His Young Maid: A Forbidden Boss Age Gap Romance Daisy Jane (love letters to the dead TXT) 📖

“I came across this crumpled piece of paper on the floor. Like he’d missed the bin. And I didn’t want to read it but it was like, just a few sentences and the paper was face up.”

“Your brain just reads things when they’re short like that,” she said, pulling a stitch through my hand. I couldn’t feel it, but I knew that’s what she was doing. I’d seen my mom get stitches plenty of times. The stitches come after the little sting, always.

“Exactly!” I said, “that’s what I told my cousin. Anyway, it was just a short poem, I think, But… it hit me, you know?”

“What did it say?” she asked.

Nervously, I recited his poem to her, staring her down, trying to capture her first reaction. She paused, her hands hovering over mine, her eyes straight forward to the wall.

“Mmm,” she said, before getting back to work on me. “A lonely soul. I see how that’d get your interest going. Especially if you’d never met him.”

“Exactly! Geez, you get me. That’s exactly it. I’d never met him, seen him, heard him, nothing. Then I read this, whatever this is, and I’m in this beautiful house and, I don’t know.”

“It did a number on you, did it? Wait—if you read that three months ago, catch me up to how you cut your hand.”

“Well, I was washing his whiskey glass in the kitchen today and he came home from work early for some reason. He’s never done that. Even my cousin who’s worked there for four years has only seen him once before. Anyway, I was washing the glass at the sink and I was thinking about those words. And I said them out loud, you know, like talking to myself.”

She gasped and looked up at me with wide eyes, fully invested in the story. “And he was behind you! Oh no!” she shrieked, pulling the last stitch through my palm.

“Yep. And I dropped the glass and I said things and begged him to not fire me and the most important part of this is obviously that he was undeniably the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.” I exhaled, my head throbbing, my hand now tingling with slight discomfort.

“How old are you, dear?” she asked, not looking up.

“Twenty.”

“He lives in that great big old house, drinking whiskey, working all the time. Something tells me he’s not twenty-five years old and a perfect match for you,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist.

“I don’t know how old he is but yeah, I mean, he’s rich and could have anyone he wants. He doesn’t want the maid who breaks his stuff and gets blood on his floor.” Reaching out, I held the end of the bandage as she began rolling it around my hand, finally pinning it closed. She filled a bag with more supplies and handed it to me.

“Good luck with the hand. And just because you’re a housecleaner doesn’t mean you aren’t worthy of a great person’s love. You just don’t know who can make you happy yet, dear, you’re still so young. Have fun.” She hugged me and I think I hugged her back too. It felt tight, too long, but it felt so nice to be cared about.

I knew she was being paid to care about me but still, it felt good to be listened to and hugged.

“Okay,” Melody said, not even glancing at the bag. “But wait here,” she paced to the tiny kitchenette and grabbed a business card from underneath the magnet on the fridge and held it out to me as she walked back to the door.

“If you tell me I got fired and this is a lead to a new job I’m going to cry,” I admitted, realizing I couldn’t make this kind of money doing anything else but stripping. Or selling my non-essential organs on the black market, maybe.

“Brooks,” she said, as she slipped the card into my hand. “That’s the house on the hill guy,” she nodded down to the card and I pulled it up to the light outside her apartment door so I could see it.

“How’d you get this?” I said, unable to read the rest of the card in front of me, the outdoor light flickering, leaving the unread portions of the card in darkness.

“He came here, looking for you,” she whispered, glancing over her shoulder. I peered over her into the apartment where Donny was passed out in front of the TV on the apartment floor, a small pillow under his head. “I don’t know where he got your address from but he wants to pay for the bill, for your hand.”

I wanted to ask what else he said, what he was wearing, the exact verbiage he used and if he asked about me, but judging by the annoyed look on Melody’s face, she wasn’t into it. And on the drive home earlier, she was right. I needed to be realistic, I told myself. Just because he had reached out to pay my bill didn’t mean he was interested in me. Maybe he just felt bad and knew, after I begged for my job, that I was broke. He was just trying to help out a member of his staff.

That was all.

In the span of a minute, I’d felt a rush of excitement—he came here? —then, with Melody’s words in the back of my mind, I realized he was just being kind and perhaps even protecting his image. I’d been so lonely and alone for the last few years, taking care of mom, that any attention or kind gestures now felt far more powerful than it should.

After all, I’m just a freaking maid and he is… wait, who the hell was he?

I looked down at the card under the single light in my kitchen once I returned to my apartment, eager to devour the information I’d been given.

Brooks Bennett

Partner

Bennett and Barrow Investments, LLC

Below that was his email address, a phone