The Keeper's Forbidden Housemaid

First test

Cade POV

"Say that again."

My voice came out flat. Too flat. The kind of flat I used right before I did something I couldn't take back.

She lifted her chin. Didn't flinch. "I already read it."

Four words. Four words, and every plan I'd made for this house, for this year, for keeping one more woman alive inside these walls, cracked straight down the middle.

I crossed the room before I decided to move. She didn't step back. That was the part that threw me... not the confession, the stillness.

Every other maid who'd ever stood where she was standing had cried, or begged, or lied straight to my face. Mira Vance just watched me, waiting to see what kind of man I actually was.

"Do you have any idea what you just did?" I said.

"I found a diary under a floorboard. That's all I did."

"That's not all you did." I held out my hand, palm up, steady, even though nothing in my chest was steady.

"Give it to me. Now."

For one second I thought she'd refuse. I saw it in her eyes... the calculation, the same one she'd made on my front step three weeks ago, weighing one danger against another.

Then she reached into her waistband and set the small leather book into my hand, and something in me exhaled that I hadn't known I was holding.

"Who told you to look for it?" I asked.

"No one told me anything. I found it by accident."

"Nothing in this house happens by accident."

"Then maybe your house has a problem, not me." Her voice shook, just slightly, the first crack I'd seen in her since she'd walked through my door.

"Mrs. Harlow looked like she'd seen a ghost. You look like you want to throw me out a window. And I still don't know who Isabella is, or why a dead woman's diary is buried under my floor."

My floor. Not the estate's. Hers, already, three weeks in. I filed that away and hated that I'd noticed it.

"She's not your concern."

"She's under my floorboard." I should have sent her away right then. Fired her on the spot, put her in Denny's car, watched the gate close behind her and never think about the particular way she refused to look away from me again. That would have been the smart thing. The safe thing. The thing that had kept me alive and kept this house's secrets buried for four years since Isabella died and I swore I'd never let it happen again.

Instead I said, "Sit down."

She sat.

I don't know why I told her what I told her next. Maybe it was the diary, warm from being pressed against her skin, sitting heavy in my hand like an accusation. Maybe it was the fact that she hadn't run, hadn't screamed, hadn't done any of the things that would have let me put her safely back in the box marked staff, temporary, replaceable.

"Isabella worked here," I said. "Before you. She wasn't supposed to find things either. She did anyway."

"And?"

"And she's dead." The words came out harder than I meant them to. "Three years dead. And the last thing she wrote in that book, the night before it happened, was that she thought someone in this house was going to kill her."

Mira's face went white. "Someone did..."

I didn't answer. I didn't have to. The silence did the answering for me, stretching long and ugly between us, and I watched her put together, piece by piece, exactly how much danger she'd just put herself in by pulling one loose board off one floor in one room she wasn't supposed to be cleaning.

"You knew," she said slowly. "You knew there was a diary. You knew what was in it. Why leave it there at all? Why not burn it?"

"Because I've been trying to find out who killed her for three years, and that book is the only thing that might tell me." My hand tightened around the leather cover.

"And because every maid who's found it before you has either run screaming or gone straight to the person I'm hunting."

"And me?"

"You didn't run." I looked at her.... the way I hadn't let myself look at anyone since the funeral. "You stayed and argued with me instead. That's either very brave or very stupid, Ms. Vance."

"Maybe it's both."

Something almost like a laugh caught in my throat and died there, unfamiliar, before it could fully arrive. I hadn't laughed in this house in three years. I wasn't about to start now, over a woman with a dead maid's secrets tucked into her skirt and a stubborn mouth that kept talking back to the one man in the county who could make her disappear without a trace.

That was when the study door slammed open.

Denny stood in the frame, breathing hard, his face the color of ash.

"Sir. You need to come. Now."

"What happened?"

"It's Marcus." He swallowed. "He's been found. In the boathouse. And, sir..." his eyes flicked to Mira, then back to me, and I felt the floor of the last three years tilt beneath my feet. "he had a photograph on him. Of her."

He didn't say the name. He didn't have to.

I looked down at the diary still clutched in my hand, then up at Mira, who had gone very quiet, very pale, watching me with the dawning look of someone who'd just realized the ground she was standing on wasn't ground at all.

"Of who?" she whispered.

I opened my mouth to answer her.

That was when the lights went out.