Two Billionaire Brothers Hired Me and Warned Me About Each Other novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Two Rule Sheets
Hired in one interview by both Kostka brothers, Siobhan is handed two opposite rule sheets, each warning her about the other; she lays them side by side and asks which one is lying, and they answer together: 'Don't ask him.'
Cas Kostka slid the page across the desk with two fingers and did not look up while he did it.
"Three rules," he said. "Read them, Miss Calloran, and tell me whether you can live by them."
The library had two floors of dark shelves, a ladder on a brass rail and a fire under a stone mantel.
The door behind my chair was propped open with a brass stop, wide enough for a cart.
The page was typed on cream paper.
Rule one said I would not be alone with Leo behind a closed door.
Rule two said I would accept nothing from him, not a coffee, not a ride, not a gift.
Rule three said I would not answer if he called me at night.
I reached for the page, and Cas's hand came down flat on the corner of it.
His fingers covered mine.
They were warm and heavy, and he left them there a second longer than the paper needed.
"Do you understand rule one?" he asked.
"I understand the words."
"Then you understand more than the last girl did."
He took his hand back.
"She left in a hurry in April," he said. "I won't have that again."
His phone buzzed against the desk.
He read the screen, and a steel chain at his belt clinked when he stood, a single key swinging on the end of it.
"Take a call," he said. "Stay in that chair. Leo, you will stay where you are."
"I live here, Cas," Leo said from the mantel. "Where else would I go?"
Cas walked out and did not close the door behind him.
I could hear his shoes all the way down the hall.
Over the fire hung a photograph of a white-haired man in a dark suit, the brothers' father, Bronislaw Kostka, dead six years.
Leo pushed off the mantel and crossed the rug in his socks.
He wore a cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, and his brown hair was a little too long.
He sat on the edge of the desk where his brother's hand had been.
"Can I tell you something, Siobhan?" he said, in the voice a man uses to offer you coffee.
"You already know my first name."
"It was in the file," Leo said. "Do you mind?"
"Tell me the something," I said.
"Cas gave you rules about me."
He smiled, and it was an easy smile, which made it worse.
"I'd like to give you rules about him."
He took a pencil off the desk and a sheet from the pad beside it, and wrote while he talked.
"Never be alone with him. Never sign anything he hands you. Never let him walk you to your car."
"That's three," I said.
"I'm told three is what people can remember."
He tore the sheet off and set it in front of me.
"The last girl left in a hurry in April," he said. "I'd rather not see that again."
I read his handwriting, and then I looked at the typed page.
They had told me, in nearly the same words, that a woman had run out of this house.
The agency recruiter had put it more plainly two days ago, with the file open on her desk.
Seven housekeepers in six years, she'd said, and not one of them had made it past the first month.
Every one had left with a departure bonus, which meant somebody in this house paid women to go.
I had listened to that and thought about my mother's rent.
It was three months behind, fourteen hundred and fifty dollars a month, and the Kostkas paid nine thousand and a room.
"Are you cold?" Leo asked.
"No."
"Your hands are." He took them, both of them, in his, and rubbed his thumbs once over my knuckles. "There. Better."
His palms were dry and careful.
Nobody in six years of hotels had held my hands to warm them.
I took them back.
"Thank you," I said. "That's rule two, and I just broke it."
"I'd say you accepted nothing." He grinned. "I'd say I took."
I laid his sheet beside Cas's and looked at the two of them.
One said never be alone with Leo, and one said never be alone with Cas.
The magazines put the two of them at over two billion dollars.
They had hired me in one sitting, and each had spent his turn warning me about the other.
I had a hotel housekeeper's rule of my own, and it was older than either sheet.
Never stay in a room with an employer if I couldn't leave it.
The door was open, and I could leave.
I wasn't going to.
Cas came back, buttoning his cuff, and stopped at the end of the desk.
He looked at the two sheets side by side.
Then he looked at his brother sitting on his desk.
I stood up.
I picked up both pages, one in each hand, and held them out between the two men.
"Which one of you is lying?" I said. "Because I'll take the job from the honest one, and I'll start with whoever answers first."
The fire popped.
Cas looked at Leo.
Leo looked at Cas.
Neither one said a word.
Then they spoke at the same moment, and what each of them said was the same sentence.
"Don't ask him."
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