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I put my hand flat on the console and try to tamp down the excitement in my chest that keeps starting up whenever the kitchen feed is on.

Rosalie Palmer is twenty-four, was born and raised in Los Angeles. She’s the only child of Douglas and Tina Palmer. Her dad is a mechanic and her mom is a florist. She did three years of housekeeping for a retired appellate judge in Pasadena before this job. No debts. No credit issues. No open cases. No visible ties to any operation that would fit the shape of a plant. Two social media accounts, both dormant since she started working for me.

Twenty hours of digging by three of my best people and there is nothing that matches the profile of an asset a rival family would insert into my household.

Which means either she is the cleanest job anyone has ever run against me, or she is exactly what she looks like — a housekeeper who loves baking.

I do not know which possibility bothers me more.

I stare at the empty kitchen on the screen. The wooden board she left the scones on. The plant. The throw over the couch in the living room feed, folded exactly how I left it after I sat there yesterday afternoon like a fool for ten minutes with a book in my hands.

She has been slowly warming up my house for two years. A campaign so quiet I only started to catch it once I was already in it.

I close the feed. Drive myself home.

The house is located thirty-five minutes out of the city, past the last of the canyon roads, up a slope that makes the road turn back on itself twice. I bought it because it was defensible. Nobody drives past this house by accident. The gates read the plate on the car and open before I have to slow down.

First light this morning was gold. This afternoon the light is white and hard as it slants across the front stones like a spotlight.

The house still smells of cinnamon and oranges. The plant on the windowsill has a new leaf uncurling at the top of it that wasn’t there yesterday.

I walk through to the living room.

The couch has been sat on. Not by me. There’s the faintest dent in one of the cushions, and a book left face-down over the arm of the chair beside it. I pick it up.

The cover is a shirtless man with a knife tucked into the waistband of his trousers and a title no sweet lady would say aloud. My cock hardens the second I read the flap copy, which is filth about a Sicilian don and a woman he abducts from her wedding.

This is what she reads in my living room, curled up on my couch, while I’m not here.

I turn to the page she was on.

The don has his fingers in the heroine’s hair and his mouth against her ear. He is telling her, in a scene that runs for another two pages, exactly what he intends to do to her when they get back to his estate.

My cock does not care that this is a paperback. Or that I have been reading the same page for a while. It cares that the woman who sleeps above my garage has been reading this exact sentence and thinking about a man whose fingers are in some woman’s hair.

I slide the book back onto the arm of the chair, face-down, exactly where she left it — except I fold down the corner of the page she was on. So she’ll know I was here. So she’ll know I saw.

This is a game I have no business playing with a woman under my roof who signs a cheque with my name on it. It is a line I have never crossed with a member of staff in twenty years and have not been tempted to cross once.

Standing in the middle of my own living room, I organize my thoughts. Rosalie was not afraid of me yesterday. She should have been. Every grown man in Los Angeles who has been in a room with me has, in the first ten seconds, done something to give away the fact that he is afraid. She did none of them. She held her ground on a batch of scones and looked at my mouth twice and did not lower her eyes once.

I am thirty-nine years old. There is fifteen years and about a hundred wrong reasons between us.

She should not have looked at my mouth.

I am glad she did.

But I won’t make her completely mine until she no longer works for me. If she says no it has to be able to mean no without the weight of her salary sitting on the answer.

I move the book to the shelf on the far wall, out of easy reach, because I don’t trust myself not to sit on that couch and finish it. I turn the throw over on the couch. Straighten the small pot on the coffee table with two fingers.

I head to the study at the back of the house and force myself to focus on work until it’s nearly time for her to start her shift. Then, I go into the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water and stand by the sink. Wait for her in the quiet of the house.

My own pulse is louder in my ears than it has been in a long time.

One o’clock arrives with the sound of the side door opening. Her footsteps are light on the tile. She steps into the kitchen and sees me.

“You’re home.”