Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (41 page)

The sparks burned his cheek over the cheekbone, grinding into his flesh, and he couldn’t do a damn thing about it without dropping at least one of them and abandoning them to the fire.

He couldn’t drop them. Beyond the fact that they were living, feeling beings and he could not leave them in the burning house, Rox loved these hideous beasts, even though no one should love anything so monstrous.

Something dropped on his back, burning.

Casimir clutched all three cats and ran for the door to the garage, their tails and hind legs swinging against his stomach.

DRIVING

Rox held the door to the passenger side of the car open, praying harder than she ever had in her life.
Please, God. Please let him make it out. What the hell was he doing?

Heat from the fire was filling the garage, washing over her bare legs and feet. Even the cement floor was getting hotter. She didn’t know how long she could wait before she ran out of the burning house and into the afternoon sunshine beyond the open garage door.

The door from the house flapped open. A spume of black smoke geysered out of the doorway like a dragon had spewed it. Casimir pushed his way out of the smoke, all three of her cats hanging from his arms. The smoke rolled across the ceiling and out of the open garage door.

“Get in! Get in the car!”
she yelled.

Casimir stumbled down the steps from the house, bouncing off the wooden railing on the side with his hip. His body contracted and spasmed, and he coughed the smoke out of his lungs. Tendrils of smoke clung to him as he staggered across the garage. One of the cats was wheezing, too.

“Cash!” she yelled, waving toward the open car door.

He made it to the car without dropping any of the cats and toppled inside. Rox slammed the door closed behind him and ran around to the driver’s side of the car. She jumped in, slammed her door, and floored the accelerator.

The tiny sports car raced out of the garage and down the long driveway toward the hills.

“Why did you stop?”
she asked, shaking and failing to keep the hysteria out of her voice. “Why weren’t you
right behind me?”

“The cats ran the wrong way,” he said, leaning back in the seat and brushing at his face. “I had to find Pirate.”

“You shouldn’t have followed them,” she said. “You should have
run.”

He closed his eyes. “But they most certainly would have died.”

“You should have saved yourself.”

“I couldn’t just leave those hideous beasts,” he said.

She gripped the steering wheel more tightly and pointed the car down the winding road. “You shouldn’t have gone back. You should have
run.”

“Just keep driving,” Casimir said, carefully lifting the cats into the back of the car. The cats trickled off the seat and huddled together in the footwell behind his seat, a miserable clump of soggy fur. “Hopefully, no one stuck around to make sure that we died in there. We obviously weren’t meant to survive that.”

“But we did,” she said. “We survived.”

In the back seat, the cats wheezed, coughing pathetically as if someone were wringing out their little lungs.

“But we weren’t supposed to,” Casimir said, “and they didn’t think that we would. They probably didn’t take the sprinklers into account.”

“How can you know what they were thinking? Do you know who it was?”

Casimir cranked himself around in the seat and looked out the back window as Rox sped through the hills. “If they had thought we might get out, there would have been a sniper on the hill, too.”

“That’s terrible! That’s awful! How could anyone even think of such a thing?”

She glanced in the rearview mirror. A column of black smoke seethed into the sky.

Casimir dug through his briefcase that was lying on the seat in back. “We need to get out of here. We can’t wait for Ana to send the reinforcements tomorrow afternoon. I’m calling Arthur and Maxence.”

“But what good will that—”
Oh.
Arthur had a plane. Maxence had a personal military.

“I’m not sure how fast they can turn the plane around, but I’m hoping they can be here sooner than Ana’s forces. Arthur!” he said into the phone, his voice suddenly jovial. “We’ve had a spot of trouble here, and we need a lift. Could you send that plane around for us?”

A speeding fire engine whizzed past them on the other side of the road, sirens blaring.

“Smashing,” Casimir said. “And when would it be here?”

Rox drove silently, maneuvering the car down the winding road.

Casimir said, “First thing in the morning.
Excellent.
We’ll just survive the snipers and firebombings on our own until then. Of course, I’m joking! But I’ll tell you all about it on the plane tomorrow.” He paused. “Slightly singed.” Paused again. “If Maxence can do without them for a few hours, I would indeed appreciate his security.” He hung up the phone. “We just have to survive the night.”

“We’ll just get a hotel,” Rox said. “We’ll find a hotel that will take animals or smuggle the motley crew in.”

One of the cats howled, as if on cue.

Maybe the hotel would have a dryer. Her soggy clothes clung to her and smelled like meth-lab smoke.

“They will be looking for us,” Casimir said. “Registering at a hotel might not be our safest option. Evidently, by giving Val an ultimatum, I seem to have tipped our hand. They want to prevent us from exposing Val and Josie to the ethics committee.”

“Those bastards,” Rox said, anger winding up in her chest. “Those bastards, that they would try to kill us like that. First a sniper, then a bomb. Those
assholes.”

“Indeed,” Casimir said, looking out the passenger-side window into the afternoon sun glancing off the hills.

Anger grabbed Rox, flushing through her body. She could feel her pounding heartbeat in her fists squeezing the steering wheel. “Those assholes think that they can burn your house down? They want to see things on fire? We’ll show them fucking things on fire!”

Casimir glanced over at her.

“We’ll show them so much fucking fire that they’ll regret ever fucking with us,” she said, her words grating in her throat and clenched teeth. “We’ll show those assholes what it’s like when
we
burn it
all
down.”

“I don’t think we should firebomb anyone,” Casimir said. “We should just go to the ethics committee and let the repercussions take their natural course. They’ll be disbarred. The clients will sue them and win. They are about to lose everything.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “They ran you off the road and nearly killed you, and then they shot at both of us, and then they threw a damn bomb and burned down your
house.
They want to see playing dirty?” She looked at him, her heart punching at her temples and wrists with rage. “They should not have messed with a Southern girl. I will fight fire with bright, cleansing fire. I will call down the wrath of God on them such as they have never seen. I will utterly destroy them, salt the Earth, and drive them into the sea.”

Casimir had been watching her, a smile growing on his face. A livid burn crossed the scar on his left cheek. “God, you’re beautiful when you’re angry.”

“You can call me beautiful some other time, Casimir. Right now, I am the vengeful angel of death and they shall rue the day they messed with me or the man I love.”

“I love it when you’re so angry that you become biblical.”

Her brain spun. “We won’t attack until the middle of the night. Until then, we need a place to hide.”

“For a few hours,” Casimir said.

“Phone Chick,” Rox called into the air. She knew of one place where those bastards wouldn’t dare look for her and Casimir.

“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty?” her car answered.

“That’s
what your phone calls you?” Casimir asked, laughing.

“My phone knows my personality better than anyone else,” she said. “Call Brandy.”

Brandy’s battalion of enormous pit bulls would tear their damn legs off and eat them.

It would serve them right, too.

BIG DOGS AND BRANDIWINE

Rox and Cash stood on the sidewalk outside of the gate to Brandy’s house.

Five slavering pit bulls leapt and frothed at the chain-link fence, just feet from where they stood. Most members of the pit bull breed are generally medium-sized dogs, but these creatures had obviously been bred from some mutant offshoot of the breed that had crossed pit bulls with buffalo.

Cash watched the dogs slam their boulder-like bodies against the steel mesh of the fence. “Are you sure it’s safe to take the cats into the house?”

“Brandy will put the dogs up. They can stay locked up for a couple hours, probably.” Assuming that they didn’t chew their way through the steel bars of whatever cage Brandy put them in.

The door to the house opened. Brandy danced out, flitting on her tiptoes. The dogs parted for her, herding around her and respectfully wagging their tails. Not one of them jumped up on her.

“Rox! Are you okay?” Brandy held out her skinny arms as she walked.

Rox said, “Are you sure that you don’t mind if we and the cats stay here for a few hours?”

“Not at all! I’ll just corral the hellhounds.” She led the dogs away to the back of the house and returned alone a minute later. She told Cash, “They’re just overgrown puppies.”

Cash smiled and nodded, ever the diplomat.

Brandy hugged Rox as she walked into the yard. “So you’ve had a rough day, haven’t you?”

“I could really use a glass of sweet tea.”

Brandy pet her hair and glanced back at Cash. “We’ll have to find you something to wear. You’re soaking wet.”

“If I could just borrow a towel or something, these clothes should dry.”

“Oh, I can probably find something you could wear.”

He glanced down Brandy’s diminutive body to her tiny shoes and raised an eyebrow. “All right.”

Rox knew what they were getting into, but she didn’t say anything. She wrapped her arm around Brandy’s waist as they walked inside to hide out for a few hours until dark.

When they got into the living room, Rox paused and almost turned around to warn Casimir, but heck, he was a European, depraved sexual dominant who frequented BDSM clubs. Nothing should shock him, right?

An enormous four-poster bed, fifteen feet across, occupied most of the living room.

A probably naked white man was chained to one corner of the bed. A sheet covered his midsection. He grinned at them, and one of his hands flapped, waving, even though an iron manacle chained his wrist to the intricately carved bedpost.

Brandy’s other two husbands were probably around somewhere, maybe tied up, maybe doing the dishes, probably naked.

Casimir stopped in the doorway, taking it all in.

His expression was his classic resting bitch face, not a flicker of emotion.

Rox couldn’t wait to grill him on what he was thinking.

Instead, she asked Brandy, “Honey? After we bring in the cats, we need to work on some things before we go out tonight for our little errand. Could we steal some WiFi, please?”

BREAKING AND ENTERING

“So, this is technically burglary,” Rox said.

In the dark law office, they held their cell phones out in front of them, using the flashlight app to see. The beams swept through the black air, illuminating circles of the blue cubicles where the admins and paralegals worked and shining white glares on the walls and plants. Computer screens glinted in the beams.

Casimir shook his head. He looked just like a stereotypical burglar, wearing black sweatpants and a matching sweatshirt, which fit his trim waist rather better than they had Brandy’s chubby but very tall husband. He said, “Burglary is breaking and entering with the intent to commit a felony while on the premises. We might be breaking and entering, or at least entering, but we do not intend to commit a felony. We only intend to send a few emails.”

More like a few thousand.

Rox smiled and hoisted her heavy purse back up on her shoulder. “Yes. Yes, we will. And that’s all.”

They walked between the cubicles, watching the shadows created by their flashlight beams, until they got to Rox’s office. A shiny brass knob had been installed on the door. “That’s new.”

“I figured that they would change the locks to our offices. I was shocked that my keycard worked in the main entrance.”

Rox glanced around the office, looking for movement or red dots from a sniper’s laser sight. “You don’t think this is a trap, do you?”

“I think that they assume we’re dead.” Cash looked around the darkened office, scanning over the tops of the cubicle dividers. “At least, I hope that they think we’re dead.”

Rox bit her lip, staring at the doorknob. “They must have changed our office locks right after we left, but they didn’t bother to change the front door code after the firebomb.”

Casimir nodded. “So Val and Josie must have known about that.”

“Dammit, I hate those guys.” Rox jiggled the doorknob on her office door, but it didn’t turn. “Shit.”

Casimir said, “Stand back.”

Rox stepped away, and Casimir leaned to his side and kicked the door hard. It popped open and slammed into the wall behind it, spraying wood from the doorjamb into the office.

“Did you take karate at some point?” Rox asked.

“Tae kwon do.”

They walked into her office, and Rox shut the door behind them. It drifted open a little because the latch was very broken. “What else do I not know about you?”

Even in the low light, she saw him flinch. “We’ll talk about that on the plane.”

They ran around to the other side of the desk, rolling her big office chair back and away, and Rox tugged her computer out of her purse. Her big rubber plant was still there, and she felt bad about abandoning it.

She set her laptop on the desk and opened the lid. The token had fallen to the bottom of her purse, and it took her a minute to fish it out. The blue glow from the computer screen washed over the token, and Rox held it in both hands, angling the tiny stick toward the computer so that she could see the numbers on it.

Casimir lit the flashlight on his phone again and shone the light on her hands and the small security device.