Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (44 page)

Three more security men climbed the ramp, each holding one of her cats. They held the beasts securely, one arm around their bellies and the other hand grabbing the scruffs of their necks. The cats looked terrified and simultaneously insulted at the indignity. Pirate was on the verge of snarling.

A flight attendant swung the door closed with a
thunk
and spun the ship’s wheel to secure it.

The three security men lowered the cats to the floor, releasing them.

All three cats swarmed Rox, piling onto her lap and shoulders and purring hard.

VAN ORANJE-NASSAU VAN AMSBERG

Casimir lowered himself into the seat beside Rox, stretching his legs under the table and under the chair across from him until his ankles touched the bottom of it.

Not enough leg room, as always.

No wonder Maxence and Arthur had claimed the couch in back with the television where they could stretch out.

He commandeered Pirate from Rox, dragging the huge ginger cat onto his own lap and petting the beast’s broken ears. The stumps felt crispy along the edges, and Casimir was careful to be very gentle as he sank his fingers into the cat’s deep fur.

Well, this had to be done. “Can we talk after we change planes in London? We’ll be alone at that point, or at least Arthur and Maxence won’t be around.”

“No,” Rox said, her sweet brown eyes stretched wide with anger. “We need to talk now. I feel like I don’t even know you.”

“You know me,” he said quietly. “You know me better than anyone else in the world. I’ve never lied to you.”

She rolled her big, brown eyes and scoffed, “You need to talk to Maxence about sins of omission.”

He nodded and stroked Pirate, who was crouching on his lap. He had known exactly what he had omitted all these years. Time to make reparations. “Ask me anything.”

Rox had a beautiful, heart-shaped face, even when her little jaw was grinding her teeth in anger. She asked, “What’s your real name?”

“Casimir Friso van Amsberg.”

“Really?”

He bit his lip. “My baptismal name is Casimir Friso David Constantijn Christof, and my surnames are theoretically van Oranje-Nassau van Amsberg, but that almost never comes up.”

“David?”

“As is traditional, I’m named after my four godfathers.”

“Holy cow. That sounds like Dumbledore. He had ‘Brian’ in the middle of a whole bunch of weird names.”

He nodded, staring at the cat in his lap. Rox had pressed him to read the Harry Potter books years ago, and he had read all seven of them. He liked her fun, fanciful taste in books. “I suppose it’s incongruous.”

“What country are you really from? Are you British?”

He glanced at her, watching to see if she thought that. “I am Dutch. I haven’t ever lied to you.”

“And yet you have a longer name than anyone I’ve ever met, and I didn’t know half of it.”

He bit his lip. “Van Amsberg is the name of my great-grandfather, who was German. I told you about him.”

Rox waited, stroking the cats in her lap. Speedbump buried his face under her arm.

He finished, “And Oranje-Nassau is the name of my House.”

“House,” she said.

“Like the House of Windsor or Romanov or Hannover.”

“So you’re not House Hufflepuff.”

A smile lifted one side of his mouth. “Nothing wrong with Hufflepuff. They’re loyal. There’s a lot to be said for loyalty.”

“I would have totally pegged you for a Ravenclaw.”

They’d had this discussion dozens of times, and it always came out the same way. “But Ravenclaws are evil.”

“No. They’re just smart. And kind of evil. And you’re a lawyer. So yeah, you’re definitely a Ravenclaw.” She looked down at the cats. “Are Arthur and Maxence some sort of royalty, too?”

“Arthur is not a member of a royal family, and we never allow him to forget it. Maxence plans to renounce everything for the Church.”

Casimir heard a man’s cough behind them that sounded like “asshole.” When he glanced back, Arthur was laughing at them, as always.

Rox was still staring at him, watching him. “And yet Arthur’s plane has three crowns on the tail fin.”

“Not crowns. Coronets.”

“Oh, and I suppose that there’s a difference.”

“There’s a difference.”

She grabbed Casimir’s right arm and pushed up his sleeve, baring his forearm with the three-shield tattoo. Her hand warmed his wrist. “Three coronets, then. Just like your tatt.”

The plane jerked and rolled backward, pulling away from the terminal.

He turned his arm over so that the morning sunlight streaming in the porthole window shone on the ink on his skin. “The blue shield with the three coronets is Arthur. The red and white harlequin pattern stands for Maxence. The Dutch lion on an orange field is mine.”

“For the Orange Nassau house.”

“For Hufflepuff.”

“Oh, stop.” She backhanded him on the shoulder, just like always. For years, he had prodded her so that she would slap his shoulder and grin. He loved every time she did it.

He explained, “We got them just before we left school. It’s a pledge of mutual support. The centerpiece between the three shields,” a triangle filled with what looked like a tangled rope, “is a Celtic knot that symbolizes friendship.”

“And that’s how your sister knew to call them.” She inspected the tattoo more closely. “It looks kind of faded.”

The ink under his skin had blued somewhat in over a decade. “It was done twelve years ago. We were seventeen.”

The plane coasted to a stop and reversed, rolling forward. Outside the round window of the airplane, domed hangars and industrial buildings cast black shadows on each other in the morning sunlight.

“So the Dutch lion symbolizes the royal house.” Rox bit her lip.

So tempting.
This conversation must go well so that he would get the chance to bite it again, perhaps tonight.

She asked, “So what
should
I have been calling you, all these years?”

“Casimir.”

“No.
Really.”

“It’s my name. It’s what my mother and sisters call me. Arthur calls me ‘Caz’ because he can’t be bothered with three syllables.”

From several rows behind them, Arthur snorted.

“It doesn’t matter what my last name is. It doesn’t matter what family I was born into. I don’t plan on ever going back to the Netherlands except for family functions. I will not live there.” He hadn’t quite meant to allow that sharp edge in his voice.

Her eyebrows rose. “You don’t like the Netherlands?”

He scratched the gnarled scar and new burn on his cheek. In his head, he was insisting that it itched, but the blistered, charred skin still burned. “I prefer living elsewhere, quietly.”

Rox turned toward him in her seat, upsetting Speedbump and Midnight, who grumbled before they settled down on her lap again. “Tell me why.”

He scratched the new scars on his cheek again, a nervous move. “I told you about the car accident when I was six.”

Rox took his hand, and he tightened his fingers around hers. Pirate nibbled on his arm when he stopped petting him.

“After the accident, some people were not kind, even though I was a child.”

“A
small
child.”

From behind them, Casimir heard Arthur sneeze, except it sounded like he said, “Willem,” under his breath.

They didn’t need to go into that, yet.

Casimir said, “One particular newspaper was abusive, following me around and taking pictures, jumping out at me because I looked particularly monstrous when surprised. The pictures ran with amusing captions.”

Rox slid her hand up to his elbow and tucked her fingers around his thick biceps. He concentrated on Pirate in his lap and Rox’s hand on his arm. He had learned as a child not to let his emotions show. A crying monster looks far worse than a stoic one.

“There’s no reason for me to permanently reside in Amsterdam. An investigation will determine whether I should return to Los Angeles. I suspect not.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you can go back there,” she agreed.

“I have the whole rest of the world.”

Rox stroked his arm, fretting over him. “I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”

Casimir shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

The new burn still felt like fire on his skin.

“If you want, I have some gauze and paper tape in my purse for,” she gestured to her own cheek, “you know.”

Anger boiled up in him, but he didn’t let it show in anything more than an eyebrow twitch. “Let them look. Let them take pictures and talk.”

“Good Lord, what did they say?”

Her horror at his response suggested that he hadn’t been entirely successful in pressing that down. “That I should give up my spot in the line of succession in favor of my brother Willem, just in case anything happened to my sister, because no one wanted their prince or a king to look like a monster.”

Rox’s sweet eyes widened, this time with sympathy. “They said that about a child.”

Damn it, he didn’t want her sympathy. He didn’t want her to look at him as a monstrous object of pity and scorn. “Luckily, my sister married and began pushing me down the line of succession quite quickly, so it was a moot point, anyway.”

“Where are you now, in the line?”

He stroked Pirate, who had a smile on his smashed, ugly face. “Sixth. Ana is first, followed by her four children.”

“So, ‘Ana,’ your sister whom I talked to, is Anastasia the Nefarious, the Warrior Queen of the Netherlands.”

He felt his smile widen. “The Warrior
Crown
Princess
of the Netherlands. Our parents are still very much alive.”

“And who’s after you?” she asked.

“My younger brother Willem and my sister, Margriet. You’ll probably meet everyone within a day or so. Ana said that she’ll ‘arrange something,’ which is every bit as ominous as it sounds.” He shifted in his seat. “Look, I don’t mean for you to be impolite or anything, but when you meet Willem, don’t take anything that he says seriously. Margriet is fine. You’ll like her.”

“Why, is he going to tell me that you’re a manwhore who ran around Amsterdam, screwing in all the brothels in the De Wallen district?”

He raised one eyebrow. “I think I liked it better when you only knew about windmills and tulips.”

“Yeah. Well. I Googled.”

“I never frequented the De Wallen district. Did you find that on the internet?”

“I just read about the red light district. I didn’t know that I should Google
you.
If I had, I probably wouldn’t be all shocked right now.”

“To be clear, Willem might have had such a story planted, if he thought it would be effective or if I would care. He probably would say that or worse if he thought that it would cause me to abdicate.”

“Are you serious? Abdicate
what?”

Ah, such naiveté. “So he could be sixth in line for the throne instead of number seven.”

“Why would he want to do that? There would still be your sister and four kids ahead of him!”

Casimir shrugged. “I have no idea why he does anything. The rest of us live in the real world, working in the law or finance or trade. He thinks he’s in a high fantasy novel and has to win the throne or die.”

“Literally?” she asked, her eyebrows raised and skeptical.

Casimir shrugged. “He’s not delusional, but I swear that, if he could have, he would have massacred us all at his wedding last year.”

“That is weird, Casimir.”

He sighed. “I know.”

Rox hesitated, but she asked, “It’s actually
Prince
Casimir, isn’t it?”

Casimir scratched the cat’s chin, knowing that he was being ridiculous, but stroking the cat’s fur was soothing. “That’s what people will call me to my face in Amsterdam.”

Behind his back, they still called him Prince Monster.

NOTHING CHANGED

Okay, so “Cash Amsberg,” Rox’s boss, the smokin’ hot lawyer whom Rox had known for three, long years, the insufferable tease whom she could make actually giggle when she got on a roll, the man who rescued her from leeches in the Amazon rain forest and gropers in Italy and had poured her into bed on more than one occasion when she misjudged the strength of unfamiliar international liquors, the guy who needed her to rescue him from a persistent Russian prostitute and to hold his hand when he was in pain after the car accident, that guy was actually
Prince
Casimir of the Netherlands.

Rox’s head boggled.

She wanted to throttle him.

You need to tell a girl something like that.

But really, nothing had changed.

He was still the same goofball who spoiled her cats. Pirate was currently drooling with contentment on his knee. Seriously, there was a dark spot on Casimir’s pants’ leg under the cat’s chin. He was literally drooling with happiness.

He was still the sharp lawyer whom she worked with, the guy who had torn down a law firm rather than allow their clients to be swindled, and they put on their resting bitch faces together to fence with opposing counsel.

He was still the same guy who could talk to anyone he met, under any circumstances, and have a lively conversation where the other person walked away believing that Casimir was awesome and their new best friend.

That gregariousness and graciousness might have been learned, she realized. Those would be excellent qualities in a royal diplomat, and he had probably been trained as such since he was a little boy.

But Casimir was still the same man.

And Rox was still his same paralegal who was probably the last woman on Earth to sleep with him.

So nothing had really changed.

Other than the fact that Rox really wanted to hide under the table in this private airplane rather than meet his sister, Crown Princess Anastasia the Nefarious, the Warrior Princess who might invade France just for the hell of it.

CASIMIR’S PLANE

When Arthur’s plane landed in London, Rox and Casimir said solemn and refined goodbyes to Maxence and Arthur, who did not nearly kill them by hugging this time, and walked through the jet bridge into the private terminal at Heathrow.

At the end of the tunnel, a squad of commandos in black fatigues swarmed them.