At my request, Mrs. Simmons put me in one of the smaller guest bedrooms at the other side of the house, farthest from the master suite.

Actually, I’d asked her to put me in the staff quarters where she herself stayed, explaining that I was to stay for the summer as help in whatever capacity I was needed. She wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that I was still a guest even if I wanted to lend a hand.

I decided it was best not to argue. The fewer questions they asked me about my original reason for arriving in Cove Manor, the better.

The staff was surprisingly small for a house this size—a housekeeper, a driver, a cook, a gardener, four maids and two security guards, not counting Jennison whom Mrs. Simmons explained was Sebastian’s personal bodyguard and right hand and stayed wherever his employer was. Cove Manor was apparently just one of Sebastian’s many homes and he usually only stayed here during the summer.

A week had passed since my arrival and fortunately it had passed without incident.

I haven’t seen Sebastian once since he hasn’t been home much and on the one night that he was, I took care to stay in my room.

I busied myself with helping Mrs. Simmons with the chores. I liked everyone in the staff who had been friendly to me but the housekeeper reminded me very much of my aunt. She gave me very light tasks to start out with—like helping sort the laundry or loading the dishwasher or helping out at the kitchen or the garden.

After a week, she found that Bart, the portly, middle-aged cook with the apple-pink cheeks and hearty laugh, found me the most useful and assigned me to assist mostly in the kitchen. I had no complaints.

I’d always helped my aunt around the kitchen but Bart took my culinary education to the next level, sharing with me tips and techniques to make excellent food. He didn’t stay in the manor along with the rest of the staff but lived fifteen minutes away with his family. He said he wanted me to be able to whip something up if he wasn’t around.

During that week, I casually asked the staff about Sebastian and they didn’t tell me much except that he was a good employer even though he could be a tad bit difficult at times. Just the way he is, they said. Brilliant as a businessman and complicated as a person. I could tell they wanted to share a little more, especially Bart and Mrs. Simmons who seemed to have been in his employ much longer than the others but I could tell they were protective of his privacy, which made me oddly curious.

Despite participating in a lot of the housework, I still had a lot of free time in my hands. I spent it walking around the grounds, even once taking the long, narrow wooden stairs that led to the private beach below, or spending time reading from the vast collection of books in the library where Mrs. Simmons had allowed me to sneak into as long as Sebastian wasn’t around. The books were all serious stuff though. A lot of them were about business, history, sciences, philosophy and literary classics. I had little money and as much as I’d like to read my usual romance novels, I decided to make use of what was available. I rediscovered Jayne Eyre all over again.

I had brought my old, slightly banged up laptop with me and since I had internet access in my bedroom, I finally gave in to searching every information I could find about Sebastian Vice.

He was twenty-nine but at eighteen his father died and Sebastian became the CEO of The Vice Group, his family’s privately held corporation that did almost everything from oil to shipping to textile. His latest acquisition a mere three months ago was a technologies company that focused on corporate security. He was reputed to be cunning and ruthless in business but too powerful to be openly criticized. I wasn’t surprised. In a way, I understood his hardness—a person given that much responsibility at that young an age was bound to grow up fast. Just like I did.

His name was tagged along a reference to Cobalt Bay Billionaires, a short list of the city’s most eligible bachelors who left a trail of broken hearts in their wake.

I snorted not so delicately.

Trust him to be part of some men’s club who flaunted their charms, wealth and power.

He was single but never without female company if the dozens of pictures of him with a variety of women attending social functions were proof.

“Can’t see him passing that up for a seventeen-year-old plain jane,” I muttered once to myself, clicking on a picture of him dressed sharply in a suit with a tall and voluptuous blonde in his arm at some charity dinner two days after my arrival at Cove Manor.

Annoyed at the direction of my thoughts, I decided I knew enough to satisfy my curiosity and decided to never look him up again. If I passed the entire summer without ever running into him again, I’d consider my part of the bargain fulfilled and I’d happily be on my way.

Except that early one Sunday morning, he walked into the kitchen.

I stilled in the middle of dropping a clump of biscuit dough on a baking sheet and stared at him.

He seemed startled and as shocked as I was as he stared right back at me.

I didn’t know he was home. Mrs. Simmons mentioned he had some party to attend but not that he’d be staying the night here. He had a penthouse downtown. If I’d known, I would’ve steered clear.

He was wearing a loose pair of wheat-colored linen pants, a white shirt that fit nicely over his muscled torso and his feet were bare and his hair mussed from sleep.

If seduction had a face the morning after, he would look like this.

Although I shouldn’t have noticed that.

“Where’s Bart?” he said with narrowed eyes, looking around the kitchen.

I blinked, snapping back to reality and carefully lowered the dough scoop I’d been using. “He’s not here yet. He goes to Sunday mass at six with his family before coming here. He says you’re never up before ten whenever you’re here on a Sunday so he had time.”

He sighed and sat on a stool across the vast prep table. “That’s true. I usually don’t get up early but I’ve hardly slept so I figured I’d just get started on my day. I have a headache and I’m starving.”

“Probably from drinking too much the night before,” I muttered as I stood to fill a cup with some of the fresh coffee I’d just brewed for myself. “Here. I normally wouldn’t prescribe coffee for a hangover but you can use a little bit of it. Partying hard and late has its price.”

He stared at the cup of coffee I’d placed before him with the creamer and sugar set right next to it before glancing up at me with a slightly amused arch of his brow. “Am I about to get a lecture on partying hard and late from a kid?”

I placed a frying pan on the stove and went to get some eggs and bacon from the fridge. “I don’t have to. Your hangover’s lecture enough. You need some fat to help you get over it. Bacon and eggs sound good?”

His lips twitched in what I suspected would’ve been a smile as he nodded. “Yeah. Scrambled please, with a little bit of cheese.”

I tossed the bacon into the pan and worked on beating the eggs with some milk before taking a smaller pan out and pouring the mixture into it.

I took out the first tray of cheese biscuits I’d worked on from the oven and slid a few of them on a plate which I pushed towards him. “Here. Start with these until the rest is ready.”

He stared down at the biscuits. “I love everything with cheese in it."

I suppressed a smile at the sight of him looking like a little boy presented his favorite food and went to flip the bacon. “Then I suggest you start eating. I’ll get you some orange juice too. It helps.”

He gingerly picked up one steaming biscuit and bit into it. He eyed me warily. “You seem to have some experience in treating hangovers. Don’t tell me I harbored a teen drunk.”

I shrugged. “Timothy comes home in a drunken stupor almost every other night. I was in charge of making the after-effects as manageable as possible for him.”

He frowned. “You should’ve just let him waste away. You’d be better off without him.”

“As much as I hate him, he’s my only family left,” I answered quietly, watching the oil and fat sizzle and burst on the bacon strips. “Besides, I owed it to my aunt and uncle for all of their kindness to me.”

“They could’ve done the world one more service by making sure someone like Pendley never made it to the gene pool,” Sebastian grumbled before stuffing his mouth with the rest of the biscuit.

I let him eat in silence until the eggs and bacon were ready.

I waited for him to send me away, considering he didn’t want me around him but he didn’t say anything and I took that as an unspoken invitation.

I knew I was nothing more really but a servant and he the master of the house, but I couldn’t stop myself from sitting back down on my stool, helping myself to a biscuit and sipping the rest of my coffee as I dropped more lumps of dough on my next tray.

“It was a benefit, you know?”

I looked up at his sudden speech and found him gulping down some orange juice. “What?”

He put the glass of juice down and speared a piece of bacon. “Last night’s party. It was a benefit. It was for a good cause. I got a little carried away with how much wine I was drinking.”

My brows furrowed as I watched him thoughtfully. “You don’t seem to be the kind of person who gets carried away.”

His lips curled into an unpleasant smile. “It’s because I’m as controlled as a rock, right? That unlike others I’m not capable of losing control.”

I blinked in surprise at the vehemence in his voice. “I didn’t say that. All I meant was that you don’t strike me as the type to do something you didn’t want to do. If you got drunk, I’m thinking you planned on it.”

His expression relaxed and now he was smirking at me. “It takes a lot to get me drunk.”

“More reason why I think it was intentional,” I quipped with a sweet smile.

He blinked slowly. “You have dimples.”

My smile deepened. “Yes, sir, I do. People are known to sometimes have them.”

His eyes fluttered close briefly. “I must be going mad.”

“Work that stressful?”

“No, not work,” he answered quietly, his green eyes glittering. “There are other... things, that I need to keep my mind off of.”

“Drinking doesn’t really make them go away for real, does it? You’re better off just dealing with it right away,” I said as I reached for the bowl of fresh strawberries I’d taken out earlier and bit into one, sucking some of the juice that trickled down my thumb.

I popped the rest of the fruit into my mouth before glancing at him and realizing that he was watching me keenly. “What? Do you want some strawberries?”

He took a deep breath, looked away for a second as if trying to remember something, and then went back to his food. “What are you doing in the kitchen anyway? It’s five-thirty in the morning. Don’t tell me Mrs. Simmons is working you through the night.”

I shook my head. “No, she’s great. I’ve been assisting Bart mostly and I thought I’d get breakfast started while he’s off to mass. Beside, I’m an early riser. I’m used to having lots of things that need doing I’ve never really had the chance to develop the habit of sleeping in.”

“That makes you an unusual seventeen-year-old,” he said with a smirk. “Kids your age go to bed late and get up around noon and then spend the rest of the day lounging in front of the TV or hanging out at the mall with their friends.”

“Is that what you did when you were seventeen?” I teased with a grin.

“No,” he answered with scowl. “I... I was busy with other things. I had a very different childhood.”

“Then that makes us both unusual,” I told him with a knowing nod, still grinning. “There must be more people out there who aren’t inclined to act the stereotypical teenager.”

His grim expression didn’t improve. “But you should be able to act like the stereotypical teenager. You should be able to enjoy the opportunities of your youth. Instead, here you are, in the home of a total stranger, paying your lewd cousin’s debt, being well-versed in ways to care after drunkards and tuned by habit to waste little on sleep because of more than your fair share of responsibilities. You’re still a child, Cassandra. You should have the privilege of being one while you still have the chance.”

All my humor fled and I felt every blow of his statement.

I was suddenly very angry. “You make it sound as if it’s so easy. If it were, then why did you skip out on being a child yourself and took on all the responsibilities no eighteen-year-old should be saddled with?”

“I had no choice but you do,” he argued almost patiently. “You’re a young girl—”

“Oh, stop always pointing out how young I am,” I snapped. “So I grew up fast. Just like you did. It’s done. Can’t regret it, can’t pine after it either. So just forget about it. I’m happy to move along.”

“No, I’d do well to remember just how young you are,” he muttered, pushing back his empty plate and getting up. “Thank you for breakfast. I shall leave you to your baking. Good day, Cassandra.”

I stared after his retreating back with an open mouth, wondering how quickly we moved from having an amicable breakfast to a snapping argument.

I closed my mouth shut and clenched my hands into fists as I frowned at the lumps of dough on the tray in front of me.

I’ve never really been one to go up against my elders. I had been content with their decisions so far except where Timothy was concerned that I never once had the need to. But for some reason I couldn’t figure out, Sebastian didn’t seem to fit in the same category and something about him provoked me to meet his temper blow by blow like we were equals, which of course, in this reality, wasn’t entirely true.

I was a poor orphan adrift in life and he was a powerful, self-assured man of the world.

He could teach me a thing or two, for sure, but sometime after our first disastrous meeting, it seemed I had unconsciously decided there may be some things he could learn from me as well.

***

On the same day, we got notice that Sebastian was hosting a small fourth of July party for friends and business associates at Cove Manor. It was, after all, a highly esteemed estate raved about by celebrity designers and the media who were always clamoring for some intimate glimpse into the mogul’s private world. It had been built right before Sebastian was born, rumored to be a gift by his father to his wife, and had set the standards for the luxury homes that started cropping up around Seaside.

The party set the household into frenzied planning which apparently was no new thing. It seemed Sebastian always made very swift decisions and gave little time for execution. We didn’t see him during the week he gave us to prepare due to a business trip to Chicago.

On Friday, morning of the event, he arrived at the house looking smug and self-satisfied with a tall and curvy brunette on his arm. She was wearing the most scandalous piece of sundress I’ve ever seen—a bright shade of orange with cut-outs that barely supported the heavy weight of her breasts.

“Good morning, Cassandra,” Sebastian greeted with a crooked smile after I walked in on them arriving at the foyer, a floral arrangement I’d carried from the kitchen pressed to my hip.

I blinked at him, a bit dazzled by the charm he rarely displayed within my vicinity.

“This is Aurora Gonzales,” he said, tightening an arm around the woman’s extremely tiny waist and smiling at her affectionately. “She’s one of our guests for tonight’s party. She’s a good friend of mine from Chicago. We thought we’d take the trip back here together.”

I offered a formal smile at the woman. “How do you do, Ms. Gonzales. I hope your trip had been pleasant.”

The woman flashed a cat-like grin, her fingers, prettied up with long and fancy french tips, grazing Sebastian’s arm. “Oh, it was a pleasure, indeed.”

I resisted the strong urge to roll my eyes and gag, especially since I noticed Sebastian watching me with a curious light in his eyes. “We have prepared rooms for guests who might enjoy staying overnight. Would you require one, Ms. Gonzales?”

I knew it was a bit impertinent of me to raise the question of whether Sebastian wanted to invite her to spend the night or not but from the looks and sounds of this conversation, she was certainly providing him some rather pleasurable company. Be far it from me to deprive him of it, no matter how that sly smile of his irritated me.

The woman turned to Sebastian with puppy-dog eyes and batted fake lashes at him, murmuring excitedly to his ear.

I stood, pretended not to hear, as I looked around everywhere but the sickening sight of them.

“Yes, she would like a room, Cassandra,” Sebastian finally answered with a quick nod. “Preferably one of our best by the east wing.”

I didn’t miss the unspoken meaning of reserving her the best room that was nearest his suite.

I gave him a stony look just as Aurora turned on her heel and dashed to the car that had dropped them off by the entrance earlier to give instructions about her luggage.

“Wouldn’t you rather give one of the best rooms to someone who’d actually stay long enough in it to appreciate it? Unless, you’d like the view of the ocean there.” I blurted out tartly.

His brows arched in surprise and I braced myself for a reprimand but he merely smiled that damned arrogant smile of his.

Before he could say anything, I dipped into a mock curtsy, balancing the vase of flowers expertly on one arm. “Don’t worry about it. Your wish is my command, your majesty.”

Then I immediately turned around and walked away, depositing the flower arrangement by the ornate, hand-carved side table gracing the entrance.

I sneaked a quick glance over my shoulder as I exited through the front door just in time to see Aurora glide back up to Sebastian and throw her arms around his neck in delight.

I wondered for a moment why his bright green gaze was still locked on me.

***

More guests started arriving around late morning. There were about thirty or so people, looking all refined, affluent and important.

Bart, along with a small catering staff he’d brought in, prepared an elaborate outdoor lunch buffet. I was just in the kitchen helping arrange colorful French macarons on a tiered tray when Jennison came in.

“Ms. Collins, Mr. Vice would like for you to join the party,” he said.

I blinked in confusion. “What? Why would—”

“You are a guest in this house even though you’ve been helping out with the staff,” the guard said politely even though I could tell he was starting to get a little uncomfortable. “Mr. Vice said he’s expecting you to join him in fifteen minutes.”

I frowned in irritation. “I don’t think so. Tell Mr. Vice that I’m—”

“It’s alright, dear. Go join the party. The food’s good and we’re holding up just fine here,” Bart said with an encouraging smile and nod of his head.

I opened my mouth to argue that I wasn’t really here as guest but to pay back Sebastian with labor but I quickly realized the staff didn’t really know the true reason I was here.

I pursed my lips and nodded at Jennison stiffly. “Thank you, Jennison. I’ll be out shortly.”

I didn’t miss the flicker of relief that crossed the man’s face. He probably had orders to haul me out if I had kept refusing.