Those two weeks had come and gone, and the number of bottles on the shelves kept growing.
She wasn't thrilled with having to leave her mother behind, but there was no way she was staying in their tiny house where everything smelled like booze and regret when she could move on with her life. The more fights she and Leandra got into, the more she saw that Ben was right. She had to move on.
While she'd never heard of Dorian Kingston before Ben went to work for him, she had done a fair amount of Google stalking when she'd found out that apparently giving her a place to stay was part of the deal Ben had struck.
From his pictures online, he looked like your average rich boy: attractive, pompous, looking down his nose at the rest of the world. He came from England, which probably made everything worse, too.
His house had looked amazing online, but for security reasons there weren't very many in depth pictures to be found. So she supposed she'd just have to wait until she moved there to see what all he had.
Reservations aside, she was excited.
Later that day she was leaving for good. Her car was loaded up with boxes already, and she was just packing away the last of her things so that she could drive over to the manor and start getting moved in.
So far, Leandra had left her alone. She'd walked to the corner store and come back with bags that clinked as she walked, and Andrea hadn't needed to ask what was inside of them.
When Andrea and Ben's father had died, he'd left them quite a bit of money in his will. His entire life savings, and the parts that Leandra had been able to get her hands on went towards feeding her addiction.
It was disgusting, if you asked Andrea. For her to use money left to her by someone who had loved her so much and piss it away on booze.
"Just one more reason to get out of this dump," she muttered under her breath as she folded clothes and put them in the box on her bed.
"Oh, it's a dump now, is it?" her mother slurred as she passed. "Been a roof over your head for your whole life and now it's a dump?"
Andrea closed her eyes and asked for strength. "It doesn't have to be a dump, Mom, but when only one person ever bothers to do any cleaning and the other is bent on making a huge mess..." she trailed off, letting Leandra fill in the blanks there.
Sometimes she was too drunk to pick up on Andrea's quips. Clearly this was not one of those times.
"You think... You think you're so good. So much better than me, huh? You and your uppity brother. Don't you forget who raised you!"
"You raised us until Dad died and then you were pretty much checked out as far as anything useful goes," Andrea said, keeping her eyes on the pile of clothes she was folding. She knew better than to engage her mother like this. Usually all she wanted was a fight, and fighting with her on the last day they would ever be living in the same house more than likely, didn't sound like her idea of a good time. And yet here they were.
Leandra's eyes turned angry at those words.
It was funny how much Andrea looked like her mother (funny in the way that it wasn't funny at all, of course). They both had the same complexion, a caramel brown that was a couple of shades lighter than Ben's dark skin. Where Andrea straightened her hair, her mother kept hers loose and curly in a natural style, more from neglect than any personal preference, but their eyes were the same, and they held their mouths the same way when they were upset, which was how Andrea knew that her mother wasn't pleased.
"Don't you speak to me like that, you ingrate!" she shouted. "Don't you talk about him!"
"About who, Mom? About Dad?" Andrea fired back. "Why? Because you know what he'd think if he could see you right now? If he knew what you've been doing with the money he left you? We never talk about him, and maybe that's part of the problem."
Leandra slammed her hand into the wall, and Andrea winced, more because she was worried about the state of her mother's hand than because she was afraid. "Shut up! You shut your mouth! After everything I've done for you. Carried you for nine... nine months. You and your ungrateful brother. And now you wanna act like you're better than me. Please! I'm ten times the person you are, even on my worst day!"
"You know, the sad part is that you actually believe that," Andrea said, her tone soft. "You don't even see what you're doing to yourself. I tried to help you, but you wouldn't let me."
"Oh, get out if you're going," her mother snapped, turning sharply and wobbling as she made her way to her own bedroom, slamming the door as she went.
For a moment, all the energy and excitement drained out of Andrea, and she stood beside her bed, half folded shirt in her hand. Part of her wanted to say that she'd stay, that there was no way she could walk out on her mother, but another part of her was just tired.
Tired and ready for something new and different that wouldn't leave her emotionally and physically exhausted at the end of every day.
By mid afternoon, she was completely packed and ready to go. Her mother had yet to leave her room, and Andrea wasn't holding her breath. She made plenty of noise on her way out, and when there was no appearance of Leandra, come to curse her name or see her off, Andrea sighed and accepted that it was what it was.
She got in her car and plugged Kingston's address into her phone, using the GPS to navigate away from the small streets of the neighborhood she had grown up in towards the larger homes in the hills.
Of course, the house she was looking for had to be the biggest one, and when, almost a full hour later, she pulled up at the destination, her mouth dropped open.
When Ben had told her that Kingston was loaded, she hadn't known that he meant loaded enough to have his own castle.
The house sprawled out for several acres, set back far from the street behind a gate and at the end of a winding driveway. Of course the lawns were an immaculate shade of green, even though it was just barely springtime, and every plant on the grounds looked like it was trimmed and pruned by hand.
Probably because they were. She could only imagine the leagues of staff the man had to take care of the upkeep on this place, and Andrea was suddenly very aware of the fact that she was wearing yoga pants and a hoodie and that she was driving up to this place in her well used Toyota.
Ben had assured her that Kingston was a good guy, though, and she knew that he patently refused to work with people who weren't decent, but still.
The man who owned all of this could easily have whatever he wanted, and that was an intimidating thought, considering she was going to be living with him.
Not that she thought they would be doing much interacting.
Holding her breath, she drove up to the gate and leaned out her window to hit the buzzer.
"Yes?" a crisp, accented voice asked less than one second after she pulled her finger back.
"Um..." How was she supposed to explain that she lived here now? "My name is Andrea Samuel," she began.
"Very good, Ms. Samuel," the voice replied. “Just follow the driveway, and I'll meet you outside."
"Oh. Uh. Okay, then."
She supposed she had to give them points for efficiency.
It took every bit of twenty minutes to get all the way up the driveway and then go through the security checks run by an older man with sun-browned skin and a kinder smile than she had been expecting.
"Just this once, Ms. Samuel," he explained after introducing himself as Carlos Ortiz, Mr. Kingston's driver and current head of security until Ben got everything set up. "We can't take any chances after what just happened and how close Mr. Kingston came to being in mortal peril."
Andrea had nodded, wide eyed. Ben had explained to her what had happened with the former security team, and she couldn't blame them for being a bit paranoid.
Once she had been cleared to enter the house, Carlos had directed a team of people to help her with her boxes, and between all of them, it hadn't taken any time at all for her to get her things up the stairs and to the wing of the house that had been put aside for her and her brother.
If the outside of the house was lavish, t
hen the inside was something out of a fairy tale. Everything was dark wood and marble, gleaming surfaces and crystal chandeliers. Andrea was almost afraid to touch anything for fear that she'd leave her prints behind on it and then be billed for the mess.
How was she supposed to feel at home in a place like this?
She didn't get a chance to really look around, as she had to follow the men who were carrying her boxes up a sweeping grand staircase that split off in the middle to either side of the house.
Her things went to the left, so she followed them, assuming that the master of the house would be living to the right.
It was some comfort that efforts had been made to make her rooms less fancy, and she had to hold back an audible sigh of relief. The dark woods were still present, but there was a definite lack of finery in her bedroom, bathroom, and small sitting room that she appreciated.
The space was already bigger than any space she'd had to call her own back at the house she'd been sharing with Leandra, and while she knew she didn't have enough stuff to fill up the space, at least it would be hers.
A maid offered to help her unpack, but Andrea waved her away, preferring to do this bit herself. She had to arrange everything to the way she liked it, and it would just take longer if she had to explain to someone else how to do it. Looking around the room, she rolled her sleeves up and got to work.
“Oh my god, I am so done,” Andrea grumbled two hours later. She’d spent the whole time organizing and unpacking, hanging clothes in the massive closet and putting books and things on the shelves. As she’d suspected, her things barely filled up part of the rooms she’d been given, but that was alright.
Now that she wasn’t going to be paying rent for her mother anymore, she would have a lot more money to work with. New clothes were going to be first on her list, because it had been too long since she’d treated herself to shopping.
Deciding that the remaining boxes could be dealt with later, Andrea listened to her growling stomach and parched mouth and left the room to head down the stairs.
The house seemed quiet, and she had no idea how many other people lived there. Ben would be showing up the next day with the rest of his things, and they hadn’t hired anyone else yet. There was clearly a lot of staff, but Andrea didn’t know if they lived there or just came when they were needed.
Obviously Dorian Kingston had his rooms somewhere, and she hoped he wouldn’t mind her raiding his kitchen for food.
If she could even find the kitchen, that was.
It took a couple of wrong turns that led her down hallways with shiny floors and pictures on the walls before she walked into a bright, sunlit kitchen.
It was a large room with a door off to one side that probably led to the dining room, an island in the middle, and windows overlooking the grounds. The windows and the white walls made it look open and airy, and Andrea liked it instantly. Appliances gleamed against the walls, the largest of which was a refrigerator that looked like it would hold a lot of things, so she started there, tugging open one of the doors and sticking her head inside.
“Can I help you find something?” an amused voice asked, and Andrea jerked back and let the refrigerator door bang closed, trying not to look guilty.
She’d been expecting to see a cook or one of the maids standing there, but nope. She found herself looking up into the eyes of the owner of the house himself.
“Oh. Uh. No? No. I’m fine. I was just, uh…” Andrea wanted to hit herself in the face for stammering like an idiot in front of this man and then run away.
Pictures online really didn’t do Dorian Kingston justice. He was taller than she’d been expecting, and his cheekbones were so much nicer in person than they looked online. His eyes were a light shade of blue, and dark hair curled over his collar and fell into his eyes, making him look playful and less severe than he’d looked in the pictures she’d seen.
He held up a hand and smiled at her, flashing a dimple in one cheek. “Relax. You’re allowed to be in here. You have to feed yourself, yes?”
God, that accent. Andrea swallowed dryly. “Uh, yeah. Yes. Right.”
The smile widened, and the dimple deepened along with it. “You must be Ben’s sister, Andrea. It’s very nice to meet you.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s me,” Andrea said with a small smile. “It’s nice to meet you, too, Mr. Kingston.”
He laughed and shook his head, holding out a hand for her to shake. “Please, just call me Dorian. I feel old when people call me ‘Mr. Kingston’ and I already have a house full of people who refuse to stop calling me that. Since you don’t work for me, we can be on more familiar terms, yes?”
Andrea could think of several ways she’d like to be on familiar terms with this man. It had been a while since she’d had time to date or even flirt with someone she found attractive. Taking care of her mother had been a full time job, but now that she wasn’t in that situation anymore…
Well. It was something to think about. Of course, starting with someone who was so far out of her league was absurd.
Dorian was dressed in jeans that probably cost more than her entire wardrobe and a sweater that had to have been made from handspun something or another, and he looked edible. Meanwhile, she was standing there in her old clothes and socks that had a hole in the toe. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that there was nothing she could give a man like this, even though she could think of a few things she’d like to give him.
But he probably had women throwing themselves at him all the time. There was no way he didn’t when he had money and looked like that.
“Dorian, then,” Andrea replied, nodding. “Your house is beautiful.”
“Thank you. I didn’t really pick it out, but it’s home. I hope you’ve found everything to your liking? Please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything you need.”
“Will do,” she said. “I was just hunting for something to eat. Unpacking works up an appetite.”
“We have a cook,” Dorian offered.
Andrea shook her head. “I didn’t want to bother anyone. I can cook for myself pretty easily.”
Those lovely blue eyes held hers for a moment, and then Dorian was smiling again. “Why don’t you let me cook something?” he said. “I was going to make a late lunch for myself anyway, and I’ll confess that I like to show off.”
“You can cook?”
He laughed again, and it was a rich warm sound. “I can. It would be my pleasure.”
Andrea held in her groan at the way his voice sounded. God, she was in trouble.
***
Chapter 5: Sparks
The kitchen was Dorian’s element. Anita had taught him enough that he was comfortable doing pretty much anything when it came to mixing and stirring and chopping to make something delicious.
He pulled a few items out of the refrigerator, with it in his head that he would make a paella. It would be filling and delicious, and there’d be leftovers if Andrea wanted them.
He almost definitely wasn’t showing off. Probably.
It was just one of those things. Dorian always wanted to be seen as being more than just his money, and he sort of wanted to prove to Andrea that he could be useful in the kitchen. Especially considering the fact that she was standing there, watching him with big eyes as he moved around the kitchen and pulled out pots and pans.
For some reason, he very much wanted Ben’s sister to like him.
And he wasn’t going to examine that too closely because he was almost sure that he didn’t want to know what the deal with that was.
“Thanks,” Andrea said after a moment’s silence. “For hiring my brother, I mean. He’s been waiting for a break like this for a really long time, and I know he’s glad to get it.”
Dorian looked up at her while he poured water into a pot to boil for rice. “It was my pleasure, really. He came highly recommended, and Carlos, you met Carlos, yes?” At her nod, he continued. “Carlos thought it would be a good fit. So far, I have to a
gree. Your brother knows his stuff, and I already feel safer.”
She smiled a little at that, looking down at the polished surface of the island she was leaning against. “He has that affect, yeah. But the good thing is, you’ll never need to worry about him. Once he decides he’s loyal to you, you’re stuck with him for life. He’s like a puppy that way.”
That made Dorian smile as well. “An apt descriptor. I think we’ll work well together. He’s already more personable than anyone in my last guard, and I much prefer that.”
“You want to be friends with your bodyguards?” Andrea asked, arching an eyebrow.
Dorian shrugged. “If possible. Having someone I’m friendly with at my back is much better than some stranger, don’t you think?”
“Hm. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. I guess if they’re your friend, they’re more likely to want to take a bullet for you.”
“You’re very frank, aren’t you?” Dorian asked, making a face. “If at all possible, I’d prefer that no one have to take any bullets. For me or otherwise. The downside to having a security team is knowing that any one of them could get hurt for me at any time.”
She looked back down at the counter, nodding quickly. “You’re right. I didn’t mean to make it sound so...callous, I guess. It’s just kind of how I am.”
He considered her for a moment and then waved her words away. “No harm done. With any luck, my new team will be mostly a formality and there won’t be any need for anyone to get hurt.”
“Here’s hoping,” Andrea said, giving him a warm smile once again. He found that he liked watching her face from the corner of his eye and seeing how she reacted.
Back in England, there had been plenty of women who threw themselves at him. He was rich and powerful, and everyone there knew who his father was and wanted a piece of his family in some way. Women had spent plenty of time sucking up to him in the hopes of becoming the future Mrs. Kingston, even though Dorian had shown no signs of wanting to get married at all.
Women here were different. Here they threw themselves at him for his accent and looks as much as for his money, if not more. Most of them had never heard of his family, and his money was just a perk to go along with the rest of him as far as they were concerned.
Dancing With Danger (BWWM 2015) (BWWM Billionaire Romance) Page 4
