by Alyse Zaftig
“Chatty? No one’s ever called me chatty before.”
“One word is too many. Now let me show you to your job for today.”
Matilda tried desperately to hold back her irritation as James led her through the house. Who did this guy think he was? Even if he did want to accept her offer of being a live-in cleaning lady, she doubted that she could handle living with such an irritating person anyway.
No matter how great his ass looked in the lounge pants he was wearing. She couldn’t help but stare at it as she followed him through the mansion. Her mind started playing dirty tricks on her, forcing her to imagine what it would feel like in both of her hands.
When they made it to the master bathroom, she had to squeeze her eyes closed for a moment to force the image from her mind. When she opened them again, she found herself standing in a huge marble tiled room with a massive walk-in shower and a deep jetted bathtub. All that beauty was covered in laundry, trash, and who knows what, from James’s personal hygiene routines. There were wet towels covering the floor, and she didn’t even want to know what she would find in the toilet.
“I don’t usually let people into my private space, but my master bathroom is in desperate need of cleaning. This is your assignment for the day.”
Matilda glanced up at James like he was crazy. As much as she wanted to make a good impression and be a good worker, she could not help being stunned by him. It was only slightly less shocking than the level of slovenliness he was clearly comfortable living with.
“Can I ask you a personal question, James?” she asked, unable to stop herself.
“No.”
“Why don’t you just clean up after yourself?”
“I’m a billionaire. Why should I do that?”
“Um… So you don’t have to live like a slob?”
“And that, my dear, is the one and only reason I invite you into my space. I have other things to do. Could you please do your job?”
“Not a problem, sir,” she said, trying to hold back the sarcasm.
“If you do a good job at this, we can talk about you maybe living here. Until I can find someone else that is.”
“Really?” she said, her tone lightening.
“I’m not making any promises, and it’s only until I can find someone else.”
“Okay then. I’ll get to work.”
Matilda set down her mop and bucket, unable to believe that this was her life now. She had sunk to begging a weirdo to be his live-in cleaning lady. James Hill may be a billionaire, but he was the slovenliest person Matilda had ever encountered in her life. And she was the daughter of a cleaning lady; she thought she had seen it all.
The things she had to clean up in James’s bathroom would have made the guys in the kill room at the meatpacking plant hesitate. But Matilda was a professional. She did what she needed to do to get the job done.
Several hours later, the bathroom was just as clean as the kitchen had been the day before when she’d left. She hadn’t seen it yet today, but she doubted it was still in the same condition.
As she scrubbed the last corner of the bathroom floor on her hands and knees, she felt the distinct feeling that she was being stared at. She turned just in time to see James standing in the doorway, staring at her as she knelt on the floor. His eyes were clearly burning a hole in her ass. Her own eyes grew round with shock and she gasped.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Her heart was thumping a million miles a minute and she couldn’t calm down. She should hate the feeling of his eyes on her, but instead, it made her blood boil and her juices run hot. She bit her lip and stood, brushing off her maid uniform.
“The room looks great. I can take a decent shower again.”
“It looks like my two hours are up. I should get going, unless you’re ready to talk about me living here.”
“I should not agree to this. However, I do need a cleaning lady. I’m going to let you stay here, but only until your mother finds me someone else.”
“I wish you would tell me what I’ve done wrong.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” he growled. “Let me show you your room.”
He led her through his bedroom, which was just as messy as the bathroom. She noted the sturdy four poster bed covered in fluffy black blankets made of the softest fabrics.
They went down the hall and turned the corner, until they came to another wing of the mansion. It was cold in this part of the big house. He opened the door, and she peered inside. It was a well-appointed guestroom for a young woman or a girl. The bedspread was covered in pink hearts that matched the curtains on a window that overlooked the snow-covered garden below.
A fireplace sat in the corner, with a stack of wood beside it. An easy chair faced the hearth, and a bookshelf covered the opposite wall. It looked like a sweet, cozy little place to call home for a time. Even though this was a strange situation, she was grateful to have the room.
“Thank you,” she said, walking inside.
“You can go get your things from your mother’s house if you need.”
“That won’t be necessary. My mother made me bring them with me in the car.”
Chapter 8
James left Matilda alone in her room and stormed down the hall, unable to believe that he had agreed to allow her to live in his mansion. His inner grizzly was going mad, threatening to break through his human defenses. The beast insisted that he claim the woman right here and now.
There was no way James could ever have Matilda. He was mad in more ways than one. His human mind was cracked and the mind of his grizzly was broken beyond repair. The horrors of war and the solitude of the mountain had pushed him over the edge.
He needed to get her out of here as soon as possible. There was no way for them to live safely together in his mansion. When she’d told him she had nowhere to go, he couldn’t help but want to help her.
She was his fated mate. As a shifter, his primary instinct was to protect her. That instinct had led him to allowing her to live in this house, as stupid as that decision may have been. Now he would be forced to smell her sweet scent every moment of every day as it filled his mansion.
He walked out onto the back porch that led to the grounds. The drops of blood from the rabbits he’d devoured still clung to the snow. He gritted his teeth at the shame of it and hurried down the walkway, through the garden of statues that stared down at him from their pillars.
As he glanced at their faces, he knew that he could see them staring back at him. It was no comfort to know the depth of his own insanity. His poor little mate had to get away from here as fast as possible before he did something he would regret for eternity.
She needed a place to stay, but more than that, she needed to be safe. And being safe meant staying as far away from him as possible. He tried not to look at the faces of the statues as he trudged through the snow to the back corner of the grounds. He needed to get away from her smell and clear his head. He had to decide what to do.
There was a small gazebo glassed in by storm windows and protected from the elements. He walked through the door and sat on a wooden bench beside the fireplace.
Shivering in the cold, he threw a few logs in the hearth and started a fire. The longer he stayed out here the better. Pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace, he tried to muster the strength to go back to the house. He knew that as soon as he went inside, she would be there. The smell of her, the sound of her heart beating, the sight of her beautiful, curvaceous, young body. He would never survive it. Neither of them would.
As he gazed at the fire, his inner grizzly sent him images of himself ripping Matilda’s clothes off, and taking her like a madman across his king-sized bed. The images were so vivid he could almost feel himself sinking into her soft core. Thinking of the velvety warmth of her sex around his shaft made him roar with desire. He broke out of the fantasy and squeezed his eyes closed, rubbing his temples. The things his bear wanted could never be.
Matilda was his mate and therefore he had to protect her, even if it was from himself. These mad, dark thoughts were twisting through his mind and keeping his attention so intently that he didn’t notice the screen door of the gazebo had swung open.
The little raven-haired college girl stood before him, her heart shaped mouth puckered questioningly and her pale cheeks flushed with red from the cold air outside.
“What are you doing out here?” he demanded to know.
“I wanted to know if I could make something for dinner?”
“You don’t have to ask.”
“I didn’t want to intrude.”
“Obviously, you have to eat.”
“Okay. I’ll get out of your hair now. Thanks,” she said, turning away.
“Wait!” he said, too loudly.
She turned back to look at him, questions in her eyes.
“I’ll make something for you,” he stammered.
“You cook?”
“Yes, I cook. How do you think I got all those dirty dishes?”
“Point taken,” she said with a giggle.
The sound of her laughter excited something deep inside his heart, sending a tingle of pleasure through his entire body. He shivered in the cold air, and his inner grizzly growled at him to stop being an idiot.
“Come on,” he said in a low voice. “I have everything we need for beef stew.”
She followed him across the grounds toward the house. James avoided the eyes of the statues as he led her to the back porch.
“Is it just me or do the statues seem like they stare at you?”
“What?” he said, not sure he understood her question correctly. Was it possible she could see it too?
“The statues, it’s almost like they’re looking at me. I know it sounds crazy, but…”
“It is like that,” he said hesitantly.
“It’s not just the statues either. I swear sometimes the objects in your house move by themselves. I can’t explain it. God, I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“The mansion can play tricks on the eyes,” he said.
He couldn’t believe that she saw it too.
“Well my eyes have been tricked since the first day I started working here. I swear I saw a candlestick dancing out of the corner of my eye.”
“You did?” he said, opening the back door of the mansion.
“What’s with all this blood all over the back porch?”
“That? That’s from a few rabbits.”
“And you know that how?”
“Because I killed them and ate them in grizzly form.”
“Okay. That’s a little too much information.”
“If you’re going to live with a grizzly shifter, you should get used to it,” he said in a flat voice.
“I’m not judging or anything.”
They stepped into the mansion and walked through a sitting room and into the kitchen. He invited Matilda to sit at the kitchen counter while he began pulling things out of the fridge.
“It’s awfully nice to get to cook in a clean kitchen.”
“I’m better at cleaning than cooking, truth be told,” she said.
“That would make sense,” he said, before he could stop himself.
“What would make sense? You’re good at cooking and I’m good at cleaning? I don’t understand.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Obviously it isn’t nothing. There’s something going on here that I don’t know about. You know I need this job, but there’s only so much weirdness a girl can deal with. I just got out of a bad relationship, and I’m trying to have better boundaries. I read that on a relationship blog.”
“Boundaries are important.”
As James was preparing his beef stew, he noticed as Matilda pulled her smartphone out of her pocket and scrolled over the screen.
“I can’t believe I signed up for Mate.com,” she said. “They even found my fated mate. Can you believe that? But this guy has never even contacted me and his profile name is Bad Bear. That doesn’t seem very encouraging, does it?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about it,” he lied.
Matilda sighed and set her smartphone back on the counter.
“It’s kind of weird to have my boss cooking dinner for me,” she said.
“I’m not really your boss,” he growled.
“Oh right. You want to fire me.”
James didn’t say anything. He just continued cooking his beef stew. He cut some crusty French bread he’d had delivered that morning, and popped it in the oven with butter and garlic for fresh garlic toast. When everything was ready he dished it up and brought it to the breakfast nook. Matilda slid into the other side of the booth and dipped her spoon into the bowl as the sun began to set behind the thick forest.
“This is really good. You definitely can cook.”
“I can do a lot of things I no longer get to do, being alone on the mountain as I am.”
“Why do you stay here by yourself, James?” Matilda asked, taking another bite of stew.
“It’s a long story.”
“I don’t have anything better to do. And I’m not going to be working for you for very long so we won’t really have to worry about those boundaries or anything.”
“I’d rather not get into it.”
“That’s fine,” she said with a sigh, obviously bored and irritated.
“Why don’t I open a bottle of wine?”
James didn’t know how alcohol was going to help the situation, but it was his only idea. He slid out of the breakfast nook and went into the kitchen, where he grabbed a bottle of Cabernet from his wine rack and uncorked it. He grabbed wine glasses and walked back to the table where he poured wine for himself and for Matilda. She took the glass and sipped. He could see the enjoyment in her eyes at the flavor of the fine wine.
“This is good. A girl could get used to this kind of thing. I can’t believe I’m getting wined and dined by my boss. My friends on social media will never believe this.”
“No one needs to know about this,” he growled.
Matilda stopped mid-Tweet and stared at him. “Fine. Social media is overrated anyway.”
He knew he was losing ground with her by the minute. But at the same time, he shouldn’t be gaining any ground with her. The less she liked him the better. But he couldn’t bring himself to push her away.
Everything in him wanted to reach out to her, pull her to him, and envelop her in his arms. He wanted to feel her soft curvy body against his hard chest. He wanted to bury himself deep between her thighs. He wanted to sink his teeth into her creamy white flesh. The growls of his grizzly were so loud he could barely hear himself think.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“I am unused to having guests,” he said, trying to explain away his strange expression.
“You need to get out more, my friend,” she said, taking her last bite of stew.
She poured another glass of wine and stood from the table. “Well, thank you for dinner. I’ll clean this up in the morning if that’s okay. Right now, I think I’ll go back to my room.”
“What’s the hurry?” he asked, standing abruptly from the table.
“I didn’t think you wanted to hang out with me anymore.”
“Why don’t we watch a movie or something?” he said, mortified at how lame he sounded.
“Sure. Why not?”
James grabbed the bottle and his glass of wine and the two of them walked through the house, down the stairs and into the mansion’s massive basement theater room. He watched her face light up as he turned on the lights, revealing the rows of theater chairs and the big screen on the far wall.
“Is this where you usually watch TV? Seems a bit much for one person.”
“I hardly ever come in here, to be honest. But I thought you might like it.”
“It’s pretty awesome. What kind of movies do you have?”
“Basically, anything you want to see. I even have access to
some theater only pre-release films.”
“No way. Do you have the new Galaxy Wars?”
“I think I do,” he said.
“I didn’t think I was going to get to see it until it came out on DVD, being on Fate Mountain.”
“That’s what you’d like to watch?”
“Absolutely,” she said, sinking into a chair in the front row.
James found a remote and flipped through the media channels until he found the new Galaxy Wars film. As the credits began to roll, he turned down the lights and sat beside her, his wine glass in hand. She laughed and smiled throughout the movie and James could not remember the last time he had enjoyed himself so much.
By the time the movie was over, they had finished the bottle of wine and Matilda was acting silly and warm toward him as they walked out the theater room. They bumped into each other as they squeezed through the door at the same time. Their bodies pressed against each other and the smell of her flesh filled his nose. His grizzly roared and the alcohol in him removed all sense of self control. Matilda looked up into his eyes, pretty lips parted.
Without a word, he grabbed her and pulled her to him. He was already hard as a rock, she gasped when she felt his erection press against her stomach. She didn’t pull away or flinch when he leaned in to claim her mouth. She moaned as his tongue slid between her lips and danced with her hot wet tongue.
“James,” she moaned. “Do you think we should be doing this?”
“Of course we should. You are my fated mate.”
Chapter 9
James’s words sent a hot thrill down Matilda’s spine. Suddenly everything made sense. Her attraction, and his insistence that she leave.
“Are you Bad Bear?”
“Yes,” was all he said before gathering her up in his arms and sweeping her off her feet.
He carried her through the mansion, up the stairs and into his bedroom. His sheets were thankfully clean, and when he laid her across them, they were soft as silk against her skin. She couldn’t believe this was happening. It was all like a dream. Was her mind playing tricks on her like it had with the candlestick dancing out of the corner of her eye, or the statues staring at her as she walked across the snowy ground?