“It’s pretty,” I said honestly. Blue and white, with little painted flowers twining up the sides. “It feels… right in this room.”
She smiled, pleased, and adjusted its position so it sat a little off-center beside a framed photograph. An older man in a suit stared out from behind the glass, his features eerily similar to the ones from the big portrait in the foyer.
Ben Stonewood’s father, I guessed.
Grief pricked the back of my throat for someone I’d never met. I tamped it down. This house had enough ghosts, and I didn’t need to feed them my emotions.
We kept going. We took turns beating the rug at one end, sending up clouds of dust that made all three of us cough andswear. Jacob moved chairs with infuriating ease while I held the corners and pretended I was helping as much as he was. Mei found extra pillows and a folded throw in a linen cupboard and brought them in to drape over the armchairs near the window.
The library came back to life piece by piece. Frosty winter light pooled on polished wood. The rug’s pattern emerged from the grime like something being restored.
For a little while, I forgot this was all a challenge, so a man behind a camera bank somewhere could assess whether or not I was wife material. A man who’d fucked me raw last night, no less. And I wasn’t on birth control.
My life had been so hectic the past few years and my boyfriends kept falling off the face of the earth, so there was really no point in spending the money on the birth control pills when I wasn’t getting laid anyway. But now? Now I?—
A raised voice, faint but sharp, cut through my thoughts.
Chapter
Twenty
CHRISSY
“I said I want peonies,not whatever the fuck this is!”
We all paused.
“That is what is in the cooler, ma’am,” a staff voice answered, thinner, strained. “We don’t have?—”
“Then go get some,” the contestant snapped. “What is the point of all this money if I have to look at cheap flowers that look like they were grown in that messy, overgrown garden out back like some middle-class nobody?”
Mei’s mouth flattened into a hard line and Jacob’s eyes darkened.
A second later, something crashed somewhere down the hall. Porcelain? Glass? It was impossible to tell. A maid yelped. Then there was that horrible wet silence of someone swallowing tears. Mei made some kind of hand signal at Jacob, grabbed a vase of flowers she’d brought in just a few minutes ago, and stepped out of the room.
“Keep working,” Jacob said under his breath, jaw tight. “Henry will handle it.”
I swallowed hard and forced my gaze back to the cloth in my hand.
I knew that tone. My own bosses had used it a dozen times when clients crossed lines and we just had to smile and suffer through it.
We’d barely gone back to dusting when the tension walked itself right into our room.
Mei came in first, one arm wrapped around the shoulders of another maid who was carrying a fresh vase with nervous hands. Her cheeks were pink, eyes damp. The new vase was… fine. Generic. Flowers from downstairs — white roses this time — nodded over the rim.
“Sorry,” Mei said. “We needed the other one somewhere else.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Somewhere peonies are in high demand.”
Mei’s lips twitched, but she didn’t answer. The maid set the vase on the tall display table, fingers trembling.
“Thank you,” I said to her. “It’s lovely, and I appreciate you.”
She startled a little at being directly addressed, then ducked her head.
“You’re welcome, miss.”
As she turned, her hip clipped the corner of the table.
