucked in a deep breath, unsure if she should tamp down her mounting aggravation or just let it rip. She glanced at her watch again. Rosanna wasn’t exactly late. She’d be here soon enough, and Casey would let her take care of her cousin. “Suit yourself.” She reached for her iced tea and sipped it.
Chase nudged the file across the table toward her. Casey avoided it like it had been illegally obtained.
“Go ahead,” he said, gesturing toward it. “I think you’ll be interested in the contents.”
Casey’s curiosity was baiting her, but she resisted, glancing toward the door. Rosanna was nowhere in sight.
“Okay...” Chase let out a little chuckle. “Rosanna’s not coming. She set the date up for me.”
“Why would she do that?” Casey shook her head. Rosanna knew full well how she felt about talking to Chase about the date that never was.
“I asked her to.” He gave a one-sided shrug. “Course, she wouldn’t agree to it until I’d solved the mystery.”
“Mystery?” Casey said, but not nearly as confidently as Chase had done.
“Who set us u
p.”
What? “You know who set us up?”
Chase nodded and pointed toward the folder once more. “See for yourself.”
Casey opened the file, but mostly all she saw was a big fat paper trail with so much electronic jargon that she had no idea where it led. She glanced up at Chase, shaking her head. “What does all this mean?”
“What it means is...” Chase fingered through the papers, directing her attention to the name on one particular page. “Someone you and I both are familiar with sent you the email.” Chase leaned back against the seat and, by the looks of the smile on his face, he was rather pleased with himself.
Ray Hudson. Seriously? Veronica had said she wouldn’t put it past Ray, but Casey wanted to believe he was more grown up than that. Apparently, he wasn’t. “Are you sure?” she asked Chase.
“Positive.” He looked at the folder again. “I have the smartest techie around, telling me it’s him.”
Great. That meant she’d dumped the peanuts into his beer for nothing. Chase was innocent. That also meant she was looking like a bigger fool than ever.
Casey felt her dignity sinking toward the floor, and groaned. “I think I owe you a great big apology.” She looked away, feeling the humiliation burning her cheeks.
“Well...it’s not entirely your fault,” he said with a hint of amusement.
“Entirely?” she questioned him.
“Not entirely. No.” He winked at her.
Okay, so it was good to know that Ray was the culprit. That meant it was a relatively harmless prank, and not much more than her dignity had been harmed. But now it was time to go. Free herself from this humiliating situation.
“Hey look...” Casey reached for her purse and pushed herself to the edge of the booth. “I appreciate that you’ve gone to all this trouble to figure out who did it and all, but I’ve got to get going.”
He grabbed her wrist as she rose. “Why the rush? You came here to have lunch.”
“Not with you, I didn’t.” She flashed him a fake smile.
“Please...” He released her hand and gestured to the empty seat across from him. “Join me.”
His smile softened his eyes and had an unexpected, albeit strange, way of melting Casey’s reserve. She sucked in a breath and blew it out, as if exasperated. “Well...” She sat back down. “I suppose having lunch with you is the best revenge I could bestow upon Ray Hudson.” Yeah, that would definitely get his goat.
Party Girl (West Coast Girlz: Book Three) Page 2