Married in Michigan

by Jasinda Wilder

  Married in Michigan

  Jasinda Wilder

  Copyright © 2019 by Jasinda Wilder

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  MARRIED IN MICHIGAN

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  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  Cover art by Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations. Cover art copyright © 2019 Sarah Hansen.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Also by Jasinda Wilder

  1

  I haven’t even clocked in before Tanya, my immediate superior, is hovering behind me. I try to ignore her, but I can tell she’s a little bit stressed. I clock in, change into my uniform—a classic maid outfit: black knee-length shirtwaist dress and white apron, modest and sensible. I examine myself in the little mirror on the inside of my locker: my explosively curly brown hair is braided back into a tight, neat fishtail, the wispies around my temples clipped back with bobby pins. My blue-green eyes look right back at me, friendly and open, and I take a quick peek at my skin—the color of caramel and milk chocolate. No makeup at work because the last thing my employers want, or I want, is to be noticed while I’m cleaning rooms—it’s a contracted part of the job, as a matter of fact.

  I’m a housekeeper at Beach by deBraun, a boutique hotel in Petoskey, Michigan—owned by none other than the deBrauns; a sprawling family of billionaires. The deBrauns have investments in shipping, technology, hotels, politics, and real estate. This particular hotel is a favorite of the deBrauns, personally overseen by Camilla deBraun, the matriarch of the family, as her pet project. She’s here frequently, and personally decorated every room, chose every wall color, lighting sconce, tablecloth, and piece of silverware. Every member of the staff, from housekeeping to desk clerks, are interviewed and hired and fired by Camilla. Front desk clerks are hired as much for their beauty as their skill and experience, and are taught diction by Hollywood voice coaches so as to articulate each syllable perfectly, without accent, with perfect elocution. Chefs are Michelin-starred, and even room service dishes are prepared and presented with five-star flair and elegance. Housekeepers are trained to the same exacting standards as the housekeepers at Buckingham Palace, and I am not exaggerating—Tanya’s job, as a matter of fact, is to inspect each room before it is assigned to a new guest, and she does so literally wearing white gloves. From toilets to tubs, nightstands to windowsills, every corner and crevice must be dusted to perfection, the beds turned down without a single wrinkle in the freshly laundered sheets and comforters. And we, as the housekeeping staff, are to be seen and not heard, and preferably not seen—“invisible and efficient!” is the motto Camilla insists we live by. Even the shoes we wear are checked for squeaks and creaks. Cart wheels are oiled regularly, vacuums are custom designed by Dyson for deBraun hotels in order to be as silent as possible.

  Mine is a very demanding job, and one for which I am well paid.

  I finish my preparations for my shift, and finally turn to face my boss. “Let me guess, someone trashed a room and no one else wants to touch it?” I ask, tying the apron around my waist.

  Tanya, on the older side of middle age, with graying brown hair in a severe bun, carrying more than a few extra pounds in the usual locations, huffs. “I wish it was that easy,” she says.

  I stifle a groan. “Bachelor party in one of the suites?”

  “Worse,” Tanya says.

  I blink. “Worse than a bachelor party…a bachelorette party then?”

  She cackles. “You wish it was a simple matter of penis-shaped glitter balloons.” She eyes me with sympathy. “Let’s just put it this way—Camilla herself assigned this job to you, and she has authorized me to pay you time and a half for the work. This assignment is your sole job for today.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Time and a half? What could have happened that she’s assigning me for a full shift at time and a half?”

  “Two words—Paxton deBraun.”

  I groan out loud, “Shit.”

  Paxton deBraun is a notorious playboy—a twenty-first-century Jay Gatsby, complete with the aura of dark, dramatic mystique, and Paxton is infamous for throwing absolutely wild parties. And by wild, I can truthfully say the stories I’ve heard make my housekeeper’s blood run cold. It seems that until last night, his mother has succeeded in keeping him away from her precious boutique hotel, but it sounds as if that run of good luck is over. I’ve spoken to other deBraun hotel employees, and they’ve cleaned up after Paxton bashes in the past, at some of the other hotels, and it was not pretty.

  I shudder all over. “You’re kidding.”

  Tanya sighs, patting me on the shoulder. “Nope. He threw a party in the penthouse last night.”

  “Of course he did.”

  The penthouse—the entire top floor of the building, with a private elevator, also comes with a private floor of the parking garage, both a private chef and a concierge available twenty-four hours a day, and a Mercedes S-Class with a private driver also available at all hours.

  Let’s review a few housekeeping facts: the penthouse is an entire floor in the hotel. It takes a team of eight women working in concert for four hours to clean an entire floor’s worth of rooms. But this is just me, in a single shift, and I’m cleaning up after a Paxton deBraun party.

  “Can I give up the extra pay to get someone to help me?” I ask.

  Tanya shakes her head. “No. Camilla was adamant—one person, my best cleaner, my most trustworthy and reliable.” She glances around to make sure we’re alone in the room. “I guess this was a pretty wild one, and Camilla wants it to stay…quiet.” Her eyes fix on mine, giving me a meaningful look, and she lowers her voice. “Cleaning up after these parties of Paxton’s is supposed to be…lucrative. I worked with a woman who did one at the deBraun Chicago, and Camilla gave her a big enough bonus afterward that Lucy paid off her mortgage with it.” Tanya’s eyes widen. “It’s not common knowledge, and Lucy had to sign some of kind nondisclosure agreement that she’d keep quiet, both about the bonus and whatever she saw during cleanup.”

  “Jesus,” I mutter. “What did she see?”

  Tanya shakes her head. “She wouldn’t say, nor would she say how much she got paid, just that she was able to take out her mortgage note with it.”

  I blow out a breath, stiffen my spine, and lift my chin. “Fine. Let me stock my cart and I’ll head up.”

  Tanya nods. “Bring extra garbage bags, extra gloves, a lot of bleach, and call Rick in maintenance directly when you need something fixed or garbage taken away.”

  Rick is head of maintenance, which means he’s probably being given similar marching orders.

  I stock my cart, loading it with extras of pretty much everything I can t
hink of, and then roll it to the service elevator, transfer to the penthouse elevator and take it up the top floor. The doors open directly into the foyer of the penthouse, and my breath halts in my chest—I’ve never cleaned the penthouse before, so I’ve never been up here; the view is absolutely breathtaking. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the foyer, looking out over Lake Michigan, the water rippling with the glittering flash of a billion diamonds in the early morning sun. Seagulls wheel on wingtips, sailboats carve across the bay with white sails, and the sky is endless and blue.

  The view of the bay, however, is not what takes my breath away—it’s the mess.

  I stand in the foyer and try to figure out where I’m even going to start.

  I’ve been to my share of keggers and house parties gone awry, cleaned up after bachelor and bachelorette parties gone crazy, and in the process seen some colossal messes. I have an iron stomach, and an ability to look at a disastrous mess, stay calm, and take on the cleanup one step at a time without getting overwhelmed. It’s why Tanya assigned this to me, after all.

  But this?

  Holy shit.

  This mess…I need a bulldozer, and a flamethrower. A hazmat suit, at least.

  I look at my contractor-grade garbage bag hanging open off the side of my cart, and realize it’s not going to be anywhere near sufficient. I take my walkie-talkie from the cart, switch it to the maintenance channel, and thumb the mic.

  “Rick?”

  A gruff, smoker’s voice answers. “This is Rick.”

  “This is Makalya, up in the penthouse.”

  “You just clocked in, and you’re already calling me?”

  I sigh. “I’m going to need, like, a dumpster. Or a garbage can, or something. And maybe a shovel.”

  A puzzled silence. “You what?”

  “My little garbage bag isn’t going to cut the mess I have in front of me, Rick. I need something bigger, or I won’t get this done by the end of my shift.”

  “That bad?”

  I sigh into the mic. “That bad.”

  I replace the walkie-talkie on the cart, stick my hand into a pair of gloves, and then a second pair, and then, with a deep breath, start cleaning.

  Trash covers every surface. In order to get past the foyer, I have to wade through a pile of beer bottles, red plastic cups, chip bags, pizza boxes…god knows what else. The trash is too much and too jumbled to make sense of it all. I take a roll of garbage bags, rip one free and shake it open, and start cramming handfuls of trash into it. Within ten minutes, I’ve filled six bags, and I’ve barely made a dent in the area directly in front of the foyer.

  Rick comes by with a big round gray trashcan on wheels. “Let me know if you need anything else,” he says, shaking his head at the mess. “I’m guessing you will, and soon.”

  I shrug. “I have no idea. Just the garbage is going to take forever.”

  And, indeed, it does. The kitchen and dining room are just beyond the foyer, and it was clearly ground zero for the party. The counters are cluttered to capacity with empty liquor bottles by the dozen, and beer bottles by the hundred, not to mentions stacks of Solo cups and empty two liters, soda cans, tonic bottles, lime and lemon rinds…I haven’t even begun to assess the mess beyond just TRASH.

  I fill the garbage can, heave the bag out, replace it with a new liner, and keep going.

  I’m finally making a dent in the hundreds of empty liquor bottles—a rough estimate so far would be around a hundred and thirty empty fifths, mostly Grey Goose, Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and Patrón, as well as Dom Perignon, and what I assume are very expensive white and red wines. The amount of money represented here just in liquor is absolutely staggering.

  I’m dragging a trash bag to the foyer when I hear an odd honking noise from somewhere in the penthouse—I was so overwhelmed by the mess in here that I hadn’t even looked through the rest of the space. I leave the bag near the others in the foyer and head out in search of the noise. Beyond the kitchen and eating area is an open-plan living room, with a huge set of glass doors which open onto a massive roof-top deck, and then beyond the living room and outdoor area is a hallway leading to two guest bedrooms, a full bathroom, and the master suite. I round the back end of the sectional couch that divides the dining room from the living room, and I stop in my tracks, boggled, speechless.

  There’s a donkey. In the living room. They used the coffee table and part of the sectional to create a little makeshift stall, and the donkey is lying down in a pile of hay. Actual hay, for an actual donkey. There’s an empty ice bucket on the ground near the donkey, and the creature is licking at the bottom of the bucket, making a mournful donkey honking sound.

  “Now, what the hell?” I mutter to myself.

  The donkey hears me, turns its head to face me, and its long ears lay back on its head, it opens its mouth and bares its teeth, and makes a long, low, drawn-out heeeeeee-HAWWWWWWW sound. The donkey is very clearly displeased. It stands up, tail swishing, and kicks the ice bucket with a front hoof.

  I’ve never been on a farm, never seen a horse or a sheep or a goat or any farm creature any closer than at a petting zoo, but that seems like a pretty obvious gesture—I’m thirsty.

  “You want some water, huh?” I say, edging slowly toward the coffee table separating me from the donkey. “All right, I’ll get you some. Just…you know, don’t kick me.”

  I slide over the coffee table, and the donkey trots toward me with the bucket in its mouth. Now, I’m no coward. I’m a kickboxer, and I’m no slouch with a pair of Kali-Silat sticks, either. I’ve faced down muggers, date rapists, and just generally nasty people. But animals? Nuh-uh. No way. Not my thing. A cat is about my speed, and that’s because you don’t have to do anything but give it food and water now and then, and change the litter box. I always thought of donkeys as small, for some reason, but the creature trotting toward me stands almost as big as a horse, and is clearly male—the tackle swinging between its legs is unmissable.

  “Heee-haw,” the donkey says.

  I scream, back away over the coffee table, and press my spine to the window behind me. “You can’t come at me like that, donkey. We’re not friends, you know.”

  “Hee-haw-haw—HAWWWW.” He drops the bucket on the table, and bobs his head at me.

  Are donkeys supposed to be this smart? He’s obviously begging me for water.

  “Fine, fine.” I summon my courage and tiptoe back to the coffee table, which stands knee-height, a four-foot square of thick, raw wood and twisted metal legs. I grab the bucket without getting too close, and fill it at the kitchen sink.

  Bringing it back to the donkey, I set it on the coffee table—or that was the plan. The donkey has other ideas, namely shoving his muzzle into the bucket as soon as I’m within reach, splashing water everywhere. But he’s so thirsty, drinking so greedily, that I don’t dare take it away, or move. This close, the donkey is even bigger than I first thought, and he smells pungently of farm animal.

  I’m stuck holding the bucket as he slurps and slurps until finally he lifts his muzzle, dripping water everywhere, and walks away to stand near his hay. Looking right at me, he lifts his tail and drops a massive pile of shit, in the form of smelly brown balls of nastiness.

  “Really?” I shout. “Really?”

  “HEEE-haw…hee-hee-HAW.”

  “Thanks,” I mutter. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Heee-haw.”

  Better see what other surprises there are waiting for me, I suppose. Leaving the donkey to his hay and his poop, I round his makeshift stall, treading through more Solo cups and beer cans and bottles and empty liquor bottles. The rooftop deck seems to be fairly normal—general party mess, no living animals or strange surprises.

  I move into the hallway, and into the first guest bedroom. Aha, yep. Here’s the fun: a king bed, two naked men, and four naked women. Not a stitch of clothing between them, bodies and limbs everywhere. Condoms on the floor, on the nightstands, on the dresser—used, I might add. Yuck. More liquor b
ottles, mostly Grey Goose in here. All the clothing seems to be in the bathroom, for some reason—bras hanging from the showerhead, thongs from the doorknob, suit coats and slacks in the sink, a baggie of cocaine on the counter, more in lines next to it. I back out of the bathroom, wondering what I’m supposed to do with the lines of coke. The next bedroom is more or less the same—this one has just one man, two women, all three naked, drugs, condoms…and a live boa constrictor coiled in the corner of the bathtub.

  Not touching that one—no way; I’ll have to have Rick call animal control.

  What the hell kind of party was this? Donkeys? Snakes? I shake my head as I prepare to enter the master suite. I mentally brace myself for the worst.

  2

  I push open the door to the master suite, already cringing at what I’m prepared to find—but, instead of more evidence of total debauchery, the room is clean, empty of trash, and the bed is occupied by a single body. I check the bathroom, but that too is clean and empty—no animals, no hookers or strippers, nothing weird, just an average luxe penthouse bathroom, with miles of marble and acres of shower space and fluffy white towels on towel warming racks…

  Back in the bedroom it is evident the person in the bed is clearly a male…the sheet is tangled low around his waist, revealing the fact that the sleeping man is in fact naked—and immaculately, perfectly, deliciously, incredibly gorgeous. Even from halfway across the room, it’s obvious he’s a perfect male specimen—broad shoulders, tanned skin, a smattering of body hair on a hard chest and a thin trail down between rippling abs…the sheet doesn’t quite cover the evidence that he’s experiencing…ahem…what I suppose is the natural physical process of male anatomy common in the morning. By which I mean he’s got morning wood the sheet cannot contain, and holy hell and almighty heaven, the man is hung like a freaking elephant.