“You’ll have to exit here,” her father said. “The garage was built for carriages and opening the passenger door is quite impossible.”
Bella nodded and slid out of the car, taking her suitcase with her. She edged her way towards the house. They were higher up, near the top of the mountains. The wind was much colder than it had been in Bearfield and the stars seemed closer, almost too close. If she reached her hand up, they could singe her fingers and set her alight, consume her completely and leave nothing but a bag of dirty laundry and a pair of old sneakers. Was that what happened to Lord Winterborn? Had he touched the stars on this old mountaintop?
Nothing else was visible in the night. There could have been a precipice ten feet away and she wouldn’t have known. The city was never so dark. San Francisco may not have been “the city that never sleeps,” but it was definitely the city that never turned off its lights or stopped shouting outside your window. She only knew where the house was because it was a deeper black than the rest of the night, and because she’d seen it briefly illuminated by the headlights as they’d pulled in.
The Winterborn estate was quiet but for the distant crashing of waves. There weren’t even any wildlife noises. There was a sort of crunch crunch noise. Bella wondered what it was. It almost sounded like someone walking on gravel.
The noise grew louder, and closer. What if it was a bear? A mountain lion? A security guard? She moved closer to the residence and with slow careful steps she curled herself down into the house’s shadow.
“Franklin,” a voice called out. “What’s going on? Why the late night drive?” The voice belonged to a man in his late twenties, maybe early thirties. The accent was American, but had the pronunciation of someone who’d attended posh schools. So, the heir then.
“Lord Winterborn,” her father said. “Pardon the interruption, I had to make a grocery run. Only we’ve run out of milk, you see.”
“Groceries? At this hour?” There was doubt in the heir’s voice.
Bella heard the soft sigh of the Lincoln’s trunk opening and then the rustle of grocery bags. “One finds time when one can, sir.” And then, after a pause, “Why are you wandering about at this hour, sir?”
The heir’s voice changed in an instant. “Are you questioning me, Franklin? Who are you to tell me where and when I can wander!” He went from polite conversation to roaring his displeasure. Bella couldn’t see him, not even his silhouette, but in her mind’s eye she saw his face contorted with rage, spit flying from his mouth.
The man was a monster. A psychopath. How could her father work for such a beast?
“No Lord Winterborn, not questioning,” her father soothed. “I am just wondering if I might be of service? If there is anything you require?”
“There is but—no, never mind—there’s an object I’m seeking. It has great personal value, but no real material worth. What’s the phrase? Sentimental value, that’s what it has. My experts have been unable to locate it, but one of them told me to check the grounds tonight. She said I might find it. Weird, huh? Why would I need to look at night? I can’t even see at night and the expert told me absolutely not to bring a flashlight. But it’s too late to bother you with this. You should go to bed, Franklin. I should go to bed.” He spoke like a reasonable person again. The change was extraordinary. If Bella hadn’t known better, she would have sworn there were two of him, one pleasant in a dull sort of way and the other a raging lunatic.
“Good night, sir,” her father said.
“Can I help you with the groceries?” Dorian Winterborn asked. “When I was a kid, I had a contest with my mom—sort of a running joke—to see if could carry the whole carload in at once. I bet I could break my old record now.”
“Please don’t concern yourself, sir. I can manage quite well.”
Bella felt behind herself along the wall. She had a bad feeling about this. She was in front of the door. If Winterborn carried the bags in, he’d step right on her. Around her was only gravel. If she moved he’d hear her like a match striking. She’d be found out, her father would be furious, and the heir would hurl both of them into the sea. Well, probably not. But certainly he’d flip out and Bella did not want to see his temper up close. Ever.
“I wish you wouldn’t treat me so much like an employer, Franklin. I know my father enjoyed your company. I’d hoped we could be somewhat more casual.”
“Yes, sir,” her father said, bristling. Asking Franklin Hart to be more casual was like asking a razor to be less sharp. He hadn’t been casual since he’d tried it once in the eighties and found the whole idea vaguely demeaning.
“Could you call me Dorian, please? I think that would be a good start. And let me help you with these bags. They look quite heavy.”
What could she do? If she were a spider, she’d climb the wall. If she were a chameleon, she could hide in plain sight. But she was a woman, a daughter, an unemployed attorney. Bella walked her fingers over the gravel around her, feeling for the biggest stone she could lift. She found one, slightly larger than a golfball with jagged edges. Reaching back, she hurled the stone forward, high and far. The rock sailed out in silence and then rewarded her with a tinkling crash.
“What the hell? Who’s there?” Winterborn yelled and then raced off across the grounds.
Something had shattered, some glass item at the other edge of the nothingness before her. And Dorian Winterborn was gone, investigating the vandalism.
Her father swiftly unloaded the groceries and dragged her in the front door.
“What was that?” he hissed.
“I threw a stone, to distract him.”
“You vandalized the estate I have spent a decade of my life preserving.”
“If I didn’t, he would have seen me.”
“I had it all under control,” her father said. “I was going to use the side door.”
Of course there was a side door. And probably three more doors around back as well. Bella’s heart sank. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I was just taking initiative.”
“Take less of it in the future,” Franklin scolded. “I’ll have to spend all day tomorrow fixing what you’ve destroyed. And my other tasks will suffer for it.”
“I said I’m sorry, dad.”
“And what is that worth? Will that give me back the hours you’ve stolen from me with your negligence?” Franklin turned and walked away, carrying the grocery bags deeper into the house.
“Where should I go?” Bella asked after him. “Where’s the residence?” She knew he lived in a smaller building, separate from the main house. He’d crowed about it on the phone to her when he’d been hired so many years ago.
“This is my house,” he said, not looking at her. “The Lord Winterborn’s residence is across the grounds from here. This house is entirely mine. The entire upper floor is unused. Do be careful with it.”
His home was three stories and quite wide, with fieldstone walls, and it was the small residence? How large was the big one? Bella wanted to explore, to take stock of her environment, but she was so tired. In the space of a day she’d been fired, evicted, berated by two men she respected, and stuffed into a musty old home to live in the ashes of her old life.
Sleep was what she needed.
WHEN SHE WOKE, she was amazed. She’d forgotten where she was and for a bright moment, she thought she’d woken in some magical palace made of books.
The building her father lived in was a freestanding library. And everywhere Bella looked, she saw books. She’d fallen asleep still dressed, on a low sofa—she hadn’t even made it upstairs. That was too nights in a row of sleeping where she hadn’t meant to and her body felt rough. The smell of her father’s bland, watery oatmeal greeted her with an unpleasant familiarity.
“You’re up,” her father said from the doorway. He was dressed in working clothes, freshly shaved, and smelling of soap. “There’s coffee in the kitchen and oatmeal on the stove. Help yourself. I’ll be back around midday with food from the kitchens. Make
yourself at home, monkey, but try to stay out of sight of the windows.”
“Morning, Dad,” was all she managed, before he left to go do whatever it was he did for the Winterborns.
In the cold morning light, with a bowl of her father’s awful breakfast waiting for her, the reality of her situation felt pretty bleak. She needed a plan. She needed to find a new job. She needed to get online and make sure the firm wasn’t subtly trashing her on social media. She needed to exercise and to lose weight. She needed to recuperate. She needed to do a hundred different things, so of course she did nothing at all.
She spent the morning exploring the residence, trying to keep out of sight of the windows, which was not very hard. The building had been created as a library and there were few things worse for books than direct sunlight. Water, maybe. Fire, definitely. The windows were narrow and shrouded with thick gold curtains. Every wall was a floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelf, with rolling ladders in every room to help reach every book.
What kind of rich weirdo builds a freestanding library that’s three stories tall? And puts in bedrooms, too? Lord Winterborn, obviously. It didn’t make sense to Bella, but she was grateful to have a cozy place to hide. After coffee and breakfast, and exploring—she counted five bedrooms in the residence, one of which was her father’s and one of which he’d placed her suitcase in—Bella found her father’s computer and decided to work on her resume and start her job hunt. But his computer was ridiculously old and wanted to install a thousand updates before it even considered letting Bella google herself.
After two years of not having time to take a breath, of eighty- and hundred-hour work weeks, she finally had time to herself, but felt too listless and adrift to do anything at all. Was she depressed? Or was it a perfectly normal reaction to upheaval to spend half your day in bed?
Her father didn’t make it back at midday, so Bella fended for herself, eating dry toast and an orange, which were the most appealing foods she could find.
He returned after dark, bearing a tray with her supper on it and a deep scowl.
“How was your day?” she asked brightly, taking the tray from him. She didn’t feel bright, but maybe if she smiled and pretended the brightness would turn inwards?
“I’m fine, monkey,” he said, slamming shut any conversational doors. And that was the last he spoke that night. He chose a book from the history section—a biography of Andrew Jackson—and sat in the den, reading in silence.
Was this how he’d spent the years since her mom had passed? Slaving away from dawn to dusk and then reading until the fatigue took him? Bella wanted to go to him, to try and talk to him. But her stomach yowled and the food was right there. She took the tray to the kitchen and dug in. Whoever the cook was, they were marvelous. The food was cold and still delightful. There was a shepherd’s pie with a buttery mashed potato crust covering the veggies inside. When she bit into it, the peas popped in her mouth delightfully. The sauce was rich, without being overly sweet. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes and moaning slightly, it was a good thing her father was in the other room. Alongside the pie was an almost-too-tart cranberry crumble that made Bella’s mouth pucker, her nose itch, and her toes curl up into little fists.
She ate every bite and unapologetically licked the plate clean. The dinner was amazing. Simply incredible. She returned to the den to thank her father, to tell him how wonderful it was, but he was fast asleep in his reading chair, with the biography opened to page one.
And so Bella spent her days that way, hiding from the world during the day, aimlessly noodling on her father’s computer, eating the worst breakfasts and the most glorious dinners. And reading. The library had a magnificent collection of all sorts of books, not just stuffy biographies and lengthy volumes about wars. The bedroom she lived in, high up on the third floor, as far from her father as possible, housed the middle of the fiction collection. Bella was spoiled for choice.
She googled the Winterborns frequently. There was a wealth of information about them, including some actual books in their library. The sons were prone to scandal and violence, it seemed. Stories about them were couched in polite language, but Bella knew enough to look up the suits on record and saw a litany of suits settled rapidly out of court. She knew what that meant—they were guilty and paid off their accusers. Alexander seemed to be the worst of the brothers and was the oldest, though the articles seemed to get his age wrong often. Or at least they never agreed. She found mentions of him that spanned ten years, and all of them marked his as thirty-nine years old. Bella chalked it up to sloppy journalism, but it was strange.
Dorian didn’t appear in any of the lawsuits or scandalous stories. In fact, she couldn’t find mention of him anywhere. Of the thirteen sons Wikipedia thought Octavian Winterborn had, none were named Dorian. There was a Xerxes and a Valdemar and even more unlikely names, but not a single Dorian. What was going on?
Bella lost whole days to research, days that she had planned to use for job hunting or for exercise or for anything more productive than reading every rumor on every abandoned forum. It was easier to obsess over someone else’s life than to try and fix hers.
It wasn’t until two weeks later that the heir found her.
THE MOON WAS full that night and Bella was feeling cooped up. Her father hadn’t warmed up to her presence at all, always using one word or no words when he could. The man had a routine—a groove he’d dug for himself—and getting him out of it was impossible. And so, unadvisedly, she snuck out of the house.
It wasn’t her fault, not really. You couldn’t trap someone on the grounds of one of America’s great turn-of-the-century estates and not expect them to be curious. She’d seen the Hearst castle once, down by Los Angeles, on a company outing. It had been indescribably beautiful. And there were scant few pictures of the estate—colorfully called Winter’s Breath—available online, just sketches, an aerial photograph showing the estate atop a mountain and two dozens smaller buildings farther down the slope, and an oil painting from the twenties. And just the idea that she was living—however temporarily—on the grounds of a similar structure but was trapped in a glorified closet burned her.
So, in the middle of the night, while her father slept in his chair in the den with another book in his lap, she slipped out the back door. Bella was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie. She’d been forced to wash her clothes in the kitchen sink, because it wasn’t like her father could present them to the cleaning staff and explain that he’d started wearing women’s workout clothes at home. She took careful, quiet steps on the gravel and eased herself away from the library with the confidence of a child first learning to swim.
The moon was high and full, painting the world in silvered tones. She took a good look at the library from the outside so she could find it again—her worst fear was that she’d wander away and never be able to get back. Thick clouds filled the sky and hung low, almost scraping the tops of the trees. The moon hid, and reappeared, playing the trickster. Bella’s world was silver and blue one moment, and black the next.
As Bella wandered away from the library, she found an ornate hedge maze with the bushes just slightly taller than she was. She absolutely resisted going inside. In fact, she couldn’t imagine a worse idea. It was tempting though, maybe because it was such a terrible idea, or maybe because she’d been cooped up so long. She skirted the edge of the maze, hoping to get a glimpse of the sea or of the main house. She craved magnificence.
She brushed the fingers of her right hand against the plants as she walked widdershins around the maze’s perimeter. Had her father planted it and cared for it? Or did Winterborn have a maze guy he used? How fun would it be to be in charge of planting and growing a maze? Maybe if she decided to change careers she could do that—become the maze builder to the rich and powerful. Because she’d certainly have to change careers, or at least move to a different state. If Black, Cross and Landon wanted to they could blackball her from corporate law. They could get her disbarred. Hell, if they b
acked up Heath’s story, they could even press harassment charges against her. But they hadn’t yet.
There was a surprising lack of discussion about her firing online. None of the gossipy, quasi-anonymous legal forums had a mention of it. The firm had gone out of their way to make it quiet. She knew what that meant—she’d been the one quieting loud voices more than once. The senior partners knew Heath was lying, but they didn’t care. He was too valuable as a client to shun, whereas she was just another bright, young attorney fresh out of law school. They made more of her every year. The partners wouldn’t say a word about her termination unless she did first. It was a game of reputation chicken. Who would blink first? The threat of Heath was like eyes watching her in the night.
How could she apply for a new position in her circumstances? Any firm that asked her about her last job and why she left—it would mean inviting trouble. No, what she needed was to lay low for a bit. Let everything blow over before she stepped back into the world. She wished she could just stay with her father, living in the shadows of the Winterborns, but it would’t work. The arrangement was temporary and her father did not do well with company. It was only a matter of days before he began pressuring her to find somewhere else to stay. She could see it coming from a mile away.
Being out of the library and in the fresh night air made the world feel more real, even under the silver moon. She couldn’t hide forever. She wasn’t living in a fairy tale bubble—she was a woman standing in the ashes of her old life unsure of where to step next.
Bella was lost in thought when she turned the corner of the outside of the maze and ran straight into Lord Dorian Winterborn. She’d spun around the edge, not paying attention, as he came around the perimeter the other way. Both of them were apparently not brave enough to dare the maze at night. Her nose and chin and breasts and all of the rest of her collided against his hard and unstoppable chest and suddenly she was pinwheeling backwards, falling on her ass.
Chained: Reckless Desires (Dragon's Heart Book 1) Page 3
