Working Stiff:Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1)(4)

Rox fell apart when people left her like that, like they didn't give a crap about her and just walked into oblivion.

She wasn't going to go through that again.

And so, since her husband "Grant Neil" had not existed, Rox had invented him.

She had assured Cash and anyone else who would listen, yes, she was  married. Her husband was a stuntman for several of the television  studios, but he wanted to get into screenwriting and directing. He did a  little modeling on the side. And maybe his music would take off for  him.

So, yeah, "Grant" was a ridiculous mashup of all the Hollywood wannabe  clichés and thus utterly believable. No one had even questioned his  existence for three whole years.

Despite the fact that no one had ever seen him.

A friend of hers, an agent, had found a suitable headshot of a hot model/stuntman for Rox to use.

Really hot.

You could see ripply abs under his tight, black tee shirt. She had  folded under his real name, Lancaster Knox, and wedged it into a frame  for her desk.

Rox liked to stare at pretend-Grant and imagine that he was, indeed, her lawfully wedded husband. Sometimes she drooled.

And for three years, Cash hadn't turned that sexy glower on her.

Yeah, thank goodness. She certainly didn't want the hot, ripped British lawyer coming on to her.

She slid the cheap rings onto her left hand, scratched her cats on the  head one last time, and opened the front door to leave the apartment.

Three cats.

She was twenty-seven and unmarried, not even dating anyone, and enmeshed  in a workaholic office so she couldn't even meet any guys who might be  prospects.

Yep, it was official.

At what point had Rox turned into a crazy cat lady?

She was pivoting on her heel away from her door as it was slamming  toward her, when a piece of paper taped under the door's knocker  fluttered in the breeze.

The two words at the top, bold and in all-caps, read: EVICTION NOTICE.

Oh, shit.

A box was bolted over the doorknob.

If that door shut, she couldn't get back in.

Her cats.

Rox kicked the crap out of the swinging door. It banged back against the wall, and she threw herself through the doorway.

The door bounced and punched her in the arm, but she shoved it and rolled inside before it could slam shut.

The door closed, but she was inside the apartment.

She sat up, panting.

Her three cats looked over at her from their beds, vaguely amused at her antics. Pirate yawned, showing three long fangs.                       
       
           



       

"Oh, my God," Rox said. "What am I going to do?"

She couldn't leave them there. That lock was bolted on. Once that door  shut one more time, she wouldn't be able to get back in. They would be  trapped until the super came and-

Rox didn't know what he would do. Toss them out into the landslide-prone hill behind the building? Throw them in the pool?

Take them to the local animal shelter where they would be considered  unadoptable because they were old and ugly, where they would be  immediately slated for a lethal injection?

At least they were all healthy now. They might have a week or two before  they were put down for overcrowding. Or maybe three days.

Fuck, no. She would not, could not, abandon them like that.

Okay, it was only six-thirty. She needed to plan. Rox needed to calm down and plan.

First of all, she wasn't behind on her rent at all. She had automatic  withdrawal set up for the first of the month, and the rent had been  deducted on schedule on the first. She had checked. She always checked.

Rox needed that eviction notice. She needed to know why.

She just had to make sure the door didn't close while she did it.

From growing up in the South, Rox understood that the solution to any  engineering problem lay in shoe glue, bailing wire, or duct tape.

A fat roll of extra-strength, silver tape was wedged in her kitchen junk drawer. She pried it loose and marched to the door.

Like Hell she was going to get locked out of her own apartment.

Rox might be a paralegal, but her daddy was an engineer. Anything that is worth engineering is worth over-engineering.

The duct tape cracked as she ripped a long length off the roll, and she  wadded it into a sticky ball before she shoved it against the side of  the door, binding the bulge in place against the latch by winding layers  and layers of duct tape around the knobs on both sides of the door. She  did the same with the hole in the strike plate, mashing the gluey tape  to the wall. So what if it peeled off some paint? If she was getting  evicted, she probably wasn't getting her deposit back, the thieves.

Luckily, Rox knew a few lawyers. She would take those jerks to court and  get her damn deposit back later. Right now, she had to get everything  she could out of this trap, starting with her cats.

She glanced behind herself.

Pirate, Speedbump, and Midnight were limp in their beds, basking in the  morning sunlight, oblivious to the fact that they had almost ended up  back in kitty jail.

And maybe death row.

Rox bound the duct tape more tightly around all the parts of the door  lock, wedging the door open with her feet and yet still standing back  inside the apartment. The door looked like it had grown a silver tumor  by the time she was done with that part.

She stood inside her apartment in the entryway and let the door slam closed.

The heavy security door bounced off the duct tape, and sunlight shone off the mound of tape through the open crack.

Good.

Rox wedged the door all the way open by jamming a butcher knife under  the bottom of it and proceeded to secure another ball of duct tape into  the hinges so that it couldn't swing even partway closed. Winding the  duct tape around and around the hinges, gumming them up but good, calmed  her down a little.

When there was no way that damn door could possibly swing shut, she swiped the eviction notice off it.

Animals was written in the box for Violations. No pets policy was  scrawled underneath. Boxes for lease violation and deposit forfeited and  endangerment of other residents and immediate eviction were checked  below.

Legal action was written in uneven letters, and authorities called.

All for three damn cats?

That was ridiculous. Rox wasn't hoarding goddamned cobras.

Pirate stretched and extended one paw, his claws gleaming in the morning  sunlight like vampire fangs or hypodermic needles or something.

Seriously. How the hell were three geriatric cats endangering anyone? They'd had all their shots.

Even if they did look a little ragged.

Okay, she couldn't fight this right now. Cash or Josie would slap the  apartment management company upside the head with a lawsuit for her  soon.

But in the meantime, she couldn't leave her cats here, not with a  permanent lock on her door stymied only by duct tape. Even a small knife  would make quick work of it.

So she couldn't stay, and the cats couldn't stay.

Which meant that they all had to go together.

This part had to be done carefully.

Rox sidled over to her bedroom and violently shook the treats bag, nearly powdering the shrimp-flavored bits inside.

The cats ambled in after her, checking out each other, unsuspecting but more than okay with an unscheduled shrimp-treat break.

She slammed the bedroom door behind them and fed them the treats.

They didn't see her sliding the three cat carriers out from under her bed until it was too late.                       
       
           



       





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.