Kitabı oku: «Modern Romance June 2019 Books 5-8», sayfa 5

CHAPTER THREE

A CRISP RAP on her door snapped her awake.

Luli glanced at her alarm clock, but it wouldn’t go off for another hour. She had set it so she wouldn’t oversleep resetting the timer on the laptop.

“Luli,” he said. “Open the door or I’m coming in.”

She quickly rose and brushed her hands down her wrinkled dress, then opened the door to Gabriel’s glower.

He glanced past her to the dented pillow on the single bed, the plain walls and utilitarian night table with only a clock and hairbrush upon it.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Sleeping.”

“You’re supposed to be eating dinner with me. Why did you tell the butler I wanted to eat with him?”

“You said, Tell the butler to prepare us dinner. I presumed us meant him.”

“No, you didn’t,” he said flatly.

It had been open for interpretation and she’d been dead on her feet. Also, there was no way the butler would believe the new master of the house wanted to eat with her unless he heard it directly from Gabriel himself. He and all the rest of the staff had given her apprehensive looks, everyone asking, What did you tell him?

And, exactly as she did when it came to her closed-door conversations with Mrs. Chen, she had given up nothing—earning zero friends in the process.

Now she’d made Gabriel angry. She’d fallen asleep thinking about his nearly kissing her, imagining things she barely understood. What would it feel like to have his lips on hers, his hand moving to her bottom? Her breasts. Between her legs.

Fresh heat pressed there, disconcerting her. How was it that all she had to do was think about him, stand before him, and quivers shook her abdomen and her mouth watered? It was mortifying.

“I’m not hungry,” she tried in a voice that scraped.

“I’m not requesting.”

His hard tone told her that all the work she’d put into giving herself leverage had left her with virtually none.

“Garden,” he said, stepping back to indicate she should lead the way.

She did, self-conscious the entire time that he was right behind her. She arrived to find a table had been set with Mae’s best china on a silk cloth. One of the maids brought the first course, a small bowl of curry laksa made with shrimp and cockles. Gabriel handled the vermicelli with his golden chopsticks as adeptly as she did.

And noticed the curious look she sent after the maid.

“I gave the butler the night off,” he said. “After clarifying he wasn’t my date.”

“I’m sure he appreciates a free evening.” He was going to kill her when he saw her next.

“He didn’t offer many compliments when I asked him about you.”

It didn’t really surprise her that he’d made those inquiries, but it made her squirm inwardly, knowing that no one would have anything very nice to say. She never dwelt on her ache of loneliness, but it was humiliating to have the staff’s contempt of her become the centerpiece of this already painful dinner.

“I sat in on his meetings with Mae when they reviewed household expenses and raises. It was my task to prepare the performance reviews and suggest appropriate wage increases.”

His laugh was a single cut of disbelief. “Have you made any friends here?”

“Perhaps you’ll be my first,” she said with a smile of false hope.

She watched for a twitch of humor in his mouth, but it held its tense line while she only wound up thinking about his rejection of her perceived advances.

She lost her appetite and set aside her chopsticks.

“I read your note,” he announced.

“Which—? Oh.” She realized as she brought her gaze back up to his antagonized one.

He must have tried to hack his way into the network while she’d been sleeping. Of course he had. And he’d found her warning against proceeding further.

“I thought this whole thing a bluff, but those are an elegant few lines capable of doing so much damage. I have an idea how to get around it. I’ve cloned the entire thing to a testing file. I’ll crack it before I go to bed,” he said with confidence, nipping off the tail of a shrimp and setting it aside as he chewed the meat.

“You realize there’s more?” she asked cautiously.

“I’d be disappointed if there wasn’t.” His smile was as false as hers had been. “Where did you learn to code?”

“We had to design our own website at school. There were a handful of standard templates to choose from. We were supposed to load basic details and a few photos, that kind of thing. I didn’t like the colors it offered and wanted a different layout. I looked up how to hack into the back end and customize it.”

“For extra credit?”

“To stand out from the rest. We were also required to have a hobby and volunteer hours. I chose programming and contributed to open-source projects. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had time and opportunity to become proficient in several languages. Mae liked that I could manipulate things to the way she wanted them.”

“Coding is a skill that’s very marketable,” he pointed out.

“That’s why I’m demonstrating my skills to you.” She pushed her bowl away. “But who will take me seriously, without a track record or credentials? Which door do I knock on when I land after being deported and have nothing in my pockets but lint? At best, I’d be recruited for click farms or phishing scams, maybe have to resort to criminal activity for my own survival. As I said before, if I wanted to break laws, I would have already.”

“You don’t fit the stereotype for coding geeks—I’ll give you that.” His penetrating look made her want to touch her hair and see if it was falling out of its knot. He certainly was unraveling her.

The maid exchanged their soup for plates of barbecued stingray.

As Luli scraped a tiny morsel of meat from the wing and dabbed it in the sauce, Gabriel asked, “Are you concerned about your weight?”

“I don’t care for seafood. And these portions were obviously meant for the butler.”

“Order something else.” He looked for the maid who had already carried their dirty bowls away.

“I don’t see how acting too good for the chef’s food will improve my social standing. It’s fine. I like the chili sauce with the rice.”

He tucked into his own. “The nurse said you were wearing a weight-loss patch on your tongue when you came here. Why?”

“For weight loss.” He was not a man to be played with, she knew that, but she knew where this was going and would really rather not.

“Why did you want to lose weight?”

She bit back a sigh.

“Advantage. My mother requested the school attach it and I went along with it. Many girls had liposuction or nose jobs. The tongue patch was nothing.” She dismissed it with a twitch of her shoulder.

“What kind of school would arrange such things?”

“One that trains pageant contestants.”

“You were training for a beauty contest?”

She lifted her gaze, mildly affronted. “Why is that shocking? I was a front-runner.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing. This is the same school where you were making websites?”

“To build our online presence from the earliest age, yes. I was eleven when I started and built it into something that would have been a decent calling card today, but it’s long been taken down.” She was still annoyed at her hard work disappearing into cyberspace.

“This is why you wanted your site to stand out from the crowd?”

“Everything was a contest.” Understatement of the decade. She tasted another bite of stingray. It was smoky and stringy, but tender and not too fishy. Tolerable.

“Which means no friends there, either?” he guessed.

“Some girls were friendly, but my mother’s view was that a consolation sash like Miss Congeniality is for those who need consoling—something winners don’t require, so there was no need to aspire to achieve it. She once played a vicious mind game with a rival, though, by pretending she was trying to win that particular title.”

“Your mother competed?”

“Won every major title, yes.”

“And yet she had no money for an apartment?”

“She has expensive tastes. And she was angry with my father. Me, too, I think.”

“Why?”

Luli sighed, hating to face this head-on.

“There’s renown in keeping the crown in the family and the prize money I won paid for my school, but how can you claim to be the most beautiful woman in the world if your own daughter is threatening to take the title from you?”

“She sounds like a lovely person. Did no one notice you dropped out and disappeared?”

“She told people I’d gone to live with relatives. A few schoolmates inquired online and I backed her up. The reality was too...”

To this day, thinking of her mother’s casual divesting of her sent a lightning strike of agony into her heart. Her mother had been purely self-serving. It was why she’d had an affair with a married man in the first place. Getting pregnant had probably been one more way to squeeze support out of him. One more thing she hadn’t thought through and wound up regretting. She had considered her daughter a commodity and certainly never loved her the way mothers were supposed to love their children. It had left Luli with a gaping emptiness in her soul, one Mae hadn’t filled, but had at least acknowledged and attempted to paper over.

“I wasn’t sorry to be away from my mother,” Luli admitted quietly. “I saw no point in telling people what had really happened. The best-case scenario would have been that she was arrested and I would be living as an orphan there, without prospects. Not even at school any longer.”

“Did you want to compete? Or did she force you to do that, too?”

“I saw opportunity and applied myself. I only competed in national titles for girls in the younger categories. I left before I moved into the teen contests. I’m confident I would do well in the global pageants if I entered today. It’s one of my contingency plans, if I’m deported. There’s quite an investment up front, though. You have to win all the feeder pageants. It’s a long game.” She was talking too fast. “That’s the only reason I set up an account for myself in Venezuela. If I’m forced to draw from it, I promise I’ll pay you back with interest.”

He didn’t immediately refuse her, only narrowed his eyes. “Pageants sound like a path to modeling. Would it be so bad to start there?”

“In Venezuela? The minute I gained any sort of publicity, my mother would come back into my life. I’d prefer to avoid that.”

“That’s the main reason you don’t want to be deported? Your mother?”

“Sí.” She poked at the stingray flesh, unable to take another bite of it.

“Stop torturing that. It’s already dead.” He took her barely touched plate and set it atop his emptied one. “I’ll finish it if you’re only going to play with it.”

“I’ll clean toilets if that becomes the only option available to me,” she told him, clutching her empty hands in her lap. “I will pursue programming, which I know can pay well, but it’s also a long game. My physical attributes mean I can aim for a higher and faster return if I try modeling or something like it. It only makes sense that I try. Don’t you agree?”

She held her breath, waiting for his assessment. So far he hadn’t pulled any punches. If he said she wasn’t attractive enough, she would rethink her strategy.

His gaze swept across her face in an almost tangible caress, like a cool scarf of silk wafted over her skin.

“I can’t deny you’re beautiful.” The gravel in his tone had her reflexively holding her breath, waiting for a strange all-over ache to subside.

Then he looked away and his expression hardened, making something catch in her chest. She wanted him to keep looking at her, keep sending that electric current through her that held such possibility.

“I’m only asking that you take me with you and give me time to establish myself,” she pleaded softly. “I’ll continue my work on Mae’s investments in exchange for accommodation and meals—”

“Quite the bargain, considering your minimalist approach to both.”

“I would need a small loan for clothing and makeup, but I can continue wearing this uniform for office work—”

“Like hell you can.”

She closed her eyes, angry with herself for trying too hard. Judges could always smell desperation.

Ignoring the sting behind her eyes, she considered other avenues of persuasion. He hadn’t seemed interested in sex in exchange for favors, maybe because he sensed her inexperience in that department? Should she tell him she’d read up on that particular topic? Extensively? She was always willing to put in the work to do better.

Soft footsteps sounded. The maid arrived with braised duck on a bed of colorful, julienned vegetables.

“Take that one back,” he said of Luli’s plate before the maid could set it. “You enjoy it. We’ll share this one. I’m getting full.” He sent Luli a droll look as he set the single plate between them.

The maid curtsied and hurried away with her full plate and fresh gossip. Luli imagined she would be accused of sleeping with Mrs. Chen’s grandson very soon. Little did they know he had already turned her down.

“Mr. Dean—”

He dipped his chin in warning.

“Gabriel?” She said it softly, not wanting to be overheard when it felt so much like an overstep. She was still the youngest on staff and always addressed others formally or at least with a respectful auntie.

“Eat,” he commanded. “My turn to talk.”

He was the one who had asked so many questions, forcing her to go on and on. She singled out a pale stick of daikon and nibbled the sweet-spicy end of it.

He sat back and regarded her with flinty eyes as he sipped his wine.

“You accused me of neglecting my grandmother—not stepping in to manage things before today. She disowned my mother before I was born. I met Mae for the first time at my mother’s funeral when I was seven. I didn’t see her again until five years had passed. My father warned me about allowing her to influence me, which seemed paranoid, but he knew her better than I did. I saw her again at my father’s funeral and we remained in touch—through you, I now realize, but I never made assumptions about whether I would inherit her fortune. As for assisting in managing her wealth... How would I know she needed help? You’ve done your job so well, I had no cause for concern.”

Was that a compliment or a rebuke?

He set down his stemless glass.

“I, however, have no need for your management services. Chen Enterprises is mine. I’ll chew and swallow it the way I would any other company that falls under my control, restructuring where necessary and allowing my existing legion of executives to do what I pay them to do.”

She kept her expression a stiff mask, not revealing the crumple inside her.

“As to the threats you’ve made, my life is completely impervious to them. I don’t need my grandmother’s money and her misdeeds are not mine. I’m not close enough to her for her loss of good standing to affect my pride. You’re the one who will feel it if you implode her legacy. I’ll walk away unscathed.”

She had known that, deep down. She had known she had no real leverage. She had nothing and was nothing. Her throat tightened and it took all her effort to keep the press of tears from reaching the front of her eyes.

“So I’m to be deported?” Her stomach fell while the flutter of nerves behind her heart became the panicked batter of bird wings against a window.

He wasn’t saying anything.

Through the lashes she dropped to disguise her agony, she saw his lips curl, but it wasn’t a smile. Self-deprecation, perhaps.

She set down her chopsticks, but she couldn’t think beyond that.

“You’re not going to eat? Come with me, then.” He rose abruptly and started into the house.

She half expected to be shown the front door, but he went up the wide staircase and strode into Mae’s bedroom. She trailed him on feet that felt encased in cement, heart dragging as a weight behind her.

She had only been in this bedroom a handful of times. It was the purview of Mae’s personal maid and her nurse, decorated in Mae’s signature classic style without too much fuss or femininity, if a little dated. Mae never spent money unless she had to.

The mirror over the makeup table swung open like a cupboard. Gabriel revealed a safe and punched in the code.

“How did you—?”

“You can open these older safes by setting them back to their factory default. It takes longer to look up the combination online than it does to actually break in.” He removed a leather-bound portfolio. “I was looking for her will and also I found this.” He handed the portfolio to her.