by Rose Francis
He watched her entire manner change.
Her body sagged, but along with the relief emanating from her was something else.
Disappointment?
Well, a job offer for domestic work wasn’t exactly thrilling for most people, and he felt kind of bad for deflating her, but he had to ease her somehow and get her off guard; he needed her not to see him as a perv, and if implying all she was good for was to help out in the home, so be it.
Still, she looked hesitant.
She was certainly a ball of negative emotions, and he hoped to see what her smile looked like soon.
The fact that she hadn’t continued to storm off, nor had she denied needing a job gave him hope.
No matter what, he couldn’t let her go; the girl’s eyes had arrested him, the raw pain in her voice as she cussed him out had pierced his chest.
He had to do something to help her; he needed to do something to take her pain away.
He was never one to be moved by women’s tears, but this woman’s sorrow inspired an almost crippling sympathy, and he had to do something to soothe the ache in himself too.
What else was going on with her besides losing her job?
He had no doubt her sorrows went far beyond that.
“In fact…” He made a show of checking his watch. “I can interview you quickly. Ten minutes is all I have time for. If the position sounds good to you, you can start tomorrow. It’s not exactly the kind of job where you need an extensive résumé.”
Her eyes flickered to the coffee shop less than half a block away, but he had long figured that was where she had been let go from.
“I know you can probably make coffee, and I have a feeling you might be open to taking a position to hold you over until you can move on to bigger and better things,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of her wayward glance.
Her beautiful brown eyes held him for what almost felt like a full minute, and he could practically see the gears turning in her head. But he had no idea what was really going on in her mind, especially with the doozy she surprised him with, accusing him of being a John.
Still, he could imagine a few things churning in her mind.
Was he a loon? she was probably wondering. Should she trust him? How many options did she have? Should she take the chance?
Finally, she nodded.
“Great! We can take a quick walk, grab some coffee—from elsewhere, of course.”
She nodded again.
He indicated they continue walking in the direction she had been headed, and they quickly found another small coffee shop.
He asked her what she would like and she looked startled.
“No thanks,” she said.
There was that wariness again; her skepticism button was strong.
What, did she think he’d want a kiss from her as repayment?
What kind of life had she led that left her so distrusting and suspicious?
“Suit yourself,” he said, putting in his order.
They sat down at a small table; in fact, everything felt rather small and uncomfortable, and he wanted to curse his cousin for encouraging him to do go out and do this, but with the sad beauty sitting in front of him, he couldn’t get too mad.
Mike might be right after all, and maybe he’d end up more than a bit grateful soon.
“So what exactly is the job position?” she asked.
Her body language was still completely closed off—hands gathered in front of her, everything else about her pulled tight.
He produced a small smile and shook his head as if she had just tried to get away with something.
“You know there’s this thing people do—once they know what the job’s for, they tailor their experiences to it, which, obviously, you’re supposed to do. But this position requires more insight into personality. Compatibility beyond whether or not the objective of the current version of your résumé lines up with the job description. Get my drift?”
She nodded but looked unsure.
“Anyway, so just start by telling me about you. Hand me your résumé verbally. Tell me about your job experiences, as far back as you want.”
His coffee was brought to him just as she started to launch into her job history.
He watched her carefully as she spoke, listening to everything she said and everything she didn’t say.
She looked sort of embarrassed by some of her jobs—the fast food places, in particular—and her eyes darted to his suit as if realizing those jobs were silly to mention in the face of his apparent wealth.
Her slightly elevated energy as she first began to speak started to come down, as if she started losing hope of being good enough for whatever he was looking for.
“So you’ve been working a while. Keep going,” he encouraged her.
She continued to talk about her jobs and he found himself distracted by her lips again.
What he would give to pull them between his…
“Hm. Well, that sounds great. I mean, what I’m looking for doesn’t require all that much experience and training like I said. Sort of an on-the-job kind of deal; no degrees needed.”
“Um, what kind of terms are we talking? Is it part-time or full-time? And what’s the salary range?”
She looked embarrassed to have asked, and he wasn’t sure how to answer her since everything was on the fly.
“It depends,” he began. “It’s a pretty fluid position. You can start off part-time but go to full-time, for example, depending on how things work out with the workload.”
He watched her eyes light up.
“As for salary range, pretty standard.”
She nodded as if she knew and he was glad he didn’t have to throw out a figure in case he was way off.
Did she really just need a job that badly that she wouldn’t even press for how much it paid? What the heck had she been making?
“What was your previous salary?” he asked.
When she hesitated, her eyes wary, he said shortly, “It’s a standard question.”
He tried to keep his face neutral when she answered, then did some math in his head.
Even if she had been working forty-hour weeks, at the rate she gave…holy cow—he made more than her annual salary in less than an hour. Pretty much anything he threw out would be a vast improvement.
“If things work out, you could be making upwards of fifty grand a year,” he said. It was the price he’d paid for his current watch.
Her eyes looked like they might pop right off her face; the figure was almost three times what she made recently.
He fished around in his pocket.
“Here’s my card. Call that number at nine p.m. tonight, and I’ll have more info for you.”
She took the card, still looking dazed.
He knew he had her.
He checked his watch again, reconsidering the time. No need to keep them both waiting too long—four hours was far more than enough time to make something up for her and iron out the details.
“Make that six o’clock,” he said, trying to keep himself from smiling at his own cunning.
He had done exactly what potential employees did in their interviews with potential employers, twisting it for his own needs. Instead of having her tailor her answers and résumé to the prospective job, he could now tailor the job to her, forming the position based off of her answers.
Retail, she’d said? Food and Beverage? Some babysitting? Done.
* * *
KEVIN BRIEFLY CONSIDERED HAVING her work in one of his buildings, but he had a strong desire to bring her home and have her in his space.
He already had a full staff of housekeepers, but surely they won’t mind another pair of helping hands?
He wondered why he felt such a pull toward that particular girl—he wasn’t usually so moved by other people’s plights; she wasn’t the first strange female on the verge of tears he’d seen.
So why did he feel a need to help her?
And beyond that, w
hy didn’t he just pull some strings and get her started filing things away or some other unskilled administrative work away from him? Why did he feel a need to have her in his mansion?
Sure, she was an attractive girl but there was certainly no shortage of those; he had access to more refined versions of her in droves.
He pushed his thoughts away.
For now, he’d just go with it—it felt great to do a good deed every now and then, something that wasn’t just a tax write-off.
He stared at the pile of paperwork on his desk again.
Maybe Michael was right and it was time for him to take a mini-vacation and stop and smell the roses.
Instead of coming to the office, maybe he’d just work from home for the next week or two now that he had a reason to hang out there.
His office assistant might appreciate the break—or maybe she’d be a little miffed he wasn’t bringing her home instead, since she knew pretty much all of his preferences—down to how he liked his sandwiches.
Either way, his needs would be slightly different at home since he already had a full staff of people who knew what he liked and how he liked it.
Damn it, where could he really slot the girl in then?
He talked to his house manager, Jeffrey, and according to his assessment, they were, in fact, overstaffed; there was only so much dusting and dry-cleaning and laundering their current staff of six could do daily.
Kevin knew he kept more workers than needed, but he certainly didn’t have the heart to let anyone go.
He didn’t want Naomi to work in a cleaning capacity anyway.
Maybe she could work with his personal shopper as a sort of nod to her past retail experience.
He finally decided to confine her to Food and Beverage needs.
She’d bring him his coffee, and maybe he’d arrange for her to work with Chef Manny—have her sent on runs for groceries or whatever he needed.
And if that wasn’t enough, he’d eventually figure out more ways to fill up her time.
She looked pretty desperate; she’d do almost anything, probably.
* * *
WHEN HIS PHONE rang at six p.m., Kevin’s heart sped up unexpectedly and he felt on edge.
What the hell was that about? he wondered.
He never got nervous about calls unless he thought his father was on the other end.
“Great news!” he said when he heard Naomi’s voice. “I’d like to offer you the position. As I mentioned, it’s in a domestic capacity so it’s for my estate, and it’s a rather fluid position—you’d be acting as a sort of general household assistant mainly to the cooks and my other personal assistants.”
“What should I wear? Or is there a uniform provided?”
Kevin thought of the plain blue and white uniform his domestic staff wore and scowled.
“Well, you won’t be getting your hands dirty exactly—especially since it’s your first day—so feel free to wear what you’d wear if going to the mall or something. Jeans, long, dark pants. T-shirts. No sleeveless tops. I’ll send over a wardrobe guide. Also, you already have the job, but I’ll need you to fill out a formal application. We can do this all electronically—send me your email, I’ll send you the secure application. Then look out for more details later tonight.”
Once her details came in, he started to research her.
Unlike his crazy cousin, he still had to use reason and logic when about to invite a stranger into his home.
He proceeded with a background check, and his heart softened once he discovered her residence at a group home in her teens and realized she was a child of the system. One of those kids who never got adopted.
Now that he had the workplaces she’d told him about on paper, he followed up and confirmed her former places of employment and her places of residence. His portrait of her filled out more as her previous employers had nothing but good things to say about her—even the one who’d fired her.
So she was late and distracted a lot—it only pointed to what he suspected—she had serious issues and he looked forward to prying them out of her.
CHAPTER 5
NAOMI
T he good thing about being fired early in the day was that Naomi was able to find out what was wrong with her car sooner than later.
Now that she knew it was just a dead battery, she felt a lot better—her car hadn’t failed her yet.
As she drove to the location she’d been given to begin her first day of her sudden new job, she still kept silently praying that’s all the problem was and breathed a huge sigh of relief once she arrived at the mansion without incident.
She followed the instructions she had been given, and once her intercom interaction was complete and the gates swung open, she had to fight to keep from going slack-jawed at the expanse and intricacy of the property before her.
Her eyes greedily took in the detailed landscaping, the grandness of the main residence.
Once she followed the curving driveway to the entrance, a man dressed as a butler and introducing himself as Jeffrey Higgins, House Manager, greeted her before taking her keys and driving her car elsewhere, after informing her to wait for ‘the master.’
She was still surprised when Kevin came out personally to greet her and take her inside.
“I’m getting you a more reliable business car to run errands in,” he said with a slight smile. “Now, follow me. I will only give you a partial tour—the main areas you’ll be working in.”
Naomi barely heard him as he gave details, distracted easily by the decor, the grandeur of everything.
She got jarred back to his voice once he mentioned the servants’ quarters.
“I’m sorry?” she said. “You mean, your staff lives…here?”
“Well, not here in the main house, but adjoined. As you can imagine, it is far more convenient to have live-in help.”
The gears started working in her head.
“So they live here for free?”
He laughed. “Of course! Since I require them to be easily accessible, it is part of my own expense.”
So not only were they getting paid fairly well, if her own new salary was anything to go by, but they didn’t even have to pay rent!
No way—they were making bank.
She wondered if they had to pay for their own food. If not, they were pocketing their entire salary—no electricity bills, no cable bills, no gas/water/trash…
She had to find out about joining them.
She wasn’t technically a servant, but surely he wouldn’t mind having her stay near?
She could save so much more money faster and get her own apartment and possibly a better car so much sooner.
She decided to wait until later to ask him about it—she didn’t want to seem greedy and needy.
As they headed for the kitchen, Naomi tried hard to listen to her new boss’s words and not get too distracted by the sights around her again.
“…I’ll be working from home the next two weeks or so, so I’ll be here most of the time. You’ll carry out the tasks I give you, plus bring my coffee and food…”
As he continued with the minor details of her duties, a scene from the beginning of the film Coming to America came to her head.
“Arf!” she almost said, mimicking the barking sound of one of the characters at the beginning of the movie. “Do you want me to scrub you in the royal bath as well?” she actually said before she could stop the words.
She immediately looked away, embarrassed and afraid of his reaction.
How on earth could she have let that slip?
She hoped she hadn’t angered him too much by stepping out of line.
But once she chanced a glance upward at him, she noticed his eyes seemed to twinkle, and it looked like he was holding in a laugh.
He actually looked like he liked the idea too much for her liking.
“I was just kidding,” she said quickly, although the idea of sitting naked behind him in a filled bathtub, perhaps surrounded by ro
se petals and aromatic candles didn’t exactly repel her.
“No, I just…” He finally let himself chuckle. “It reminded me of a scene from Coming to America is all.”
Naomi felt her eyebrows raise, but she said nothing about having had the same thought.
No use encouraging him to flirt with her.
She also suppressed her other response: what would he know about Coming to America? Did guys like him even watch T.V. beyond stock market recaps or something?
Once it sounded like he was done with his overview, she said, “Excuse me for saying this, but when you first mentioned domestic work and helping out around the home, I imagined I’d be doing some sort of cleaning—dishes, dusting…You know, housework.”
“Oh no, that’s not necessary. The others are here for all of that. Like I said, you won’t be getting your hands dirty, per se.”
“It’s honest work, Mr. Davenport—I don’t mind doing it.”
“Christ, please call me Kevin; don’t make me feel old.”
What the heck was he talking about? He was probably no more than ten years older than her.
“And assisting me personally isn’t all you’ll be doing. As I mentioned, I’ll have you work closely with the cooks and they’ll guide you through some of the rest—familiarize you with the pantry, send you out for ingredients every now and then. You’ll also be working with Jeffrey—he oversees and coordinates everything, and he’ll let you know what he needs, and generally act as our in-between. The job requires you to be flexible—your tasks will probably change day-to-day, and some days you might work more closely with me than others.”
A thrill ran through Naomi at his words, and she wondered about the possibilities.
She wasn’t sure what he meant exactly, but she absolutely didn’t mind working closely with him, inhaling his heavenly male scent and looking into those beautiful gray eyes at all.
She couldn’t believe her luck.
* * *
MOST OF THE day was orientation, but from what she gathered of her daily duties, it would be the easiest job she’d ever had, and she was getting paid far more than she ever had to do it.