Working Stiff: Casimir (Runaway Billionaires #1) (7 page)

“I would have thought that you would have an English name, like William or Henry, or something.”

“No, I don’t think I would.”

“And your last name is funny, too.” She squinted at the diploma, reading the calligraphy yet again.
Van Amsberg.
“It’s not very English, either.”

“It was German, but my great-grandfather made it sound more Dutch when he married my great-grandmother. It was
von
Amsberg, but this was within a few decades of World War II, and anything German was still rather unpopular in the Netherlands.”

“So he changed his
name?”

“Modified it to appease my great-grandmother’s relatives.”

“That’s weird. How did you end up in England?”

He laughed and glanced at the ceiling. “You think I’m British?”

“You sure do have a pretty British accent.” She flipped a hand up in the air. “And everything you do is British. You called everyone a ‘barrister’ instead of a lawyer for years.”

“That’s common.”

“It’s so British. And you drink tea.”

“Occasionally. I drink coffee in the morning.”

“You have tea every day at four o’clock. The only thing that I’ve never seen you drink is hot cocoa.”

“Oh.” Cash stopped smiling and laid his hand over his stomach. “Don’t even mention hot chocolate. I can’t even stand the smell of the stuff.”

She blinked at him. “I didn’t know anyone had that strong an opinion about cocoa.”

“They used to force it on us twice a day at school.”

“In London?”

He set his laptop aside and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m not British. I’ve only visited London upon occasion.”

“No way!”

He raised an eyebrow at her and hesitated before he carefully pronounced, “Way.”

“But you laugh when people sing that ‘Englishman in L.A.’ silliness at you!”

“It’s meant in fun.” He leaned back again.

“So what are you?”

“I am Dutch.”

“How did I not know this about you after three years of working with you?”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t advertise it.”

“Dutch. That’s, like, Holland, right?”

“The Kingdom of the Netherlands is composed of far more than Holland and includes several Caribbean islands, but yes.”

“The Netherlands.
Sounds like something out of Minecraft. So where were you born?”

“Amsterdam.”

“Oh,”
she chortled.
“Amsterdam.
You hear all those things about how decadent
Amsterdam
is. That explains a lot.”

“It’s not that bad. Less crime than Los Angeles. Less decadent than Denver or Las Vegas, probably.”

“So you speak Dutch?”

“Yes.” He blinked at her, obviously amused at her naiveté.

Fine. Whatever.
“Is it called Dutch or Netherlanderese or what?”

His dark green eyes laughed at her. “Dutch.”

“So what does ‘Friso’ mean in Dutch?”

“John William Friso was the first monarch of the Netherlands. Most current European kings and queens are descended from him.”

“So you’re named after a king? My dad says that I was named after a literary character, Roxane in
Cyrano de Bergerac.”

“Ah,” Cash said. “The one where the ugly man falls in love with a beautiful woman and writes letters to her for another man, one who is handsome but stupid, and he charms her with his wit and words into the other man’s bed, and then he dies. So romantic.”

“It’s too bad that the Netherlands doesn’t have a king anymore. There should be more kings.” Rox stared at the wavy patterns the sun screens shadowed on the walls. Hey, it was better than working.

“We have a king.” Cash shrugged. “The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy.”

Rox looked up at him,
very
interested. “So you have a king? A real king?”

“Well, that’s open for debate, whether or not he’s a
real
king.”

“You aren’t one of those anti-monarchists like they have in England, are you? I
like
royalty. They’re like celebrities who didn’t have to do anything stupid or crass to get famous, like ‘accidentally’ make a sex tape.”

Cash laughed. “Oh, there are always sex tapes.”

“No way.”

“Way. You seem to be channeling your inner surfer today.”

“Tell me about the
king,”
Rox begged, her eyes feeling too wide on her face.

“The King and the Queen—”

Fluster rose in Rox’s head. “Oh my God, you have
both.
That’s so
cool.”

He tilted his head, looking at her, and the sunlight grazed the golden highlights in his hair and glistened off his short beard. “I didn’t realize you were so much of a royal watcher.”

Rox smoothed down her black slacks. “Oh, yeah. I stayed up all night to watch Wills and Kate get married.”

He blinked those deep green eyes of his. “I never would have guessed.”

“Oh, yes. I’m a royal geek.”

“Well,
that
I would have said about you, but I didn’t realize you followed the noble and royal families of Europe.”

“Dork.
Tell me about the
Queen.”

“The King is kept busy with state functions, garden parties, recognizing accomplishments, that sort of thing. The Queen is active in negotiating trade deals. Other heads of state seem to be amused by negotiating with a queen, and they sign rather favorable deals with us. It’s like they want to please her, and they don’t realize that what they are signing is binding. She’s a shark in the boardroom.”

“You don’t think of royalty doing business stuff like that,” Rox said. “You think of them riding in the backs of convertibles and waving like this.” She pursed her lips, held her fingers together, and waved by swiveling her wrist.

“They do the waving thing, too.”

She leaned in, demanding, “Do they have
children?
Are there princes and princesses? Who’s next in line for the throne? That’s how you say it, right?”

“So many questions. The King and Queen have four children. The oldest, who is the heir, is Crown Princess Anastasia,” he said.

“So they didn’t have any boys?”

“There are two sons. One of them was a terrible monster, cursed to be horrifically ugly. He was hidden most of his childhood in a far-away castle, and no one speaks of him. His curse can only be broken by true love.”

“I declare, you are teasing me now. I know the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ You cannot fool me, Cash Amsberg. Tell me about why the princess will get the throne if there are boys.”

Cash laughed out loud. “The Kingdom is inherited through absolute primogeniture, so oldest-first, regardless of gender, a practice that I find brilliant.”

“Really, I would have thought you wouldn’t.”

“Why?” His wary tone should have warned her.

“Because you’re a guy.”

“And that’s supposed to mean—”

“Aren’t you rootin’ for your own team?”

He stared at the ceiling before answering. “The Netherlands had a succession of queens for over a century. We haven’t had a king inherit the throne since the eighteen-hundreds before the current one. Queen Wilhelmina was one of the great leaders of the Dutch resistance during World War II, managing to oust Nazi sympathizers from the government even though she was in exile in England, and she gave a nightly rallying broadcast over Radio Oranje. I think Anastasia will be a brilliant queen someday. Britain has the same succession rules, now. They changed them just a few years ago.”

“Oh, a princess who will be queen. That’s so—” Rox trailed off, trying to find a good word, her hands clasped under her grin.

“Romantic?”

“Feminist,” she decided. “I love that
she
is going to rule the kingdom. Queendom?”

“Kingdom. They don’t change the money and the stationery every few decades.”

“Is she beautiful?” Rox asked, thoroughly aware that she was going all girlie-girl over the princess, but Valerie’s contracts were so damn boring.

“Oh, yes,” Cash said, his tone sing-song because he was obviously humoring her. “She is as beautiful as she is evil.”

“Oh, no!” Rox sat up straight. “She can’t be evil. She’s a
princess.”

“They call her Princess Anastasia the Nefarious.”

Rox curled her upper lip at him, doing her best to snarl. “That is totally not how the fairy tale goes. The princess is as beautiful as she is
good.”

“When Princess Anastasia comes to power, she’ll probably overthrow the Dutch elected government and invade France.”

Rox shrugged. “Everyone invades France first. It’s like the center square in tic-tac-toe.”

“The one that everyone thinks they should take but is actually a losing strategy?”

“You know it.”

“And then she’ll conquer the world,” Cash said, his voice turning low and ominous and his green eyes laughing.

“It would be kind of cool to be ruled by a queen who conquered the world,” Rox mused.

Still in the ominous voice, Cash intoned, “As long as you understand that she has a raging temper, and she will summarily execute anyone who annoys her.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“Seriously?”
Cash’s dark green eyes widened.

“And still, a beautiful, young, evil princess—”

“She’s thirty-three now.”

“—looking for love while she conquers the world—”

“She’s been married for nearly ten years and has four children.”

“Dude, y’all are harshing my mellow!”

“You’re so funny when you speak surfer with that Southern accent.” Cash’s voice and eyebrows rose, and he made fun of her accent. “Y’all are hahshing mah melluh.”

“Oh my God. The British accent trying to do the Southern drawl doing a surfer dude is going to make my head explode. Get back to work, slacker. We’ve got a thousand of Valerie’s contracts to look over.”

He stretched, his leather shoes pointing up from where he had rested them on the coffee table. “Let’s continue this at home.”

Let’s continue this at home.

Rox felt his voice resonate all through her bones like a bell that was tolling for her. Maybe accepting his invitation had been a mistake, even if the alternative was sleeping in her car.

“We can pick up some Italian or Thai on the way and eat on my far more comfortable couches while we work for a bit.” Cash smiled that brilliant smile, leaned forward, and held out his hand to her. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

Rox made a hard decision and rolled her eyes. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

FRISO

You know that exhilaration,
Casimir thought,
when you’re zooming down the wide and open freeways of Los Angeles, when the traffic becomes tightly packed around your car and yet no one slows down?

When you are barreling at eighty miles an hour, a missile in a speeding flock of missiles, and the pavement runs away underneath you and you know that you should divert but the feeling, the utter joy of getting away with it, of sailing as the wind rushes over your car,
that
takes you, and you
fly?

The other cars ahead of you are blocking your view, and the sunset streams across the sky, glaring on the windshield and blinding you. Your music roars around you from the stereo. You’re moving almost by instinct, keeping your car even with the others, the equivalent of flying wingtip to wingtip, as you and other cars form a dart and flow together.

And then you dodge through an opening and survive yet another minute.

That
was what Casimir was feeling when he and Rox were sitting on the couches in his office, when she so casually asked about his middle name, Friso.

Friso.

What a name.

What an odd, obvious name.

Casimir dodged, and he feinted, and he survived each moment of the conversation, when any comment could have turned into a flaming pile of rubble and twisted metal.

And yet, surely Rox wouldn’t want things from him. Surely she wouldn’t take advantage of him for something that he couldn’t control and had never sought.

The cynical side of himself laughed at such immature thoughts.

Of course, she would.

Any time that anyone found out anything more about him, they changed, and they always changed for the worse.

It was better to keep quiet.

He had no need to tell her the things that he had shoved deep down inside, the pain, the horror, all the reasons why he was a monster. It wasn’t as if they were dating. It wasn’t as if he had any sort of a shot with Rox. She was married to someone else.

She. Was. Married.

So it didn’t matter, while they talked about Holland and tulips, that he was a prince of the Netherlands, currently sixth in line for the throne. It wasn’t like he was particularly hiding it.

All right, he was.

But surely he would never inherit. His older sister and her four children were ahead of him in the line of succession, and Ana might plan to have more children.

He was never going to inherit the crown. He had given up all his official duties to be a lawyer and occasional trade ambassador for the Netherlands. Being a member of the royal family had nearly no impact in his day-to-day life.

Casimir could not have been more delighted.

So he hadn’t mentioned it to Rox or to anyone else.

He had no reason to mention it.

It was not as if he were in love with her or had any chance to build a life with her.

She. Was. Married.

BEAUTIFUL

Boxes of Peruvian food, all stamped with the logo for Inca Papa, littered the low coffee table where Rox and Cash were sitting. Their laptops lay beside them on the velvety leather upholstery. Wine glasses and an empty bottle stood among the foam boxes and paper litter.

The couch was so deep that Rox’s feet stuck out straight, but tall, leggy Cash looked proportional sitting across from her with his ankle crossed over his knee. Even though they sat catty-corner to each other on the sectional, Cash had been reaching over with his chopsticks to feed her little tastes from his chicken and carrot dish, which was scented with garlic and soy sauce and was savory in her mouth.

His suit jacket was draped over the end of the couch, and he had rolled up his sleeves again. Black inked fire snaked to his wrist on his left arm.