Working Stiff:Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1)(25)

Even if his housekeeper had his suits cleaned and then hung them, he had probably instituted the system.

This chaos was unlike him. One of the reasons that he was such a good IP  contract attorney was that he thought in neat little boxes and then  used language to tidy up all the loopholes until a document solidified  into a solid block of beautiful text.

What's more, as she opened contracts that he had been working on, all of  them were only partly finished, each of them with a notation reading  WHAT THE FUCKING HELL IS SHE THINKING? staked out in bold, red capitals  somewhere in the middle of the contract.

And in each of them, no more notes were written beyond that.

Okay, Cash ranted when they were at the office, but he ranted after he  had finished a thorough read-through and with full knowledge of every  minute detail that was in a contract.

Rox scrolled ahead and searched for "autobiography," one of the keywords  that she had discovered would lead them right to some of the horrible  clauses that were popping up in Valerie's contracts.

About ten percent farther in the contract, she found one of the rights-grab clauses.

Cash had given up before he had even gotten to it.

He was still asleep on the couch, his hand resting on his stomach. In  sleep, his square jaw was relaxed a little, but his lips had softened  and become more lush.

Rox felt her own lips part. She blinked and looked away.

That white gauze on his cheek ruined the entire effect, anyway. She  wanted to rip that damn bandage right off his face to see what was so  horrible that he was keeping it covered up even from her. They had been  to doctors' appointments together. If it were infected or not healing,  the doctors should have given him antibiotics or fixed it somehow.

She turned back to his computer, which looked like goshdarn gumbo.

Oh, Cash.

Her stomach clenched. Today wasn't a triumph. Going into the office for  him, letting him hunker down again in his house, had been a huge  mistake.

Rox felt like she was falling sideways, and she grabbed an arm of the  chair and Cash's laptop, but it hadn't been an earthquake, just her own  head.

Vibrant extrovert Cash-that guy who was always out with the other guys  after work, always in one or another flash-in-the-pan  relationship-hadn't left the house for over a month.

Now he couldn't work, was sleeping during the day, and drinking alone.

Rox knew what happened after that.

Her chest clenched, falling inward like someone had been missing her whole life.

Not Cash. She wasn't going to let it happen to him.

She crouched beside the couch where he lay and took his hand. "Cash, honey?"

He stirred and stretched on the couch, his long legs vibrating. "Hey,  you're back." His wan smile was a pale imitation of the laughing, joking  Cash that she had known for three years.

"I brought supper," she said. "Mexican."

"That sounds good. I'm not too hungry."

For a guy who had only recently begun exercising-and his recent workouts  had been gentle and limited compared to what she had seen him lift in  hotel gyms around the world-he hadn't run to fat at all after a month of  lying around. His abs were still hard cobblestones under his clinging  tee shirt, as she had felt every time she had changed that bandage on  his side.                       
       
           



       

If he had been eating normally, he should have put on a little weight, a little insulation over those carved muscles.

But he hadn't. If anything, his definition had gotten better as his little remaining body fat had burned away.

Man, she hadn't even figured out what was going on when he had thrown away all those half-full boxes of food every night.

"Cash?"

He looked to where she was kneeling beside him.

Rox took his hand. Saying this scared the hell out of her, but not saying it scared her more. "I'm worried about you."

"There's nothing to be worried about." He rolled up on the couch, not even wincing or holding the incision.

"I don't want to lose you."

He shook off her hand and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the  couch. "The doctors said that I will live a normal life span without a  spleen. I just have to be careful if I get sick and use antibiotics  early and often."

Careful here. Not accusatory. "That's not it. You won't see anyone. You won't go anywhere."

"I'm not quite up to it yet," he said.

"That scar from your splenectomy is all healed up."

"It is."

"If the wound on your cheek isn't closing right, then you need to see another doctor."

He turned toward the long row of French doors that overlooked the ocean,  unwittingly angling his bandage toward her. "It's fine. It just needs  more time."

"We should go out after supper. Maybe get a drink or a cup of coffee.  There are some places at the bottom of the hills. There shouldn't be  anyone there that we know."

"We should work on these contracts," he said. "We've got years of contracts to look back through."

And yet he wasn't making progress on them. "There are so many. It feels overwhelming sometimes," she said, watching him.

He nodded. "And I hate what they mean."

That his partner in the firm was negligent at best and criminally  misrepresenting her clients' interests at the worst. "Me, too."

"What do you want to do after supper?" he asked. "Work?"

"Or a glass of wine at that restaurant, Vino's? I saw that they have a bar on the way home tonight."

He said, "Charley Lees's new comedy is out on the streaming service. We  did the contract for it last year. Might be interesting to see if it was  worth all those crazy amenities he demanded."





RÉSUMÉ





"Do you have any guns in the house?" Rox asked Cash.

He chuckled, but his eyebrows dipped in confusion. "No one has guns in California."

"Does that actually mean that you don't?" she pressed.

"I have no guns in the house."

"Oh, okay."

He cocked his head to the side. "Jan's comments about Pym's car accident  upset you, didn't they? I assure you, no one is trying to murder me  because I found that ridiculous clause in the Watson contract."

"Okay."

That wasn't actually what she had been worried about, but now she was worried about not having guns in the house.





Rox found a three-pound box of rat poison hidden under the kitchen sink.

God, rat poison. That was a terrible way to die. Why the hell didn't Cash have humane traps or something?

The next day, Rox took a short walk on the grassy hillside and poured it  out. She was gone only a few minutes, but her heart was racing as she  ran back to the house, terrified of what she might find.

Cash sat in his home office, snarling at a contract. He typed something  on his laptop, stabbing at the keys, and slapped the lid shut.

"Are you okay?" Rox asked, breathless.

"If I never see one of Valerie Arbeitman's contracts again, I'll be fine," he growled.





Rox stood in Cash's enormous bathroom, staring at the shower rod that  circled the soaking tub. She had already raided the medicine cabinets  and drawers, finding nothing more sinister than over-the-counter  painkillers and one lone antibiotic capsule from three years ago.

The stainless steel shower rod wasn't one of those tension bars that you  jammed between the shower stall walls to hold up your curtain. The ends  of this thing were screwed into the wall, secured right into the rough  stone tile with what looked like huge screws. The screws' heads were  bigger than Rox's thumbnails. They probably speared straight into the  studs.

That thick steel bar looked like it could hold a man's weight, even if  the man was swinging at the end of a rope tied to the bar.

Rox picked up the screwdriver and went to work.





"Is there a reason you keep leaving the garage door open?" Cash asked.                       
       
           



       

Rox paused, thinking up lies. "I didn't have a garage at my apartment. I guess I'm not used to remembering to close it."

"And sometimes when you close it, it doesn't shut all the way." He  frowned. "Mice are coming in through the gap, and I can't find the mouse  poison."

She glared at him. "You don't need rat poison. We have three cats."

His dark green eyes, now healed from all the bruises and swelling, widened. "Will they hunt the mice?"

Yeah, dude. Cats hunt mice. "Well, Speedbump just kind of stands there  and yells at them. He's the manager. But Midnight and Pirate are great  hunters. I used to catch moths for them to hunt in my apartment. They  loved it."

"Let's get them down there, then. I've got to see this."





ABSENCE





Rox stood out on the deck, the sea breeze picking at her hair, and  tapped the contact on her cell phone titled Brandy and held it to her  ear. "Hey, honey?"