Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (11 page)

“Fine with me, Cash. You just—” she was not giving him another chance to say something like
that
again by telling him to get into bed, “—walk right out there and sit, or something.”

He chuckled and grabbed his side again, but he did as instructed.

And a good thing, too. Rox might be a Southern belle, but Southern belles turn into Southern mommas, and God help you if you cross a Southern momma.

Not Rox’s momma, though. She had been different. A lot different.

She followed Cash out into his bedroom. “Now you just lie down out there, you hear me?”

Cash behaved himself and climbed onto his mussed bed, sliding his legs under the sheets.

The bedroom was Spanish modern, too. Again, the framed art on the walls was of pottery or plants.

Rox walked around the other side of the bed and crawled over, holding the supplies to her chest. “Just stay still.”

He gingerly slid his hands behind his head, stretching his side. The staples strained in his skin.

She said, “You don’t have to do that. Doesn’t that hurt?”

“I’m fine.”

“Did you take those pills the doctor gave you?”

“I don’t like drugs.”

“Yeah, I can understand that.”

Now that she was holding the medical supplies and Cash’s bare skin was spread in front of her, uncertainty made her hands shake. Hurting him was the last thing on her mind.

The first thing in her mind was something else entirely.

His skin was pale gold and inked darkly with black flames and streaks. A whorl of flames started on his left pectoral muscle and spun out, spraying dark flames up and over his shoulder, spiraling down his arm to his wrist, and around his waist to dip under the white towel he had cinched around his hips. A short sheen of amber fuzz covered his chest and tapered toward his navel.

The incision where they had removed his spleen was over his ribs, and the cut had managed to miss all the ink.

Rox realized that her finger was tracing a dark streak of ink that ran over the thick muscle of his chest. The inked skin felt velvety, a little rougher than his satiny skin.
“Oh!
I’m sorry.”

He was watching her, his green eyes steady. “You can’t feel tattoos. They’re under the skin.”

“I guess not.” She grabbed the tube of antibiotic gel.

Okay, ointment first. She could do this.

And she could do it without making a dang fool out of herself.

She squeezed a stripe of ointment onto the stitches, careful to not touch them but just gently laying the gooey stuff on top. Cutting the square of gauze was next, and she managed to do it without cutting off one of her own fingers.

The gauze fluttered and stuck to the gel, which held it on the wound.

“Just another second,” she said.

“Take your time.” His voice was lower, throaty.

She glanced at him, but his arms were still behind his head. Cash was so beat up that she couldn’t read anything on his swollen face. He would have been deadly in a courtroom right then. Opposing counsel wouldn’t be able to tell what he was thinking at all.

Rox ripped off a modest length of tape and held it above the bandage, almost ready to press it onto his skin.

The paper tape dangled over his skin, clinging to her fingers, as she hesitated. His soft breath made it sway.

She was going to have to press it onto his body.

His rippling, muscular body with the sexy tattoo that trailed under the towel.

His skin and inked flesh stroked with cologne that smelled like rich sandalwood and vanilla beans.

Press the tape on his taut flesh, she thought. The tape right there in her hand. Press it down now.

Damn,
all those heavy muscles and tight flesh were nice to look at.

The tape fluttered from his soft exhale, and he asked, “Are you sure that you have a merit badge from the Girl Scouts in first aid?”

She shot him a dirty look, but she pinched the tape between her fingers and lowered it onto his skin.

Under her hand, as she smoothed the tape, his skin was warm, not feverish but solidly warm, and she pressed the tape over his side and the smooth ridges of his abdominal muscles.

The scent of soap and shampoo and cologne rose from his body, lingering in the air.

Another length of tape, and she ran her fingers under the round, tattooed mass of his pectoral.

Manboobs. He had manboobs. Moobs. And she was touching them.

He inhaled a quick breath, and his chest rose under her fingers. She pressed his chest more firmly than she had meant to.

Rox cleared her throat. “That’s a nice tattoo.”

“Thanks.” His voice was as hoarse as hers. They must be coming down with a virus or something.

“Is it fire?” she asked.

“It’s a phoenix,” Cash said, “the bird that catches fire, is destroyed, and rises again from its own ashes.”

Her hand was resting on his chest, and his heart pulsed under her palm. “Is that a symbol of the Netherlands or something?”

“No.”

His gaze looked like he was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t fathom what he meant.

Her gaze dipped to his lips. Oh, Lord. She might hurt him if she touched him at all, if she even touched her lips to his bruised lips. Her heart pounded in her chest, but she had to finish taping the gauze onto him.

She applied more tape, one piece to each of the four sides of the gauze pad, sliding her fingers over the tape to adhere it to his warm skin.

His chest rose and fell under her fingers with his breathing.

She pressed the tape with her fingertips, far too aware of her skin, her body, and her lips.

“So, that’s it,” she said. “You’re all done.”

His tongue licked his swollen lips. “Do it again, tonight?”

His voice was still hoarse from the intubation, she guessed.

But hers shouldn’t have been. “Yeah. I’ll do it again tonight.”

She considered cutting the gauze into an octagon next time so that she would have to press eight strips of tape onto his skin, just to touch him a little more.

Because it was just innocent. She wasn’t flirting with him. She wasn’t getting herself into a relationship with him.

Not with Cash Amsberg. She knew better than that.

The first time Cash had gotten up to walk—because you do need to walk several times a day after having surgery, no matter how much you hate it—he had joked, barely, in whispers, that he needed to give her a tour of the house. When Rox had stayed with him that first night after she had been thrown out of her apartment, he had just flipped his hand at a few rooms—the kitchen, television room, and their two bedrooms—rather than show off the entire, enormous house.

Estate. Compound. Mansion. It wasn’t just a
house.

The first time he took her walking around the house, he showed her the dining room, where carved chairs upholstered in maroon and gold tapestry surrounded a long, dark wood table that looked like something out of a medieval castle. The wrought iron chandeliers above looked like they could double as Inquisition torture devices. The effect, however, was beautiful and very masculine.

The second time that he sauntered around the house, only occasionally leaning on walls, he showed her the other guest bedrooms, which had carved dark wood four-poster beds, too.

“Do you have a lot of guests?” she asked after the fourth guest bedroom.

“Sometimes,” he said, “and they tend to arrive several at a time. My sister and her family have visited, so there must be enough space for her and her entourage.”

“Lots of kids, huh?” Rox closed the door to the last bedroom.

Cash leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment. “Four. She likes children and is breeding them as fast as she can. Luckily, her husband is more than amenable.”

Rox walked slowly with him, looking at the art they passed.

If those several paintings which hung in every room and lined every hallway were worth anything at all, the fact that there were so many of them must mean that Cash had a lot of money tied up in art. If the lawyer thing ever fell through, he could open a gallery.

He walked a little farther through the house every time, but he mostly slept for several days, healing.

When he was awake, he got into his laptop and read through contracts, mumbling, annotating, and then sending them to Rox for her comments.

He might be wounded, but the crash hadn’t cured his workaholism.

SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES, SQUANDERED

A few days after she had gotten Cash situated at home, Rox drove down into Los Angeles, meaning to stop in for two minutes at Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg just to drop off some insurance paperwork that Cash had signed. HR wanted it in hard copy, of course, because signing it online like every other time would be too damn easy.

Plus, she had to navigate the damn document security system to dump a bunch of contracts in the cloud so that they could work on them at Cash’s house.

Dealing with that damn thing was such a pain in the ass.

First, she had to input her damn secret security code, and then she had to find one of the damn tokens with the secret, randomly generated passcodes on it and wait for it to change, then type in the nine-digit number really fast so that it would validate her access before the token changed again in eight seconds.

Some people couldn’t do it. Daffodil was always begging Rox to do the token for her. Melanie was competent, but Wren was absolutely hopeless. Rox was pretty sure that Wren hadn’t ever successfully navigated the document security system.

As soon as Rox walked in the office, the admins and paras rushed her like a pack of rabid possums, demanding information about Cash.

“All right, all right!” Rox called out and retreated to the larger common area because people were climbing on desks and prairie-dogging over cubicle dividers to stare at her. It was like being in the middle of a mob of meerkats, all staring at her with their wild little eyes. She announced, “He’s fine! He’s beat up as all heck. He’s sore and sleeping a lot to heal. But he’s going to be fine.”

People called out questions, and she answered them. “His spleen. It’s an organ thingee that’s part of the immune system and does something that I don’t know. He’s going to be fine without one, though. It’s a tough way to lose six ounces.”

She listened to another question from the back, her hand cupped behind her ear. “I don’t know. Maybe a month until he’s back in the office? He demanded his laptop while he was still in the hospital and has already begun working, but he’s going to be slow for a while. He’s sleeping a lot. At least Valerie should be back soon, so it’ll probably be only a few more days with one partner on the floor.”

More questions. “I don’t know when he’s going to be up to playing volleyball, you letch.”

After everyone drifted away, satisfied that Cash would survive and that Rox really didn’t know much more, Josie Silverman tugged Rox’s arm, whispering, “We need to talk.”

Cash had probably told Josie about the Watson contract. This wasn’t Rox’s responsibility, but Josie would probably want a full briefing. She was kind of surprised that he had let the proverbial cat out of the bag so soon.

Rox followed and kept mum until Josie closed her office door behind them. “If it’s about that autobiography clause in the Watson contract—”

Josie demanded, “Are you sleeping with him?”

“I beg your pardon?” Rox’s voice squeaked at the end.

“Are you sleeping with Cash Amsberg?”

“What? No!” Rox covered her heart with her hand. “Good Lord, Josie. No, of course not.”

“You’re staying at his place.” Josie’s dark eyes were wide, serious, not squinty and jealous.

Rox relaxed a little. She didn’t think that Josie would start a slap flight over Cash, but he inspired some sort of weird mania in women. “He needs someone to take care of him. He just had surgery. He’s as weak as a blind kitten.”

Josie pressed her palms flat together in front of her chest like she was praying. “So you guys aren’t involved.”

“Not at all. That’s how I’ve stayed his paralegal this long.”

Josie nodded. “Okay, because if you’re going to be there for him, to take care of him, then you need to stay out of his bed. Otherwise, he might push you away when he really shouldn’t.”

Rox scrutinized Josie, watching for all the little tells that Cash had taught her to figure out when someone was lying their butt off. “Josie, were you involved with him, too?”

She rolled her eyes. “Look, it was a while ago, and I can still work with the man.”

“I knew Valerie had a fling with him, but I didn’t know about you.”

“Well, I never talked about it, and he’s a British clam.”

“Dutch,” Rox said. “He’s not British. He’s Dutch.”

Josie raised her eyebrows, her manicured, lined arches rising as high as the Botox would allow. “His accent is Royal Shakespearean Company British.”

“He’s Dutch.” Rox nodded.

“Well, don’t go Dutch with him, so to speak.” Josie turned and elbowed Rox in the side.

“Really?”
Rox sighed. “Is that
really
the best dirty joke you could come up with? You can usually do so much better than that.”

“I know. I think they shot this last round of filler directly into my brain and it all calcified in there.” Josie patted her prominent cheekbones. She looked about forty from the tiny lines around her eyes, but you could never tell in Los Angeles.

“Something about tu-lips, maybe?” Rox asked.

“Yeah, two lips. That would have worked. Or Cash on delivery.”

“Yep. So many opportunities, squandered.” Rox shook her head. “I expected better from you.”

Josie shrugged. “I’m not always on my toes. This is why I’m not a litigator.”

“But seriously,
no.
I have no interest whatsoever in getting involved with Cash. I’m a married woman,” she flashed her fake rings around to prove her point, “and I want a long, fruitful,
lucrative
career working with Cash Amsberg and this law firm. I will never get involved with him. I have fruit flies flitting around my office that have been around longer than most of his girlfriends.”

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