Ruthless Rival (Cruel Castaways #1)(6)

Riggs was the richest of us three. On the outside, however, he looked like he was cruising through life, unable to commit to anything, including a cellular network.

“Had a good meeting?” Arsène popped his paperback shut next to me. I glanced at the cover.

The Ghost in the Atom: A Discussion of the Mysteries of Quantum Physics.

Can someone say party animal?

Arsène’s problem was that he was a genius. And geniuses, as we all know, have an extra hard time dealing with idiots. And idiots, as we also know, make up 99 percent of civilized society.

Like Riggs, I’d met Arsène at the Andrew Dexter Academy for Boys. We’d connected instantly. But whereas Riggs and I had reinvented ourselves to survive, Arsène seemed to be consistently himself. Jaded, cruel, and dispassionate.

“It was fine,” I lied.

“Am I looking at Cromwell and Traurig’s newest partner?” Arsène eyed me skeptically.

“Soon.” I dropped onto a stool beside him, flagging down Elise, the bartender. When she moved over toward us, I slid her a crisp hundred-dollar bill across the wooden bar.

She quirked an eyebrow. “That’s one hell of a tip, Miller.”

Elise had a soft French accent, and a soft everything to go with it.

“Well, you’re about to have one hell of a task. I want you to walk over to Riggs and splash a drink on his face à la every corny eighties movie you’ve seen, acting like you’re his date and he just ditched you for Blondie there. There’s another Benjamin waiting for you if you can produce some serious tears. Think you can do that?”

Elise rolled up the note and tucked it into the back pocket of her snug jeans. “Being a bartender in New York is synonymous with being an actress. I have three off-off-Broadway shows and two tampon commercials under my belt. Of course I can do that.”

A minute later, Riggs’s face smelled of vodka and watermelon, and Elise was two hundred bucks richer. Riggs dutifully got called out for leaving his date waiting. Blondie stalked off with an angry huff back to her friends, and Riggs made his way to the bar, half-amused, half-pissed.

“Jerk.” Riggs grabbed the hem of my blazer and used it to wipe off his face.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Penicillin was first called mold juice. I bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t, either, until last month, when I sat on a flight to Zimbabwe next to a very nice bacteriologist named Mary.” Riggs grabbed my beer, downing the whole thing and then clucking his tongue. “Spoiler alert: Mary was no virgin between the sheets.”

“You mean in the lavatory.” Arsène made a disgusted face.

Riggs let out a roar of a laugh. “Need some pearls to clutch, Corbin?”

That was the other thing about Riggs. He was a nomad, drinking other people’s drinks, crashing on their couches, flying economy like a heathen. He had no roots, no home, no responsibilities outside of his job. At twenty-two, it had been tolerable. At thirty-two, it was skirting the edge of pitiful.

“Which reminds me: Where are you off to tomorrow?” I snatched the empty beer before he could start licking the damn thing.

“Karakoram, Pakistan.”

“Ran out of places to visit in America?”

“About seven years ago.” He grinned good-naturedly.

Riggs was a contributing photographer for the National Geographic and a few other political and nature magazines. He’d won a bunch of awards and visited most countries in the world. Anything to run away from what was—or wasn’t—waiting for him at home.

“How long will you be gracing us with your lack of presence?” Arsène asked.

Riggs kicked back his stool, balancing it on two legs. “A month? Maybe two? I’m hoping to get another assignment and fly straight from there. Nepal. Maybe Iceland. Who knows?”

Not you, that’s for damn sure, you industrial-refrigerator-size baby.

“Christian asked Daddy and Daddy for a promotion today and got denied.” Arsène filled Riggs in, his voice monotone. I picked up his Japanese beer and downed it.

“Yeah?” Riggs clapped my shoulder. “Maybe it’s a sign.”

“That I suck at my job?” I asked pleasantly.

“That it’s time to slow down and realize there’s more to life than just work. You’ve made it. You’re in no real danger of becoming poor again. Let it go.”

Easier said than done. Poor Nicky was always going to live inside of me, eating two-day-old kasha, reminding me Hunts Point was just a handful of bus stops and mistakes away.

I elbowed Riggs’s ribs. His stool snapped back into place. He laughed. “And it’s not that I didn’t get it,” I said, setting the record straight. “They want me to give them a show-off case. A big win.”

Arsène tossed me a cruel smirk. “And here I thought things like that only happened in movies with Jennifer Lopez.”

“Cromwell just pulled it out of his rectum to buy time. Jumping through one more hoop won’t make a difference. The partnership is mine.”

Cromwell & Traurig wasn’t more than a pile of bricks and legal-size papers on Madison Avenue without me. But it still had that shine as Manhattan’s best white-shoe firm, and leaving it for a partnership, even one in the second-biggest firm in the city, would raise questions, as well as eyebrows.