Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (47 page)

And getting closer.

Rox said to Casimir, “Let’s dance,” and they walked out onto the center floor to waltz to the small orchestra that had set up at the back of the room after the supper. His strong arms settled around her, and Rox practically melted with relief.

While they were dancing, Casimir said, “You fit in here extraordinarily well.”

“Oh no, I don’t,” she protested, following his very firm lead. “I have been concentrating on not falling off my pumps or snagging my hem with my heels all night long. The silk in this dress is so delicate that it would just rip right off of me and expose my control-top panty hose for all the world to see. And there are so many
people.” One-
two-three,
one
-two-three,
she counted in her head while she talked. “And they’ve all got titles and beauty pageant sashes and tiaras and the guys are wearing man-jewelry like yourself, there.” She touched the white cross medal-thing that hung on a ribbon around his neck. A lion reared up in the center, extending its claws, just like his tattoo on his right forearm. “And they’re all milling around. And they all know each other. I have been hanging on you all night like a howler monkey in a sidecar.”

He was laughing by the time she finished her complaint.

And now she felt like a petulant little whiner for throwing shade upon the royal reception that his lovely sister had thrown on a few hours’ notice.

She plastered a weak smile on her face. “But I like it!”

He laughed more. “I’m glad that you like it.”

“What is all this?” she asked, poking the brooch on the left side of his chest. The eight-pointed silver starburst surrounded a gold-enameled lion, and gold letters spelling out “Je maintiendrai” arched above the lion. His beauty-pageant sash was orangey-gold with blue stripes on the edges.

“It’s a thing that we wear.”

“Baloney. It means something.”

“It really doesn’t. It’s a House Order, called the Order of the Gold Lion of the House of Nassau. It was awarded to me when I was born, so it doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t a medal for bravery or for service. It was just handed to me because I was born to a particular set of parents.”

The medal dangling under his white bow-tie had the same lion on the same blue circle, but the cross was one of those eight-pointed Germanic-looking designs, a Maltese Cross. “It might seem useless and meaningless to you because you didn’t do anything to earn it, but it’s pretty.”

“I think that sums up my opinion of the monarchy.”

Okay, then.
She stepped and turned with him as the waltz music swelled and the other dancers swung around them.

He held her hands more firmly. “You waltz beautifully. Why haven’t we danced before?”

“Because we travel together for work. You don’t go
dancing
when you travel together for work.”

“We go dancing all the time when we travel.”

“Only when the other side insists on taking us, but we never
waltz.”

“I would have, if I had thought that you wouldn’t have backhanded me and told me to ‘keep my paws to myself.’”

She laughed at his ear-curling hodge-podge of a British accent and a Southern one. “Exactly.”

He said, “I didn’t even know you could waltz.”

“Cotillion, again. I was one of those prissy little Southern girls who dreamed of their debut from the time they were seven, when they are presented to society as a debutante wearing a white ball gown with crinolines and hoops like Scarlett O’Hara and opera-length white gloves. For that one, brief, shining night, we show off that we could be proper upper-class, decorative wives without a thought in our heads, that we can waltz, foxtrot, and do several other useless dances, and that we can select the shrimp fork out of five or more other stupid forks. And then next Monday we go back to high school and go on with our lives as if nothing ever happened. Because it didn’t. It’s all fluff and noise.”

Casimir was still smiling down at her. “I like the thoughts in your head.”

She shot a wicked glance up at him, a flirtatious smirk. “I like the thoughts in your head, too.”

His eyes brightened, and his hand around her waist pulled her a few inches closer to himself.

THE GARDEN BY MOONLIGHT
 

A few hours later, well after Rox’s phone battery had died sometime around one o’clock and most of the guests were gone, Casimir led her outside to the gardens, a real garden around the real royal palace in the woods, telling her that he wanted to show her a thing back in there.

You know, a thing.

In the garden of a royal palace.

The palace where Casimir had grown up.

Things were weird.

They walked, first arm-in-arm, and then he slid his arm around her waist. She wrapped her arm around his middle, too, feeling his belt and trim middle under her fingers.

Rox stumbled on the dim walkway, laughing and giddy and slightly tipsy. The waiters had been pushing the champagne, swapping her empty glass for a full one before she had a chance to tell them that she’d had enough.

Then one waitress had discovered that Rox liked the harder stuff and, evidently, had made it her mission to introduce Rox to Dutch liquors or get her totally wasted in public, she wasn’t sure which.

Solar lights illuminated the edges of the path under their feet and the pale flowers along the sides, but darkness clung to the branches of the tall trees around them.

“It’s those foreign liquors again,” she told Casimir, “I cannot judge how strong a drink is with those foreign liquors in it. Give me a good ol’ Jack and Coke, and this never happens.”

He was laughing, too, his body limber and relaxed against her side. “I can’t remember when I’ve had such a good time at an official function.”

She was pressed so tightly against his body that she felt his phone buzz in his pants’ pocket, a flicker through the heavy beads shimmering on her dress. “That’s because you’re hanging out with all those old fuddy-duddies. You just need to get down and get funky with your fine self.”

He was laughing so hard that he was almost stumbling, but he kept his arm around her waist and lifted her every time she dragged a heel across the rough stones in the walkway.

Because her head was totally spinning.
Totally.

He led her down paths edged with hedges and paths without, past wide, dark lawns and under trees and by gurgling fountains.

His phone buzzed again in his pocket, tickling her.

She stepped sideways, but he tugged her back under his arm. “Come on, I want to show you this.”

At the end of the path, after a short walk punctuated by Casimir’s phone shivering through his pants against her, a small gazebo rose out of the foliage, white wood lattice overgrown with ivy and fall flowers.

Casimir took out his cell phone and turned the flashlight app on. A beacon of light sprayed from the phone, and he laid it on the little bench inside, lighting up the flowers hanging from the arches overhead.

“This is beautiful,” Rox said, wandering around the small structure. She grazed the flowers and leaves with her fingertips, and they swayed where she had touched them.

When she turned, he was watching her, his hands tucked in his pockets.

On the bench, his phone vibrated again, rattling on the wood and jittering the light that shone on the leaves and vines.

He said, “When I was a kid, very young, this was my haven. With the way that door faces the hidden path, the photographers couldn’t get a picture through the trees, even though they hid in the forest with telephoto lenses. For about six months, I came here every day for at least a few hours until one of the nannies came to retrieve me. You would think that they would have started looking here when I was missing, but I think they were giving me time alone. It was the only place outside where I could get away from them. I was all right inside the palace, of course, but no child wants to stay inside all day.”

The gazebo walls seemed closer, and the roof, lower, as Casimir described his hiding spot. Rox came back over to him and touched his arm.

The phone buzzed on the bench again.

Casimir wrapped her hand under his arm and led her to the bench. “Sit for a moment.”

“Thank you.”
Sore spots ringed her feet where the new shoes had rubbed her. A blister was forming on her heel, a needlestick of pain, but she hadn’t wanted to stop dancing, either. She pried her shoes off with her toes, and her feet felt like they ballooned two sizes as soon as the high-heeled pumps flopped onto the cobblestones. Oh, her
toes,
her poor, broken, blistered
toes.

Casimir sank to one knee in front of her and held both her hands in his.

Oh, that’s right. They had some unfinished business that had been so rudely interrupted by a flippin’ firebomb.

He started, “Roxanne Dolly Neil—”

“Yes,”
Rox said.

He frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yes,”
she said again. What, was that the wrong answer in this situation?

He frowned, lines gathering shadows on his forehead in the dim light. “You didn’t even hear what I was going to ask.”

“There’re only three occasions in a girl’s life when you hear all three of your names: when you are in deep trouble with your momma, when you are being served a warrant for your arrest, and when someone is proposing marriage to you. So,
yes.”

“I might have been going to ask if you wanted to get a taco at one of the all-night food trucks down by the bars,” he insisted, his brilliant green eyes sparkling with laughter by the column of light from the cell phone.

The phone behind her vibrated again, shivering the bench under her legs.

She said, “You weren’t going to ask me if I wanted a taco, and you know it.”

“Perhaps I was going to serve a warrant for threatening the life of a member of the royal family.”

She thought about it and frowned. “I haven’t threatened to kill you lately.”

“I meant Willem.”

She pointed back toward the palace and the reception. “I saw how those people in there were looking at him. No court would convict me. Now you stop teasing me.”

“All right. I won’t tease you. Yes, marry me,
lieveke
. Always be my paralegal whom I can’t do without and my wife.”

“That’s going to be in our vows, that you aren’t allowed to tease me.”

“Then you’ll have to say ‘obey.’”

“I beg your pardon you son of a—”

“Kidding!
I’m kidding you. I can barely get you to make me a cup of coffee when we’re in the office.”

“I am a licensed paralegal, not a naughty secretary. The
only
time that I made you a cup of coffee was that one time when you came in the office with a hundred and two-degree temperature and the shakes from the flu because we were meeting with Pitt-Jolie’s people that morning.”

He looked at her from the sides of his eyes, his mouth turning down. “You didn’t actually say yes yet. The stones are beginning to grate on my knee.”

“What? I said yes. At least twice. Why are you still down there?”

“But that was before I finished my—”

“Get up! Get up!”

“—sentence.”

She tugged on his shoulders. “Come on.
Yes.
I said yes. Now
get up.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that glowed in the dim light of the cell phone that was buzzing yet again.

White diamonds surrounded a dark and brilliantly green rectangular stone. The gold band curved down into his fingertips.

“Oh, my,” she said and held out her left hand.

He slipped it onto her ring finger. The size was a little jiggly, if anything. “If you don’t like it, we can select another from the collection here or go to Paris for a few days and have one made.”

She looked up from the emerald and the ring into Casimir’s dark green, sparkling eyes. “I like this one.”

He slid onto the bench beside her and wrapped her in his arms, his mouth finding hers in the dim light from the cell phone. Even bickering, even teasing, she melted against his rugged body and slid her arms around his waist. His hand pressed along her curves, holding her.

His voice lowered, “Have you ever been made love to in a royal palace before?”

“No. Have you?”

“I probably shouldn’t answer that question. You think that I’m enough of a manslut as it is.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to know.
Ever.
Have you ever
done it
in this gazebo before?”

She felt his intake of breath against her, and he looked off to the side, as if he expected reporters or his sister to walk into the gazebo. “No.”

“Oooh. It’s like you’re a virgin. That’s hot.” She slid her hand down his back and grabbed his ass. “It’s like I’m taking advantage of the hot, young prince.”

“I’m two years older than you are.”

“Shush, my sweet, young prince. Let me show you the ways of wicked women.”

“And you have done the deed before in the garden of a royal palace?” he asked, his lips brushing her neck right in that soft place behind her jaw.

“Hey, you’re the blushing innocent, here. It doesn’t matter what I have or haven’t done.”

“I take that to mean that you haven’t.”

“Like I said, you’re the sweet, young thing, here, and I’m going to have you in this garden, out here, where anyone might walk in or see us through the leaves.”

Under her hands, she felt the shiver run through him, and he scraped his teeth over her neck and pulled aside the thin strap of her dress to lip her shoulder, blowing his warm breath over her skin.

Rox hiked her skirt up around her thighs and straddled the bench, turning Casimir so that he did the same. In the laser-like flashlight beam from the cell phone, shadows cut his face into a patchwork of darkness and pale skin, and she could see the scar on his cheek and his brilliant green eyes.

She stood on one foot and with one knee on the bench so that she was taller than he was where he was sitting. She kissed him, her hands on his face and her fingers feeling the satiny smoothness of his jaw in her palms.

With his face turned upward like that, under her lips, it almost did feel like he was the inexperienced one, except that no inexperienced man kissed like that. His lips caressed and sucked hers, and his hands circled her waist, touching her sides and ribs. His hands were so large that his fingers almost touched each other over her spine, even though Rox’s waist was as ample as the rest of her.