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 cocoa-dusted, 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.
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 lied, “I need to spend a little time with my actual husband instead of my work-husband.”
She didn’t have an actual husband. She had fake wedding rings set with the finest cubic zirconia that worked perfectly as an Cash Amsburg-repellent. She did have three rescue cats who loved her, though.
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.
CLICK HERE TO SEE WORKING STIFF!
~~~~~
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Hello!
I hope you’ve enjoyed these three light paranormal romances about dragons and witches! I had a good time writing them. They’re far outside my usual books’ topics of billionaires, ingenues, and danger, but we all need a break now and then, a palate-cleanser, if you will.
I’ve always loved to read a wide variety of books, including contemporary romance (of course,) PNR, fantasy and urban fantasy, mysteries, and science fiction. Basically, I like to read everything except horror. I don’t like horror. In these PNRs, you can probably see the influences of all the fantasy that I’ve read. Of course, even my contemp romances have some influences. Wulf von Hannover bears a striking resemblance to Prince Corwin of Amber and Prince Elric of Melniboné. Interestingly, Melniboné is also known as the Dragon Island, which might explain my ongoing fascination with dragons. Indeed, when my friends Violet Vaughn and Deanna Chase originally opened up the LoveSpells line to outside writers, I was like, “Dibs on dragon shifters! Dibs on the dragon shifters!!!!!” And thus, Dragons & Witches was born.
The little aside in several of these books about the shy bear shifter girl that the witch trio went to high school with is a direct reference to Vivian Arend’s bear shifter PNRs, especially Copper King, which is the cutest little PNR that I’ve read in a long time. Viv talked with me for hours and helped me brainstorm these books when I was lost as to how and where to start them. She’s an amazing writer and a generous lady. You should check out Viv’s website here, and her Takhini Shifters series including Copper King here.
If you’re primarily a PNR reader, I hope you’ll try my usual romance novels, too. Many of my series starters are free, so go get them and see if you like them! You can see a Reading Order of all my books here, or just browse the covers and find a guy, er, a book you like here.
Dragons and Fire Page 20