The Hidden - Jessica Verday [6]
“Yeah, it’s fine. You know, you’re going to be handy to have around. You can put away all of my laundry.”
He made a short bow, then came back to the bed and stretched out beside me. “If laundry duty is what milady wants, then laundry duty is what she will get.”
He turned to face me, and his black streak of hair covered one eye. My heart fluttered.
“That’s the picture of domestic bliss,” I said. “Add in a big fan and an exotic drink, and you have every girl’s dream fantasy.”
“Domestic bliss, huh? You wanna play house with me, Abbey?”
I felt my cheeks heating up. “I, um … You know what I mean. Servant. Fantasy. That sort of thing.”
“Right. Right. Every girl’s fantasy. But I’m only interested in one girl’s fantasy.” He leaned forward. “Yours.”
I thought back to our recent hotel stay in West Virginia. Where we’d shared a bed … and a towel. Then something else struck me. “Hey, who did the laundry at your house?” I asked softly.
His face grew serious, and he looked away. “We went to the Laundromat. There was a lady there who washed it for us. Eventually she showed me how to do it. She even made me a cheat sheet so I wouldn’t forget. Only took a couple loads of pink shorts and one overflowing washer, but then I taught Dad.”
I watched his face move as he spoke, and was struck once again by how beautiful he was. And by something more … How mine he was.
“So you did all of your own laundry? What else did you do?”
“I got myself up for school and made my own lunches.”
I pictured a younger version of Caspian trying to put together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every morning, and my heart felt sad. Mom had always made my lunches for me when I was little. She’d even taken special requests, like when I wanted egg salad for three months straight. “I would have made your lunch for you,” I said softly.
He went to squeeze my hand, but pulled back as he remembered he couldn’t. “I know, Abbey,” he replied instead. “I know.”
We lay there in silence until finally I said, “You know what’s going to be the best thing about having you here with me?”
“Having a manservant at your beck and call?”
“Nope. But that’s a close second.” I moved my free hand closer to his until that faint tingle of almost touching buzzed through me, and I gazed up at the constellations covering my bedroom ceiling. “The best thing is having someone to look at the stars with.”
A couple hours later Mom called me down for dinner, while Caspian stayed up in my room. The whole time we ate, I kept thinking about what it was going to be like to have him there without my parents realizing it. I’ll have to be careful. Have to watch that I don’t let anything slip in front of them, that they don’t hear me talking to him.
“You’re awfully quiet over there,” Dad said. “What are you thinking about?”
“The fact that we should get an alarm system.”
Okay, so that wasn’t really what I’d been thinking about, but it sounded good.
Mom and Dad exchanged uncomfortable glances. “Your mother and I have someone coming over this week to talk about our options,” Dad replied.
I forked a piece of broccoli and kept eating. “Okay.”
They both just looked at me, dumbfounded.
“So … you’re okay with that?” Dad asked.
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well, we wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable with the idea of needing to have one, to feel safe here.”
I put my fork down. “Dad, someone broke into our house. I think an alarm system would be okay.”
Mom put her hand on the table with a loud bang. “Enough! Enough of this conversation! I don’t want to discuss it anymore.”
“I think we should all discuss this,” Dad said.
“Yeah. It’s only an alarm system, Mom. No big deal …”
Mom’s face was stricken. “I don’t want to discuss this. We’ve lived in this town our entire lives and nothing like this has ever happened before. I don’t want to know that we’re getting an alarm system put in because there’s some crazy person breaking into homes and hurting people’s children and … and …” Her voice grew louder with every word until she