Two Billionaire Brothers Hired Me and Warned Me About Each Other novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Doors Open Wide

Every door in the Kostka house stands open, the study stays locked, and Cas's hand stops at her waist on the back stairs with 'You'd have to ask'; at one in the morning Leo calls and she answers.

By eight the next morning I had counted every door on the ground floor, and every one of them stood open.

Brass stops held the heavy ones.

A rolled bath towel held the pantry.

"House rule," Cas said when I asked.

He walked half a pace ahead of me down the west hall in shirtsleeves with the cuffs buttoned.

The steel chain at his belt ticked against his hip.

"The staff stairs are kept clear after nine at night," he said. "No one uses them. No one sits on them."

"Understood."

"The study is locked." He stopped at a tall oak door and touched the key on his chain. "Only one key. I carry it."

"And if there's a fire?" I asked.

"Then I will open it," Cas said.

"And if you're in the shower?"

He looked at me, and one corner of his mouth moved, the first small sign of anything in his face.

"Then you'll wait," he said.

I asked about the seventh housekeeper, because a good housekeeper asks where the last one went wrong.

"She cried," Cas said. "I gave her an envelope and a ride to the bus."

He said it flatly and kept walking.

At ten I was sent to the east wing to meet his mother.

Halina Kostka sat in a straight chair by a window, in black wool and pearls.

Her silver hair was pinned in a twist, and a cane hung from the chair arm.

She did not stand and she did not offer me a seat.

"Your agency says you worked four years in hotels," she said.

"Yes, Mrs. Kostka."

"Leopold has asked to speak with you already. You will tell me if he does it again."

I said I would.

"Doing what, exactly?"

"Rooms, mostly. Then the whole housekeeping floor." I kept my hands folded. "Winter was our busy season, with the conventions and the holiday parties."

Halina's hand stopped on the head of her cane.

She went very still, and the clock on her mantel was suddenly loud.

"Casimir will show you the linen," she said. "That will be all."

I went out thinking that I had said something wrong, and not knowing what.

The linen closet was at the foot of the back stairs.

The stair was steep and narrow, with a door at the top.

At four I carried a stack of towels up to the second floor.

I was on the ninth step when a corner of the pile slid.

I grabbed, missed, and a man's arm came around me from behind.

His left hand slammed flat across my stomach and held me still against him, and his right caught the falling towels against the wall.

"Steady," Cas said, close to my ear.

I was held against a wall of chest and shirt, with his heartbeat going hard against my shoulder blade.

Lower, against the small of my back, I felt something else, hot and thick through his trousers.

It was not a thing a man could hide, and he did not try to.

He did not move either.

We stood on the staff stairs in the afternoon light for the space of three slow breaths.

I could have turned around, and I could have said his name.

He took his hand off me and stepped down a stair.

"If you want something, Miss Calloran," he said, a little roughly, "you'd have to ask."

"I didn't," I said, and turned. "I dropped towels."

"No." His eyes were very dark. "You'd have to ask."

He gathered the towels, put them in my arms, and went down without looking back.

I stood there on step nine with my pulse in my throat and my face hot.

Staff supper was at six at the long kitchen table.

The cook, a broad woman in a white apron, had cooked for the Kostkas for twenty years, and the driver ate with her.

Leo sat across from me with his sleeves rolled, eating her pierogi with his fingers.

Cas sat at the head, because he sat at the head of everything.

"Your brother's afraid of you," Leo told me, cheerfully. "He told me so himself."

"I am not afraid of her," Cas said.

"You said you didn't trust yourself."

"I said I didn't guess." Cas put down his fork.

"I don't guess and I don't take," he said. "If Miss Calloran wants my hands on her, she'll say where."

"And then?" Leo asked.

"Then I put them there, and not an inch past it."

The cook dropped a spoon.

The driver studied his plate.

Leo put a hand over his mouth, and his shoulders shook.

I kept my face straight and my eyes on Cas.

"Noted," I said. "I'll bring a map."

For one second, down the length of the table, the whole of him went still, and then he picked up his fork again.

Later that night Leo caught me in the kitchen hall outside his small office, a cup in each hand.

"Rule two," he said. "Nothing in it. Watch me."

He drank from the first cup, a long swallow, then held it out.

"Tea. I drank first. You've accepted nothing but tea."

"That's a loophole."

"I run a real estate office," he said. "Loopholes are the job."

I took the tea.

Past his shoulder, his office door stood open, and on the desk lay a stack of letters on foundation letterhead.

Each was headed Legacy Grant, and under the heading was a different woman's name.

I knew none of the names.

Leo saw me looking and moved a folder over the letters, without hurry.

"Go to bed, Siobhan," he said kindly. "You start early."

My room in the staff wing had a narrow bed, a window on the river and a door I could lock.

I didn't lock it.

I lay awake and listened to the house, which was so open that I could hear the furnace from the third floor.

At one in the morning my phone lit up on the nightstand.

The screen said LEO.

I looked at it ring.

Rule three said I would not answer.

Rule three had been written by a man who kept the only key to the study on his belt.

I picked up the phone.

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