AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It had been a long and frustrating process, she knew, to blend a synthetic that matched the original. But it needed to be done. Not only did oakmoss give a scent a longer life on the skin, but it was also widely used to anchor volatile notes in a fragrance.
She shivered. If only there was a scent that could anchor Achileas’s volatile notes. But even with around two hundred essential oils and one thousand five hundred synthetic materials to choose from, she wasn’t confident she could do that.
Getting to her feet, she made her way over to where he was sitting just as Demy arrived with a tray of coffee and petit fours.
‘Just leave it,’ he said tersely, flicking the housekeeper away with his hand. Effie gave Demy a small, tight smile and sat down on the sofa opposite him.
‘I was thinking,’ he said, stretching out his legs, ‘about how to explain our getting from that first meeting to me asking you out...’
Effie frowned. ‘But you wouldn’t have asked me out.’
There was a short pulsing silence as the distance between them seemed to shrink and fill with a familiar dark impatience—the same dark impatience with which he’d dismissed Demy. It was always there, as if something was constantly chafing him. Only how could that be? He was wealthy and powerful. If that were true, he would simply snap his fingers and make it go away.
‘You’re not suggesting you would have asked me?’ Eyes narrowing, he held her gaze as she shook her head slowly. ‘Then what? Because I thought we agreed this would be a Cinderella story.’ His lip curled. ‘Surely you know how that works? It is, after all, a tale as old as time.’
‘That’s the wrong fairy tale,’ she corrected him quietly.
Now the corners of his mouth twisted in what would probably be the beginning of a smile with anyone else. But this was Achileas, and it could just as easily be a scowl or a frown.
It was a scowl.
‘Is there a difference? It’s all happy ever after in the end.’
He shifted back against the sofa cushion, and when he spoke again, she could hear the harnessed tension in his voice. ‘My point is that Cinderella is asked out by the Prince. In case you’re having trouble following the conversation, in this scenario that’s me.’
She felt her own flicker of impatience. ‘He thinks she’s a princess when he dances with her at the ball. In this scenario, obviously I’m not a princess. I’m Housekeeping,’ she said pointedly.
There was another silence, longer this time, and thickly solid like the blanketing silence that followed a heavy fall of snow, expanding and thickening around her so that she could no longer hear the sound of the waves.
He shrugged. ‘So, I saw past the uniform.’
His blue gaze hurt where it rested on her face.
‘Isn’t that love?’
The cynicism in his voice hurt even more than his gaze.
How could he be so jaded? So dismissive?
She thought about her mum, always hopeful, always wanting to believe that this time would be different. And her father too, tearfully begging for another chance. Both of them buying into the dream of love over and over again, even though theirs was damaged beyond repair.
Yet here was Achileas, the product of a forty-year happy marriage, with a sneer in his voice.
‘I thought we’d agreed to stick as closely to the truth as possible,’ she said quietly. ‘In that case, we should say you dropped off my folder and that should be the end of it. After that we can get creative, but wherever we say we met next has to be somewhere away from the hotel. Somewhere random. Somewhere nobody would know either of us. Where I’m not a maid and you’re not...’ she hesitated, her eyes drifting over his astonishingly beautiful, unforgettable face ‘...you’re not you.’
She blinked as Achileas leaned forward, his muscular shoulders bunching beneath his T-shirt. For a moment she thought that he would dismiss her with one of those careless gestures he seemed to have at his fingertips. Instead, he picked up the coffee pot and poured out two cups.
Jaw tightening, Achileas watched Effie take her cup with a hand that trembled ever so slightly.
But that was Effie Price all over. She didn’t scream or shout or throw things, only somehow that only made her quiver of resistance more seismic.
She had no reason to be angry, he thought irritably.
Okay, he was brusque with his staff, and maybe that touched a nerve with her, but it wasn’t as if he was expecting her to lift a finger. All she had to do was learn her lines and lie in the sun. And if she thought he was about to modify his behaviour, then she could think again. She’d known who he was before she signed on the dotted line, and he had been straight with her.
Well, to a point.
Clearly, he couldn’t tell her the whole truth, and nor did he want to. There was no need for Effie, of all people, to know that Andreas had only recently reached out to him. Or that his father’s acceptance came with conditions. That was between him and Andreas and way over Effie’s paygrade.
