Working Stiff(127)

But Hugo had stepped back, one of his arms spread wide and the other resting on the butt of his gun, as the security men bustled her and Casimir into the elevator and out of the building, to where black SUVs idled at the curb, waiting.

Casimir held her elbow and led her toward the cars.

Another of the security men said to Casimir, “This way, Your Highness.”

Rox stopped dead in her tracks.

One of the other security guys danced around her, his arms raised, rather than run her over.

Casimir stood, staring at her, his green eyes wary, looking to see if she had heard.

Oh, she had heard all right.

She braced her fists on her hips. “And what did he just call you?”





CODENAME: LUMBERJACK PRIME





In the SUV, Rox and Casimir sat on the very ends of the seat, as far away from each other as they could get. She rolled the hem of Brandy’s faded workout shirt between her fingers.

Casimir looked out the window of the SUV. The morning sun shone on the hard angles and planes of his face, glinting in the auburn scruff of his growing beard. He wouldn’t even look at her, and he was wearing his impassive bitch face, repressing all emotion, as if they were in an enemy lawyer’s office.

She said, “That guy wasn’t serious. That guy was just joking around because suddenly you need all this security, right? That’s why he called you ‘Your Highness.’”

“Rox, we should discuss this in private.” His reserved, cultured English accent sounded very foreign to her.

She cracked her knuckles, and her shoulders relaxed. Just because he was filthy rich didn’t mean that he was actually royalty. “You’re just screwing with me, right. Of course, you are. I’m the Queen of Sheba, too.”

Casimir didn’t reply. Even though the back seat of the SUV had a lot of legroom, his long legs still folded like a grasshopper behind the seat in front of him.

Rox looked at him, really looked at him. With his slim, elegant build, confident bearing, and the sweet and subtle scent of oodles and oodles of money, it kind of made sense that someone had called him Your Highness.

Her head boggled.

Just then, her phone buzzed in her purse, indicating an incoming text.

Probably someone from the office.

Probably everyone from the office.

She paused in her internal tirade.

Rox called her phone’s voice prompt “Phone Chick.”

And her phone called her “Your Imperial Majesty.”

Like a code name.

These men were security guys, like the Secret Service.

One of these guys had called Casimir “Your Highness.” Another one of the guys had called Maxence “His Highness,” exactly the same thing.

Or, you know, really close.

Didn’t the Secret Service give the President of the United States a nickname like Bald Eagle One or Lumberjack Prime or something?

Of course. That must be it.

It was a security guy codename thing.

See? Easy answer.

Rox said, “So, ‘Your Highness’ is what these security guys call the person that they’re protecting, isn’t it? It’s just a code word or something. So that the bad guys won’t know who they’re talking about. Whoever the bad guys are. Because there are always bad guys.”

Casimir continued to stare out the window of the SUV, the morning sunlight glowing on his face, and didn’t agree with that obvious explanation.

Rox crossed her legs away from him and watched the city slip behind the SUV as they traveled.

The caravan stopped at Brandy’s house. Rox unlocked her door and began to open it.

Casimir touched her arm. “Don’t.”

She looked around the perfectly normal neighborhood. Short chain-link fences bounded the properties’ gravel front yards, and some of the houses could use a fresh coat of paint over the peeling bits, but it was fine. “What?”

“The security detail will get the cats,” he told her.

The neighborhood around Brandy’s house was a perfectly normal suburban neighborhood. It was a little on the old and cheap side when compared to the nicer part of Los Angeles, and some of the folks were sitting on their porches and peering at the caravan of tinted-window black SUVs, probably because their air-conditioning was broken again. It wasn’t a gang neighborhood. Rox always felt perfectly safe coming here, except for Brandy’s hellhound-variety pit bulls. No one felt safe around those rabid monsters except Brandy.

“What?” she asked. “I’ll grab my cats. It’s fine.”

“This is how things are done. When we’re in Amsterdam, you’ll need to get used to it.”

“We can’t take the cats to Amsterdam,” she exclaimed.

Casimir flipped his hand in the air, brushing off her concerns. “My nieces and nephews will love them.”