She nodded, wondering if he had known she worked at the firm before Friday night...which was completely irrelevant because he didn’t know he’d even been with her on Friday night. The cad!
‘It’s good we ran into you,’ Drew said, cutting into her increasingly irrational thoughts. ‘I was just bringing Sam to your office.’
Ruby tried not to show her alarm. ‘You were?’
‘Yes. With Mandy about to go into labour any day now, Sam has agreed to oversee the Star Burger case and I’d like you to bring him up to speed. Once this thing hits the media it’s going to be bigger than Ben Hur, and I’d feel much better having a senior partner on board.’
As much as Ruby wanted to ease Drew’s mind right before his first child was born, she had this case well in hand. ‘Really, I have everything under control,’ she advised him, hoping she sounded cool instead of defensive.
‘Your last update said you were planning to put a political bigwig on the stand. This thing is getting huge, Ruby.’
‘I’m not just planning it,’ she stated crisply. ‘I intend to do it.’ She didn’t mean to bristle but she knew Drew had been dubious about her taking this pro bono case in the first place, and there was no way she was going to pull her punches now or, heaven forbid, drop the case altogether. Star Burger was an immensely popular chain of restaurants throughout Australia. The owner, Carter Jones, had franchised his business but had neglected to put in ethical standards to protect his employees. As a result everything from discrimination to racism and underpayment ran rampant throughout the organisation, and Ruby aimed to prove that it started at the top down.
Winning would not only mean that her badly treated clients were paid the money owed to them, it would also give a group of young people who were typically vulnerable in the community a voice they’d never had before. ‘And it already is huge.’
‘Which is why Sam needs to help you out,’ Drew said, ‘he has experience with cases like this.’ He looked from Sam to her. ‘Plus he said you already know each other.’
He had? Ruby swallowed. ‘Only because my best friend married his brother. We don’t actually know know each other.’ Okay, so that time she had definitely sounded defensive; she knew it and steadfastly refused to look at Sam.
‘I can take it from here, Drew,’ Sam assured the other man calmly. ‘You still want this?’ He held the cup of cold coffee up to her.
‘No. But it’s a reusable cup, so you can’t throw it away.’
‘Fine.’ He held on to it for her. ‘You’ll have to lead the way. I have no idea where your office is.’
Unable to come up with a plausible reason to defer their meeting, she gave him a tight smile. At least he didn’t know what had transpired between them on Friday night. It was a small comfort, considering she did know and it was all she could think about, but she clung on to it anyway.
* * *
Cool as a cucumber, Sam thought, watching the sway of Ruby’s body as she marched ahead of him, her pencil skirt lovingly outlining the sweet curves of her bottom and long legs that ended in skyscraper heels. This was the Ruby he’d met two years ago in the bar, all sharp edges and take-charge attitude wrapped in a glossy, unruffled package.
Or so she would have him believe. Because she wasn’t entirely unruffled if her inability to maintain eye contact with him was any indication. That could be shock, of course, at having him turn up at her workplace. He was a little in shock himself. He hadn’t known where Ruby worked before today and there was no way she could have known he was about to merge his firm with Kent’s.
They had deliberately kept the merger quiet so as not to tip off the markets until it was a fait accompli. But this development, having Ruby as an employee, certainly threw a spanner in the works. He’d planned to get her phone number off Miller this week and call her up. Demand an explanation as to her actions last Friday night and then tell her what he thought about them. Tell her that next time she had sex with a man, she needed to wait around so that he could make sure she was okay and see her home.
Given that she was treating him like a veritable stranger right now, she probably wouldn’t have responded to his call very positively. But they weren’t strangers at all. They were lovers. Well, maybe not lovers. A lover didn’t run out on a man after she’d sent him to heaven and back, did she?