Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1)
Read Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) Online
Authors: Blair Babylon
Working Stiff
Billionaires in Disguise: Casimir
Runaway Billionaires: Book 1
By: Blair Babylon
Working Stiff
Billionaires in Disguise: Casimir
Runaway Billionaires: Book 1
By: Blair Babylon
Here’s the problem: when Rox was hired, she told her smoking-hot boss Cash that she was married, but she’s not. Now, three years later, she’s kind of accidentally living with him, and he’s being a perfect gentleman, dang it.
Everybody in the office said that Cash was a heartbreaker, that he’d bump her and dump her, so Rox decided not to become a statistic. She went out and bought herself some rings of the finest cubic zirconia so that she could work with Cash, who was several inches over six feet tall, emerald-eyed, ripped, gorgeous, his tailored suit clinging to his athletic body, sporting a British accent, and loaded.
It had seemed like such a good plan at the time.
But now, three years later, she and Cash have become friends. They travel together for work often, and they’re the best of buddies. When Rox gets thrown out of her apartment, Cash insists that she come live with him until they can find her a place because that’s what friends do.
Now, even though everyone insists that Cash never goes after married women, something about him has changed. There are little touches, little slips, and Rox is more and more tempted to tell hunky, gorgeous Cash that she never was married.
And then he’ll take her and break her, and then he’ll walk away, and then she’ll lose her job, and she still hasn’t found a place to live.
And yet, every time he looks at her with mischief in his dark green eyes, every time they’re teasing and it somehow turns into tickling, every time she swats at him and somehow ends up in his arms, she wants so much to risk everything.
What’s a working stiff to do when she falls in love with her friend, the boss?
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Published by Malachite Publishing LLC
Copyright 2016 by Malachite Publishing LLC
Table of Contents
~~~~~~~~~~~
So Many Opportunities, Squandered
Junior Partners and Paralegals
Teaching Maxence To Make Coffee
Amsberg v. Arbeitman, Round Two
Arthur, The Unlikely Voice of Reason
Amsberg v. Arbeitman, Round Three
Princess Anastasia the Nefarious
The Orange Hall at Huis ten Bosch Palace
~~~~~~~~~~~
More Rock Stars and Billionaires from Blair Babylon
RED FLAGS
Rox was standing in Cash Amsberg’s corner office in the law firm again, listening to him rant,
again.
If he hadn’t been so damn sexy, she might have had to put a stop to this. But he was, so she just ranted along with him.
It was kind of their thing.
At least Rox wouldn’t get fired from this law firm for being a “hothead.” She wasn’t a hothead. She was a Southern belle with a fiery temper, a tradition harkening back to the founding of Virginia. She would have done well in bygone eras, stamping her foot beneath her flowing hoop skirts and cursing like “Fiddle-dee-dee!”
Except for maybe that last part. Rox enjoyed a good cussin’ when the situation called for it. Not that the situation called for it too often. But sometimes, she went
biblical
on people who desperately needed to be told that she would smite them and salt the Earth.
Cash Amsberg pointed to a sentence in the contract, stabbing at the thick sheaf of paper with his finger. “What the bloody hell could Monty mean by this section? He must have known we would strike it off. It’s not even a negotiating point. There’s no way we would let Gina Watson sign this. Why would he even suggest such a thing?”
They were standing on the same side of Cash’s mahogany desk. He leaned over the contract, bracing both hands on the edge. Windows broke open the walls on two sides of the room. The afternoon California sun blazed in, glaring on the scarlet design of the Oriental rug covering most of the floor. Cash’s enormous diploma from Yale Law School hung above the couches at the back end of the office.
Dark bookcases packed with leather-bound books lined the other two walls. The books were mostly for show because the law firm had done all their research via LexisNexis for years, but Rox had caught Cash reading the hard copies late at night sometimes, rubbing his eyes.
He ran his hand through his hair, a sign that he was perilously close to losing his cool. She’d only seen him do that a few times, once when a Taiwanese film director had insisted that Cash play golf with him. Cash had appeared to be in good humor and had shot a perfectly respectable ninety-two, but he had returned to their hotel and ranted about
The Damned Scottish Game
for half an hour
.
Rox had laughed at his tantrum until he started chuckling about how his ball had gone into the water three times on the seventh hole.
Rox flapped her hands at her sides, narrowly missing Cash’s broad shoulder. “I cannot believe that he would even try such a dick move. That’s why I put a red flag sticky on it, so you would see that part first. Does he think we’re
redneck
idiots?” She emphasized
redneck
with her Southern accent to camp it up.
Cash scowled. “He must think we’re idiots. He must think we’re
all
idiots, every
one
of us, if he thought no one here would catch this.” Cash’s upper-crust British accent made them sound like the King of England conversing with a redneck colonist.
When Cash got all heated up like this, he literally got hot under the collar, and the subtle cologne that he wore—sandalwood and cinnamon and vanilla—crept out of his sharp designer suit and crisp white shirt. She tried not to lean in to catch a whiff, but she could just smell it when he was having a good rant. She could almost taste the vanilla on her tongue, as if she had her mouth pressed to his neck.
“This is one of Valerie’s contracts,” Rox reminded him.
Cash ran a hand through his hair. “Surely Monty doesn’t think that Valerie wouldn’t have caught this. Was he counting on her illness throwing us in such disarray?”
“This came in the very morning that Val had her stroke. I don’t see how Monty could have known that that was gonna happen. He’s still an asshole of the first degree, both for thinking that Valerie and her paralegals would miss this
and
for trying to do this to Watson. I mean, these frickin’ autobiography rights have nothing to do with the movie. It’s just a jackass rights grab.”
“This is egregious,” Cash muttered, his British accent turning more clipped. “Monty has gone senile or something. Call Patty. Mention it in passing. See what you can get out of her.”
Patty was Monty’s paralegal at his law firm. She was in Rox’s lunch bunch of girls who ate meals and went to movies together sometimes, mostly chick flicks. Rox went with them when she could escape from workaholic Cash, who liked to work through meals, and nights, and other appointments.
He shook his head. “Perhaps she can give us some insight into his thought processes, such that they are.”
Rox refrained from rolling her eyes and nearly sprained an eyebrow from the effort. “I don’t think Patty is going to do any industrial spying for us, not after you didn’t call her the next day,
or ever again.”
“She didn’t care,” he said, waving his hand to dismiss that.
“Oh, I
assure
you, she
cared,”
Rox told him.
Cash raised an eyebrow at her. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Did she?”
“Oh, yeah.” Rox had heard from Patty about what an asswipe her boss was for weeks, and Rox hadn’t disagreed, not when she knew that ghosting was Cash’s favorite
modus operandi
to end relationships. He took women out on a couple of dates, screwed them a few times, maybe kept up the appearance of something that was becoming substantial for a few weeks, and then dissipated into thin air,
poof.
He became unreachable, untextable, untouchable. As far as the women could figure out, he might as well have turned into a ghost, even if they worked in the same office and saw him every day.
Which was one of the many, many reasons why Rox would never date him.
One of many, many,
many
reasons.
Other women looked far, far up at Cash’s brilliant, intense green eyes, the dark blond streaks in his auburn hair and his pale scruff of beard, and the hard lines of his cheekbones and jaw line.
They dropped their panties even before he took off his perfectly cut suit and silk shirt to reveal his broad, rounded shoulders, those chiseled abs like cobblestones on his flat stomach, and the deep vee of his obliques that pointed below his tight boxer-briefs.
They were lost before he whispered to them in that cultured, sexy accent and far before they saw the top-of-the-line Mercedes Maybach that he drove to his rumored enormous, manicured estate in the foothills. No one had ever been there, but everyone said that his house was huge without any evidence whatsoever.
Yep, Cash was several inches over six feet tall, emerald-eyed, ripped, gorgeous, his tailored suit clinging to his athletic body, sporting a British accent, and loaded.
Shockingly, women swooned over him.
Even after he ghosted on them, every admin and paralegal and client in the office still flirted with him. When he walked by their desks, they pushed their boobs together with their elbows and smiled up at him, blinking rapidly.
The one time he got a little bit of road rash on an elbow playing basketball on the roof of the parking structure, they fawned over him and brought him cookies the next day to raise his spirits, even though he had laughed the whole thing off at the time.
But not Rox.
Never.
The afternoon sun heated the corner office, and Cash had already taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, baring the strong ropes of muscle on his forearms, the rough hairs on his tanned skin, and his tattoos. On his right forearm, above his wrist on the inside, three shields surrounded some kind of a triangular Celtic knot thing. It was small, maybe three inches across. The orange shield that pointed down at his hand had a white figure on it like a stylized lion rearing up with extended claws. The other shields were blue with three crowns and a red and white diamond checkerboard.