Working Stiff

Working Stiff

Chapters: 51
Updated: 19 Dec 2024
Author: Blair Babylon
4.9

Synopsis

Here’s the problem: when Rox was hired, she told her smoking-hot boss Cash that she was married, but she’s not. Now, three years later, she’s kind of accidentally living with him, and he’s being a perfect gentleman, dang it. Everybody in the office said that Cash was a heartbreaker, that he’d bump her and dump her, so Rox decided not to become a statistic. She went out and bought herself some rings of the finest cubic zirconia so that she could work with Cash, who was several inches over six feet tall, emerald-eyed, ripped, gorgeous, his tailored suit clinging to his athletic body, sporting a British accent, and loaded. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. But now, three years later, she and Cash have become friends. They travel together for work often, and they’re the best of buddies. When Rox gets thrown out of her apartment, Cash insists that she come live with him until they can find her a place because that’s what friends do. Now, even though everyone insists that Cash never goes after married women, something about him has changed. There are little touches, little slips, and Rox is more and more tempted to tell hunky, gorgeous Cash that she never was married. And then he’ll take her and break her, and then he’ll walk away, and then she’ll lose her job, and she still hasn’t found a place to live. And yet, every time he looks at her with mischief in his dark green eyes, every time they’re teasing and it somehow turns into tickling, every time she swats at him and somehow ends up in his arms, she wants so much to risk everything. What’s a working stiff to do when she falls in love with her friend, the boss?

Romance Billionaire Forbidden Love BxG Office Romance Playboy

Working Stiff Free Chapters

Red Flags | Working Stiff

Rox was standing in Cash Amsberg’s corner office in the law firm again, listening to him rant, again.

If he hadn’t been so damn sexy, she might have had to put a stop to this. But he was, so she just ranted along with him.

It was kind of their thing.

At least Rox wouldn’t get fired from this law firm for being a “hothead.” She wasn’t a hothead. She was a Southern belle with a fiery temper, a tradition harkening back to the founding of Virginia. She would have done well in bygone eras, stamping her foot beneath her flowing hoop skirts and cursing like “Fiddle-dee-dee!”

Except for maybe that last part. Rox enjoyed a good cussin’ when the situation called for it. Not that the situation called for it too often. But sometimes, she went biblical on people who desperately needed to be told that she would smite them and salt the Earth.

Cash Amsberg pointed to a sentence in the contract, stabbing at the thick sheaf of paper with his finger. “What the bloody hell could Monty mean by this section? He must have known we would strike it off. It’s not even a negotiating point. There’s no way we would let Gina Watson sign this. Why would he even suggest such a thing?”

They were standing on the same side of Cash’s mahogany desk. He leaned over the contract, bracing both hands on the edge. Windows broke open the walls on two sides of the room. The afternoon California sun blazed in, glaring on the scarlet design of the Oriental rug covering most of the floor. Cash’s enormous diploma from Yale Law School hung above the couches at the back end of the office.

Dark bookcases packed with leather-bound books lined the other two walls. The books were mostly for show because the law firm had done all their research via LexisNexis for years, but Rox had caught Cash reading the hard copies late at night sometimes, rubbing his eyes.

He ran his hand through his hair, a sign that he was perilously close to losing his cool. She’d only seen him do that a few times, once when a Taiwanese film director had insisted that Cash play golf with him. Cash had appeared to be in good humor and had shot a perfectly respectable ninety-two, but he had returned to their hotel and ranted about The Damned Scottish Game for half an hour. Rox had laughed at his tantrum until he started chuckling about how his ball had gone into the water three times on the seventh hole.

Rox flapped her hands at her sides, narrowly missing Cash’s broad shoulder. “I cannot believe that he would even try such a dick move. That’s why I put a red flag sticky on it, so you would see that part first. Does he think we’re redneck idiots?” She emphasized redneck with her Southern accent to camp it up.

Cash scowled. “He must think we’re idiots. He must think we’re all idiots, every one of us, if he thought no one here would catch this.” Cash’s upper-crust British accent made them sound like the King of England conversing with a redneck colonist.

When Cash got all heated up like this, he literally got hot under the collar, and the subtle cologne that he wore—sandalwood and cinnamon and vanilla—crept out of his sharp designer suit and crisp white shirt. She tried not to lean in to catch a whiff, but she could just smell it when he was having a good rant. She could almost taste the vanilla on her tongue, as if she had her mouth pressed to his neck.

“This is one of Valerie’s contracts,” Rox reminded him.

Cash ran a hand through his hair. “Surely Monty doesn’t think that Valerie wouldn’t have caught this. Was he counting on her illness throwing us in such disarray?”

“This came in the very morning that Val had her stroke. I don’t see how Monty could have known that that was gonna happen. He’s still an asshole of the first degree, both for thinking that Valerie and her paralegals would miss this and for trying to do this to Watson. I mean, these frickin’ autobiography rights have nothing to do with the movie. It’s just a jackass rights grab.”

“This is egregious,” Cash muttered, his British accent turning more clipped. “Monty has gone senile or something. Call Patty. Mention it in passing. See what you can get out of her.”

Patty was Monty’s paralegal at his law firm. She was in Rox’s lunch bunch of girls who ate meals and went to movies together sometimes, mostly chick flicks. Rox went with them when she could escape from workaholic Cash, who liked to work through meals, and nights, and other appointments.

He shook his head. “Perhaps she can give us some insight into his thought processes, such that they are.”

Rox refrained from rolling her eyes and nearly sprained an eyebrow from the effort. “I don’t think Patty is going to do any industrial spying for us, not after you didn’t call her the next day, or ever again.”

“She didn’t care,” he said, waving his hand to dismiss that.

“Oh, I assure you, she cared,” Rox told him.

Cash raised an eyebrow at her. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Did she?”

“Oh, yeah.” Rox had heard from Patty about what an asswipe her boss was for weeks, and Rox hadn’t disagreed, not when she knew that ghosting was Cash’s favorite modus operandi to end relationships. He took women out on a couple of dates, screwed them a few times, maybe kept up the appearance of something that was becoming substantial for a few weeks, and then dissipated into thin air, poof. He became unreachable, untextable, untouchable. As far as the women could figure out, he might as well have turned into a ghost, even if they worked in the same office and saw him every day.

Which was one of the many, many reasons why Rox would never date him.

One of many, many, many reasons.

Other women looked far, far up at Cash’s brilliant, intense green eyes, the dark blond streaks in his auburn hair and his pale scruff of beard, and the hard lines of his cheekbones and jaw line.

They dropped their panties even before he took off his perfectly cut suit and silk shirt to reveal his broad, rounded shoulders, those chiseled abs like cobblestones on his flat stomach, and the deep vee of his obliques that pointed below his tight boxer-briefs.

They were lost before he whispered to them in that cultured, sexy accent and far before they saw the top-of-the-line Mercedes Maybach that he drove to his rumored enormous, manicured estate in the foothills. No one had ever been there, but everyone said that his house was huge without any evidence whatsoever.

Yep, Cash was several inches over six feet tall, emerald-eyed, ripped, gorgeous, his tailored suit clinging to his athletic body, sporting a British accent, and loaded.

Shockingly, women swooned over him.

Even after he ghosted on them, every admin and paralegal and client in the office still flirted with him. When he walked by their desks, they pushed their boobs together with their elbows and smiled up at him, blinking rapidly.

The one time he got a little bit of road rash on an elbow playing basketball on the roof of the parking structure, they fawned over him and brought him cookies the next day to raise his spirits, even though he had laughed the whole thing off at the time.

But not Rox. Never.

The afternoon sun heated the corner office, and Cash had already taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, baring the strong ropes of muscle on his forearms, the rough hairs on his tanned skin, and his tattoos. On his right forearm, above his wrist on the inside, three shields surrounded some kind of a triangular Celtic knot thing. It was small, maybe three inches across. The orange shield that pointed down at his hand had a white figure on it like a stylized lion rearing up with extended claws. The other shields were blue with three crowns and a red and white diamond checkerboard.

On his left arm, ink trailed tendrils of black fire all the way down to his wrist.

He glared at the Watson contract as if the paper had offended him.

Other women might fall across his desk, hike up their suit skirts, and let Cash screw them face-down on the green blotter.

But three years ago, the other women in the office had warned Rox about Cash.

Manwhore.

Ladykiller.

Heartbreaker.

He was a walking, waving cluster of red flags.

And Rox had been fresh meat.

At first, she had assumed that he wouldn’t be interested in a chubby, dumpy, short, brunette Southern belle such as herself, not in an office swarming with slim California blondes.

When he had walked by her desk at ten o’clock that first morning, Rox had suppressed the gasp that had sucked into her mouth and through her body.

When he turned his head, gazing into her soul and her heating chest and her very cells, she gripped her mouse like she might fall off her office chair.

She had wiped beads of sweat off the mouse afterward where she had clutched it.

Stunning, she thought later, when her brain had rebooted. He was stunning. Looking at him made the world stop.

No wonder he could get away with loving ‘em and leaving ‘em.

“Why?” Rox had finally asked Melanie, one of the beautiful-blond admins. Rox could tell Melanie apart from the rest of the herd of golden beauties by the strawberry highlights in her hair. “Why would women have casual sex with him if he’s just going to dump them like that?”

“Well,” Melanie had mused, and her smile turned sentimental and vague. “He’s never a jerk about it. There’s never a fight. There’s no drama. He never calls a woman a slut afterward, ever, or says anything bad about her to anyone, as far as we can tell, and we all talk a lot. He won’t even confirm or deny anything. And he’s,” she cleared her throat, “attentive.”

Rox frowned. “Like, he listens to you?”

“Yeah, that, too.” Melanie twiddled with a piece of paper on her desk and wouldn’t look at Rox.

“You mean that he told you that he loved you?”

“Oh, no. He’s not mushy at all. A good time is had by all, but he doesn’t lie about what’s going on. He doesn’t talk about ‘love’ at all.”

“But there’s something else,” Rox prompted. “He’s attentive—”

Mel cleared her throat. “In bed. I mean, you know. He’s good in bed.”

Rox shrugged, wanting to reach over and snatch that shredded paper away from the blonde. “A lot of guys are good in bed.”

Mel glanced up at Rox, her blue eyes serious and direct. “Not like him.”

Rox had tugged her sundress lower on her thighs the whole afternoon that first day, but after that, Rox had worn professional-class suits, either skirts or pants, but definitely suits, and wedding rings.

Since then, in the three years that Rox had worked with Cash as his paralegal, he had humped and dumped at least fifty women, and those were just the ones she knew about for sure. The actual number was probably higher.

He didn’t seem to have a “type,” either. He liked the skinny-willowy ones and the shortie-curvy ones, the pale redheads and the delicate blondes and the gorgeous raven-haired, the porcelain-skinned and the golden-tanned and the polished obsidian-hued, the nubile nineteen-year-old interns and the silver-fox lady partners, and all the women in between.

Cash even sent out discreet, non-threatening sexual feelers to the seven lesbians who worked at the law office, just in case any of them were actually a little more toward the center of Kinsey scale than they had previously thought themselves. One was. For two and a half weeks, Ginger declared herself bi-for-a-guy, which is not the usual meaning of that term but she owned it. She got along with Cash better than any of the other women, afterward.

Rox had watched them all traipse into Cash’s bed and then out of his life.

All the admins stared at Cash with weepy doe eyes. All the other paralegals teared up or blushed when they saw him stride through the office. The women attorneys were businesslike and courteous to him, but their glances turned sharp when he wasn’t looking.

The clients, however, still flocked to him, flirted with him, and went for round two in record numbers.

And then he ghosted them again.

The actresses didn’t seem to care much about his retreats. They were used to ninety-day shoots, so to speak.

The models probably didn’t have the attention span to notice his absence.

And, for some unholy reason, the guys in the office loved him. You would think that, with Cash sopping up all the available women, that the men would be competitive or derogatory, but they were all bestest buds with him. He was a great guy, always up to go have a beer with, or to watch a game with, or to be on a league team with.

He charmed them, too.

But Rox was the only person in the office who could work with him.

Now, after three years, every time Rox went in for quarterly evaluations with the senior partners, her paycheck fattened, just by her suggesting that she might be looking at other, less tempestuous law firms. They couldn’t let her leave, not with just about everyone else emotionally unable to work with Cash.

Some of the women threw themselves at him, hoping for another taste. He usually accepted their offers, but the ghosting came sooner the second time or the third.

Some of them stared at the floor and mumbled around him, stealing glances at his chest or lower, but dodged when he came too close, unwilling to go through it again.

It was a matter of concentration and efficiency, really. The women imagined his hands taking the sheaves of paper from their fingers for hours, imagining a brush or a touch, and failed to get the damn work done.

And so Rox made out like a proverbial bandit.

She had bought herself an awesome sports car last month even though she knew she should be saving for a down payment on a house, and she grinned just thinking about the drive back to her apartment.

But sleep with beautiful, brilliant Cash Amsberg?

Never.

And he had never hit on her, anyway. Not even once. Not even a little bit.

Not in any serious way. He joked around a lot.

But she could tell that he was just joking. It was pretty obvious.

Cash wasn’t particularly a chubby chaser, anyway. Not only could he have any woman whom he wanted, he actually had them all, one after another.

“Well, talk to Patty anyway,” he said, poking the Watson contract again. “See if she’ll do it for you.”

Rox flicked the red plastic tag hanging onto the margin of the page. The sparkling stones in her wedding rings caught the afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows and threw spangles over the office for a moment, illuminating the heavy desk and running down Cash’s bare arms.

He saw the glitter on his arm, tracked the points of light to her rings, and shifted his weight away from her.

There was only one type of woman that Cash Amsberg was not interested in.

He did not hit on married women, not even once, not even a little.

Rox said, “Fine. I’ll call Patty and see if she wants to grab a drink after work today.”

Cash said, “We appreciate you taking one for the team.”

And that was the only way that Rox was going to take one for the team of Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg. “Yeah, whatevs.”

Cash smiled at her, his lush lips sliding apart over his straight, white teeth, and his green eyes sparkled with humor. “Thanks, work-wife. Have I told you that I love you today?”

That time, Rox let it happen, and the muscles at the corners of her eyes strained from her epic eye-rolling. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

He laughed, his broad shoulders lifting. “Only you, Rox. You’re my rock.”

“Yeah, the ball and chain holding you in this law firm. If it weren’t for me, you would probably be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by now, writing learned opinions about which of the lawyers arguing the case in front of you was better in bed, the redhead with the fake boobs or the black woman with the low-cut top.”

He was laughing harder now. “Surely I’m not so bad as all that.”

“Worse. You’d probably have all the lawyers, the women ones anyway, in your chambers in some sort of a horrible orgy on your huge law desk, and then they’d all kiss and make up and dismiss the case. It would be the only Supreme Court session where absolutely no decisions were handed down, and you would go down in history as the Screw It All Court.”

Casimir fell backward onto the couch, his long legs splayed, both his arms wrapped over his stomach and giggling helplessly. “Stop.”

“All right, fine. But seriously, at least with me, you get the work done.”

“Yes, I can trust you.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and shaking his head. “Now, did Bessie from Universal send us the DiCaprio contract yet?”

“Yep. Got it this morning.” She waved her phone, indicating email.

“When can I see it?”

“Soon as I read it and flag it.”

“This evening, then?”

“Not if I’m gonna be pimping Patty for information about Monty.”

He shrugged, his white shirt sliding over the thick muscles of his chest and arms and straining around his tight waist. “Come back afterward. We can get delivery from that new Thai place around the corner and go over it.”

Rox waggled her left hand at him, letting the cubic zirconia stones in her rings catch the sunlight again and trying to flash the spangles in those brilliant green eyes of his. “I’ve got to see my own husband sometimes. I’ll check out the file before I leave so I can look at it when I get home.”

The law firm’s draconian security system didn’t let them access files from outside the office unless they had been checked out, a stupid process involving speed-typing security codes.

“Oh, Grant. Leave your husband, Grant, for me, Rox. I’ll take you to Fiji for our honeymoon.”

They played this game a lot, too, sometimes every day. “Never. He’s six-foot-seven and a blond-bearded Norse god.”

Cash mused, stroking the soft hairs of his short beard, “Last week, you said he was six-three, two seventy-five of pure muscle, and a Latin lover.”

“Grant is all things to all women,” Rox said, her chin held high.

“Is he coming to the office volleyball tournament this weekend? We could use a guard, if he really is that tall.”

Yet another opportunity for Rox and all the other female staff to view Cash with his shirt off, displaying his rippling abs and black tattoos, always an impressive sight. A tribal-looking tattoo illustrated the left side of his body. A swirl of black fire on his round pectoral muscle spread into flames that reached over his shoulder to his back, trailed down his left arm all the way to his wrist, and slid over his rippled stomach to duck into his waistband.

Rumor suggested that the ink ran down the cut vee of his belly, over his hip, and to the middle of his thigh, but Rox had not seen that much of his skin.

“No,” she said, blinking. “He’s busy working on his screenplay, and that’s taking up a lot of his time. One of the series that he does stunts for is going to start shooting next month, so he has to get his script done because choreographing the stunts gets in the way of his writing. He gets really sore from being beaten and blown up all day. And he’s thinking of auditioning for ‘American Obstacle Course Warrior’ this year.”

Cash frowned. “I saw one of their contracts. It was reprehensible. Don’t let him sign anything unless we look at it first.”

“Josie Silverman always looks over his contracts.”

He nodded. “Josie is good. All right, then. But come back to the office tonight.”

And spend yet another long night curled up on those couches under Cash’s diploma, feeding each other with chopsticks or plastic forks, battling legal wits and cracking jokes, while she watched that beautiful man harmlessly flirt with her, that gorgeous man who was so delicious on the outside but poison when tasted?

Not if she could get out of it.

Rox said, “I need to spend a little time with my actual husband instead of my work-husband.”

Cash laughed. “Tomorrow morning, then?”

“You’ll get it when it’s done. You know that Bessie will try at least one thing like this,” she tapped the red flag in Watson’s contract, “for her studio. Maybe she’ll try to tie Leo down to a fifty-year right-of-first-refusal clause or something.”

Cash shook his head. “Why do we always play these games? It’s going to end the same way.”

Rox glanced at him, wary, but the seriousness in his green eyes meant that he was talking about the movie studios’ contract shenanigans. She said, “I couldn’t say, Cash.”

He pushed off the desk, his biceps pumping under his shirt, and ran a hand through his gold and bronze hair. “Until tomorrow, then. What would I do without you?”

Rox lifted her nose in the air as she walked away. “Wither away and die, I s’pose. Good night, Cash.”

She went back to her own office, a much smaller, interior room. The only window was beside the door and looked down a corridor between cubicle dividers. None of the other paralegals had a separate office, instead working in the cubicle farm in the center room, but Rox got whatever she wanted from HR.

She sucked in a deep breath.

It was exhausting, sometimes, being around him, knowing that she shouldn’t, knowing that she must not, and waiting for a touch or a glance from him that never came.

The Crazy Cat Lady | Working Stiff

After an entirely non-enlightening supper with Patty the night before, Rox went home, slept, and was getting ready to leave for the office the next morning, standing in the entryway of her single-bedroom apartment.

Yes, nine hundred square feet of shag carpet and Craigslist furniture were all hers.

Well, hers and her three fuzzy roommates’.

She had uploaded the DiCaprio contract to the office cloud, ready to print it out and hand it to Cash when she got there after flagging it last night. For some reason, Cash liked to go over a contract at least once in hard copy, reading the actual pieces of paper with her notes typed in little bubbles in the margins. Pointing and yelling at the contract was easier to do with a stack of paper.

Paper was much more dramatic when thrown against a wall, too. A thumb drive just went plink on the plaster and dropped to the carpet. So unsatisfying.

Rox trotted over to the door, adjusting her blouse and suit jacket, which she was of course wearing even though it was almost eighty degrees Fahrenheit out there already. Suits hid her lumpy pudge a lot better than some of the slim sundresses that the other girls wore, anyway.

Luckily, her new car had fantastic air conditioning and that new-car smell.

On the table near the door, one of her cats had squeezed himself into Rox’s purse. His long, ginger-blond fur and sumptuous gut overflowed her bag, and he swished his bushy tail and blinked his one good eye up at her. His chewed-up ears, long since healed, swiveled toward her while he purred, thrilled with himself that he had wedged himself inside it once again.

She scratched his head, feeling the lumpy scar tissue, and ran her hand down his back, careful to go easy on the hard pebble where someone had shot him with a BB during his homeless kittenhood. “Pirate, we have discussed this. I need my purse.”

He purred more loudly and blinked his yellow eye at her.

“Come on.” She slipped her hands around him—her fingers running through his cottony fur—and grunted when she lifted him out of the bag. “You need to diet, mister. You and me, both.”

She had been working a lot the last few years, staying late and getting into the office early, and working through meals. Back home in Georgia, she would have been considered a little plump. In body-obsessed Los Angeles, Rox was constantly aware that she was always the chubbiest one in the room.

Rox carried Pirate over to one of the three cat beds in the middle of the room where the sunlight shone most brightly during the day and lowered him into the nest. Hand-crocheted kitty afghans lined each bed. The one in Pirate’s bed looked a little shredded. She should buy some yarn and whip him up a new one.

Speedbump and Midnight sprawled in the other beds, stretched to suck up the morning sunlight. Pirate sniffed and poked around before he settled.

Yep, three cats.

When you volunteer at an animal shelter, accidentally adopting cats is an occupational hazard.

It was a good thing that she volunteered at the no-kill shelter the next town over. They needed her help more than the local shelter, and if she had volunteered at the local shelter that euthanized a lot of their strays, Rox would have owned three hundred cats.

Hiding even these three beasts from the super could be a hassle.

Behind the cats, her living room was smothered in pearl pink velvet and lace, just how she liked it. Rose potpourri fumed flowery scent from every tabletop.

Rox might wear dark, tailored suits to work, but she went full-blown girlie-girl when it came to her own space. One of the guys she had dated last year, Robbie, had loved it, saying that it was like being invited into a lady’s bedchamber where no man had ever entered, only to ravish her.

Robbie had been fun, but it hadn’t quite worked out. They had drifted apart amicably after a few months.

She went back over to the little table by the entryway and called goodbye to her cats as she fished around her purse for her keys. They thumped their tails, ready for their fully booked day of eating and sleeping while she earned the money for the kibble and cat litter.

Just before Rox left, she slipped on the wedding ring set that had been lying in a blue bowl on the table beside a larger bowl of lemons and oranges. The cubic zirconia glittered in a stray sunlight shaft, and the thin gold plating shone.

She had bought the rings for herself during her lunch break on her first day of working at Arbeitman, Silverman, and Amsberg, after hearing that Cash Amsberg the Heartbreaking Superman was repelled not by kryptonite, but by diamonds.

Cash might be a male slut, but he didn’t touch married women. He didn’t even flirt with them. It was like he shut it all down. His flirting with Rox was just friendly banter, like girls do with their gay guy friends. It’s just all in good fun.

He didn’t mean anything by it.

She didn’t want to have her heart broken like all the other women in the office. They had all assured her that Cash would come for her and that she would love every minute of it, until suddenly, he wasn’t there anymore.

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 their heads 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.