Natalie

“C’mon. C’mon. Hurry up,” I chanted under my breath as I waited for the elevator.

I jabbed the button again, cringing as I glanced at my watch. Although I’d given Jax a hard time about telling me to bring a bag to his place tonight, it was the smart thing to do. Racing from his townhome to my apartment, getting ready and then hauling ass to the office took longer than I’d expected. It wasn’t even seven thirty yet, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t technically late, since junior associates were expected to be here before any of the partners made it in.

The elevator finally pinged, and I heaved a sigh of relief when the doors closed without anyone else joining me. Grabbing my lipstick from my bag, I was able to put the finishing touch on my makeup by the time the doors opened to the reception area of the firm where I worked. I hadn’t bothered to do it while I was getting ready at home because they were still swollen from my night with Jax, but it had gone down a little since then.

“Ms. Gardner, Mr. Warren would like to see you in his office,” the receptionist trilled at me with a smug little grin on her face.

I didn’t know what I’d done to piss her off, but she’d had it in for me ever since I started here. There had been too many errors on phone messages, company-wide emails I didn’t receive, and scathing looks, for it not to be obvious that she disliked me. Immensely. Of course this was the day she got to the office early, when she usually showed up barely in time to roll the phones over from the answering service. As if it wasn’t bad enough that a named partner had beaten me into the office and wanted to see me, she had to be here to witness it.

“Dammit,” I mumbled, picking up my pace as I headed to my cubicle to drop my stuff off before I raced to my boss’s office. The emotional high I’d been on from the amazing night and early morning I’d spent with Jax flew out the window as I braced myself before knocking on Mr. Warren’s office door.

“Come in.”

I plastered a smile on my face as I pushed open the door and peeked my head inside. “You wanted to see me, Sir?”

“Yes,” he replied, waving me inside without looking up from his computer screen. “Close the door behind you.”

He didn’t say anything else as I sat in one of the chairs across from him. A minute passed, and I had to restrain myself from fidgeting. Another one, and I forced my lips to stay closed instead of blurting out an apology for not being here when he arrived. Finally, his gaze switched to me and I straightened my spine while trying my best to look calm as I stared back.

“You’re new here,” he began, and my stomach fell because I expected a lecture about how things work for junior associates. “Which means you might not already be aware that I’m in the middle of a messy divorce.”

That was so not where I thought he was going with this. “I’m sorry to hear that, Sir.”

“I talked it over with Yates last night since he’s representing me. We both agree that it will look good to have a woman on my side, in case things get any uglier.”

Which explained why he’d called me into his office. The only other female lawyer at the firm was another partner, and I’d heard they didn’t get along with each other. It was easy to understand why he wanted to go with a junior associate who didn’t hate him, instead of a more experienced lawyer who liked to take verbal digs at him on a regular basis.

Even though I’d just complained to Jax last night about only being assigned busy work, I wasn’t excited by the prospect of being assigned to this case—not when I felt like he was tossing a live grenade at me and it could blow up in my face any minute. Representing my boss in his divorce sounded like a bad idea before I factored in the fact that he, himself, had described it as “messy.” If the settlement didn’t go the way he wanted it to, it would be easy to blame me for screwing it up.

“Divorce isn’t really my area of expertise.”

“As a junior associate, your job is to take whatever cases are assigned to you without complaint. Sometimes they’ll be within your area of expertise”—sarcasm was thick in his tone as he repeated my phrase back to me—“and other times they won’t.”

“Understood, Sir.”

He ran a hand over the top of his closely cropped blond hair. “Look,” he sighed. “As much as my soon-to-be ex-wife will make me out to be heartless, I’m not. Yates is damn good at what he does, and this will be a good learning experience for you. Some might even look at it as an opportunity to prove yourself to two named partners in the firm—an opportunity given to you much earlier than any other junior associate, since you’ve only been with us a short time.”

It was clear that his mind was already made up, and there would be no getting out of this. “You’re absolutely right, Sir. I promise I’ll do whatever I can to help get you the best divorce settlement possible.”

I quickly regretted my choice of words when his gaze slid from my face and down my body.

“I think you’ll be more help than you realize.” I suppressed a shudder at the masculine appreciation in his eyes when he finished his perusal and met my gaze again. “My wife is out for my blood, and she hired a shark in her attempt to get it. And, having you on my side of the table is going to make her unhappy. Very unhappy.”

He sounded damn cheerful about it, too. Considering the fact that we had just discussed my inexperience with divorce cases and the way he’d checked me out, I was going to hazard a guess that he was hoping I would make his wife feel insecure. What an ass. “A shark, Sir?”

“Opposing counsel used to work here,” he sneered. “He was pissed when I was named partner before him and left to join another firm. Since then, he’s been a thorn in our side, which my wife damn well knew when she went to him for representation.”

Great, so both parties were making decisions about their legal representation based on what would piss the other one off.

“I see,” I murmured.

“You’ll meet him yourself in a little more than an hour.”

An hour? “I will?”

“Yes, my wife is coming in for a deposition at nine.” I didn’t do a good job at hiding my surprise, and he noticed. “Yates will handle it, but we expect you to sit in.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“If there’s anything time sensitive on your desk, let me know and I’ll reassign it to another associate. I expect you’ll be busy getting up to date on my case for the next few days, at the very least.”

I spent the next hour doing as he’d asked, going through everything on my desk. I handed several files over to other associates and wrapped up a couple more by the time my phone rang and I was instructed to head to the firm’s largest conference room. It wasn’t the usual location for a deposition because of its size, but it was the best one we had. From the way Mr. Warren had talked about his wife’s lawyer, it was possible the choice of location had been made as some sort of pissing match.

Although it initially made me roll my eyes, I was grateful for the size of the room when I walked in and spotted opposing counsel seated at the end of the long conference table on the side of the room. The shark who was out for my boss’s blood was someone with whom I was intimately familiar. He was the man whom I’d reluctantly left this morning, after he’d fully demonstrated exactly how he expected me to kiss him—Jax Croix.

Our eyes met and I was caught in his intense regard, though his expression remained neutral. I was barely able to tear mine away from him as I walked the length of the room to take a seat next to Mr. Yates. It wasn’t easy to pull myself together, but I’d managed to wipe the stunned expression from my face when he introduced me to Jax and Mrs. Warren. She lifted her surgically perfected chin and glared down her equally fake nose at me. When she shifted in her seat, moving a little closer to Jax, I balled my hands into fists to avoid clawing her eyes out.

I needed to get control of myself. With a deep breath, I averted my gaze, but I could feel the heat of his stare and it made my skin tingle. It was a damn good thing I wasn’t the one asking the questions during the deposition, because it was incredibly difficult for me to take notes while my mind reeled at the revelation that Jax used to work for Smith, Yates, and Warren. If he’d left the firm the way Mr. Yates explained, and fought many cases against us, he damn well should have mentioned it when I told him where I worked.

An hour later, I had pages of notes. I was in possession of more information than I ever wanted to know about any of my bosses. Or my co-workers. Or anyone I knew. What I didn’t have was any idea of how I was going to proceed with Jax. My heart was telling me to figure out a way to continue my relationship with him, but my head was telling me to get out as quickly as I could or else I’d risk losing my job.

I watched him walk out of the room, with his blonde bitch-of-a-client next to him, and I wanted nothing more than to yank her hand off his arm. Mr. Yates and I followed them to the reception area, and I bit my tongue the whole way there. It was neither the time nor the place to have it out with Jax. And even if it was, I wasn’t ready for the kind of discussion we needed to have. But as his eyes met mine before the elevator doors closed, I knew by the gleam in them that he wasn’t going to give me long—not with him looking at me like he owned me and didn’t give a damn who saw him doing it.