Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (16 page)

The whole time, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was standing right behind her, his arms around her and his lips near her neck, whispering in her ear.

CASIMIR DE BERGERAC

Casimir lay on the couch in the media room with his laptop resting on his stomach and Rox’s three cats surrounding him, whispering into the Bluetooth to cue Rox while she was in the meeting with Watson’s lawyers and accountants.

Yes, he knew that he could hold the Bluetooth a little farther away from his mouth and speak normally.

He whispered, “Tell them: this contract includes standard work ethic clauses, which Watson has never had trouble meeting, so we didn’t quibble on those. Communication is key in the event of a personal or health emergency, and provisions for those are written in the usual manner.”

Rox typed,
K.

Casimir scrolled to the next section of the contract,
Amenities.

This part was easy. He could discuss it with his eyes closed, so he did.

Casimir imagined plush, succulent Rox in his arms, his nose buried in her hair and the scent of her lemony shampoo rising all around him, and he whispered, “Ms. Watson has asked for certain amenities, all of which are reasonable and standard, and those are outlined in this section.”

Her body would press against his, her curves soft against his hardness, and her skin smooth under his palms.

He didn’t worry that Pym’s accident last year might be connected to his own. In Los Angeles, car accidents happened every day. The only wonder was that he hadn’t been involved in one sooner.

“Let’s discuss amenities,” he whispered and sipped from the glass of wine on the table beside him.

JUNIOR PARTNERS AND PARALEGALS

Rox was walking out of the meeting, whispering with fretful, brooding Wren, when Josie grabbed Rox’s elbow and steered her into her office again.

This time, Josie kicked the door shut. “Is he okay?”

Sweet baby Jesus, Rox had thought that she was going to get bawled out for impersonating an attorney. “Yeah, he’s fine. He’s having a hard time with some things.”

Josie crossed her arms and frowned. “With the contracts?”

“Yeah. The contracts.”

“Like what?”

“Like there are some problems with them. Has he said anything to you about them?”

Josie’s dark eyes widened, and her head tilted forward. “Rox, did he have a head injury?”

“What? Oh, no.
No.
Not at all. Cash had me read his charts to him while he was in the hospital because his eyes were swollen shut, but they actually ruled out any kind of head injury or concussion. His brain’s all there.”

Josie deflated with relief, and she braced her hands on her knees, bent over. “Jesus Christ, I thought I’d lost a partner there for a minute. It’s just been a few days since they said that Valerie was going to make a full recovery and could come back to work soon.”

“About Valerie—”

Josie was still bent over. “You scared the shit out of me, Rox.”

“Yeah, but about Valerie. We’ve been finding some serious irregularities in her contracts, things that she should have found.”

Josie squinted at her from where she was bracing her hands on her knees. “Was this before or after her stroke?”

“Before.”

She straightened. “Valerie is the best. If she signed off on them, then I’m sure it’s okay.”

“They really aren’t okay. These clauses are very,
very
not-okay.”

“Valerie is the senior partner because she’s been in this business for decades. She knows
everyone,
and everyone knows that she’s the best. Cash has only been out of law school for a few years and was only made partner a year ago. I’ll take Valerie’s interpretation of a clause over Cash’s every day of the week and twice on Sunday. He’s just not as experienced.”

“Even I can tell that these clauses are either squirrels to give us something to take out so we won’t fight the other rights grabs, or else something is terribly, horribly wrong.”

Josie smiled at her. “Roxie, sugarbear. As much as I value your very astute judgments, I am going to trust the interpretation of the senior partner over a junior partner or a paralegal.”

Rox ground her teeth at that.

Just a damn paralegal, was she? She wasn’t damned blind.

Josie walked her to the door, even though Rox was hanging back, stuttering. “Now you go back to Cash and tell him to get better and to make sure that he’s not second-guessing the senior partner’s judgment.”

NOT A TRIUMPH

Rox grabbed the Styrofoam boxes of Mexican food take-out off the other seat of her car and practically skipped into the house. “Cash! I can’t believe we pulled that off! They bought it, hook, line, and sinker and are under the blatant misconception that I’m a scum-sucking, bottom-dwelling lawyer. You should be paying me ten times what I make. Everything went perfectly!”

Cash was lying on the living room couch, a half-empty bottle of wine beside an empty glass, with his laptop on his thighs, sound asleep. That horrid white bandage was still stuck to his face.

Speedbump had climbed up on the couch somehow and was sacked out across Cash’s legs. Cash had probably helped him up there.

Pirate was curled up between his side and the back of the couch.

Midnight sprawled on the floor. He stretched and sauntered over to greet her with a rub.

Cash had been drinking alone.

And he had fallen asleep while working, even though it was barely five o’clock.

Cash was one of those high-energy guys. He paced. He jumped up and gestured. He had a standing desk in his office to work at. When they traveled together, he was at the gym before her and stayed to drink with the clients or other lawyers long after she retreated to her hotel room.

He didn’t doze off while watching television at midnight.

She very gently lifted his computer off of him by one corner of the screen. He stirred a little, his hair brushing his forehead, but he didn’t wake.

Rox tucked the computer under her arm and glanced down to make sure she hadn’t roused him.

His breathing deepened as he settled, and his strong chest rose and fell easily.

Rox opened his computer and entered his password,
Oranje-Nassau-6
.

On his desktop, files and folders littered the screen like he had thrown them against the wall and some had stuck.

She frowned. Cash usually nested his files in multiple levels of organized folders and then alphabetized them. While she hadn’t actually gone snooping in his bedroom, she bet that he color-sorted his socks. Her quick glimpses at his closet suggested that his several racks of suits were organized first by color and then by style, then maybe by designer.

Even if his housekeeper had his suits cleaned and then hung them, he had probably instituted the system.

This chaos was unlike him. One of the reasons that he was such a good IP contract attorney was that he thought in neat little boxes and then used language to tidy up all the loopholes until a document solidified into a solid block of beautiful text.

What’s more, as she opened contracts that he had been working on, all of them were only partly finished, each of them with a notation reading WHAT THE FUCKING HELL IS SHE THINKING? staked out in bold, red capitals somewhere in the middle of the contract.

And in each of them, no more notes were written beyond that.

Okay, Cash ranted when they were at the office, but he ranted after he had finished a thorough read-through and with full knowledge of every minute detail that was in a contract.

Rox scrolled ahead and searched for “autobiography,” one of the keywords that she had discovered would lead them right to some of the horrible clauses that were popping up in Valerie’s contracts.

About ten percent farther in the contract, she found one of the rights-grab clauses.

Cash had given up before he had even gotten to it.

He was still asleep on the couch, his hand resting on his stomach. In sleep, his square jaw was relaxed a little, but his lips had softened and become more lush.

Rox felt her own lips part. She blinked and looked away.

That white gauze on his cheek ruined the entire effect, anyway. She wanted to rip that damn bandage right off his face to see what was so horrible that he was keeping it covered up even from her. They had been to doctors’ appointments together. If it were infected or not healing, the doctors should have given him antibiotics or fixed it somehow.

She turned back to his computer, which looked like goshdarn gumbo.

Oh, Cash.

Her stomach clenched. Today wasn’t a triumph. Going into the office for him, letting him hunker down again in his house, had been a huge mistake.

Rox felt like she was falling sideways, and she grabbed an arm of the chair and Cash’s laptop, but it hadn’t been an earthquake, just her own head.

Vibrant extrovert Cash—that guy who was always out with the other guys after work, always in one or another flash-in-the-pan relationship—hadn’t left the house for over a month.

Now he couldn’t work, was sleeping during the day, and drinking alone.

Rox knew what happened after that.

Her chest clenched, falling inward like someone had been missing her whole life.

Not Cash. She wasn’t going to let it happen to him.

She crouched beside the couch where he lay and took his hand. “Cash, honey?”

He stirred and stretched on the couch, his long legs vibrating. “Hey, you’re back.” His wan smile was a pale imitation of the laughing, joking Cash that she had known for three years.

“I brought supper,” she said. “Mexican.”

“That sounds good. I’m not too hungry.”

For a guy who had only recently begun exercising—and his recent workouts had been gentle and limited compared to what she had seen him lift in hotel gyms around the world—he hadn’t run to fat at all after a month of lying around. His abs were still hard cobblestones under his clinging tee shirt, as she had felt every time she had changed that bandage on his side.

If he had been eating normally, he should have put on a little weight, a little insulation over those carved muscles.

But he hadn’t. If anything, his definition had gotten better as his little remaining body fat had burned away.

Man, she hadn’t even figured out what was going on when he had thrown away all those half-full boxes of food every night.

“Cash?”

He looked to where she was kneeling beside him.

Rox took his hand. Saying this scared the hell out of her, but not saying it scared her more. “I’m worried about you.”

“There’s nothing to be worried about.” He rolled up on the couch, not even wincing or holding the incision.

“I don’t want to lose you.”

He shook off her hand and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the couch. “The doctors said that I will live a normal life span without a spleen. I just have to be careful if I get sick and use antibiotics early and often.”

Careful here. Not accusatory. “That’s not it. You won’t see anyone. You won’t go anywhere.”

“I’m not quite up to it yet,” he said.

“That scar from your splenectomy is all healed up.”

“It is.”

“If the wound on your cheek isn’t closing right, then you need to see another doctor.”

He turned toward the long row of French doors that overlooked the ocean, unwittingly angling his bandage toward her. “It’s fine. It just needs more time.”

“We should go out after supper. Maybe get a drink or a cup of coffee. There are some places at the bottom of the hills. There shouldn’t be anyone there that we know.”

“We should work on these contracts,” he said. “We’ve got years of contracts to look back through.”

And yet he wasn’t making progress on them. “There are so many. It feels overwhelming sometimes,” she said, watching him.

He nodded. “And I hate what they mean.”

That his partner in the firm was negligent at best and criminally misrepresenting her clients’ interests at the worst. “Me, too.”

“What do you want to do after supper?” he asked. “Work?”

“Or a glass of wine at that restaurant, Vino’s? I saw that they have a bar on the way home tonight.”

He said, “Charley Lees’s new comedy is out on the streaming service. We did the contract for it last year. Might be interesting to see if it was worth all those crazy amenities he demanded.”

RÉSUMÉ

“Do you have any guns in the house?” Rox asked Cash.

He chuckled, but his eyebrows dipped in confusion. “No one has guns in California.”

“Does that actually mean that you don’t?” she pressed.

“I have no guns in the house.”

“Oh, okay.”

He cocked his head to the side. “Jan’s comments about Pym’s car accident upset you, didn’t they? I assure you, no one is trying to murder me because I found that ridiculous clause in the Watson contract.”

“Okay.”

That wasn’t actually what she had been worried about, but now she was worried about
not
having guns in the house.

Rox found a three-pound box of rat poison hidden under the kitchen sink.

God, rat poison. That was a terrible way to die. Why the hell didn’t Cash have humane traps or something?

The next day, Rox took a short walk on the grassy hillside and poured it out. She was gone only a few minutes, but her heart was racing as she ran back to the house, terrified of what she might find.

Cash sat in his home office, snarling at a contract. He typed something on his laptop, stabbing at the keys, and slapped the lid shut.

“Are you okay?” Rox asked, breathless.

“If I never see one of Valerie Arbeitman’s contracts again, I’ll be fine,” he growled.

Rox stood in Cash’s enormous bathroom, staring at the shower rod that circled the soaking tub. She had already raided the medicine cabinets and drawers, finding nothing more sinister than over-the-counter painkillers and one lone antibiotic capsule from three years ago.

The stainless steel shower rod wasn’t one of those tension bars that you jammed between the shower stall walls to hold up your curtain. The ends of this thing were screwed into the wall, secured right into the rough stone tile with what looked like huge screws. The screws’ heads were bigger than Rox’s thumbnails. They probably speared straight into the studs.