Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (13 page)

On the television, the actor slipped and fell in a vat of something orange and slimy, splashing the bad guy, who fell on his back and scrambled to get away. This was a lot more slapstick than they usually watched.

Cash cracked up, but he grabbed his side under his ribs, over the incision where they took his spleen out and winced.

“You okay?” she asked. Her fingers drifted toward his side, but she pulled her hand back. There was no reason for her to fondle him. He was just sore from surgery.

“Yeah, let’s just watch the movie.”

Rox closed the screen of her laptop and set it aside, too.

She had no idea what was going on. The good guys just seemed to screw up everything, and the bad guys seemed to be the ones that she should be rooting for. The actress who played the love interest was just a blond placeholder.

The good guy scrambled out of the vat of orange slimy stuff and chased after the bad guy, grabbing his ankle, and they both nearly fell over the side of the suspended walkway because it had no railing.

“Of course it’s a suspended walkway,” she said. “Movies don’t have ordinary sidewalks that are on the ground. Shouldn’t it have railings? Where is OSHA in all of this?” Her tone was a little drier than she had intended, but it was a pretty stupid thing in a movie.

Cash chuckled. “The walkway should have been suspended between two skyscrapers. That would have been even funnier.”

“Why is it funny if he fell?”

“Because of this.” He pointed at the television.

As the two actors plunged off the suspended walkway, falling toward their doom, the main character sprouted wings and flew, saving the astonished bad guy.

Rox’s mouth fell open. “No way.”

Cash cracked up. “Oh, come on! It was funny!”

She shrugged. “I suppose.”

“It was!” Cash elbowed her lightly on the arm. “You really haven’t been watching it. Don’t let work take over your life. Laugh at the movie.”

“I really should have watched the movie more.” Her smile was a little sheepish.

Cash bumped her with his shoulder and grinned. “It was funnier than that.”

“I promise that I’ll actually watch the next movie. I guess I’m just distracted.”

In the movie, the main character was yelling something about the beauty of the clouds to the bad guy, who was wound around his leg about four times. The look of sheer terror on his face was pretty funny, considering that he was so evil that he had been trying to steal money from baby sloths. His shoe fell off and plummeted hundreds of feet through the air, landing in the orange vat of goo, where it bubbled and disintegrated.

“Wait, how did the other guy fall in the big vat of orange goo and not die?” she asked.

“Because he’s Awesomeman. He just looks like a shlub because he’s still undercover in his secret identity.”

“I love it when you say ‘shlub’ with that British accent. That’s even funnier than the movie.”

“Is it? Do I amuse you with the way that I speak?”

“Of course. It’s just darlin’ when you try to speak American.” She looked back at the TV as if she didn’t even need to keep an eye on him.

He asked, “Do I make you laugh?” and he grabbed her side, pinching her ribs with his fingers just hard enough to tickle her.

His move surprised her, and she flinched, trying to jump away from him. He
never
tickled her. They
never
laid hands on each other unless it was absolutely necessary. It was a
rule.

His fingertips crawled up her side, digging in and making her whole body contract while she laughed helplessly. “Stop it!”

“Do I make you laugh?”

“Oh my God yes! Stop it.
Stop it!”

He grabbed her side harder, clutching her flesh with his fingertips, and she flipped over on the couch and tried to crawl away from him, giggling like she’d gone insane. “Please, oh God. Stop!”

“Now you’re laughing.” He grabbed her around her waist with his other arm and dragged her back to him, her stomach sliding on the couch cushions. “I’ll make sure that you’re laughing, this time.”

She reached behind herself and slapped at his head and shoulders, but she was laughing too hard to do anything effective. “Cash!”

He tossed her in his arms, turning her back around to face him and then dropping her on the couch. As he hovered over her, his green eyes were bright with laughter, and his hair had fallen down over his forehead. “Come on, laugh!”

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, breathless from laughter and trying to wiggle away from him, but he drew her body against his.

“Making you laugh.” Cash dug his fingers into her ribs harder, and paroxysms of tickling ran up her ribs and through her whole body. She laughed and writhed in his arms, kicking futilely.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and gasped out. “Okay, stop it. I mean it.
Stop it.”

Cash stopped tickling her with one arm around her waist, and his other hand stretched over her ribs.

That was when she realized that he was half-lying on her, their bodies pressed together, and his hand was against her bare skin under her shirt. His face was flushed, and the brightness in his eyes faded as he looked at her lips, replaced by a misty tenderness that she had never seen before. His lips parted, even though he was still panting from wrestling with her.

Her arms were around the back of his neck.

She should move those. She should push him away. She should make a joke of this, and they should never speak of it again.

Her hands dropped slowly from around his neck, caressing his neck and brushing his jaw line just underneath that white bandage that he still wore.

His face turned, and he nudged his chin into her palm. His five o’clock shadow felt like sandpaper in her hand, and the heat of their bodies brought out the last subtle scent of his cologne.

A heartbeat.

His eyes searched hers, and he didn’t move away.

Another heartbeat.

She said, “I think the movie’s over.”

They both turned their heads to look at the television. Credits scrolled up the large screen.

Rox let her hand drop away from his face, and Cash pushed himself up on his arms. The cool air chilled her side where he had been lying against her.

“I guess it is.” He sat up and stared at the screen. “You didn’t miss much.”

His hands curled into fists on his knees, and his downward glance seemed ashamed. “That went too far. It won’t happen again.”

Great.
Now they were uncomfortable with each other. It wasn’t like they were living together or anything.

“It was just the wine, Cash. Wine and pain meds are a bad mix. We’re fine. Don’t even worry your fool head about it.” Rox touched his shoulder with just her fingertips. “You did make me laugh, though.”

A smile curved his lips, and his head bounced a little bit as he chuckled ruefully. “There is that.”

SEDUCTION

Two days later, Rox returned from a quick trip to the grocery store and the wine shop because they were killing at least a bottle every night, almost like they were daring each other to use drunkenness as an excuse, or maybe that was Rox’s wishful thinking. More bottles seemed to go missing. She suspected the cats.

She carried the bags into the living room and turned right for the kitchen, through the dining room, calling, “Cash? Where’d you go?”

No answer.

“Here, kitty-kitty-kitty!” she called.

Nothing.

Not a puff of breath in the house.

Visions assailed her: Cash slipping and falling somewhere, maybe still too sore to catch himself, maybe hitting his head, or maybe something internal had torn because they had actually botched the surgery and he had bled out internally, and he was dead and the cats were eating his dead body.

She had no illusions that her cats would stand guard over his corpse. Cats know when your soul has fled and there’s nothing left but the kind of barbecue that takes a secret sauce and pairs well with fried green tomatoes.

“Cash? Cats?
Cats!”
She walked into the kitchen.

The three cats were lined up like circus-performing lions on the barstools.

Cash was standing on the other side of the breakfast bar, a thin slice of turkey dangling from his fingers.

She asked, “Are you feeding them lunch meat?”

“Um,” Cash said, and he withdrew his hand. Pirate took a swat at the turkey but missed because he had no depth perception, with only one eye.

White paper sat on the counter, flopped open.

Rox set the clinking bag of wine bottles on the counter and craned her neck to look at it. “Are you feeding them Boar’s Head Maple Roasted Turkey?”

“No,” Cash said.

Midnight licked the black fur around his lips over and over, obviously sucking up the last of the turkey juice.

She said, “You totally are.”

Cash threw the piece that he was holding to Speedbump, who snagged it out of the air and ate it off his claws. “They looked hungry.”

“They
each
have their own bowl of kibble in my room. The scientifically formulated for optimal cat nutrition kind of kibble.”

“Cats eat birds.” He was starting to grin. “It’s their natural food in the wild. It’s even better for them than kibble.”

“Cats do not eat maple-roasted turkeys in the wild.”

“They would if they could catch them.”

“Sadly, the elusive maple-roasted turkey is endangered in this part of California. Gimme that.” She made a grab for the meat, but Cash plucked it out of her reach.

Pirate jumped down from the chair, sauntered around the counter, and walked right the hell past Rox without a glance to rub on Cash’s leg.

“Traitor,” she told him.

Cash’s grin was so big that the bandage on his cheek was in danger of peeling off.

“Great,” she said. “They love you now. You seduced my cats.”

He laughed and held out a turkey slice at her eye-level. “Want to see if it works on humans?”

“I am not so easily trained, Amsberg.”

“I’ll say. It took me months to train you at work. All that chocolate worked wonders.”

“You are incorrigible, and I’m not sharing my wine with you until you learn proper manners.”

Pirate wound between them, rubbing Cash’s leg and then hers, helplessly purring and trying to get more turkey.

Speedbump yowled, and Cash walked around the breakfast bar and picked him up, scratching him around the chin for a second before he set the cat on the ground.

It occurred to Rox that Speedbump had known just what to do when he wanted to get down, and there was no way that he could have jumped up on that barstool by himself, due to his bum leg from when the car had hit him.

The four of them had been doing this every day, every time that she left.

That heartbreaker had seduced her cats just like he seduced every woman who crossed his path.

Oh, she should never, ever,
ever
get involved with him.

ANOTHER TRY
 

They sat in the living room, watching a storm outside whip the sea into gray froth. The wind battered the scrubby trees and long grass on the hill, but the house remained perfectly sturdy, silently withstanding the gale.

Rox had her laptop propped on her folded legs. Midnight and Speedbump sprawled on the rug, oblivious to the storm. Pirate was curled up tightly on the couch, his head tucked under Rox’s knee. Every time thunder rumbled through the house, Pirate growled at it, his warm fur vibrating under her leg.

“Cash, I’m going into the office today to dump more contracts in our cloud. You wanna come with?”

He looked up from the piles of paper stacked on the coffee table. His knees were spread wide as he leaned over, reading and etching notes in the contract’s margins in green ink. Leaning over like that, his broad shoulders looked bigger, and his narrow waist, smaller, and he was even more of an inverted triangle. In the light grayed by the storm, the golden highlights in his hair faded, but his green eyes darkened. The bruising on his face and arms had begun to fade, and the swelling diminished a little every day. “It would be more efficient for me to stay here and look over Valerie’s contracts.”

“You remember that meeting with Watson’s people is in three days, right?”

He went back to working on the contract. “What of it?”

“You’re going to have to go into the office.”

Cash didn’t look up again, but he paused, his pen touching the paper like he had frozen. He didn’t look frozen, though. He looked like he was restraining himself from leaping up. “I’m aware of the appointment.”

“Are you going to postpone it?” she asked.

“We can’t. Principal photography is due to begin in less than a month. This contract is already overdue, thanks to the producer’s dithering and my accident.” Anger laced his voice at the end.

“Just making sure you knew.”

Lightning cracked across the sky. Under Rox’s leg, Pirate growled.

“I know.” Cash went back to writing on the contract.

BANDAGE

The next evening after dinner, after they had split another bottle of sweet, white wine, Cash laid down flat on his bed again for Rox to change the bandage on the surgical incision on his side, which she had done with trembling hands twice a day, every day.

She should have gotten used to stroking the paper tape and gauze onto his bare skin, feeling the subtle velvet of him on her palms, and brushing her fingertips over his muscles and flesh, but twice a day for almost three weeks now, she had been left shaking after she touched him.

He had begun exercising, gently, in his small gym in a back bedroom of the house. His body sure hadn’t atrophied in the couple of weeks since the accident. Muscles wound around more muscles on his chest and arms, all decorated by the black fire of his tattoo that ran along his left side and disappeared into the jeans that he still wore.

And she could see all those muscles and most of his tattoos.

She could see them because he was wearing jeans and the two white gauze bandages, one on his ribs and one on his cheek,
and nothing else.

Not even socks.

Even his feet—clean, blunt toenails and smooth skin—were sexy.