Forest Whispers (11 page)

Raina had known immediately that she’d
fucked up when she’d shown up for the interview in jeans and a knit
top, be they ever so neat. The housekeeper, Mrs. Higgenbottom, had
looked her over as if she smelled something that stank--like
shit.

It was menial work she was applying for,
though. How the hell was she supposed to guess they’d expect her to
dress up just to crawl around on her hands knees to clean? She’d
figured she should wear work clothes. She’d worn her best jeans and
a neat, almost new, conservative knit top.

It had been obvious immediately that she’d
figured wrong. The housekeeper, she strongly suspected, would’ve
pitched her out on her ass right then and there, without an
interview, except for Mr. Smith. The woman’s face had looked as if
it was about to crack wide open with outraged contempt--that Raina
had dared to show herself like she was--when she’d looked up and
met Mr. Smith’s gaze. Raina hadn’t noticed a single emotion ripple
across the man’s face and yet after that exchange of gazes, the
housekeeper had settled and started the interview.

What was up with that, anyway?

So far, she’d met--not been introduced to,
but had them pointed out to her--Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, Mr. Black,
Mr. Green, and Mr. White.

No way in hell was she believing that was
their real names.

They were like--a security detail of some
kind, reminded her of glimpses she’d had of the secret service men
that surrounded the President--they were that fucking scary! Maybe
a little more scary.

Except for the detail of slight variations
in hair coloring, they almost looked like a matched set of
bookends--all of them were at least six foot tall and built like
bouncers on steroids. All of them wore suits and dark glasses. All
of them had hard angular, strangely exotic faces and looked as if
their faces might crack if they ever used any of their facial
muscles for anything approaching a smile. They all had
unfashionably long hair, which was smoothed back on their heads and
tied at the base of their skulls into a ‘ponytail’ that should’ve
made them look ridiculous but somehow didn’t--probably because they
practically dripped testosterone.

Like the housekeeper, they all wore black,
except their suits weren’t throwbacks in style like the
housekeeper’s dress--or dresses. Either the woman wore the same
dress every day or she had a closet full of the identical style. It
was Raina’s third day on the job and she’d yet to see the woman
wearing anything that looked the least bit different from the dress
she’d worn the day Raina had come to interview a week earlier.

She had yet to see the mysterious Mr. Simon
Draken, her actual employer, but, as curious as she was about the
man, she actually dreaded the possibility of running in to him.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Higgenbottom, had
spent most of her first day on the job telling her what was
expected of her and laying down the ‘rules of the house’.

She was a servant, not to be seen or
heard--at all--which was where the archaic attitude came in. Mr.
Draken was a busy man and rarely left the west wing, where his
‘suite’ lay so she was assured an encounter wasn’t likely, but if
she happened to be in an area of the house when he did pass
through, she was to try to make herself invisible and never to look
directly at the man.

Archaic!

It made her uneasy, though. Maybe she wasn’t
supposed to look at the guy because she was a servant and dirt
beneath his feet, and maybe there was some kind of dark and creepy
reason she wasn’t supposed to look at him.

It was a flaw in her personality, she
supposed, that aside from engendering a good deal of resentment in
her, the restrictions had also given rise to a wealth of curiosity
she might not have felt at all if Mrs. Higgenbottom hadn’t been so
adamant that she was forbidden even to look at the man. Her active
imagination had instantly began to conjure speculative images.

The mansion almost looked like it could’ve
been from the Dark Ages, in style anyway. Except for the style of
the architecture, it didn’t look old, but the house didn’t look new
either, mostly because she couldn’t imagine the craftsmanship
evident in the place having been mass produced or even handcrafted
by modern day millworkers.

So she figured he must be old, especially
with his archaic expectations of his household staff.

He was obviously filthy rich, too. Even if
this estate had been handed down to him, she couldn’t imagine a
younger man wanting to live in a place like this--single, she
thought. There’d been no mention of a Mrs. Draken.

The fact that she’d been forbidden to look
at him made her think he was deformed or disfigured in some
way.

Maybe not.

The security detail that guarded the place
as if it was Fort Knox suggested he might be someone who’d, at
least at one time, been famous, maybe a political dignitary or
something.

Or maybe not. She supposed it could’ve just
been his wealth.

Shaking the thoughts off, she focused both
her mind and her gaze on her work for a moment, examining it
carefully. She didn’t want to get fired when she hadn’t even
collected her first paycheck and Mrs. Bitch, old as the crow was,
had the eyes of a fucking eagle. If there was so much as a speck of
dust or a smudged fingerprint, the old bat would make her start
over from the beginning.

She’d been trying to convince herself this
was just the ‘new girl’ shake down, typical of most jobs where the
boss led you around by the short hairs and cracked the whip over
your head until they were certain you’d been properly broken in and
cowed. If she could just make it through the initiation phase, it
would be smooth sailing after that.

The intricate carving of dragons and vines
and strange, exotic flowers was beautiful, she supposed. She’d
thought so before she was told to clean and polish the damned thing
anyway. All the tiny crevices and grooves collected dust, though,
and a cleaning rag and polish just didn’t get it insofar as
removing the dust in the minute fissures.

Unconsciously rolling the kinks out of her
shoulders and back, she glanced surreptitiously around the foyer
again. Seeing no sign of Ms. Hatchet-face, Raina lifted her head
for a more thorough search. All the doors along the foyer within
her view were firmly closed and after a moment, she slipped the
toothbrush out of her jeans pocket.

The woman would probably shit a squealing
worm a mile long if she caught her using a toothbrush, which was
why Raina didn’t intend to get caught. She also didn’t intend to
spend the entire day cleaning the fucking balustrade that wound up
both sides of the foyer in a grand, horse shoe shaped curve.

Draping her cleaning rag over the handle of
the toothbrush, she dipped the soft bristles in the cleaning
solution and made short work of the balustrade support, darting an
occasional guilty glance around to make certain she wasn’t caught
at it. When she’d finished, she used another rag to wipe off the
excess cleaning solution and then stood up and leaned over the
balustrade to clean the outside.

Somewhere in the rounds of balancing and
cleaning and the need to finish the task quickly, she became so
focused on what she was doing that she not only forgot to keep a
look out for her nemesis, the housekeeper, but she also didn’t pay
any attention to the march of many feet on the upstairs landing
until they slowed and finally stopped.

It was the cessation of the sound that
finally penetrated her absorption. Instinctively, she glanced up
and froze as she met the gaze of the man standing at the top of the
stairs.

His eyes were unlike any she’d ever seen--on
any human, or animal for that matter. Even with the distance
separating them the color--a strange gold flecked with
orange-rust--seemed to jump out at her. The black pupils didn’t
look ‘normal’ either. Instead of round, as they should’ve been,
they were elongated, almost diamond shaped.

It wasn’t the eyes, though, that caused her
such a jolt. It wasn’t anything her eyes were registering, because
she wasn’t actually aware of noting and cataloguing his physical
attributes at that suspended moment in time. She wasn’t the sort of
person who went around talking or thinking in terms of ‘auras’ and
yet she’d felt his even before she looked up, an almost electrified
charge in the air that had already been crawling over her and
prickling her skin even before she looked up. Once she did look up
and met his gaze, she was enveloped in something like a force-field
that was ten times stronger than that first awareness, a powerful,
unidentifiable ‘something’ that seemed to suspend her breath in her
chest and her heart and then jumpstart both with an electric
current that made her heart take off like a runaway freight
train.

He seemed almost as frozen as she was,
though she was quite sure, later when she could think at all, that
it wasn’t for the same reason or anything approaching it.

For her, the closest she could come to
describing her feelings later was that she was awestruck, as if
she’d found herself in the presence of some deity, or a being with
god-like powers--or a sex god of the silver screen.

After a long, long moment, while her heart
hung suspended in her chest, and the air she’d sucked into her
lungs and held slowly depleted of oxygen and began to bleed a
dizzying current of carbon monoxide into her feeble brain, he
lifted a pair of sunglasses and settled them over his eyes. The
movement, or the sudden release of her captive gaze, allowed Raina
a handful of seconds to gather an overall impression of the man
before she became aware of the men surrounding him, standing
slightly behind him.

A security detail, her mind clicked.

The mysterious Mr. Draken, her mind
added.

The toothbrush in her hand.

Guiltily, Raina made a belated attempt to
hide the contraband in her hand. She averted her gaze but not
before she saw her guilty movement had drawn his attention directly
to the toothbrush she’d tried to palm.

She was never to be seen, or heard, and
under no circumstances to look directly at the man. The color left
her face in a rush as those rules, drummed into her head over the
past several days, belatedly filtered into her mind. Straightening
abruptly, she grabbed her tray of cleaning supplies, galloped down
the stairs, and around the curve, flattening herself against the
wall. Her heart, jump started by her abrupt awareness, was
galloping in her chest at around ninety miles an hour. Her lungs,
laboring overtime now that she’d remembered to breathe, pumped like
a bellows, over oxygenating her blood so rapidly she thought for
several horrifying moments she was going to pass out.

Triple shit, she thought in dismay as she
caught a glimpse of the housekeeper’s shoes in the doorway off to
her right!

She’d broken every single damned rule in the
space of a heartbeat and topped that off by galloping down the
stairs like an idiot, drawing even more attention to herself!

She flicked a look at her hand by her side
and saw the bright blue handle of the toothbrush sticking up out of
the cleaning cloth. As casually as she could, she rotated her arm
so that the handle, she hoped, was hidden from the woman’s view,
but she had a bad feeling it was way too late to be worrying about
the damned toothbrush. Even if Hatchet-face hadn’t seen the
toothbrush, she’d probably seen her gallop down the stairs, and
seen her look directly at the man--Simon Draken--staring at him as
if she’d heard a chorus of angels singing in the background.

She knew it had to be him. As stunned as
she’d been, she’d been dimly aware that he wasn’t alone even before
she glanced up. The fact that four of the security men had flanked
him was enough to assure her it was ‘his lordship’ himself.

She frowned at that thought. She’d been too
mesmerized to take in any particular details about him, but she
certainly hadn’t gotten the impression that he was old. His bearing
had been ramrod stiff--almost military, although ‘regal’ was what
popped into her mind from out of nowhere--not bent with age. His
bearing aside, the impression she’d gotten was one of exceptional
height, and massive proportions, not a body shriveled with age.

Not fat.

He wore black like everyone else in this
bizarre household, but it hadn’t been a suit. The slacks had been
tailored to fit narrow hips and long, lean legs. The shirt, almost
‘blousy’ and old world looking, had been open at the neck, but his
shoulders were broad and straight and the silk-like fabric had
draped what seemed, in retrospect, hard, bulging muscles a
body-builder would envy.

The men were halfway down the stairs before
her hearing picked out the sound of their footsteps over her
drumming heartbeat. Inwardly, she cringed, wishing she hadn’t
stopped by the stairs. She’d been lucky to make it as far as she
had, though, without her legs completely losing muscle tone and
dumping her in the floor. She was fairly certain she wouldn’t have
made it down the hall to the service area without embarrassing
herself.

Sweat beaded her brow when the contingent
reached the foot of the stairs and paused. The housekeeper was
still watching her. She wasn’t going to look, even though it was
eating her alive to glance in that direction just to see if he was
looking at her.

She wasn’t going to.

She slid her eyes in his direction. She
couldn’t see anything but black shoes and calves clad in dress
pants--and a pair of knee high black boots. The toes were pointed
toward the door. For some reason, though, she had the impression
that he’d glanced in her direction.

Paranoia?

After that brief hesitation, the entire
party went out the front door.

Raina expelled a breath of relief when they
disappeared.