HOMELESS
Three days later, Rox sat behind her desk, annotating yet another contract on the enormous monitor that threw blue light on the walls of the office, blazing even brighter than the sizzling fluorescents overhead. Her feet were baking, nearly steaming, but she didn’t so much as wiggle her toes.
The picture of the very hot Lancaster Knox, model and stuntman, sat on her desk. She blew him a kiss.
A huge rubber plant blocked the tall window beside her door. A dark track in the beige carpeting led from the heavy pot to the far wall.
Over the thick leaves, Cash’s face rose in the window. He grinned at her, pointing at the locked doorknob.
Couldn’t that man ever text or email or call on the damn phone?
But he never texted unless something was horribly wrong. When they traveled, he showed up at her door at all hours of the night, holding documents to talk with her about. She had bought three pairs of travel jammies so she could open the door when he had had a brainstorm or just needed to talk to her in the middle of the night.
She hadn’t seen him coming.
Usually, that plant stood over beside her desk, and Rox could see Cash striding down the aisle lined with cubicles where the admins and other paras worked. His long legs covered the floor, and he grinned at everyone in the office he passed. The other women smiled at him, laughed at something, and a few fluffed their hair and inhaled deeply.
Considering that they were all nursing broken hearts about him, they sure got aggressive with the flirting whenever he walked through the cubicle farm.
She withdrew her feet from under her desk, found her pumps with her toes, and walked over to open the door.
As soon as she flicked the lock on the door, Cash poked the door open and started to walk into her office. “Rox? Did you receive the Killer Valentine contract?”
She stepped in front of him, blocking his way. He stopped short and blinked at her, looking far down from where he stood up there at six-feet-whatever. Confusion twitched his eyebrows downward.
She glared up at him and stepped toward him, crowding him back toward the door. “Yeah. Working on it,” she said. “Let’s talk in your office.”
“But I’m right here,” he said.
Rox put her hand in the center of his broad chest and pressed, intending to steer him out of her office. Even through his crisp shirt, his pecs rounded in toward his sternum. “Let’s go.”
He grinned down at her, his white teeth even and straight between his lips. “Don’t worry, I won’t take advantage—”
He paused, looking over her head.
Everyone was able to look over Rox’s head.
He asked, “Is that a cat?”
“Nope. No cats in here. Let’s go.”
He side-stepped, peering around her, and her fingers slid across his chest to his muscular biceps.
He said, “That’s a cat.”
Rox slammed the door behind him, not to keep Pirate, Speedbump, and Midnight from running out the door but to keep anyone from seeing them or hearing Cash. “Look, I’ve had a little problem.”
Pirate was peering around the corner of her desk with his one, good eye. His blond fur was rumpled on one side of his head where he had been sleeping on her feet. His ears—rounded on top from crumbling off due to frostbite and the stumps shredded from fighting—twitched toward Cash. He yawned, showing that he was missing one of his big canine fangs, too.
“It is a cat, right?” he asked.
“Um, yeah.” Rox started figuring out some new lies, just in case he didn’t believe the fifty or so she had already cooked up.
He asked, “You have a cat in your office?”
“It’s a long story.”
He squinted at Pirate. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s perfectly healthy.”
Cash frowned. “Is it one of those weird mutations that got turned into a breed?”
“He’s not a Scottish Fold. He had a rough kittenhood.”
“You can’t keep a cat in your office.”
“It’s just for another day or two.”
A black cat’s face appeared above Pirate’s blond head.
“There’s two of them,” Cash said.
“Um—” Damn. Rox needed a good lie about now. All the ones she had thought of seemed stupidly transparent.
Of course, right then, Speedbump sauntered around the other side of the desk and stretched like he was doing kitty yoga. His body arched so hard that the silver and gray stripes on his sides expanded.
Cash’s lips parted, and his eyebrows pinched in the middle. “There’s another one? How many more of them are there?”
“Three. Just three,” Rox told him. “I call them the motley crew.”