Dragon Lord (11 page)

There was just something about the way he stood so still for so long that did something to her, that created a yearning inside of her that she couldn’t completely understand. His back was as ramrod stiff as ever, his shoulders erect, not slumped with dejection, but she
still
felt that she could sense loneliness and pain in him. And that drew her almost as much, though in a vastly different way, as her absolute fascination with the aura of power that surrounded him, and the less exalted, but equally distracting, lust she felt every time he came within her vicinity.

She had never been around a man that had that kind of effect on her, that she had only to look at to feel the urge to hump something--preferably him--as if she’d just shot up with some potent aphrodisiac. And the strange thing about it was that she wasn’t entirely sure of
what
it was about him that made her feel that way. He was handsome and had a body that had a serious pant factor, but the other men were handsome and built well, too--Audric was gorgeous and he really turned her on, but she didn’t feel like she was going to melt just from looking at him. Her brain didn’t take a holiday every time she looked at his mouth--or his eyes--or his hands. She didn’t feel weak kneed and faint and clumsy and stupid whenever he passed through the room.

It was almost as scary, the way he made her feel, as it was enthralling and she could never decide whether she most wanted to run
from
him, or
toward
him.

Mostly, though, if she could command her feet to move at all, she ran
from
him, afraid he’d see the really embarrassing effect he had on her.

She had a bad feeling, though, that he
knew
how he effected her and that was why he always scowled when he got a glimpse of her because he hadn’t looked at her once as if he welcomed her mindless adoration. He hadn’t even looked vaguely interested until he’d seen Audric kissing her and she didn’t flatter herself that she’d actually figured that much into the lust factor--mostly because
all
of them had the glazed look men got on their faces when they watched a porn.

“Raina!”

Raina nearly jumped out of her skin at the sudden intrusion into her thoughts.

“Get your cleaning supplies and come. Now! Quickly!” Mrs. Higgenbottom said sharply, turning away before Raina had a chance to scowl at her for scaring the pee out of her. The urgency in the woman’s voice communicated, however, and she scrambled to her feet, tossed everything into her tray, and hurried after the woman.

The housekeeper was nearly at the top of the stairs before Raina reached the foyer.

The woman might look as old as time, but she moved fast, Raina thought with surprise. Grabbing the handrail with her free hand, she hurried to catch up, stumbling about halfway up and nearly sprawling out on the stairs. Fortunately, she had a firm grip on the balustrade because she almost never managed to negotiate the entire staircase without stumbling at least once.

Damned treads! There was something about the height of the steps, or the depth of the treads that didn’t go well with the height of her step or the length of her foot because she always stubbed a toe on at least one riser going up, and caught her heel on at least one step going down, sometimes more than one.

She didn’t know how the men, with their great big feet, managed to go up and down the stairs without rolling to the bottom.

The door to Simon’s suite was standing open when Raina reached the upper landing. Raina’s heart instantly stepped up its pace. Since it was already fluttering a bit frantically from her near fall, the racing pulse had her panting.

Or maybe it was the idea of entering Simon’s private sanctum?

Mrs. Higgenbottom stepped into the doorway. “Quickly now! We must get the rooms cleaned before he comes back!”

Raina frowned but hurried down the hallway. She’d been at the mansion for weeks and she still couldn’t get used to the strange way everybody acted. She supposed it was because she’d never been a ‘domestic’ before, had never even met anyone who had been--cleaning ladies, yes--but not a ‘domestic’. It seemed really weird, though, to be so frantic to dash into the man’s rooms and clean the place up while he was out.

As if they were magical pixies or something!

It wasn’t as if the man didn’t
know
he had servants in the house.

And Ms. Higgenbottom, she knew, wasn’t as awestricken with the man as she was, couldn’t be if she’d known him all his life--wasn’t afraid of him--so why the almost panicked way she ran around serving him and trying to keep from being
seen
serving him?

She
didn’t know, but she found that it really
annoyed
her. Mostly, she supposed, because she hadn’t gotten the knack of the ‘never seen or heard’ part of the job. If he wanted to pretend they were invisible and didn’t exist unless he wanted something, though, she didn’t see why he couldn’t just
pretend
it without her having to play invisible.

She was breathless by the time she scrambled through the door, but she didn’t delude herself into thinking it was from the rush--not the race upstairs, anyway. It gave her a rush even stepping across the threshold of his suite, as if his aura lingered over the rooms. She stopped dead in her tracks when she’d stepped inside, though, her gaze drawn automatically to the huge portrait hanging over the fireplace at one end of the sitting room.

The woman depicted in the portrait was movie star beautiful, breathtaking--intimidatingly so. It looked like some old world painting, something like one of those famous old painter’s might’ve done, partly because of the colors, and partly because the woman was wearing a style of dress that looked like a historical costume. The long, flowing gown reached all the way to her ankles, covering her feet. She was curled up on her side on some sort of sofa that had one arm, half sitting, half reclining against the arm of the sofa in a position that displayed a nicely rounded hip and deep waist indention despite the flowing gown. The waist of the dress fit just beneath her breasts, and at least half of those bountiful mounds were protruding above the rounded neckline. There was a lacy looking, standing collar sort of thing around the back edge of the neckline that started near the woman’s creamy shoulders and stood up behind her long, graceful neck. Around that beautiful neck was a jewel encrusted collar, not a necklace, but rather a piece that fitted around her throat, making it look even longer and more elegant.

The woman’s inky black hair was swept up close to her perfectly shaped head into some kind of intricate knot that perched directly on her crown, except for a thick, wavy lock that sprouted from the center of the knot and flowed down her shoulder and across one bosom. Freed of the intricate knot, Raina calculated the hair probably reached almost to the woman’s waist.

Which would make it about a yard long, because Raina could see she was a tall woman--unless she was reclining on a really short couch.

A little girl, still with the chubby baby cheeks of a toddler, was perched on the sofa in front of her mother. She looked like a miniature copy of the woman.

Mrs. Higgenbottom had stopped to stare up at the portrait herself, as if she’d never seen it before. Shaking herself, she finally turned and spied Raina gaping at the picture. Her movement had caught Raina’s attention, dragging her gaze from the smiling face of the woman. Higgenbottom, she saw, looked, pale, shaken.

Raina instantly realized this was no classical painting of an unknown subject. Mrs. Higgenbottom knew the woman and child. “Who is it?” she asked in an awed whisper, wondering if, maybe, it was Simon’s mother, although even that seemed improbable because of the clothing the woman was wearing.

“The princ …. Evangeline and Tiera.”

Raina lifted her gaze to the painting again, noticing the background of the portrait for the first time. The couch had been arranged in front of very tall windows, or maybe French doors. Long, semi-transparent drapes fluttered at the openings, as if lifted by a light breeze, and beyond the windows lay a city. Riana could see the shapes of a multitude of buildings and the peaks of dozens of strange roofs that looked sort of like upside down ice cream cones--except they weren’t perfectly conical. The wide base was sort of bubbled outward and the narrow tips twisted. The top of a bright orange, huge ball of a sun peeked from behind one of the strange looking spires, partially hidden by a purplish range of snow capped mountains in the distance.

It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of the ancient buildings in Russia--except not quite. Something about it wasn’t the same and it wasn’t just the fact that there were mountains and she couldn’t remember seeing mountains in any of the pictures she’d looked at.

“Evangeline and Tiera?” she echoed.

“Mr. Draken’s wife and daughter.”

A shockwave rolled over Raina like the concussion of an exploding bomb. For several moments she felt completely divorced of her body, lost awareness of any of her senses. The shock suspended even her thought processes. She stared blankly at Mrs. Higgenbottom as she moved away, creeping like an old woman. She seemed to have shrunken somehow, aged. She looked a little dazed, as if she was wondering where she was, wasn’t certain what she was supposed to be doing.

It clicked in Raina’s mind abruptly that she’d not only not seen the woman or child, she’d not seen any sign that they’d ever been in the mansion. There were no toys, not feminine articles laying around.

Not that she’d been in Mr. Draken’s suite before, but she
had
been in places where children lived. There were always signs everywhere--grubby little handprints, toys scattered about, things they weren’t supposed to play with hidden behind chairs and under seat cushions.

“They don’t live with him?”

“They don’t live,” Higgenbottom said harshly. “They’ve been dead ….” She stopped, frowned. “Five years,” she said, almost as if to herself. “Can it really have been that long? I haven’t seen the portrait in at least five … Six? It’s so hard to remember the years he ….” She broke off her rambling monologue abruptly as she looked up at Riana. “Cleaning,” she said more briskly, looking around again as if she’d lost something and finally striding briskly toward the double doors at the other end of the room that opened, Riana saw, into a large bedroom.

Riana had to force herself to move. Her mind had taken a vacation and was no longer with her as she set to work cleaning, gaining a little speed as her frozen muscles began to thaw a little. Mrs. Higgenbottom came out of the bedroom a few minutes later, a bundle of bed linens in her arms, and left the room, moving quickly down the hallway to the back stairs.

The room, like the rest of the house, was actually not messy at all. She hadn’t given it a lot of thought before, but with six men in the house and only the housekeeper, she supposed, before she’d arrived, it was almost amazing to realize the place wasn’t a wreck. Her last boyfriend’s apartment had looked like a war zone and he’d only shared the place with one roommate.

Beyond cleaning the floors and polishing the endless furniture and woodwork, and helping Mrs. Higgenbottom with some of the kitchen cleanup, there was very little cleaning or straightening to do. This suite looked the most ‘used’ in the entire mansion.

She didn’t look up when she heard approaching footsteps until they halted just inside the door. A fresh wave of shock went through her when she did. Simon had halted just inside the door, his gaze riveted to the portrait over the fireplace mantel.

She didn’t mean to pry. She stared because he always had that effect on her. Any time he came within her view, she was paralyzed until something broke the spell--a fly trying to fly into her open mouth or up her nose, the house falling down ….

The look on his face as he stared at the portrait crushed the air from her lungs, though, made her heart squeeze painfully in her chest. It was raw, the pain so clear in his eyes that she felt it all the way through her.

She wished, desperately, that she hadn’t seen it.

She must have made some sound, some slight movement. As she stared at him, feeling like crying, wishing she could sink into the floor, trying to make her body work again and at least avert her gaze from the painful sight of his tortured eyes, she drew that gaze. Instantly, all the pain she’d seen there transformed to boiling rage, fury that she’d intruded on something that personal, that painful, she knew, and it sucked every ounce of strength from every muscle in her body until she felt like a jelly fish.

“Get out!” he ground out in a rumbling growl that sounded like the low, threatening growl of a wounded lion.

Chapter Seven

Raina shot to her feet as if an electric current had boosted her from her knees. Escape was the only thought running through her mind as she barreled toward the door, which he was blocking. His hand snaked out and caught her arm as she shot around him. Her momentum carried her in a tight circle, but she wasn’t really aware of anything but a dizzying sense of disorientation until she was slammed back against an unyielding surface. The collision wasn’t painful, but she didn’t know if it was shock that cushioned her or if she just hadn’t hit it that hard. She didn’t have time to inventory possible damage or even figure out what had happened. A wall of flesh, as unyielding as the wall behind her, closed in on her, sandwiching her between the two. The pressure eased after a moment. A hand tangled in her hair, dragging her head back until she was staring straight up at Simon’s taut face.

She didn’t think, even if she’d had any of her wits about her, that she could’ve deciphered that expression. She certainly couldn’t at that moment. The only thing rattling around in her brain was total confusion as to just how she’d gotten where she was.

Every muscle in her body seized as the dim awareness filtered through her shocked brain that the body flattened against hers was Simon’s. Abruptly, she couldn’t breathe. Weakness filtered through her in a stinging path from her chest outward, as if her heart had stopped beating and her body was slowly dying of oxygen deprivation. As devastating an effect as he had on her from across the room, nothing could have prepared her for the way he made her feel at that moment.