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by Michelle Smart
CHAPTER ONE
TABITHA BRIGSTOCK WHEELED her trolley to the laundry room and heaved the sack of dirty linen and towels from the suites she’d spent the morning cleaning into the white dirty washing tub, then left the laundry to wheel the trolley further up the corridor to the storage room, where she locked it away with the other trollies. Her hands were red and sore but there was no time to go to her room to rub the hand lotion on them that sometimes stopped them cracking too badly. The staff quarters were right at the other end of the hotel, a good fifteen-minute walk away.
Instead she climbed the stairs and headed to the far end of the first floor. She knocked on the door out of habit then used her master key to unlock it.
‘Hi, Mrs Coulter,’ she said cheerfully as she walked into the opulent suite. ‘How are you feeling? Sorry I couldn’t pop in earlier but they needed me to help out on the second floor.’
At eighty-three, Mrs Coulter was the oldest guest at Vienna’s Basinas Palace Hotel and had been in residence for three months. The poor woman had been floored by a virus that had left her bed-bound for two weeks. Tabitha had been very concerned and had taken to dropping in on her regularly to make sure she was okay. Thankfully, Mrs Coulter had been much improved the last couple of days, and today she was up and dressed and eating her lunch at the table by the window that overlooked the palace’s vast grounds.
Mrs Coulter smiled, the twinkle in her eye that had been missing all week very much back. ‘I’m feeling much better, thank you. And thank you for getting Melanie to check on me earlier.’
‘Not a problem. I’ve got the vitamins you asked for.’ She pulled the small plastic pot out of her handbag and put it on the table.
Gnarled arthritic hands covered hers. ‘You are an angel. Will you sit and have a cup of tea with me?’
As Tabitha still had twenty minutes of her lunch break left, she took the offered seat and pour
ed them both a cup from the bone-china pot.
It felt wonderful to sit after six straight hours of physical exertion. The hotel was in a state of great excitement. The Greek owner, Giannis Basinas, was hosting a masquerade ball there that evening for the world’s elite.
Tabitha had caught a glimpse of him earlier. She’d just finished cleaning a room and was wheeling her trolley down the corridor when he’d strolled past. Her heart had soared to see him but, as normal, he didn’t spare her so much as a glance.
In the five months since she’d started working there, she had seen the billionaire widower, who was rumoured to be descended from Greek royalty, only a handful of times. The Basinas Palace Hotel was but a small part of his vast empire. When he did bother to show his face in Vienna, the excitement and fear amongst the staff was palpable. The hotel had once been a royal palace and was now regarded as Europe’s most prestigious hotel with a price tag to match. Working there was a coup in itself but, should standards be deemed to have dropped, the risk of being fired was all too real.
Tabitha could not afford to lose her job and had no idea what it was about Giannis that meant every rare glimpse of him played on her mind so much or made her stomach come alive with butterflies. As a live-in member of staff, to be fired would be to be made homeless. The salary here was much better than her old job in a small English hotel, and the tips were often amazing, but even with all the overtime she grabbed she still hadn’t saved anywhere near enough for a deposit on her own home.
That was all she wanted. A place of her own. A home where she could be safe. A home that no one could ever take away from her.
‘I was hoping you would come see me this lunchtime,’ Mrs Coulter said.
Tabitha raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you ready for a game of cards?’ The two women had taken to playing rummy most days when Tabitha’s day shift was over.
‘My head’s still too fuzzy for that, my dear. No, I wanted to discuss tonight’s ball.’
‘The masquerade ball?’
‘Is there another one I should know about?’
Tabitha laughed. ‘I hope not. I’m grateful for the extra shifts it’s giving me but I’d need a holiday to recoup if we had another one too soon.’ And she could not afford a holiday.
The twinkle reappeared in Mrs Coulter’s eye. ‘I have a ticket for it.’
‘No way!’ Tickets for the ball were forty-thousand euros. To have the privilege of forking out that astronomical amount of money, you had to be invited. To be invited, you had to be rich and part of the global elite. It was an open secret that all the single women who’d been invited were under the age of thirty, the rumour—not denied—being that Giannis Basinas was using the ball as a means of finding himself a new wife. Mrs Coulter was rich and recently widowed but she was not part of the global elite and she absolutely was not under the age of thirty. ‘How did you get that?’
Mrs Coulter winked and tapped her nose. ‘A lady has her secrets, dear.’
Tabitha felt a surge of excitement for her. To go to the ball... She’d seen all the preparations for it, heard all the whispered talk, and it was obvious it was going to be the ball of century. ‘Do you want me to do your hair and nails for it? My shift finishes at four, so I’ll have time...’
‘No, dear. The ticket is for you.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I bought the ticket for you.’
Tabitha was momentarily struck dumb. She stared at the wizened old woman with the white wispy hair and twinkling eyes and wondered when she’d gained such an evil sense of humour. It had to be a joke. Who would spend forty-thousand euros on a ticket to a ball for a chambermaid?
