Prologue Champagne Cocktail #2
“Are you gonna come?” the woman asked. “I want that milk, Daddy. It does a body goooooood .”
Ewwwwwww.
I clapped my hands over my ears. The woman’s moans were still audible, but at least her words weren’t quite as clear. Or graphic. Or plagiarized, for that matter.
Even through my palms, I could hear when Daniel gave a great shout. The woman’s final squeal genuinely made me wonder if a fire alarm had gone off in at the party.
Eventually, their shouts died to murmurs. Murmurs turned to imperceptible conversation. The vibration of a toilet flushing, followed by a sink running, told me they were up and moving around. I decided my ears were safe.
Besides, if Daniel came out of the bathroom and realized he’d made a horrible mistake, I wanted to hear it.
Maybe he’d take a look at the impossibly beautiful, probably injected and surgically enhanced blonde in his bed, remember that her best attempt at dirty talk came from nineties TV jingles, and decide he was ready to settle down with a real woman at last.
Preferably one who was five-foot-one, terribly near-sighted, and had never met a cardigan she didn’t love.
The bathroom door opened.
Please be bad. Please be bad. Please be bad.
“Honey, if I’d known you gave head like a Hoover, I would have done this years ago,” Daniel said with a chuckle.
Dammit.
“God, Daniel, you are such a lush. We did do this years ago, or have you forgotten Jemma and Oliver’s wedding?”
“Oh, right… Well, that’s what an open bar of grappa does to my brain. Won’t be forgetting this time, I promise.”
“We should probably get going.” The woman sniffed, sounding unimpressed.
How dare she? After the way he had obviously blown her mind?
Frankly, I was miffed on Daniel’s behalf.
He didn’t seem to notice. “So soon? I was thinking round two was in order.”
I shoved my face into my hands. Oh, God, please, no .
“Maybe later. Robbie’s party starts at eleven. Do you think your mother will be mad if we ditch her birthday?”
“Mom’s three sheets to the wind. She wouldn’t notice if I drove the Rolls through the great room windows right now. Hold on, babe. I need to change.”
I froze. Holy crap, he was coming in here . A post-coital Daniel Lyons was about to find the assistant cook, with whom he’d shared maybe five whole conversations, buried in his closet and clutching his towel like a stalker.
Out of instinct, I threw the towel over my head. Because that would hide me.
“No, don’t,” the woman was saying. “I want you to smell like me all night. Just like I’m going to smell like you. Like sex.”
Under the towel, I made a face. Gross.
“You really are a dirty girl,” Daniel told her. It didn’t sound like he disapproved.
Thankfully, the door to the closet remained closed, and when I pulled the towel off my head, the sounds of more sloppy kisses permeated through the door. With a fervent cross over my chest, I prayed to every saint I could remember that the kisses would not turn into Daniel’s desired second round.
“Come on, let’s go,” said the girl. “If we leave now, I’ll go down on you on the drive over.”
Oh, thank you, Jesus.
But wait. People did that? Talk about a driving hazard. Daniel would never?—
“Well, you’ve got me convinced.”
It sounded as if they were getting dressed before I heard the telltale sound of his bedroom door opening and closing, then the taps of their shoes on the oak floors gradually fading away.
I remained in the dark closet for what seemed like hours, even if it was just fifteen minutes.
To make sure no one was coming back up, I told myself.
But also possibly contemplating throwing myself out the window out of shame and self-pity.
Unsurprisingly, I did not have the guts to do that. I did, however, manage to lug myself off the floor and stumble through the bedroom in the pitch dark.
“Christ, Daniel. When are you going to grow up?”
Just as I was rounding Daniel’s king-sized bed, the door opened, the light flipped on, and I ran smack into Lucas Lyons, Daniel’s older brother and the family’s de facto patriarch.
“Ah!” I fell back onto the bed with a shriek, and then, after realizing what kinds of “remnants” might have been left on its mussed linens, scrambled off just as quickly, a black tumbleweed of skirt and sweater.
“What the—Marie?”
I managed to get back up without my skirt being tucked into my underwear or something equally embarrassing, though I was spitting hair out of my mouth from where it had escaped its bun.
I straightened my glasses and stood as tall as I possibly could.
Which was still more than a foot below my looming boss’s bewildered expression.
“H-hello, Mr. Lyons,” I said to the third button of his shirt.
Not for the first time, I was struck by how vastly different Lucas and Daniel Lyons were.
It was a phenomenon I was familiar with, given the way my younger sister and I, despite being born only ten months apart and having shared a room most of our lives, were also polar opposites.
Joni was the life of the party. I was Debbie Downer.
She was effervescent, beautiful, and impossibly charismatic.
I was plain, unremarkable, and basically the human embodiment of a shadow.
Similarly, Lucas was his brother’s foil.
While Daniel seemed to have walked directly out of the sun with his golden hair, California-bright smile, and shining blue eyes, Lucas was more like the storm cloud arrived to blot out the light.
He was just a little too tall, had dark hair that was always immaculately trimmed and combed, always wore a full suit and tie, and wore a persistent scowl that would make a sunflower wither down to seeds.
A scowl that was currently focused on me.
“What are you doing in Daniel’s room?” he demanded. “You haven’t worked as a maid for at least seven years.”
I swallowed. Lucas and I had spoken maybe four or five times. I wasn’t even aware he knew my face, let alone my name or what exactly I did for his family.
Perhaps I should have expected it. Lucas Lyons knew everything about everyone who worked for him, his family, or any related project or company. The man had a notoriously encyclopedic memory, which the staff murmured was photographic and not particularly forgiving.
“I—I was just—” Usually, stuttering was only a problem around Daniel.
Lucas glanced around the room. “Are you here to bring back Daniel’s dishes?”
I followed his gaze to the pair of champagne flutes and the open bottle on the bureau. One of the glasses had a lipstick print on the rim.
I barely hid my glare.
“Yes.” I decided to accept the alibi. “That’s right.”
Out of instinct, I attempted something like a curtsy, except I’d never been taught how to curtsy, nor was I a servant at Downton Abbey. So, it was just an awkward sort of bob. One that sent me sprawling to the floor.
That fall was apparently the last straw that evening for my sanity. Like a button had been pressed to open the floodgates, tears fell down my face in torrents.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” The deep, take-no-prisoners voice I usually heard from rooms away quieted to a hushed purr. “Here, let me help you.”
I looked up to find Lucas’s broad palm extended toward me. Reluctantly, I let him pull me back to standing, then steady me with both hands on my shoulders.
Those hands were broad and heavy. Warm and surprisingly grounding.
I sniffed back my tears, wiping furiously at my cheeks. God, this was mortifying .
Two fingers slipped under my chin and tipped my face up toward his.
“I’m—sorry,” I managed to squeeze out around hiccups. “I’m n-not usually like this.”
“I know you’re not.”
He did?
We stared at each other for a good long minute.
Up close, I had to admit that Lucas was better looking than he was given credit for. Younger, too. As the story went, he was an accident, his father’s first child at a much younger age. To hear the staff gossip, Lucas was old enough to be Daniel’s father. Fifty, they alleged. Sixty, even.
Up close, I doubted he was even forty. He was quite handsome, with intense blue-gray eyes, chestnut brown hair that matched his ruddy skin, and a serious, purposeful manner that seemed to see right through me.
He wasn’t Daniel. No one could be Daniel. But for a split-second, I wondered what Lucas Lyons might look like if he smiled as much as his younger brother. If he might charm the world a little bit more. Maybe he’d be happier too.
“Thank you.” I found my voice again now that the tears had abated. “I just…had a moment.”
Lucas stepped back and shoved his hands into the pockets of the staid black tuxedo that had to be custom-made, just like all the Lyonses’ clothing was. How could it fit those strangely broad shoulders so well otherwise?
“I’m admittedly not the most perceptive man in the world,” he said. “But I don’t think a little stumble is responsible for the waterworks.”
Tears welled again, but I shook my head. “I—it’s nothing. Only?—”
I cut myself off. This was my employer. He didn’t want to hear about my unrequited love for his brother.
“Tell me.”
A clear command, no question even implied. I doubted anyone said no to him.
“Don’t you ever just want to be someone else?” I sighed. “Only you can’t see how you could ever get there? Like you’re just stuck in the box everyone’s made for you, and you don’t know how to get out?”
The more I babbled, the sillier I felt. What had gotten into me, treating Lucas Lyons, of all people, like my freaking therapist?
To his credit, Lucas didn’t seem disturbed by my incoherent confession. He rubbed his cheek, studied me a bit more, and then, to my surprise, gave a curt nod.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
We watched each other for a moment more. The longer the moment continued, the harder I found it to look away.
This time, he was the one to break the silence.
“You’re the cook,” he commented as he picked up the T-shirt he had brought Daniel and set it on the unmade bed. “The one who used to be a maid. We’re sending you to Paris to replace Ondine.”
I swallowed. “That’s—that’s correct, sir.”
He looked up sharply. “You don’t need to call me that, Marie.”
I bit my lip. What was I supposed to call him? “Sorry, Mr. Lyons.”
His grim expression tightened, but he didn’t correct me further. Instead, he took a seat at the end of the bed and folded his hands over his knees.
“Good,” he said thoughtfully. “Everyone needs a chance to become someone else if that’s what they want. You’re going away to Paris. This sounds like your opportunity to find out who you are. When you come back, things will happen for you, just like they’re supposed to.”
When his eyes met mine, I could have sworn there was envy there. Just a little.
I nodded. “Yes, sir—I mean, Mr. Lyons—er…Lucas.”
I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what made me use his first name, but his shoulders seemed to relax a bit as I did. Those stormy slate eyes filled with something like promise.
Then he smiled. Just a little. And something deep inside my chest, down in the bedrock of my being, gave a thump in response.
“You have a good trip, Marie. I’ll see you when you get back.”