“He’s my boss’s kid,” I said.
Off limits. For sure.
Right?
“It’s what Mr. Lewis would want,” Seth said. “He’d adopt you if he could, letting his son screw your brains out makes you practically family.”
“Not positive that’s how that works, sweetheart,” Andre said.
“Fairly sure he doesn’t want his beautiful, talented, gilded son fucking the help, either.”
As soon as the word escaped me, Ireallyhoped Seth wouldn’t pick up onbeautiful.
“You’re notthe helpand you know it,” Andre turned to me. “I don’t have any opinions on whether or not you should sleep with the hot son. Do whatever your heart tells you to.”
“You make decisions about who to fuck with yourheart?” Seth asked, brows knitted together in confusion as he sipped his drink again.
Meanwhile, Andre had rescued me from getting roasted for calling Hayden beautiful. I probably owed him another brunch.
I laughed as Andre rolled his eyes, licking bacon grease off my fingers again.
But in the back of my head, all I could think wasoh no, he’s hot.
* * *
Once I was done cleaningthe bottom of the pool—I figured it’d be nice if it was sparkling for a guest arriving—I headed for the outdoor shower around the corner of the house to hose off before I changed out of my swim trunks and back into my clothes.
I definitely wasn’t hoping Hayden was an avid swimmer so I could see what he looked likeunderthe chef’s jacket he’d been wearing in that photo. Cleaning the pool was in no way meant to encourage him to get mostly naked.
That was my story if anyone asked.
As soon as I turned the tap, things started to go wrong.
Instead of coming out of the shower head, water poured out of the back of the tap, gushing onto the floor.
Great. This was the third time that washer had failed in a year.
Which probably meant it was the tap itself, not the washer to blame. One dud was fine, but three in a year? Unlikely.
Mentally planning a trip to the hardware store—I could make it there and back before Hayden arrived and have the tap fixed before anyone knew it was broken—I headed inside and slipped upstairs to the main bathroom to finish my shower.
The shower spray was soothing and the fresh water washing pool salt out of my eyes felt incredible. I peeled off my swim trunks and nudged them over the shower drain with my toes so they’d get a rinse, too, and I wouldn’t have to worry about the salt fading the colors or making them stiff and scratchy later.
Disaster averted.
Ithought, until I stepped out of the shower and realized there were no clean towels in the bathroom, because I’d been so busy thinking about the pool that I hadn’t set them out yet.
Dammit.
Well. No one was home, right? I could make a run for the stack of clean fluffy towels I’d folded in the laundry this morning, and it wasn’t as though Mr. Lewis ever had to know.
Not that he’d especially care about me running around the house naked. Maybe if he had people over, but not when we were alone. He was cool like that. We’dlaughabout it.
I shook some of the water out of my hair so I wouldn’t drip too badly on the floor, abandoning my soaking-wet swimming trunks on the towel rail and stepping out of the bathroom, naked as the day I was born.
The stairs creaked under my feet, reminding me that replacing the second one from the top was on my to-do list. The laundry was at the back of the house, but a glance out the window told me Mr. Lewis’s car wasn’t in its usual spot out front, so the coast was still clear.
So far so good. Just another few steps and I’d be wrapped in a warm fluffy towel and no one ever had to know what’d happened.
