Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (37 page)

“Ah.” Maxence’s shoulders dropped about two inches, and he blinked slowly. “Good. He’s a very private person in some ways.”

“So what did you guys call him?”

His eyebrows twitched downward, and he sighed. “We didn’t give him the name. He insisted that Arthur and I call him that. He owned it, and he wore it like a mantle to throw it back at people who tormented him.”

Rox’s hands curled into fists at the thought of someone tormenting Cash. “He was a kid.”

“Children can be cruel.” He actually flinched as he looked at the walls. “Certain children, especially, seemed to be born with no conscience. Casimir’s treatment at the hands of certain people is what made me study theodicy, why evil exists in the world. Arthur and I tried to protect Casimir from those kinds of people, but he wouldn’t allow it.”

Rox shook her head. “Yeah, he wouldn’t.”

“He always battles injustice, and he won’t let other people fight his battles for him. Most of the boys were fine. After they got to know him, everybody liked him. Heart of gold and all that. Always picked for teams early, too.”

“All the guys love him at the office.”

“That’s Casimir. Everyone’s a friend. No one could have actually teased him even if we had wanted to. None of the boys, anyway.”

A few tumblers fell into place on the lock that was Cash Amsberg. Rox clarified, “None of the boys, you said.”

He nodded. “None of the boys.”

“But the girls?”

Maxence studied a painting of a golden bowl full of jewel-toned fruit. “The girls were different. When we were very young, it wasn’t a problem. Once everyone hit puberty, though, things changed for him. There was some groupthink going on, not uncommon in children.”

“I’m not sure I want to know this anymore.”

“I think you should.” He still wouldn’t look at her, though.

“Okay.” She took a deep breath and steeled herself.

Maxence pursed his lips. “They toyed with him.”

“This sounds really bad.”

He nodded. “They dared each other to go out with him, to kiss him, to make him fall in love with them, and then they laughed at him to his face and among their friends. It was brutal. No one could stop him from believing them and falling in love with them, until one day, he didn’t anymore.”

“Oh.”

“Something clicked in him, and he never believed them after that day. When one of them approached him, he was unflaggingly polite, but his eyes were hollow for hours afterward. We watched him to make sure that he didn’t ski into a tree or stop swimming in the middle of the lake.”

She looked at the Spanish tile under her feet. “Okay.”

Maxence nodded, biting his lower lip.

Rox planted her hands on her hips so that Maxence wouldn’t see them shake. “So what did you guys call him?”

Maxence stared at his feet, embarrassed. His mouth went tight, and he enunciated very precisely, “Prince Monster.”

ARTHUR'S WORK HERE IS DONE

In the kitchen, Cash was sitting at the table by the front window with Arthur. Empty cereal bowls stood on the table between them.

Cash was holding his spoon in his hand, pointing it at Arthur’s nose like he was going to shank him.

Arthur was inspecting the tip of the spoon as if something was clinging to it.

Both looked up when Rox came in, then looked over her shoulder when Maxence walked in behind her.

Arthur asked, “Are you packed?”

Rox asked, “For what?” but behind her, Maxence said, “Yes. We can leave whenever you want.”

“Where are you off to now?” Cash asked.

“Home,” Arthur said. “I have socialized all the kittens in Los Angeles, and so my work here is done.”

Cash raised an eyebrow. “More like you managed to coax Maxence and me into going to The Devilhouse with you, so you’ve tempted us enough with your evil ways.”

Arthur pretended to frown. “Evil lurks only in the hearts of men, not in our dicks. Support me here, Maxence.”

“I’m not getting involved in this conversation.” Maxence’s breezy tone didn’t seem serious, but it did sound like he had heard that line of reasoning far too often.

Or maybe he just feared for his immortal soul whenever Arthur was around. Rox wondered just how often Arthur felt the need to tempt Maxence, whether with liquor or women or who knew what else Arthur was into. She wandered over to the cabinets and poured herself a bowl of cereal.

“Fine, don’t support my position.” Arthur’s dry drawl suggested that he didn’t believe Maxence for one minute. “But you would still like a lift to London, wouldn’t you?”

Maxence shrugged. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

Arthur’s grin and the squint of his silvery eyes bordered on demonic. “It would be my pleasure.”

SUB MODO

Rox strode through the law firm from her office toward Cash’s, careful to skirt the long way around the cubicle farm to avoid Val’s and Josie’s offices.

Wren discreetly waved at her over the top of her padded walls, but a lot of the other paralegals kept their heads down and their gazes, averted. The mumble and mutter of the office died down as she walked through.

She holed up in her own office for a few minutes before she met with Cash in his. Flipping through the document security system just pissed her off more. Josie and Val had been into everything, all of Cash’s contracts, everything that Rox had worked on, and a bunch of other contracts, too. Obviously, they had been searching for something or trying to hide what they had done.

She skulked around the perimeter of the cubicle farm to get to Cash’s office. Something was definitely going on, and the rabble knew about it. If she asked someone, though, she might get them into trouble.

Cash opened his office door for her. “Meeting time?”

“Eleven,” Rox said. “We’ve got half an hour. Cash, do you want to look at the DiCaprio contract?”

“Casimir,” he said, shutting the door behind her.

Rox looked behind herself. “Pardon me?”

He closed the distance between them and folded her into his arms.
“Casimir,
not Cash. I’ve never liked that nickname. You started calling me Casimir this morning. Don’t stop.”

“I, well, okay. I might slip sometimes, Casimir,” she said, trying it out. It sounded funny, but it fit him. Calling him by his whole, real name was a little more exotic, a little more formal, and yet intimate.

“That’s all right.” He kissed the top of her head. “Do you want me to call you Roxanne?”

“Ain’t nobody but my daddy called me by my full name, and then only when he was threatening to whup my butt for being sassy.”

“I did not understand a word that you said, but I’ll assume that I’m to continue calling you Rox.”

“You’re not wrong.”

He laughed and released her. “Pull up the revised draft for that DiCaprio contract. It should’ve come in last night.”

Rox pulled her computer out of her purse and logged on. “Yep, there it is.”

Cash moved around behind her to look at the screen. He braced his arms on the desk, one on each side of her, something that he wouldn’t have done a month ago. He rested his chin on her shoulder. “Go to the compensation section, Twelve Point Six.”

Rox skimmed the solid black blocks of text on the screen. “Casimir,” she said carefully, “this says ‘net’ again. They changed it back. They’re trying to give DiCaprio a share of the
net
profits instead of the gross.”

“What? It
can’t.
We changed that in the document while we were sitting in the conference room. Are you sure that’s the right file?”

“It was the last file on the list, the most recent.” She flipped back to the screen that listed all the documents. “Yep, look. It came in at eleven-thirty last night.”

“So they changed it
back?
Why would they do that?”

“I have no idea, and the note on the side says that it was
sub modo.”

“We certainly didn’t agree to that,” Cash mused.

Cash? Casimir. Yeah, Casimir.

She asked, “But why would they tag it as
sub modo?
That’s insane. It’s like they wanted us to catch it.”

“Or they didn’t take care because they assumed that no one would ever look at it. It’s possible that the agents have been conspiring to screw their clients, and we’ve been wrongly accusing Val and Josie of malpractice.”

“I would be dang hard-pressed to believe that it was
all
of the agents,
every single one of them,”
Rox said. “And besides, they make a percentage of their clients’ fees. They have no reason to reduce what their clients are paid.”

Casimir scratched his cheek and squinted at the ceiling, thinking.

“Let me check something.” Her fingers rattled over the keyboard. “No, all of these contracts are from different agents and even different agencies. If the agents are the guilty ones, then they’re all psychic because they’re all doing
exactly
the same thing,
exactly
at the same time, in
exactly
the same way.”

Casimir frowned. “That’s unlikely.”

“Statistically impossible,” she agreed.

“Can’t the document security system tell us who checked things out?”

“Yeah, I think it can.” Rox tapped a bunch of keys, searching the list.

There should have been a list of people who had dropped the contract in the cloud, but that list was empty except for Rox’s name. A hot flash of panic puffed over her at seeing only her own name, even though she knew that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

And of course her name was on that list. She had dropped it into the cloud so that they could work on it at Cash’s house.

However, there was a list of people who had accessed the contract from inside the office, too.

The first name on the list was Wren Sishi.

Wren’s name peppered the list.
Weird.
She must have been getting someone other than Rox to log her on.

Even the last name on the list was Wren Sishi, and she had supposedly edited it at six o’clock that morning.

Wren? At the office at six o’clock in the godforsaken morning?

Unlikely.

Rox pointed to Wren’s name on the screen. “That can’t be right. Wren is
never
here that early. She’s never
anywhere
that early. She rushes in late at nine-thirty every day.”

“Maybe if someone paid her well enough,” Casimir said.

“And she’s hopeless at using the tokens to log onto the system. She always needs help. You remember a couple months ago when I got an emergency text in the meeting with Lourde Clinchy’s people? Wren was freaking because she couldn’t log onto the system, and she was too embarrassed to tell anyone else. I had to leave the meeting to help her.”

“Maybe it was a ruse to make people think that it wasn’t her.”

“Then it was a very long and embarrassing and perfectly consistent
ruse.” A ruse.
Man, he sounded British sometimes.

Cash’s breath was warm on her neck.
Casimir’s breath.
He said, “Good. We need to talk to her. Tell her that we have a few questions about some other contract and bring her in.”

He pushed himself away from the desk so that Rox could leave, but she was sure that his hand grazed her hip, his fingers lingering on her skirt.

Rox wanted to turn and grab him, hold him and hear him whisper in her ear again, but she swallowed hard and walked out of his office door.

She trotted through the cubicle farm to Wren’s desk. “Hey, can you come talk with us for a sec?”

“Yeah, sure.” Wren followed her, but she kept looking around nervously, her blond hair swishing around her shoulders as she walked.

Back in the office, the three of them sat down on the couches around the coffee table. Cash’s law school diploma hung high on the wall above them.

Cash was leaning back, his arms resting on the back of the couch. Rox sat on the opposite end of the couch from him, trying to make it look like they weren’t screwing around.

Wren was hunched forward, her arms crossed and her elbows resting on her knees. “Val and Josie called us all into a meeting first thing this morning. They said that some irregularities have been found in the contracts, and they’re bringing in an outside firm to investigate what has been going on. So, you must have told them what you found?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Cash said.

“What time was the meeting?” Rox asked.

Wren rolled her eyes. “Right at nine.”

“Did you make it in time?”

Wren laughed, but the harsh sound was more like a nervous cackle. “I skated in and stood in the back for part of it.”

So Wren couldn’t have opened the DiCaprio contract at six in the morning in the office, assuming that she was telling the truth about when she had dragged herself into the office.

“You sure about the time?” Rox asked her.

Wren squinted at her. “Yeah. I had trouble catching on to what they were talking about. Something about the security system and how no one knows what’s been checked out or hasn’t been or what’s going on.”

“Well, we know what’s been going on,” Rox said, crossing her knees. “We just don’t know
how.”

“Or why,” Cash said. “The studios’ motivation is obviously money, but I am shocked that Val would be a part of this.”

Wren shook her head. “But Val wouldn’t have done it. She just wouldn’t have. Do you think it could be Josie?”

“Why do you think Val didn’t do it?” Cash asked.

“I just can’t imagine her doing anything like that. She’s always been so strict about everything ethical.”

Rox shrugged. “Might be Val. Might be Josie. Might be both of them.”

Casimir turned toward her on the couch. “Oh?”

“A couple weeks ago, Josie gaslighted me.”

Cash raised one eyebrow. “And that means?”

Rox spread her empty hands in front of her. “I mentioned to her that we had found some irregularities in Val’s contracts, some clauses that were detrimental to our clients, and she told me that either I was imagining it or that you were lying about it, or you were mistaken. She made me feel like I was crazy. She said that she didn’t trust a junior partner’s opinion over Valerie’s, and she kind of threatened my job.”

Cash’s jaw set in a harder line. “I wouldn’t have thought that of Josie.”