Charade (A Fake Fiancée Romance) (Pretense and Promises Book 1) Read online

  But she wasn’t really upset about it—not right now, anyway. Her head wasn’t where it should be and she was struggling with it. She should have been contemplating her future clients—all five of them—and thinking of questions to pose, strategies to consider, arguments to make; instead, her brain was stuck on Brock. When she’d impulsively kissed him, she’d gotten a whiff of his spicy cologne. It was his trademark, and after sharing a bed for two days and the close confines of a car several times over the past weekend, she realized she loved the scent.

  And she was seriously falling for him.

  He was a gentleman when he wanted to be, but even his rougher edges appealed to her.

  What the hell was going on inside her head?

  She shook her head when she heard him repeat her name. “What?”

  “Hold out your mug.”

  She’d been holding her hands down at her sides, the coffee cup dangling from her right fingers, but Brock was going to pour her some. “Thank you.” If only he knew what she’d been thinking…

  Think about the clients, Erica. The bottom line was that she considered herself a people person. She had no problems talking to folks, asking them questions, letting her intuition guide her. How difficult could it be to gather information for a potential lawsuit? She could wing it, no problem. On their way back to Brock’s office, she said, “I think I’m ready for our first client. I have a couple of opening questions.”

  “I think it would be better if you let me do the first few and then you can do the rest.”

  Oh, she was tired of his bullheadedness. “Why? You’ll be right here. If I mess something up, you can step in.” He got ready to say something more, so she continued. “If I need more information, what’s going to stop me from contacting them later? You act like it’s such a big deal.”

  “Goddamn, woman. You are stubborn.”

  Erica’s shoulders dropped. “Sorry.” She was just excited, but she didn’t know that she’d be able to explain that.

  “But you have spunk. I love that, and it will serve our clients well.”

  “So does that mean—”

  “No. First interview’s mine. But maybe I’ll let you do the rest.”

  He’d called her stubborn? But he’d still acquiesced some, so she was going to take his offer. “Deal.”

  * * *

  Erica had gotten through the first three client interviews just fine. Brock had been a little overbearing at times, not letting her follow her own instincts when it came to questions. Instead, he’d interject what he felt was important to the case. During her first interview, she simply bit her tongue and let him take over but took back the reins as soon as he’d let her.

  By the second interview, she felt her anger start to rise and, by the third, she was ready to explode, and so, during their quick lunch of a sandwich and chips Harriet had picked up for them, she tamped down her emotions and calmly told Brock she felt like she was ready to handle the next interview completely by herself.

  While he’d said that was fine, it seemed like he was blowing her off, because he wasn’t giving her his attention. Instead, he was checking and responding to emails between bites of food.

  She’d harrumphed and flipped open one of the case files. After they were done with interviews, they could discuss strategy, but what was the point? She had the feeling Brock was going to simply tell her she needed to file this motion and that, contact so-and-so’s attorney, etc. She was pretty sure he wasn’t going to let her come up with her own ideas first.

  “Sorry, Erica,” he said, as she continued looking at the file, “but this is the kind of life you’re going to have to get used to. When I’m on the clock, so to speak, I’m working. You might have gotten your ideas about attorneys from TV, but it’s not the life of glamour Hollywood makes it out to be. When you’re spending time with clients, you’re not doing the actual work, and when you’re doing the actual work, the inquiries don’t stop—emails and voicemails, phone calls, and sometimes drop ins. Harriet picks up as much of that for me as she can, but there’s only so much she can do, and there are a lot of questions she can’t answer—either because they’re questions seeking legal advice or they’re things she doesn’t know the answer to. I just want you to know that if you think life will be easier here than when you were doing research, you’re wrong.”

  It was like he didn’t know a thing about her. “I didn’t think that. I want to work hard. This is the part I’m passionate about.”

  He looked at her then, eyebrows raised, an expression almost conveying surprise. “Okay.” The desk phone rang and Brock hit a tiny button on its face. “Yes?”

  “Your next appointment is here.”

  “We need about five minutes, Harriet. I’ll call you when we’re ready.” He looked over at Erica. “Did you get enough to eat?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay. Let’s clean up in here. If you need to go to the ladies’ room or anything, now’s the time.”

  “Nope, I’m good. I have all my questions prepared.” That way maybe he wouldn’t feel the need to derail her—or, if he did, she could get back on track. As requested, Erica crumpled up the trash from lunch and tossed it in the wastebasket under Brock’s desk. “I still have soda in my cup—should I set it somewhere else?”

  “You’re human, Erica. You can have a drink here unless you’re prone to spilling. And we always have water and coffee for the clients if they get thirsty.” Without warning, he dialed Harriet; in seconds, she responded, and Brock asked her to show the client in.

  Harriet arrived, looking a little less tired than earlier in the morning, and said, “This is Kylie English.” Both Brock and Erica stood to shake their new client’s hand and Harriet left as they all sat down.

  Kylie looked to be thirty-something and she was a tall drink of water. She was also thin with red hair, a smattering of freckles on her nose and cheeks, and bright green eyes, almost the color of a blade of grass. She slapped on a huge smile, but somehow Erica could tell it wasn’t completely genuine—and she knew it had to do with why she was here—sexual harassment.

  “Kylie, I’m Brock and this is Erica. I’m a senior partner here at the firm and Erica is an associate. She’ll be handling your case but I’ll be overseeing it—and that’s why we’re both here today.”

  Why Brock couldn’t let her handle the introductions, she had no clue. He’d made a big deal out of Erica needing to be the person they associated with their case, so he needed to shut the hell up. But Kylie was the last case of the day, so she was just going to let that go. She only hoped the clients would have confidence in her abilities—in spite of the fact that it seemed like she needed a babysitter.

  “Nice to meet you, Kylie,” Erica said, shaking the woman’s hand. “Please have a seat.” All three took their respective chairs and then Erica said, “I’ve reviewed the interview you had with the paralegal last week, but would you mind telling me more details about what happened to you?”

  “Yes. Thank God. I wanted to tell that girl last week and she told me to save it for you after I only told her one thing.”

  “Do you mind if I take notes?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Begin whenever you’re ready.”

  The woman pulled out a small red notebook and flipped to the first page. “My dad always told me to document things at work when they got weird…and, man, did they get weird.” She was scanning through her notes and said, “Before I tell you that stuff, I need to, I guess, disclose something. So I work at Pioneer Manufacturing. I’ve been there for about eight years. I started out on the assembly floor—boring work but it paid the bills. There were dozens of us in the warehouse, and employees came and went like there was a revolving door out front. Anyway, after the first six months, I got a promotion into the QA Department. I was thrilled. Even though I didn’t like the idea of being a cop, I liked that I would be making more money and not stuck doing the same thing all day long.

  “I wasn’t in Q
A long before my boss and I started dating.” Erica paused from taking notes and looked up at Kylie, raising her eyebrows. “No, he wasn’t harassing me. The attraction was mutual. But we didn’t work out—and, when we didn’t, I started looking for another department to transfer to. I didn’t care much for the job in QA anyway, but then having to see my ex every day made it a little painful. It just so happened that the shipping department had an opening, and I was lucky enough to get a job there.

  “So, because I’d never been in that part of the plant before, I had no idea what to expect. Yes, I’d gone to the foreman’s office for an interview the week before, but I hadn’t actually gone deep inside. Our lockers there weren’t like the ones in assembly or QA.” She shook her head as if to emphasize her point. “I need to back up a second and tell you that shipping, for some reason, only had men working there. It’s not like the job is hard—I mean, sure, sometimes there’s some heavy lifting, but most of it’s done with pallets and a forklift. And it’s definitely no more dangerous than assembly. But, for some reason, women avoid that part of the plant like the plague. Pioneer tends to employ more men than women anyway, but shipping is literally a No Woman’s Land—until me. And that’s okay. I didn’t mind. Sometimes I prefer working with men because they’re not as catty as women can be.” She smiled then—this time, a genuine one—and said specifically to Erica, “Sorry. No offense.”

  Erica smiled back. “None taken.” That little exchange made her feel as if she was starting to build a little rapport with her client, and that was a good thing.

  “Anyway…the locker rooms. Each guy had—on the outside of his locker, mind you—a pin up poster of a naked girl. Wasn’t that a thing a long time ago—naked girls pinned up in overtly masculine places, like auto shops and stuff? Not that it matters. I felt like I’d entered another country. It was so weird. And if they’d had them in their lockers, even that wouldn’t have been so bad. I could have ignored them then.

  “So I started wondering if it was stuff like that that put off women from working there. But I thought, Hey, I’m the new kid. I gotta pay my dues, and I didn’t say squat about it. It made me uncomfortable, especially a couple of extremely nasty pictures that kind of made my skin crawl.”

  Brock interrupted, “Did you say anything to you supervisor?”

  “Not then. I just figured I’d deal with it. Some pictures? Okay, no biggie. I just wouldn’t look at them when I went to my locker, which was, like, three times a day, five max. I’ve been in uncomfortable work situations before, and it seems like if you ignore stuff like that, it eventually goes away.”

  “But these guys? They were disgusting pigs.” She looked at Brock. “No offense.” He just shrugged and shook his head to indicate to their client that he was all right. “They’d tell really filthy jokes around me all the time and, at first, I just tried to ignore it—kind of like the locker room, you know? But it got to a point where I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, because it was like they were escalating. We didn’t get a rise out of Kylie that time. Maybe this’ll work.”

  “So why didn’t you think you should say something to them or your supervisor?”

  Erica could tell Kylie was making her way toward that and why Brock was hounding her, she couldn’t say, but he wasn’t letting her lead. She gave him a glance, her eyebrow raised, hoping he’d take the hint.

  “Well, I finally did say something to the guys. One of them, a guy named Dale, was telling some stupid disgusting vampire joke about a woman on her period, and that was the final straw for me. I mean, here we are, busting our butts, packaging this huge special order for one of our best clients in Texas, and they’re screwing off playing comedians. I stopped what I was doing, made sure I was loud enough to be heard by them all, and said, ‘Excuse me. I’m flattered that you think I’m just one of the guys, but what you’re saying is kind of offensive.’ Instead of apologies, I got responses like, ‘Well, sorreeeee!’ and ‘Aw, do you wanna go back to the kitchen now?’ Just really rude stuff.”

  “Sounds kind of like they were egging them on,” Erica said.

  Before Kylie could answer, Brock said, “You don’t want to lead our client.”

  Erica could have died. Okay, so maybe to a degree, Brock was right, but it wasn’t like Kylie was on the stand in court. “I’m just trying to get a sense of what was happening.”

  Instead of replying to Erica, he said to Kylie, “Please continue, Ms. English.”

  Erica could keep her cool, but she was starting to get pissed.

  “For the rest of the week after that, they were all pretty quiet, you know? I thought they were trying to respect my wishes, and I was glad I’d said something, you know, stood up for myself, even though those guys were kind of intimidating.

  “But then, the next week, it was worse. They kept talking about ‘this woman,’ saying stuff like, ‘One time there was this woman. She thought she was kinda smart but she was actually kind of stupid. Anyway, one day she tells her old man to shut the fuck up. An’ know what? He pops her, square in the jaw. Taught her to keep her mouth shut.’ Seriously. They talked like this all day long nonstop. Finally, I said, ‘Guys, I know what you’re doing. Very funny.’ And they’d say, ‘What, Kylie? Why does shit always have to be about you? Careful. Your head’s gonna get so big, it won’t fit through the door’.”

  Brock said, “Our paralegals said you documented these behaviors? Days, times, people?”

  “Yes.”

  Once more, Erica had to bite her tongue. Yes, it was all there in the file. Why did he feel the need to interrupt her story?

  “So, throughout all this crap, I made one bad move.” Kylie paused, taking a deep breath, and Erica could tell what she was going to say was upsetting.

  “It’s okay. Take your time.”

  “I found a picture online of a naked guy. I’d been complaining to a friend about everything that was happening and she dared me to hang a naked guy picture in the locker room—so I did. It wasn’t any worse than what the men did, but I knew how these guys were, and I knew it would piss them off to see a naked guy in there, so I hung it up. But no one said anything. And I just thought maybe they hadn’t noticed.

  “But when it was time to leave for the day and I went to my locker, I had a lovely surprise. They’d taken some of their nudie pics and used them like paper dolls, taping them around the picture I’d hung. One picture was made to look like the woman was licking the naked man’s rear—they drew a tongue on her—and another woman they had up around his neck. These guys just couldn’t let anything go. And that was when I knew I’d made a mistake. So instead of making it worse, I took the pictures down and threw them away.

  “And that was when I went to the boss. He made a good show of it, acting all concerned and angry, taking notes and stuff. And I knew he couldn’t resolve it right away—or at least that’s what he said. He said it was a personnel issue and he’d have to talk to HR—and then, at some point, I figured it would get better, you know, when he could actually talk to the guys. But days went by and then weeks, and literally nothing changed. That was when I figured he hadn’t done anything.”

  “Was your boss ever around when any of these things happened?”

  There was Brock interrupting again.

  “No. He usually just sat in his office doing paperwork. I’m convinced he just didn’t care.

  “So that’s when it got really bad. The jokes got worse and, instead of talking about me like ‘this woman,’ they just started talking about me like I wasn’t there. And they’d say threatening things, like, ‘If I was Kylie’s boyfriend, I’d fuck her good.’ And their jokes got nastier. But the final straw for me was the day I found what I’m pretty sure was semen in my locker.”

  “What? Please tell me—”

  “Did you record it?” Brock interjected. “That should be cause for immediate dismissal.”

  “I was horrified. Disgusted. Disbelieving that someone would stoop to that level. And I was kind of scared. I went
straight to my supervisor then and I decided if he wasn’t there or wouldn’t do anything, I was either going to go straight to HR or someone else. It was time to punish these guys.

  “Well, my supervisor wasn’t in his office. I had to search the building and finally found him in the break room talking to another supervisor. I told him he needed to come see something immediately. He blew me off but finally, after much urging, came with me.

  “And I think my jaw actually hit the floor—because, by the time we got to my locker, it was gone. My supervisor told me he was tired of me trying to get the guys in trouble, that I was making it up, stirring up shit—and, yes, he used the word shit. See? That’s the thing…I knew the guys down there were crude, cussing and stuff. I learned that day one. And I didn’t want to disrupt anything, but it was oppressive in shipping. It really was.”

  Erica was content just letting her vent so that she could wind her way through her emotions and the events, but Brock once more intervened. “What happened next?”

  And Erica felt even angrier at herself that she was even emotional—that what he was doing had such an effect on her in the first place. It made it harder for her to concentrate on Kylie’s words.

  “He sent me home for the day. It was time to leave anyway. But he told me to get some rest and think about what I’d done…what I’d accused the men down there of. I was kind of confused at first. Very upset…so upset that I called in sick the next day. I really questioned my sanity but, by the day after, I was convinced my supervisor had to be in on it—or, at the very least, he was aware of it, even though he pointed the finger at me. He was, by far, the worst boss I’ve ever had. So I decided to go to HR during my lunch break or after work. And, believe me, I wanted to go there first thing, but their office didn’t open till nine, and I had to report to work by seven. But I figured I could tolerate half a day with those primates before that. I’d just bide my time.