Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (3 page)

Paper was much more dramatic when thrown against a wall, too. A thumb drive just went
plink
on the plaster and dropped to the carpet. So unsatisfying.

Rox trotted over to the door, adjusting her blouse and suit jacket, which she was of course wearing even though it was almost eighty degrees Fahrenheit out there already. Suits hid her lumpy pudge a lot better than some of the slim sundresses that the other girls wore.

Luckily, her new car had fantastic air conditioning and that new-car smell.

On the table near the door, one of her cats had squeezed himself into Rox’s purse. His long, ginger-blond fur and sumptuous gut overflowed her bag, and he swished his bushy tail and blinked his one good eye up at her. His chewed-up ears, long since healed, swiveled toward her while he purred, thrilled with himself that he had wedged himself inside it once again.

She scratched his head, feeling the lumpy scar tissue, and ran her hand down his back, careful to go easy on the hard pebble where someone had shot him with a BB during his homeless kittenhood. “Pirate, we have discussed this. I need my purse.”

He purred more loudly and blinked his yellow eye at her.

“Come on.” She slipped her hands around him—her fingers running through his cottony fur—and grunted when she lifted him out of the bag. “You need to diet, mister. You and me, both.”

She had been working a lot the last few years, staying late and getting into the office early, and working through meals. Back home in Georgia, she would have been considered a little plump. In body-obsessed Los Angeles, Rox was constantly aware that she was always the chubbiest one in the room.

Rox carried Pirate over to one of the three cat beds in the middle of the room where the sunlight shone most brightly during the day and lowered him into the nest. Hand-crocheted kitty afghans lined each bed. The one in Pirate’s bed looked a little shredded. She should buy some yarn and whip him up a new one.

Speedbump and Midnight sprawled in the other beds, stretched to suck up the morning sunlight. Pirate sniffed and poked around before he settled.

Yep, three cats.

When you volunteer at an animal shelter, accidentally adopting cats is an occupational hazard.

It was a good thing that she volunteered at the no-kill shelter the next town over. They needed her help more than the local shelter, and if she had volunteered at the local shelter that euthanized a lot of their strays, Rox would have owned three hundred cats.

Hiding even these three beasts from the super could be a hassle.

Behind the cats, her living room was smothered in pearl pink velvet and lace, just how she liked it. Rose potpourri fumed flowery scent from every tabletop.

Rox might wear dark, tailored suits to work, but she went full-blown girlie-girl when it came to her own space. One of the guys she had dated last year, Robbie, had loved it, saying that it was like being invited into a lady’s bedchamber where no man had ever entered, only to ravish her.

Robbie had been fun, but it hadn’t quite worked out. They had drifted apart amicably after a few months.

She went back over to the little table by the entryway and called goodbye to her cats as she fished around her purse for her keys. They thumped their tails, ready for their fully booked day of eating and sleeping while she earned the money for the kibble and cat litter.

Just before Rox left, she slipped on the wedding ring set that had been lying in a blue bowl on the table beside a larger bowl of lemons and oranges. The cubic zirconia glittered in a stray sunlight shaft, and the thin gold plating shone.

She had bought the rings for herself during her lunch break on her first day of working at Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg, after hearing that Cash Amsberg the Heartbreaking Superman was repelled not by kryptonite, but by diamonds.

Cash might be a maleslut, but he didn’t touch married women. He didn’t even flirt with them. It was like he shut it all down. His flirting with Rox was just friendly banter, like girls do with their gay guy friends. It’s just all in good fun.

He didn’t mean anything by it.

She didn’t want to have her heart broken like all the other women in the office. They had all assured her that Cash would come for her and that she would love every minute of it, until suddenly, he wasn’t there anymore.

Rox fell apart when people left her like that, like they didn’t give a crap about her and just walked into oblivion.

She wasn’t going to go through that again.

And so, since her husband “Grant Neil” had not existed, Rox had invented him.

She had assured Cash and anyone else who would listen, yes, she was married. Her husband was a stuntman for several of the television studios, but he wanted to get into screenwriting and directing. He did a little modeling on the side. And maybe his music would take off for him.

So, yeah, “Grant” was a ridiculous mashup of all the Hollywood wannabe clichés and thus utterly believable. No one had even questioned his existence for three whole years.

Despite the fact that no one had ever seen him.

A friend of hers, an agent, had found a suitable headshot of a hot model/stuntman for Rox to use.

Really hot.

You could see ripply abs under his tight, black tee shirt. She had folded under his real name, Lancaster Knox, and wedged it into a frame for her desk.

Rox liked to stare at pretend-Grant and imagine that he was, indeed, her lawfully wedded husband. Sometimes she drooled.

And for three years, Cash hadn’t turned that sexy glower on her.

Yeah, thank goodness. She certainly didn’t want the hot, ripped British lawyer coming on to her.

She slid the cheap rings onto her left hand, scratched her cats on the head one last time, and opened the front door to leave the apartment.

Three cats.

She was twenty-seven and unmarried, not even dating anyone, and enmeshed in a workaholic office so she couldn’t even meet any guys who might be prospects.

Yep, it was official.

At what point had Rox turned into a crazy cat lady?

She was pivoting on her heel away from her door as it was slamming toward her, when a piece of paper taped under the door’s knocker fluttered in the breeze.

The two words at the top, bold and in all-caps, read:
EVICTION NOTICE.

Oh, shit.

A box was bolted over the doorknob.

If that door shut, she couldn’t get back in.

Her cats.

Rox kicked the crap out of the swinging door. It banged back against the wall, and she threw herself through the doorway.

The door bounced and punched her in the arm, but she shoved it and rolled inside before it could slam shut.

The door closed, but she was inside the apartment.

She sat up, panting.

Her three cats looked over at her from their beds, vaguely amused at her antics. Pirate yawned, showing three long fangs.

“Oh, my God,” Rox said. “What am I going to do?”

She couldn’t leave them there. That lock was bolted on. Once that door shut one more time, she wouldn’t be able to get back in. They would be trapped until the super came and—

Rox didn’t know what he would do. Toss them out into the landslide-prone hill behind the building? Throw them in the pool?

Take them to the local animal shelter where they would be considered unadoptable because they were old and ugly, where they would be immediately slated for a lethal injection?

At least they were all healthy now. They might have a week or two before they were put down for overcrowding. Or maybe three days.

Fuck, no.
She would not,
could not,
abandon them like that.

Okay, it was only six-thirty. She needed to plan. Rox needed to calm down and plan.

First of all, she wasn’t behind on her rent at all. She had automatic withdrawal set up for the first of the month, and the rent had been deducted on schedule on the first. She had checked. She always checked.

Rox needed that eviction notice. She needed to know
why.

She just had to make sure the door didn’t close while she did it.

From growing up in the South, Rox understood that the solution to any engineering problem lay in shoe glue, bailing wire, or duct tape.

A fat roll of extra-strength, silver tape was wedged in her kitchen junk drawer. She pried it loose and marched to the door.

Like Hell she was going to get locked out of her own apartment.

Rox might be a paralegal, but her daddy was an engineer. Anything that is worth engineering is worth
over-
engineering.

The duct tape cracked as she ripped a long length off the roll, and she wadded it into a sticky ball before she shoved it against the side of the door, binding the bulge in place against the latch by winding layers and layers of duct tape around the knobs on both sides of the door. She did the same with the hole in the strike plate, mashing the gluey tape to the wall. So what if it peeled off some paint? If she was getting evicted, she probably wasn’t getting her deposit back, the thieves.

Luckily, Rox knew a few lawyers. She would take those jerks to court and get her damn deposit back later. Right now, she had to get everything she could out of this trap, starting with her cats.

She glanced behind herself.

Pirate, Speedbump, and Midnight were limp in their beds, basking in the morning sunlight, oblivious to the fact that they had almost ended up back in kitty jail.

And maybe death row.

Rox bound the duct tape more tightly around all the parts of the door lock, wedging the door open with her feet and yet still standing back inside the apartment. The door looked like it had grown a silver tumor by the time she was done with that part.

She stood inside her apartment in the entryway and let the door slam closed.

The heavy security door bounced off the duct tape, and sunlight shone off the mound of tape through the open crack.

Good.

Rox wedged the door all the way open by jamming a butcher knife under the bottom of it and proceeded to secure another ball of duct tape into the hinges so that it couldn’t swing even partway closed. Winding the duct tape around and around the hinges, gumming them up but good, calmed her down a little.

When there was no way that damn door could possibly swing shut, she swiped the eviction notice off it.

Animals
was written in the box for Violations.
No pets policy
was scrawled underneath. Boxes for
lease violation
and
deposit forfeited
and
endangerment of other residents
and
immediate eviction
were checked below.

Legal action
was written in uneven letters, and
authorities called.

All for three damn
cats?

That was ridiculous. Rox wasn’t hoarding goddamned cobras.

Pirate stretched and extended one paw, his claws gleaming in the morning sunlight like vampire fangs or hypodermic needles or something.

Seriously.
How the hell were three geriatric cats endangering
anyone?
They’d had all their shots.

Even if they did look a little ragged.

Okay, she couldn’t fight this right now. Cash or Josie would slap the apartment management company upside the head with a lawsuit for her soon.

But in the meantime, she couldn’t leave her cats here, not with a permanent lock on her door stymied only by duct tape. Even a small knife would make quick work of it.

So she couldn’t stay, and the cats couldn’t stay.

Which meant that they all had to go together.

This part had to be done carefully.

Rox sidled over to her bedroom and violently shook the treats bag, nearly powdering the shrimp-flavored bits inside.

The cats ambled in after her, checking out each other, unsuspecting but more than okay with an unscheduled shrimp-treat break.

She slammed the bedroom door behind them and fed them the treats.

They didn’t see her sliding the three cat carriers out from under her bed until it was too late.

HOMELESS

Three days later, Rox sat behind her desk, annotating yet another contract on the enormous monitor that threw blue light on the walls of the office, blazing even brighter than the sizzling fluorescents overhead. Her feet were baking, nearly steaming, but she didn’t so much as wiggle her toes.

The picture of the very hot Lancaster Knox, model and stuntman, sat on her desk. She blew him a kiss.

A huge rubber plant blocked the tall window beside her door. A dark track in the beige carpeting led from the heavy pot to the far wall.

Over the thick leaves, Cash’s face rose in the window. He grinned at her, pointing at the locked doorknob.

Couldn’t that man ever text or email or call on the damn phone?

But he never texted unless something was horribly wrong. When they traveled, he showed up at her door at all hours of the night, holding documents to talk with her about. She had bought three pairs of travel jammies so she could open the door when he had had a brainstorm or just needed to talk to her in the middle of the night.

She hadn’t seen him coming.

Usually, that plant stood over beside her desk, and Rox could see Cash striding down the aisle lined with cubicles where the admins and other paras worked. His long legs covered the floor, and he grinned at everyone in the office he passed. The other women smiled at him, laughed at something, and a few fluffed their hair and inhaled deeply.

Considering that they were all nursing broken hearts about him, they sure got aggressive with the flirting whenever he walked through the cubicle farm.

She withdrew her feet from under her desk, found her pumps with her toes, and walked over to open the door.

As soon as she flicked the lock on the door, Cash poked the door open and started to walk into her office. “Rox? Did you receive the Killer Valentine contract?”

She stepped in front of him, blocking his way. He stopped short and blinked at her, looking far down from where he stood up there at six-feet-whatever. Confusion twitched his eyebrows downward.