Charlotte

Ben was right. If I didn’t have two thousand dollars—and I didn’t—I’d have to work it off. So I’d work two jobs for a while. Jeremy was my brother, the only family I had left. We weren’t as close as I wished we could be, but I had no one else—no parents, no boyfriend, no one. So I’d work. I was used to it.

I’d file some papers and order some office supplies or something, and my lawyer—my crazy hot lawyer—would get Jeremy out of jail.

I wasn’t sure I trusted Ben to get Jeremy out. I trusted him to roll in to work at five o’clock at night and look lickable in a pair of jeans. I trusted him to box me against a wall and look like he was about to devour me whole—the memory made me shiver. He’d smelled like leather jacket and male skin. I’d known him for all of twenty minutes, and he’d been so close I could have kissed him. Twice. And I had done nothing to stop it.

God, how long had it been since I’d been with a man? Or even been on a date? All I did was work and worry. I’d taken one look at Ben Hanratty and I’d had to squeeze my legs together to keep them closed.

Still, when it came to Jeremy’s arrest, there was nothing in this mess of an office that suggested Ben knew what he was doing—at all.

I pulled out my phone and called the pub where I worked. I’d been at the Red Cardinal for three years now, tending the bar and trying to keep both Jeremy and me afloat. I was taking an accounting course, too, but that was online, so hopefully if I burned the candle at both ends, I could keep up with the course work, the job, and now the office work to pay Jeremy’s legal bill.

The last three years had not been good ones for the Browning family. Our parents were gone; the money was gone. It was just Jeremy and me. But Jeremy hadn’t been able to find a job, and I had, so I worked as many hours as I could to keep us both swimming.

I told my boss I couldn’t come in tonight because of a family emergency, but I skirted around exactly what that emergency was. The last thing I needed was to get fired because my brother was arrested for potentially dealing drugs. It hurt to give up a Friday night shift—the tips were good on Friday nights. But I still had my Saturday night shift to make some money.

When I hung up, I looked around the disaster of an office. I’d told Ben the truth: I’d never worked in an office. The desk seemed the logical place to start, so I sat down. It was covered in papers. I rifled through them and saw receipts, ripped-up scraps with unintelligible handwritten notes, phone numbers, crumpled business cards, and empty envelopes. A massive, massive stack of unopened mail. What kind of lawyer doesn’t open his mail? I brushed all this aside and looked at the computer.

It was, surprisingly, a nice new MacBook. I opened it and it blinked awake. A prompt opened up and asked me for a password. Which of course he hadn’t given me.

I tried Ben, then Benhanratty, and even password, but nothing happened. I sat back in the chair and looked around, stumped.

He’d told me to sort his email. It seemed kind of a private thing considering we’d just met, but orders were orders. I just needed the password to freaking do it.

I sighed, and my gaze traveled up the wall to the calendar. The woman in the bikini with her sand-covered ass in the air. She looked at me and pouted, and suddenly it made me mad. If Ben wanted me to work here, I didn’t have to look at Miss Perfect Bum all day. On impulse, I reached up and tore the calendar from the wall, ready to aim it at the trash bin.

I glanced at the calendar before I tossed it, then glanced again. This calendar was from 2015.

Seriously? He’d kept it on the wall this long, just to look at this woman’s ass? I wadded the calendar up, disgusted all over again—and then something ticked over in my brain.

Reluctantly, I looked at the calendar again. Miss Perfect Bum was Miss August. I tossed the calendar in the garbage and turned back to the computer. In the password screen, I typed missaugust2015.

The computer blinked open.

I made a sound in my throat—part laugh, part disgust, and part reluctant admiration. He had a sexist calendar on the wall as a freaking password reminder.

That was the first inkling I got that with my crazy hot lawyer boss, nothing was going to be what it looked like.

* * *

Based on the calendar, I’d expected bikini pictures on his computer, if not outright porn, but there was nothing of the kind. In fact, his computer files were in immaculate order, the desktop clean. After half an hour of clicking around, I was starting to suspect that I’d seriously misjudged Ben. If you looked only at his computer, he didn’t need an assistant at all—he had everything under control.

I got up and wandered the office. Aside from the mess of papers, Ben’s gym clothes were on the floor where he’d tossed them off the sofa. The sofa itself had a blanket thrown over the back, like maybe he slept here sometimes. There was a sweatshirt tossed on top of one of the filing cabinets, a T-shirt discarded on top of it, like he changed his clothes in here. There was even a small fridge humming in the corner, though when I opened it there was nothing inside but a pocket flask of vodka, mostly full.

The whole place smelled like… I didn’t know. Man, maybe. A man-smell. Not something I was familiar with in my tidy one-woman apartment over a candy store, where men sure as hell never came. At twenty-seven, I was locked in singlehood: too mature—or so I told myself—for one-night stands, too disgusted by online dating after one too many tries. Intimidating, one date had called me, because I spoke my mind. I was too opinionated, he said. Well, screw him. The chaos in my family over the past few years, and the amount I worked, meant I wasn’t focused on finding someone anyway.

The longer I stayed single, the more men my age dropped off the radar. I didn’t think my standards were too high: I wanted a guy with a job, a brain in his head, and not too much baggage. Good looks and sex skills were a bonus. I told myself that the fact I hadn’t found such a person was manhood’s fault, not mine.

The corridor at the back of the office contained a storage room—empty—and a bathroom. The bathroom was another trip to Guysville: used razor on the edge of the sink, crusted can of shaving foam, toothbrush. There was a hook on the back of the door, and two suits hung from hangers off it—beautiful, nicely pressed suits, one dark gray and one navy, complete with shirts and ties. I ran my hand down one of the sleeves, picturing Ben Hanratty in a suit. Coreen was right: there was a lot of testosterone in this office. I was probably ovulating right now like one of the factory machines you see on How It’s Made.

I left the bathroom and walked back into the main office, ending up at the stacks of boxes against the wall. I lifted the lid of one of them and pulled the top file out, flipping through the pages. It was from a case in 1987. A name jumped out at me: Michael Hanratty. Ben’s father, maybe?

The phone on the desk rang, and I dropped the file back into the box. Mostly collect calls from prisoners, Coreen had said. But he’d told me to answer the phone, so I answered it. “Ben Hanratty’s office.”

“He there?” a voice said. Low, dangerous. Sort of a growl.

“Um.” I gathered myself. “Mr. Hanratty is out on an appointment right now.”

The low growl was unimpressed. “With who?”

“A new client. Can I—”

“Ben doesn’t have any new clients.”

This was, undoubtedly, one of Ben’s seedy customers. I put on my best assistant’s voice. “In fact he does,” I said. “If you’d like to leave a message, I’ll let him know you called, sir.”

There was a pause. Just a beat, but it was there. “Are you the assistant? You’re not the same woman who was there yesterday.”

“She resigned,” I said diplomatically. “I’m her replacement. Temporarily.”

“She quit?” There was a sort of exasperated laugh on the other end of the phone. “Fucking Ben,” the man said.

I shivered. This guy sounded like he could bite my head off, but he also had a very sexy voice. “Maybe you could call his cell phone, if you have it,” I said.

“I’ve been calling his fucking cell phone,” the man said. “He’s not answering it. That’s why I tried this line. And I don’t know what he told you, but he isn’t seeing a new client. He isn’t taking new clients at all.”

“He is,” I said. He had to be. “He never said—”

“What’s your name?” Sexy Voice asked.

“Charlotte.”

“Okay, Charlotte. I’m going to make a guess here. I’m going to guess that Ben didn’t tell you a fucking thing about his actual business. Am I right?”

My voice sounded confused even to my own ears. “He’s a lawyer,” I said. “Isn’t he a lawyer?”

“I see I’m right,” the man said. “Yes, he’s a lawyer. You have a piece of paper and a pen?”

I grabbed a pen and an old Staples receipt. Something about this man made me scramble to obey him. “Yes.”

“Write down this name,” Sexy Voice said. “Devon Wilder. That’s me.”

I wrote the name down, my memory working. I’d heard that name before. Somewhere… Where? Ben’s computer had a file called DEVON. But Devon Wilder—I knew that from somewhere. “Okay,” I said to him.

“Next, write down Max Reilly,” Devon Wilder said. “And below that, write Cavan Wilder. That’s my brother.”

I wrote the three names. “And?” I said.

“We’re Ben’s clients,” Devon said. “His only clients. If anyone calls who isn’t one of those three names, or pertaining to one of those three names, forget it, because it isn’t Ben’s business anymore. He isn’t taking new clients. For anyone.”

I blinked through the shivers—he really did have a sexy voice—and tried to process this. Ben only had three clients? What kind of lawyer only had three clients? Who the hell were they? The mob or something? Jeremy hadn’t said anything about the mob.

And if Ben wasn’t taking new clients, why had he agreed to see Jeremy?

“Okay, next,” Devon said. “Maybe I should have told this to the last assistant, but she wasn’t much of a listener. You may think you were hired to do a bunch of complicated legal shit, but you weren’t. You have one job, and only one job: to clean him up.”

I frowned, though he couldn’t see me. “What do you mean, clean him up?”

“That office. Are you looking at that fucking office?” I opened my mouth to argue, but he talked first. “Don’t get pissed. I don’t mean you’re a janitor. I mean that Ben himself is the one that needs a cleanup. He spent a lot of years dealing with a lot of scummy people, and he doesn’t have to do that anymore. Which means he needs to get his shit together, and he needs someone to help him.”

I shouldn’t have known what he meant by that, but I did. The office was a mess, but the suits hanging in the bathroom were genuinely expensive, and so was Ben’s leather coat. I thought of the immaculate files on his MacBook. On the surface, he looked pretty much like a failure. Except he didn’t, and he wasn’t. He was some sort of mix between crazy and successful. And this man knew it.

“I threw the calendar out,” I said to Devon Wilder.

“You what?”

I lifted my chin, even though he couldn’t see me. “I threw it in the trash.”

“That stupid thing with the bikini girl on it?”

“Yes. It’s offensive. And if you ask me, I think he should get out of this awful strip mall. What kind of lawyer works in a strip mall?”

There was a pause. “I like you, new assistant Charlotte. You can stay.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But the calendar was actually the reminder of his computer password. I just figured that out.”

“I know. The man is a mindfuck. Good luck with it. He needs someone like you more than he knows. And don’t quit.” There was a click in my ear. Devon Wilder had hung up.

I put the phone down and stared at it for a second. He hadn’t even told me if he wanted Ben to call him back.

Don’t quit. Little did he know, I couldn’t. Not while Ben was working for Jeremy. So it looked like Ben was my project, like it or not.

Devon Wilder. Who the hell was Devon Wilder, and why did I know that name?

I turned to Ben’s MacBook and opened the internet browser. I Googled Devon Wilder’s name. The results came up in front of me.

“Oh,” I said to the empty room. “Oh, my god.”

Devon Wilder. Oh, lord. Now I remembered where I’d seen the name.

My boss’s biggest client was a billionaire.