by Callie Rose
His father’s got the look of someone who was stunningly handsome in his youth and is aging well. But this guy? He probably hasn’t even hit the peak of his good looks yet.
And I can see why he ran into me. I stopped to gawk right in front of a doorway that leads to what looks like a den or something.
“Lincoln, this is our new Executive Housekeeper, Penelope Thomas, and her daughter, Harlow. She’ll be going to school with you.”
Samuel beams as he makes the introduction, ushering my mom forward with a hand at her lower back. She smiles and steps up to shake Lincoln’s hand, but in the two seconds it takes her to reach him, I see something change in his eyes. His gaze was curious and vaguely neutral when he looked at me before, but now his brows draw together slightly, and the warm amber of his eyes hardens like glass. His jaw twitches too, like he’s clenching his teeth, and when he shakes my mom’s hand, the movement is stiff.
His dad turns to me expectantly.
Fuck.
The last thing I want to do is shake this boy’s hand. For one thing, given his sudden change in attitude, I’m afraid he might bite it off. And for another, his spicy, coriander scent is still clinging to me from when we collided earlier, and I don’t think I can handle another hit of it so soon.
Not because I don’t like it, but because I really, really do.
But he’s the son of my mom’s new employer, and both she and Samuel are watching me now. I can’t just cross my arms over my chest and refuse.
So I swallow heavily and step forward, holding out my hand. He takes it in one of his, and unlike his father’s handshake, his grip is strong, almost bruising.
Like he’s trying to see if I’ll break.
I squeeze back a little harder myself, forcing a smile to my face. “Nice to meet you, Lincoln.”
He nods, his eyes narrowing slightly as he keeps his hold on my hand. “You’re the new help?”
Samuel lets out a quiet, disapproving noise behind me, but his son ignores him.
“Executive Housekeeper,” I correct, bristling at the term.
He cocks his head with a taunting grin. “You’re the Executive Housekeeper?”
“No. My mom is. I’m her… assistant.”
Goddammit, I wish I knew what game we’re playing so I’d know if I was winning or losing.
His grin dissipates, and his gaze flicks from me to Mom to his dad. When it lands on me again, there’s no trace of humor left on his face.
“Got it. Good to know.”
He releases my hand suddenly, gives a curt nod to the adults, and then heads up the stairs to the second floor.
“Good to know?” What the fuck does that mean?
On the surface, the words don’t mean much at all. But it was the way he said them that bugged me. As if I’d confessed some terrible sin or incriminated myself just by admitting I was one of the new housekeepers.
Jesus. Is poor little rich boy mad his daddy made him shake hands with the help?
Without even thinking about it, I wipe my hand on my pants as I turn to follow Mr. Black and Mom deeper into the house, wishing I could forcibly remove Lincoln’s scent from my nostrils. That sweet, spicy, addictive smell has somehow turned bitter.
Just before I step through the arched doorway at the back of the room into a small gallery space, I glance over my shoulder.
Lincoln is standing on the second-floor balcony, hands braced on the railing, gaze locked on me.
It’s only then that I realize his rude behavior earlier was actually him holding back—putting on a mask of civility. He must’ve been restraining himself, keeping his emotions in check in front of his dad and my mom.
Because the look on his face now?
It’s one of pure loathing.
2
My mom, God love her, doesn’t seem to have picked up any of the weird fucking vibe Lincoln was throwing my way—and maybe her way too, I can’t quite be sure. He definitely seems to hate me though, so I can’t imagine he’d be a big fan of the woman who gave birth to me.
I catch up to her and Samuel as he ushers us into a back foyer that leads to a large terrace and a sprawling backyard. From there, he circles around to show us the great room, the conservatory, the ballroom, the library, and the den. I don’t even know what the fuck a “great room” is, but it’s huge and has couches, chairs, and end tables artfully arrayed around the space.
The other wing of the first floor holds the kitchen and several guest rooms, with a humongous motor court and two garages at the far end. There’s a basement with a steam room and sauna, several rec rooms, a small basketball court, a wine cellar, and an actual mini-movie theatre.
At some point during the tour, my eyes stop bugging out of my head. I’ve seen too much to be surprised anymore—the level of wealth and luxury in this place is staggering.
As we’re heading up a different set of stairs to the second floor, a willowy woman starts down the steps toward us. She’s wearing a loose, expensive-looking top and flowing pants. Her chestnut hair is streaked with subtle highlights, and her berry-red nails are long. She looks younger than Mom, and for a second, I totally understand the struggle people go through when they meet me and my mom together—that moment of confusion about whether we’re mother/daughter or siblings.
Is this woman Samuel’s wife or his daughter?
She stops a few feet away from us, her eyebrows lifting with mild, bored interest. “Oh. Who are you?”
“Darling, they’re the new housekeeping staff. I told you they’d be arriving today, remember?”
Samuel wraps an arm around her waist, tugging her toward him and kissing her lightly.
Well, guess that answers that.
The woman shrugs out of his grasp, her gaze bouncing between me and Mom. She doesn’t seem openly hostile like her son did, so that’s good, I guess. But she doesn’t seem… all there either. Her eyes have a slightly glassy quality, and there’s a slowness to her movements, as if there’s a half-second delay between her brain and her body.
She smiles, her lips slowly stretching as she blinks at us. “Oh, yes. Of course. Welcome to our home. I’m Audrey.”
My mom makes our introductions as I step up beside her. Shaking Mrs. Black’s hand is like holding a piece of cardboard. It’s cool and dry and slightly stiff.
“I’m sure my husband will take excellent care of you.” Her lips float up in another smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Darling, I’ll be in the pool house if you need me.”
She brushes past us to continue down the stairs, and as Samuel starts leading us up again, my mom shoots me a look. Okay, even she picked up on that weirdness.
I shrug to let her know I don’t understand it any better than she does.
Rich people be crazy, am I right?
The Black family mansion is so huge and ostentatious that it actually has “service quarters”. After giving us a brief tour of the second floor, Mr. Black leads us to a self-contained one-bedroom apartment on the west side of the house, above the garage.
“And this is where you’ll be staying,” he says, smiling at my mom. He’s the only person in this house who seems to do that and mean it. Then he turns toward me. “It only has one bedroom, unfortunately. And it seems silly to ask the two of you to share when we have plenty of perfectly good guest rooms that aren’t being used. So you’ll be staying just around the corner, if it’s all right with you, in a spare bedroom near the laundry room.”
I shrug. “Sure. Works for me.”
He beams again, and I wonder if it’s always like this. If he’s trying to compensate for having a son who’s an asshole and wife who’s barely there.
“Wonderful! Then I’ll leave you two to get settled in. Penelope, tomorrow evening we can go over your expected duties and some household logistics. We’ve had live-in help before, so it’ll just be a matter of getting you up to speed on the systems your predecessor created.”
“That sounds great.” My mom nods enthusiastically. She
shakes his hand again. “Thank you for having us. This is a wonderful opportunity. We can’t wait to get started.”
He does the double handshake thing again, clasping hers between both of his. “Of course. Celeste spoke very highly of you.”
Before he leaves, he shows me around the corner to my room. The service entrance door is nestled into the corner where two hallways meet, and my room is several yards past that. The room is huge—obviously it wasn’t intended for servants to sleep in—and as Mr. Black noted, the laundry room is right next to it. There’s even a door that leads from the bedroom to the laundry room, although I’m not quite sure why. All I know is, he just gave my mom the perfect excuse to assign me laundry duty.
I chuckle under my breath, rolling my eyes. Thanks a lot, dude.
A second later, Mom raps gently on the half-closed bedroom door and pokes her head inside. “Hey, kiddo. Want to help me unload the truck?”
Heaving a breath, I stand from where I was testing out the bed. The mattress is soft and bouncy, just how I like, and what I really want to do is put on my pajamas and curl up under the covers. But we only have a few hours of daylight left, and until we unpack our shit, I don’t even have any pajamas to change into.
“Yeah. Let’s do it. Home, sweet home.”
There’s no sign of either Lincoln or his mom in the house as we unload our boxes and bags from the moving truck. It doesn’t take long—we sold or donated all our furniture, and neither of us own a whole lot. It’s mostly clothes, books, and other day-to-day necessities.
That night, I sleep like a damn baby swaddled in the softest sheets known to mankind. Usually I have a hard time sleeping in new places, and I would’ve thought that would be especially true in this massive, overwhelming house. But tucked away in the northwest corner, around the corner from my mom’s little makeshift apartment, I feel safe and cozy. I can almost imagine the rest of the house doesn’t exist.
There are some guest bedrooms on the first floor, but everyone who lives here sleeps on the second. Mr. and Mrs. Black share the master bedroom, which has an attached sitting room and two gargantuan walk-in closets and takes up almost the entire east wing of the house. Lincoln’s room is on the south side of the house, around the corner and down the hallway from mine—Mr. Black pointed it out to us on the tour. I can only assume Lincoln was inside of it at the time, glaring at the thick wood as we walked past.
I can tell Mom’s a little nervous about starting work, but she makes a point to peruse the house more thoroughly the next day. She was joking when we first arrived, but she made a good point—if we’re scared to touch anything here, we’ll be the shittiest housekeepers ever.
Despite the glowing recommendation from her old high school friend Celeste Barker, my mom isn’t exactly an expert housekeeper or anything. She cleaned houses through an agency for about a year when I was fifteen, and I helped whenever I wasn’t at school. Celeste putting in a good word for my mom was more about throwing her a bone than about her actual qualifications.
Apparently, they were good friends in high school, but life circumstances sent them spinning in very different directions after that. My mom got pregnant with me the year she graduated, and my dad split a year later. Celeste married some hotshot lawyer and ended up working as an interior decorator in Fox Hills. They reconnected on social media randomly a while ago, and I think Celeste felt a little bad to see where my mom had ended up.
I sort of hate that it was pity that got us here, but, hey—my mom’s not dumb enough to turn down a life-changing opportunity because of pride.
And this could be life changing.
With this kind of job—this kind of money—we could finally crawl out of the hole of debt we’ve been living in for years.
Without conscious thought, my fingertips reach up to brush against the port scar on my chest. I can’t even feel it through the fabric of my shirt, but I know it’s there.
“Low? You okay, honey?”
I jerk in surprise, turning toward the bedroom door to see Mom’s head poking through the crack.
“Yeah.” I smile, letting out a breath. “Fine. You unpacked?”
She shrugs as she pushes the door open wider and leans against the frame. “Good enough for now. And I already know I packed a bunch of shit I should’ve just gotten rid of. Ah, well. I’ll just keep it for another ten years and then decide what to do with it.”
I smirk, tugging my long hair over my shoulder. “Good call.”
“Hey, I’m about to sit down and chat with Mr. Black, get the lay of the land here. You can come if you want, but if you don’t—”
“Option number two,” I say quickly.
I’m perfectly happy to help my mom with the cleaning duties, but if she handles the meetings with the head of the household, I’ll be even happier. Mr. Black seems nice enough, but he still oozes privilege and power, and it makes me a little jittery to be near him. To be near anyone in this family, really. I have to assume that feeling will go away at some point—we’re all living together now, for fuck’s sake—but I’m not in any hurry to force it.
“Yeah, I thought so.”
She smiles at me, and for a second, her expression grows painfully wistful. After everything she’s done for me—the insane hours she worked, the massive debt she took on, the days and weeks of taking care of me through chemo after my cancer diagnosis—sometimes I think she should hate me. Resent me.
But in moments like these, I’m positive if I asked her whether she’d do it all again, she’d say “yes” in a heartbeat.
Some days, I can barely stand that thought and the guilt that comes with it.
“I’ll take copious notes, and we can go over them over some ice cream tonight. What do you say?” She waggles her eyebrows at me.
Her mini apartment comes complete with a little galley kitchen. It really is it’s own self-contained space.
“Mm.” I grin. “Yes, please.”
I break down the last moving box and lay it on top of the others, stepping on them to squish them down further. She salutes me with two fingers and steps back into the hall, closing the door behind her.
Her meeting with Mr. Black lasts over an hour, and I’m tempted to leave my room to explore some more, but I don’t want to risk running into Lincoln. It fucking sucks that there’s a guy in this house who’s my age—a hot as hell guy, even—and he turned out to be a major asshole. Not that I was hoping to make a new best friend here or anything, but it’d be nice if I didn’t feel like my very existence was a personal affront to him.
So instead, I pass the time lounging on my bed texting Hunter. She’s on a date with her boyfriend of five months, Kevin, and I feel a little bad for totally distracting her. But I’m calling best friend privileges here.
I tell her all about the weird interactions I had with Lincoln and his mom, but somehow all that gets through to her is my offhanded comment that he’s the hottest guy I’ve ever seen. By the time Mom gets back upstairs and comes to get me, I’m under strict instructions to snap a picture of the younger Black and send it to my bestie.
Yeah. Not happening, Dummy. Sorry.
I am a little tempted, I have to admit. Mostly because I’d like to be able to examine his features more thoroughly without him glaring at me—or knowing I’m looking at all, really. Like his eyes. They’re the most incredible shade of amber, so bright they almost have a golden hue. And set beneath his tousled dark hair, they seemed to stand out even more. His dad has light brown eyes, but nowhere near the same brilliance and clarity as Lincoln’s.
Ugh. And now I just spent the past five minutes thinking about his eyes.
Scraping my spoon through the tub of ice cream, I zone back in on what Mom’s saying about coordinating duties with the groundskeeper and cook.
I’m not here to ogle the rich kids. I’m just here to work.
3
The worst thing about this new job is the fucking uniforms we have to wear.
I swear to God, they’re
just this side of being sexy French maid Halloween costumes. What is this, the nineteen-fifties? It’s like they don’t think we’ll be able to remember our job descriptions if we’re not wearing the black dress and white apron that signify us unmistakably as “the help”.
Then again, maybe I should be grateful we have to wear them, since it helps delineate when we’re on and off the clock. I feel more human when I slip on my street clothes again at the end of the day—more myself. I guess if the uniform is good for anything, it’s reminding me that being a housekeeper, working for these filthy rich people, is just what I do.
It’s not who I am.
These are the things I tell myself as I scrub the grout between the tiles on the pool house floor anyway.
We’ve been at the house for three days, and I’ll be starting school in another three. That’ll mean I won’t be around to help my mom as much, so I’m trying to do whatever I can before then to make things easier on her.
Hence, the tiles and the scrub brush.
The pool house is gorgeous though, which helps the chore feel a little less torturous. A long pool runs through the middle of it, with expensive, padded lounge chairs gathered at one end. There’s a skylight over the pool, and one entire wall is made up of floor-to-ceiling windows, giving a view of the manicured backyard. And even though I’m in here to work, not swim, the sound of the water lapping gently at the side of the pool is soothing, and the slight humidity in the air feels good.
I pick up my bucket, rags, and scrub brush and am about to move to a new section of the floor when the door to the pool house opens behind me. I glance over my shoulder, expecting to see Mom coming in to ask for my help with something in the main house.
But, no.
It’s Lincoln. And three other boys.
They’re all wearing board shorts that sit low on their hips, revealing cut abs and muscled chests. They each have broad shoulders and thick biceps and forearms, and even the shortest of them is at least six inches taller than me.
