He stares for a very awkward moment, before his gaze slides down to my legs locked tight, and his lips curve upward in a slight smirk.
Compelled to fill the silence and get his eyes back up where they belong, I ask in a slightly perky voice that doesn’t belong to me and is a desperate attempt to hide my nerves, “So what do you want to talk about?”
His lips curve higher as his eyes come to mine, and I’m pretty sure he’s amused by my overt attempt to mask my anxiety. “I wanted to thank you again for your help.”
I give a wave of my hand in dismissal. “That was just my job.”
And let’s face it… I didn’t do much.
I walked out of the police station with Evan Scott and while our investigator was easily able to locate the redhead he was with but didn’t know her name—a thought that is quite distasteful to me—this information was ultimately not even needed as they’d made an arrest in the case already. From what I’ve read, it looks like a drug deal gone bad.
“I want to hire you,” he says and my body actually jumps in surprise.
“Excuse me?”
“I want to hire you,” he repeats simply.
“For what?” I ask, still astonished to the point I don’t think I’m following along as well as I should.
“For a variety of reasons,” he says casually and with a careless shrug. “Midge agrees you’d be perfect for the job.”
I honestly can offer no intelligent response, so I just stare at him with my mouth hanging open.
He finds this humorous, and I know this because he chuckles. Then he sits up in his chair, rolls it a little closer to the table and leans in toward me. “So will you, Emma? Work for me?”
I give a swift shake of my head back and forth a few times, not as a negative response, but to clear the mud my brain seems to be mired in. “I’m sorry… but I don’t understand. What could I possibly do for you?”
Another chuckle, which actually sort of annoys me because he’s enjoying my discomfort, before he says, “There’s a few things going on. My former bandmates are suing me over the rights and royalties to some of my songs.”
Geez Louise… I don’t know anything about copyright infringement law—
“And on top of that, I’ve got three major deal offers from record labels, and I need help navigating through the contracts to make sure I’m protected, if I decide to accept one of them.”
“Evan,” I say firmly. “I can’t handle all of that.”
“And that’s not really all,” he barrels forward. “I need a publicist… someone who can fend off all the media questions regarding all of these legal issues as we battle them out, particularly because, while there’s been an arrest in Keith’s death, he would have been involved in the suit for my song rights. That’s going to be brought up. I don’t have time for it, and frankly, I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. I don’t want to jeopardize my ability to fight that lawsuit.”
“Evan,” I say even more firmly, and then I pause to make sure he doesn’t throw anything else at me. “I’m not qualified to handle all of that.”
“Midge says you are,” he counters.
“She’s wrong,” I say with steel in my voice. “Not only can I not do it, but even if I could, I’m not interested. It’s not the type of law I want to practice.”
“That would be contract law,” Evan says with a knowing look. “Right?”
My jaw drops wide open again. “How did you know that?”
He runs his gaze over my outfit and then cocks an eyebrow at me. “Come on, Emma. You positively scream isolationist. I’m guessing you’re most at home in a cavernous library, flipping through musty books. It’s not that difficult to figure out, and that’s one of the reasons you’d be great at helping me navigate those record label deals.”
“Try again,” I say with narrowed eyes and a sneaking suspicion starting to sink in. “How do you know I want to do that type of law?”
He smirks this time, and without any apology in his voice, he says, “Midge knows you’ve applied to several firms around this area for a position where you can keep your nose buried in a book.”
An equal mixture of anger and embarrassment fills me. Anger that Midge knows of my job search, which means she must have been reading my emails somehow, and embarrassment that she’s busted me looking for another job on the sly.
“And before you even think that Midge is snooping in your business, let me tell you that a few of the firms contacted her when they received your resume,” Evan adds on with a knowing grin. “They were surprised someone from the great Knight & Payne would be making a break and they wanted to know why.”
“Son of a bitch,” I mutter under my breath. Am I going to be stuck at this job forever with no way out?
Then an equally disturbing thought crosses my mind. “Darn it all to hell,” I mutter again. “She’s probably going to fire me since I’ve been looking for another job.”