Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (36 page)

“This is different,” he said. “There are things that happened to me when I was a child that I never told anyone.”

He was a very private person, Arthur had said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I think I do.” He sighed and looked at the wall across the room. “Yes, I need to tell you.”

Pencil-thin lines of light rode across his face from the dawn’s glimmerings shining through the horizontal slats, but she couldn’t really see his face yet. “We’ve been friends for three years, and we’ve been okay with it this way.”

He took both her hands in his and inhaled a deep breath. “When I was six, I was in a car accident.”

“A car accident? Jesus, no wonder this accident freaked you out, even beyond the almost-dying part.”

“The car that I was riding in flipped over the safety barrier and rolled down the side of a mountain.

“Oh, Lord.” She gripped his hands more tightly in the dim light.

He said, “The seat belt didn’t fit me right. I was too small. I went through the windshield.”

She tightened her fingers around his. “Oh, God.
Cash.”

“The glass scraped me up. I had cuts all over my body, crisscrossed, like I had gone through rollers of knives. Some were worse than others.” He let go of her hand, and through the darkness, she could see his arm lift as he ran his fingers down the tattoo that covered his left shoulder and ribs under his tee shirt. “This side went through the window first. The tattoo is to hide the worst of the scars. Here. Feel.”

He guided her fingers under the soft cotton of his shirt. His ribs were long lumps under his flesh, but the skin over them was rougher than the skin around the tattoo, thicker, like leather.

“The plastic surgeons sanded down the scars, so you can’t feel much.”

She ran her fingers over his skin, finding that odd texture under more of the tattoos. “Didn’t that hurt?”

“A bit.”

“Like sandblasting a few layers of your skin off?”

He shrugged. “That’s pretty close.”

“When you were
six?”

“No. When I was eighteen and nineteen, during my undergraduate degree.”

“Wow, Cash. I’m so sorry. At least it didn’t mess up your face, huh?”

He held her other hand more tightly. “Actually, it did.”

“They must have done an amazing job with the sandblaster.”

“There weren’t a lot of cuts on my face.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good.”

“The bones inside were smashed. My cheekbones. My nose.”

Rox covered her mouth with her hand.

“For most of elementary and high school, I was disfigured, rather badly. They couldn’t do major reconstructive surgery until I had stopped growing.” He lifted her fingers to his cheekbones, his jaw. “This is all plastic and cement. It’s like I’m wearing a mask.”

She ran her fingers over the hard lines of his cheekbones and jaw, trying to feel any seams or scars, but everything felt normal. “They did an amazing job. I can’t feel anything that doesn’t feel perfectly natural. Is this what you should have looked like?”

“It’s probably close. They used pictures of my father when he was that age and of my younger brother Willem, who was seventeen at the time, to make the casts. They also did some age-progressed photos of me that had been taken before the accident, but I look more like my father, I think.”

“I’ve never seen pictures of them. You don’t have any pictures of them around.”

“I’ve got some, somewhere. There’s more than a familial resemblance.”

His dry tone made her smile.

Early tendrils of sunlight leaked through the slats that covered the window.

In the dim light, something began to form on his cheek, something twisted.

Rox kept her hand cupped on his cheek on the other side of his face, the uninjured side. “Does the scar hurt now?”

“No.”

Her fingers drifted around to the other side of his face. On his other cheek, hard lumps and pits puckered his skin. A crease and ridge ran under his cheekbone. “This feels like it must have hurt.”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad. It was over with quickly.”

The sunlight strengthened, and a dark rose glow infiltrated the blinds.

Under her fingers, gnarled skin marred Cash’s cheek like wood knots growing under his skin in an area just below his cheekbone.

Even though she had felt it, seeing the damage on what had been perfection was shocking, like seeing someone slash a painting in a museum. “Oh, Cash.”

His voice was quiet as he asked, “Are you going to leave?”

She glanced at the window. Scarlet light trickled though the blinds. “It’s five in the morning.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She looked at him, startled. His green eyes almost glowed with the red light staining his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He was watching her eyes very closely. “I mean,
me.
Are you going to leave
me?”

Good Lord.

Heat flashed on her skin. “Do you actually mean, would I break up with you because you have a silly ol’ scar on your face?”

Cash still didn’t say anything. He just watched her, his emerald eyes wary in the brightening sunlight.

Righteous country anger began to simmer in her blood. “Are
you
saying that you
think
that I am so damn
shallow
that I would see a little scar on your face and take off for the
hills?”

Confusion creased the skin between his eyebrows, and his lips opened.

Her voice hardened as the anger boiled up. “Casimir
Friso
van
Amsberg,
I have never been so
insulted
in all my life!”

His eyes widened. “I did not—”

She yanked her hands out of his and held them up by her shoulders, fingers splayed to strangle him. “You think that I am so
damn
superficial that I would give a
fig
—no, that I would give
a nit on a gnat’s ass
—about that little
pucker
on your face and that I would walk out on you, that I would take my cats and
depart
as if you were a leper or an
atrocity.”

He sputtered, “That’s not what I—”

“That is
entirely
what you meant and you know it. You have a lot to learn about me,
Casimir Friso van Amsberg.
I am not some fragile, inbred, hairless mutant cat who would keel over at the sight of blood or a bit of scar tissue. That is
ridiculous.”

The corners of his mouth rose just a little, and he turned his chin to look at her out of the corners of his eyes. “I’ll have to make you angry more often.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea at all,
Casimir.
I will whup your effete Euro
butt
if you say something like that to me
ever
again.”

His smile curved more. “I like it when you say my name.”

“I say your name all the time. I’ve yelled it across the office and screamed it at the ceiling once or twice, too.”

“Casimir.
You’re calling me
Casimir.”

“That’s right. I am angry enough to call you by your full and legal name. You had best
beware.”

He blinked, looking at her face. “I like it when you call me Casimir.”

“Well, that’s neither here nor there. I am so irritated with you that I could spit.”

He stroked her arm, his smile warming. “If all this has persuaded you to call me Casimir instead of Cash, then it was worth it.”

“I declare, I will go get a horsewhip if you do not stop provoking me.”

“You do have a temper, don’t you,
lieveke?”

“Oh, you have no idea. Once I get riled up, I
stay
riled up. Watch out when I go
biblical,
and let me assure you, I am nearly
there.”

He wrapped his arms around her, pressing his whole body against hers. The heat from his flesh warmed her long tee shirt and her skin underneath, and he kissed the tender spot where her neck met her shoulder. “I won’t bring it up again.”

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all morning.”

He chuckled against her skin and held her more closely. “I want you to come to Amsterdam with me next weekend.”

So this was it, the start of the whirlwind-travel phase of their relationship, where they jetted off to Europe for no good reason.

At least it meant that he wasn’t ghosting on her just yet.

She asked, “Why Amsterdam?”

“There are some people whom I want you to meet.”

“Your sister, Ana?”

“Among others.”

“It would be nice to meet her.” Ana had known to send Maxence and Arthur, the perfect foils for Cash’s downward spiral. Rox should thank her and tell her that it had worked.

Maybe she should bake Ana some brownies or something.

“She’ll love you,” Cash whispered.

“She seems nice. I’m sure I’ll just love her, too.”

Cash rested his forehead on the side of her head, his lips near her ear, and he whispered, “I love you.”

Rox’s throat collapsed. She couldn’t speak or breathe.

Wren had said that he wasn’t lovey-dovey. On Rox’s first day, Melanie had said that Cash wasn’t mushy and didn’t lie about what was going on.

Rox closed her eyes and just felt his strong arms around her.

God, she wanted so much to believe him.

An echo of his words jumped around inside her, a vibration straining to get out, but her throat was constricted so tightly that she could only sip air. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t
think.

“And I don’t say that to all the other girls,” Cash said. “I haven’t said that to anyone except you. I’ve been in love with you for years, torn between wanting you to divorce Grant and yet not wanting you to suffer through a divorce.”

This didn’t compute. This was contrary to all the laws of the state and nature. Cash Amsberg didn’t fall in love with anyone. He just fucked his way through the office contact list and client roster.

Rox carefully, slowly, slipped her arms around his waist, trying to tell him with her body because her throat would not open.

“I’ve wanted to tell you this for so long, that I love you. I’ve wanted you in my arms, in my bed, in my life
this
way, not just at work. I won’t ghost on you. I’ve been waiting for you for so long.”

Rox turned in his arms and buried her face against his chest, holding him as hard as she could.

Even with his splenectomy scar right under her arm, he wasn’t in any danger of being hurt by her squeezing him. She wasn’t strong enough to hurt him.

She was too weak, far too weak where he was concerned. She wanted to believe him so much.

“I love you, too,” she whispered. “Don’t ghost on me. No matter what. I couldn’t bear it now.”

His arms tightened around her, and his fingers wove into her hair. He curled around her, protecting her, holding her in his arms and with his whole body. “I won’t ghost on you. I won’t leave you, ever.”

“Don’t get creepy,” she said, her voice choked because she didn’t want to cry but she couldn’t quite laugh.

He chuckled. “I won’t get creepy, but I love you and I won’t leave you,
lieveke.
”

They sat that way for a few more moments until it seemed prudent to lie down before they fell over, and they slept in each others’ arms in the morning sunlight for another hour.

PRINCE MONSTER

Rox wandered out of Cash’s bedroom to go to the kitchen to rustle up some breakfast.

Cash had left his bedroom a few minutes before her, kissing her on the forehead and then ducking to kiss her on the lips before he went out to make sure that Arthur and Maxence had found food and coffee.

As Rox closed the bedroom door behind her to walk down the hallway, Maxence turned the corner from some guest bedroom in the deeper part of the house and smiled at her.

She lifted her chin and refused to be shamed by the wannabe priest catching her leaving a man’s bedroom in the morning. Hey, Maxence had definitely followed that black leather-clad woman out of the office at The Devilhouse, and from what Arthur had said, he wasn’t as pure as Irish butter before that, either.

He was following her down the hallway, however. She should probably wait and walk with him to be polite. She leaned against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest.

Maxence was wearing another tailored black suit, bringing to mind priests, morticians, and ravens. It fit his broad shoulders and tapered to his athletic waist and long legs too well to have been bought off the rack, and the discreet stylishness of it caught even Rox’s attention.

Talk about mixed messages.

While she leaned against the wall, waiting, Maxence was inspecting the art hanging on the long hallway’s walls as he strolled, his hands clasped behind his back. He hadn’t seen that she was hanging out, waiting for him.

A lot of art hung on the walls of Cash’s house.

Rox stared at the painting across from her of a still life of fruit, glowing scarlets and oranges. She drifted over to look at a landscape painting of a Spanish fort on a hillside. Another painting farther down the hall was of an archway, draped with ivy and flowering vines.

None of the paintings were portraits of people.

Cash didn’t have any mirrors in his bedroom or the common areas, either.

Or pictures of his sister or other family.

No
faces,
at all.

Her heart broke a little more for him.

Maxence was close enough to talk to without yelling down the hallway.

She said, “I need to talk to you.”

Maxence walked to meet her in the hallway. “All right.”

“So you’re His Holiness Pope Fuckitall.”

He folded his hands behind his back and smiled, looking down at his feet. “That’s a rather recent nickname. As a child, I was the Emperor Maximum. I grew to my adult height about six months before everyone started to grow in eighth standard.”

Rox pressed, “And Arthur is the Earl of Givesnofucks.”

“He’s always had that nickname. You can see why.”

“So what was Cash?”

Maxence lifted his head and looked down at her, a wariness in his dark eyes. “How much has he told you about his childhood?”

“He told me that he was in a horrific car accident that smashed his face, but he didn’t have reconstructive surgery until he was eighteen.”