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Lola stood, recognizing that she’d already wasted too much time that morning. “No.”
Natalia put her reading glasses back on in a move Lola interpreted as a gesture of support and encouragement.
Rather than let the morning’s events get her down, Lola puffed up her chest and strode across the space to her office. She had a meeting with Roxy that morning, and she was excited to go over another deal for a movie soundtrack. Her last song had gone over so well, the studio wanted her for a three-picture deal and would throw an insane amount of money at her.
Lola smiled. She’d gotten Roxy a better non-touring deal than either Natalia or Adriana had ever secured. She’d love to rub Adriana’s face in it, but Natalia had been clear they couldn’t talk about Roxy in any professional capacity.
As she reached her glass door, Lola saw a flash of bleached blonde hair move in her periphery. Roxy was already in the office, but she’d gone into Adriana’s rather than wait for her in the conference room.
In ripped jeans, a t-shirt, and wavy blonde hair falling down her back, Roxy was walking Adriana to her office like she needed an escort. In a revolting display inappropriate for the office, Adriana cupped Roxy’s face and kissed her on the cheek before sitting down at her desk.
Of course Adriana would have the luck to fall in love on tour with her client — a totally unprofessional move — and then start a wholly inappropriate relationship with her. They’d been together six months and acted like embarrassing teenagers in love.
Lola would never let herself look so stupid. Sensing her gaze, Adriana looked at her through the glass wall of her office and nodded in her direction. Roxy turned to her a second later and signaled that she’d be right there.
Stepping into her office, Lola dropped her things on the small sofa positioned beneath her wall of degrees. Her associate’s degree from Miami’s community college was the only one not on display. The others, her bachelor’s from the University of Miami and her MFA and MBA from NYU, were hung in elaborate heavy bronze that could double as murder weapons in a pinch.
She sat behind her computer and opened the email from Bamford’s assistant. What little peace she’d found was gone in a blink.
CHAPTER4
Late,Carmen rode the elevator up to her office while finalizing her rental car reservation on her phone. Apparently, the dent on the door could be popped out, but her entire running board needed to be replaced, thanks to the kink in the frame. And because she wouldn’t accept an aftermarket part, the body shop had to order a replacement running board from the manufacturer. Why that apparently took weeks, Carmen still didn’t understand.
It served her right, she decided when guilt crunched in her stomach the way her car had against the cement pillar. She should have just let Lola cut her off. It didn’t matter that she’d been waiting to turn, and that Lola was obviously unhinged. No regular person would have thrown their car between another car and a bus just to get somewhere first. But then again, Lola was anything but regular.
Regret was sour in her empty, clenched stomach. She hated herself for not being able to ignore Lola.
For the last seven years, she’d been practicing high-stakes, complex civil litigation in one of the most cut-throat cities in the world. Half of the old-school Miami lawyers used baiting as a regular tactic, and the rest were outright hostile. Carmen had no problem ignoring them. She always remained calm. Kept her focus on the goal and refused to be emotionally manipulated into taking a misstep.
And then there was Lola. Just being around her turned Carmen into a reckless maniac who would put anything on the line just to beat her. She could never seem to ignore her absurd antics for what they were. She could never let her have even the emptiest of victories, like getting into the stupid parking garage ahead of her.
Sweltering despite the June morning not being hot yet, she picked up her long, light brown hair despite having ironed it straight that morning. She needed it off her neck, and as soon as she got in her office, she was going to tear off her jacket.
When the elevator doors opened to the Law Offices of Bernal, Bernal-Vargas, and Associates, Carmen was greeted by her great-grandfather the way she’d been nearly every day of her adult life. An oil painting the size of a middle schooler hung in their recently modernized waiting room.
Abelardo Bernal, a man so imposing in effigy that she couldn’t imagine what he’d been like in real life, looked down on her in harsh judgment. Hair as black as midnight, slicked back and parted on the side, stood in stark contrast to his fair skin and light hazel eyes. The same eyes Carmen had inherited by all accounts.
More imposing than his linebacker shoulders and hard, square jaw was Abelardo’s legacy. A member of the Supreme Court of Cuba before he was forced to flee to Miami with his children and infant grandchildren in 1961, he’d humbled himself and smuggled them all onto a crabbing boat that had a secret compartment cut into the vessel.
Her family didn’t talk about the fleeing in the middle of the night part. Didn’t talk about the trauma of laying still for over a day while they crossed dangerous seas, unable to talk or move for fear that at any moment the boat might be intercepted. Her grandmother never talked about what it had been like to be six months pregnant with her mother while gripped in terror by the unknown and nauseating ocean swells. No one talked about the pain of leaving behind everyone and everything without even saying goodbye for fear of lethal reprisal.
There was only Judge Bernal and his legacy. It was a foregone conclusion that Carmen’s grandfather, already a young lawyer in Cuba in 1961, would do everything necessary to become licensed in the United States. Her mother, Ana Bernal-Vargas, had been groomed to be an attorney since she uttered her first word.
What chance did Carmen stand? She never considered doing anything other than going to law school. Graduating second in her class, she’d snagged a prestigious federal clerkship before going to work at the firm her mother had grown to over thirty attorneys and just as many support staff.
While she moved beyond the reception area and into her side of the sprawling office, Abelardo’s eyes followed her. Burning into the back of her skull, he reminded her of his expectations from beyond the grave.
If word art had been a thing when he was alive, Carmen was sure that he’d have Hard work, Integrity, and Perseverance sitting on his coffee table the way some people had Live, Laugh, Love. Duty hanging in their dining room instead of Gather.
Even though her grandfather had retired years earlier, his name was still ahead of her mother’s, as if she didn’t run the firm single-handedly. Carmen smiled to herself, imagining that the names etched on the front door might one day be Bernal, Bernal-Vargas, Vargas. She pictured the letters morphing in a kind of ombre display.
Carmen’s office was the smallest. Wedged between the copy room and the break room, her window was barely bigger than a porthole and faced another high rise rather than the bay. The silence of her enclosure was so different from the colorful chaos of the morning.
Despite having been with the firm for years, and hardly being new at thirty-three, she was still the youngest and greenest associate. As if she needed proof that she was still expected to do the grunt work, a neon yellow note was waiting for her on her already overflowing desk.
Cover Levi’s 2pm depo - ABV.
Tearing the note off the stack of discovery she had to review, Carmen muttered a string of curses before crumpling the paper and throwing it away.
