Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (17 page)

That thick steel bar looked like it could hold a man’s weight, even if the man was swinging at the end of a rope tied to the bar.

Rox picked up the screwdriver and went to work.

“Is there a reason you keep leaving the garage door open?” Cash asked.

Rox paused, thinking up lies. “I didn’t have a garage at my apartment. I guess I’m not used to remembering to close it.”

“And sometimes when you close it, it doesn’t shut all the way.” He frowned. “Mice are coming in through the gap, and I can’t find the mouse poison.”

She glared at him. “You don’t need rat poison. We have three cats.”

His dark green eyes, now healed from all the bruises and swelling, widened. “Will they hunt the mice?”

Yeah, dude. Cats hunt mice.
“Well, Speedbump just kind of stands there and yells at them. He’s the manager. But Midnight and Pirate are great hunters. I used to catch moths for them to hunt in my apartment. They loved it.”

“Let’s get them down there, then. I’ve got to see this.”

ABSENCE

Rox stood out on the deck, the sea breeze picking at her hair, and tapped the contact on her cell phone titled
Brandy
and held it to her ear. “Hey, honey?”

From the barking in the background of the call, Brandy was already at the animal shelter. She asked, “Yeah? When are you coming in?”

“I can’t this weekend. There’s some stuff going on. You have enough food for the week?”

“Plenty. Don’t sweat it. I’ve got three other people coming today. Two of them have been socializing kittens for a couple of weeks, so now I can put them to work.”

So the shelter was set for labor and food. “I’ll be in next weekend. I promise.”

“That’s right. You get your butt down here. Are you still homeless?”

“In that I’m still shacking up with that guy, sure. But I’m not sleeping with him.”

“Why are you living with him if you’re not even getting any?”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“This is the guy who might dump you at any second, and his M.O. is just disappearing when he doesn’t want to deal anymore?”

“Yeah. Well, it’s complicated.”

“I do not understand why you are putting up with this. If you need a place to stay, come hang with me.”

“Your dogs will eat my cats.”

“They will not.” Brandy paused. “Probably not.”

“I’m fine, really. And he kind of needs a friend right now, just a friend. And we’ve been just-a-friends for three years, so it’s cool. I’m okay.”

“Okay, then. But call me in a few.”

“I will.”

QUID PRO QUO

“You haven’t left the house for days, Rox. I’m beginning to worry about you.” Even though Cash was trying to joke, his voice and laugh were still so dispirited.

She looked over at him, holding onto her laptop screen so she wouldn’t dump it on the floor. They were sitting beside each other on the couch in the media room, watching sitcoms over their laptops and working during commercials. Cash sat to Rox’s left, which meant that the awful white bandage was taped to his far cheek. Unless he turned and looked at her, she really couldn’t see it.

On the coffee table near their feet, two empty wine bottles stood among wine glasses and sauce-streaked Chinese food boxes. The light from the television painted garish colors on the sides of the containers and bottles in the darkened room.

Truth be told, the wine sang in Rox’s head so much that she was having trouble concentrating on the television and hadn’t read anything on her computer for over an hour.

She said, “I haven’t needed to go into the office to drop more docs in the cloud, and all our favorite restaurants around here deliver. Even the wine store delivers. I’d rather work.”

He looked back to his computer. “You’re beginning to sound like me.”

“I suppose that was inevitable after all these years.”

“You follow me around more than the cats,” he said.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s possible.”

The three cats were draped over them both. Speedbump had trained Cash in his peculiar vocalizations that meant he wanted to be picked up or set down on the ground, a necessity with his bum leg, which meant that Speedbump now loved Cash with the burning fire of a thousand suns and was currently lying behind him on the back of the couch, cuddling the back of his head. The cat was purring so loudly that Rox could hear the vibrations through the upholstery.

Cash, however, had glommed onto Pirate and snagged the fluffy ginger cat whenever he walked by, settling the motheaten cat in his lap. Pirate usually strained against Cash’s arms, his single eye bugging out, until Cash calmed him down by scratching around his destroyed ears.

It was a love triangle to rival the best of them, a bromance of man and beasts.

Midnight was still very much Rox’s cat and was lying beside her on the couch, tummy-up. She scratched his chin and chest while she pretended to work. His triangular head hung off the cushion, his black fur blending with the dim room.

Good to know who the loyal one was, though, especially when shrimp-treat time came around.

“Yeah, well,” Rox dithered, trying to get her buzzed brain to work properly. Cash had a tendency to pick sweet wines, and she
loved
them. Where had Rieslings been all her life? “If I didn’t follow you around, I might get lost in this humongous house, and they would only find my dry bones when the new owners moved in twenty years from now.”

He chuckled. “And I thought that you liked hanging out with me.”

She punched him in the shoulder. “You? If I wanted to hang around a hot, successful lawyer, I’d flirt with Josie. At least she would fix me up with her plastic surgeon.”

He laughed a little more at that one. “Josie keeps her plastic surgeon pretty close. Otherwise, he would get too busy to see her for emergency Botox. Can’t have that.”

“I’m worried she’s going to end up looking like Michael Jackson.”

“There’s little chance. Josie does plastic surgery the correct way, in consultation with her very good surgeon and taking his advice on what subtle procedures will effect the best outcome. Michael Jackson ordered his unethical surgeon to keep cutting because he wanted a smaller and smaller nose, and the surgeon did what the client wanted instead of insisting that there wouldn’t be a good outcome. A good surgeon is an artist, and you have to let them do the work.”

“Her surgeon is great. She looks great for forty.”

Cash looked up at the dark wooden beams on the ceiling, considering. He must have decided that he wasn’t violating confidentiality, because he said, “Josie is fifty-five.”

“No way! She looks forty!”

“Yes, but she doesn’t look like a cartoon of a twenty-year-old.”

“Wow. Now I seriously want the name of her plastic surgeon.” The sitcom came back on, but the television was still muted. The remote sat beside Midnight, close to Rox’s hand.

“He is an artist. Not that you need any plastic surgery at all.”

“If Josie offered, I have a list of procedures that I would do. A
long
list.”

He laughed out loud that time. “Surely you don’t.”

“Obviously, I would start with liposuction or just go whole-hog for a tummy tuck. Or a lap band. Or a gastric bypass.” She didn’t grab the chub that hung around her waist. She had some pride left. If she’d had a little more wine, she might have gone for it. “And then we would move onto a nose job and lip injections.”

His expression turned to disbelief. “You wouldn’t let a scalpel near you, would you?”

“Oh,
heck,
yeah. In a heartbeat, if I had the money.”

“Promise me that you won’t.”

“Drunken promises never count.”

He set aside his computer and turned on the couch, rumpling Pirate, who stalked down the couch to collapse by the arm. “Promise me that you won’t let a surgeon cut you, even if you had the money. Your skin is beautiful.”

Rox laid aside her own laptop and turned toward him on the couch, jostling Midnight, who stalked off and flopped on the arm of the couch, because she was very, very buzzed. If she had been sober, she probably would have turned the TV volume back up and ignored him.

But she was buzzed. So she turned.

His emerald eyes—so dark in the dim room—were unfocused from the wine, and he stroked her cheek with his knuckles. He said, “It’s like you don’t even have pores.”

“It’s dark in here,” she said.

“It’s not the dark. I marvel at you all the time. No matter how good the surgeon was, he couldn’t improve on this. If you let someone cut you, it would destroy this satiny feel.” His fingers warmed her cheek, and he ran his thumb over her cheekbone almost all the way back to her ear. “Your bone structure is incredible. Your nose is perfectly straight.” His fingers wove into her hair. “You don’t color your hair, do you?”

“They don’t make a bottle called ‘Garden Dirt Brown.’”

He chuckled, but he watched his fingers comb through her hair. “It’s lustrous. I’ve been accused of highlighting mine, but I don’t.”

Her own hand rose, and she kind of watched it, too drunk to want to do anything about stopping it. She touched one blond streak at his temple that ran though his dark auburn hair. “I can tell. It’s growing out, but the streaks are still there.”

He turned his chin, resting his face against her hand, and watched her. “Your hair doesn’t look like dirt. It’s glorious. It’s so dark, and then the sun shines on it and picks out gold and copper.”

“It’s—” She couldn’t think, not with his fingers deep in her hair and cupping the back of her head. “—It’s not.”

“I like your hair,” he said. “I think it’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

“I am not,” she said, her voice getting more breathless. “Stop saying that.”

“You
are
beautiful. I won’t stop saying it, even if I have to whisper it late at night when we’re both a little too drunk.”

“You’ve been setting out two bottles every night. This is obviously part of a fiendish plan.”

His hand was so warm and strong on the back of her head. “I don’t have a fiendish plan.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,” Rox said to him, her voice too damn breathless.

“I usually don’t have to be drunk to make a pass at a woman, but you’re married.”

Guilt wormed around her. “Oh.”

“Why doesn’t he tell you that you’re beautiful?” Cash whispered, and he leaned toward her.

“Because he doesn’t lie to me.” His lips were an inch from hers, less than an inch.

“Then he’s blind. Or purposefully stupid. Or a cad. Or he doesn’t want you to know it.” Little puffs of his breath—scented with wine and mint—touched her lips.

“But it’s the truth. I’m just ordinary. And chubby. And not cute.” Just a fraction of an inch. A sliver of air separated their mouths.

Cash asked, “Shouldn’t you be defending your husband’s honor about now?”

The wine kept her from coming up with a defense for her fictional husband. It fuzzed around her head until her fingers curled around the back of Cash’s neck, and she pulled him that last fraction of an inch to her lips.

He grabbed her lips with his. His arms wrapped around her, around her shoulders and around her waist, and he pulled her against his chest and abs, locking her against him. Her arm slipped around his neck. Her other hand splayed on his chest, feeling the rounded muscle in her palm.

His lips felt as soft as the other night, but this time, his hands roamed over her body. He sucked gently at her lips, nipping, and his tongue stroked over hers. His hand dropped, and he gripped her ass, shoving her hard against him.

He lifted his head. She tried to keep kissing him, but he peeled her off with his arm around her shoulders. His mouth found her neck, and he scraped his teeth over her throat and breathed on her moist skin, making her shiver.

In seconds, she was panting and arching her neck, trying to get closer to him, to get
more
of him. It had been
so many months
since a man had touched her, and she had been too near Cash all that time.

A whisper of cologne, warm spices and musk, lingered on his skin, and she breathed him in.

Cash sat backwards on the couch, and his strong arms hauled Rox with him. She twisted and ended up with her legs straddling his thighs, standing on her knees. They were both wearing jeans, but she was essentially open to him, the bulge in his pants directly below her spread legs. If she lowered herself, her clit would rub right on him.

He surged forward, gathering her to him and shoving her tee shirt up to her armpits and then over her head. It flopped on the carpet somewhere. He was so tall that he had to bend to run his lips over the tops of her boobs, his breath warm and humid on her cleavage and the swells above her lacy, pink bra.

Yeah, she had been wearing the good lingerie, and she had bought more since she had moved in with Cash. Her subconscious had been planning this for weeks.

“Wow,” he whispered, grasping her breasts, almost kneading them, one in each hand.

He had probably never felt real ones before. After all, they lived in California.

Cash held her tits, his palms and fingers full of her skin, and lifted them to his mouth. His lips and tongue started gently, drawing silken lines around her nipples through the thin lace while he held the weight of them, and then he opened his mouth, sucking her in.

Ripples started in her body, flowing outward.

He opened his mouth, breathing on the wet fabric and her skin.

Rox felt like she was tumbling and falling, speeding out of control.
“Cash,”
she gasped.

“Hell, yes. Say it again.” He used his thumbs to flip aside the lace of her bra cups and licked her nipples, suckling them into hard peaks.

Rox curled down over his head, standing on her knees, holding onto his shoulders, and gasping while he rolled his tongue around one nipple and the other and then sucked her hard. Her breath roughened, panting.

She didn’t want to ask where this was going. She didn’t want to know.

He stroked down her body to her ass and pulled her harder against himself while he lipped and tongued her tits. He cinched one arm around her waist, holding her tightly. With his other hand, he popped the clasp on her bra behind her back, dragged it down her arms, and tossed it aside, too.