Dragon Lord (15 page)

If she was honest with herself, she supposed it was her ‘hero worship’ problem. She’d always found idiots annoying herself--she just couldn’t help it.
Stupid
bothered her--and it gave her such palpitations every time he looked at her, or walked by her, or she caught sight of him, that her brain stopped functioning and her mouth watered--not the one on her face. Even if her brain had been working and made it possible,
that
one dried up until she couldn’t talk for the fact that her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth because the
other
one was gathering all her juices--and that kiss had certainly not helped one little bit.

It made her shiver all over every time she remembered it.

Not that she could remember it all that clearly. She had been in
such
a state the only thing about it that she could really remember was that she was in
such
a state she hardly knew where she was.

Learning about his personal tragedy had made things much, much worse. She wished, for an infinite number of reasons, she’d never found out about that, mostly because she thought if she hadn’t she could’ve just dismissed her ‘god’ as an arrogant asshole after a while, not worthy of the hero worship she’d bestowed upon him completely without his consent--and obviously without his desire. She hadn’t just heard about it, though, and made up her own little fairytale about the tragic, handsome prince. She’d
seen
what it had done to him and as feverish as his kiss had made her, his pain had reached a lot deeper, stirred things up inside her that was ten times worse than lusting over her boss.

As far above her as the man was, a man’s cock was never all that discriminating. She might have had a chance of appeasing the lust, even if it meant doing so
also
meant she’d be waving goodbye to the job fairly soon and hello to the unemployment line.

The other--well she didn’t need Hatchet-face to tell her that, to men like Simon, she fell in the category of something one stepped in and scraped off the shoe as soon as possible in the hope of removing the stench. She didn’t have an inferiority complex, but she knew she belonged firmly with the working class. Even if she’d tried as hard as she could--and for him she would’ve been willing to try--she just didn’t know how to act like a high society lady. She’d never been close enough to one to find out, but she knew enough to know she would always stick out as ‘not belonging’ and that meant no chance in hell he’d ever consider any kind of relationship outside of the bedroom.

She wasn’t even the kind of woman a man would consider as a ‘trophy’--not beautiful enough, young enough, sexy enough, and certainly not glamorous enough.

No matter how much she suffered for him, no matter how desperately she yearned to be the one to try to soothe his hurt, she was never going to get the chance to get that close.

She’d never spent a lot of time worrying about what she wasn’t, but she envied that dead woman more than she’d ever envied any living woman in her life. If she could’ve just been half that beautiful, elegant, and graceful …. The truly ‘stunted’ like her couldn’t
attain
elegance and sophistication, though. The best they could hope for was ‘cute’ and she’d missed that, too. She didn’t have the face for ‘cute’, or the figure--or the temperament, if it came to that.

And she didn’t
want
to be cute, dammit to hell! She wanted to be taken seriously. She’d never wanted to be cute, and she damned sure didn’t want Simon to think so. She wanted him to look at her like he’d looked at that beautiful woman in the portrait--like she was a goddess or something.

“…. The handyman has arrived to repair the … uh … damages. When he has finished inside the main house, he will repair the apartment above the garage.”

Raina blinked, dragged from her abstraction by the keyword ‘handyman’ so that she caught the tail end of the conversation. She perked up instantly. “Really?” she asked hopefully, feeling such a dizzying rush of relief she forgot the ‘neither seen nor heard and never, under any circumstances, look directly at Mr. Draken, or draw attention to herself, or address him directly unless he has addressed you’ rule.

She remembered all that when Mr. Draken and the housekeeper both looked at her. Clearing her throat uncomfortably, she frowned at the potato in her hand. She would’ve picked up the knife and focused on peeling except, one, the housekeeper still hadn’t given it back to her and, two, she didn’t want to cut her thumb off in front of the boss and spoil his lunch.

Apparently, Higgenbottom didn’t trust her not to bleed all over the vegetables either. She put the knife away and searched the kitchen tool drawer until she’d unearthed a potato peeler when Simon Draken left. Raina tried for a while to mentally calculate how long it might take the handyman to get around to the bathroom in her apartment, but since she didn’t know the full extent of the ‘damages’ Simon had mentioned, and she didn’t know anything about handyman work and how long it took to do things, she finally dismissed that exercise in futility.

She hadn’t wanted to mention anything that might give Hatchet-face the opportunity to raise hell at her for her part in the fight the day before, but since Simon had already introduced it, she decided to see if the housekeeper knew where Audric stood now.

She cleared her throat. “I haven’t seen Audric today,” she said tentatively.

Higgenbottom stiffened and turned to look at her. Raina wasn’t looking at the woman, but she sensed the movement and then the burning laser effect of her gaze. “
Mr.
Smith?”

Raina frowned, trying to decide what the undertones were in that query. “His name isn’t Audric?” she asked doubtfully. She still hadn’t completely got the hang of those names. They were just too ‘generic’ to keep straight.

“He is
Mr.
Smith to you!”

She didn’t really want to get into another argument with Hatchet-face, but that irked her. “He told me to call him Audric,” she said, turning to look at the woman.

Higgenbottom’s lip curled like she smelled shit. “Earth …. American women, bah!” she muttered to herself. “No respect for their betters! If he said to call him that when you are romping in his bed, then that is his decision! Otherwise, you will respect his station and refer to him as
Mr
. Smith!” she added, turning to fix Raina with a hard glare.

Raina reddened, her hand tightening on the potato peeler. Maybe it
had
been a really good idea to take the knife and give her the potato peeler before she insulted her? Briefly, she indulged a little fantasy about shoving the peeler up the woman’s flared nostril. She gritted her teeth, counting to ten, and then to twenty. “Right,” she said sarcastically. “When we’re
fucking
, I can call him Audric. Otherwise, Mr. Smith. I’ll remember that.”

She fumed while she attacked several more potatoes, but when she got her temper under control, she tried again. “I guess that means
Mr
. Smith didn’t get canned?”

The woman stopped and turned to stare at her.

“Fired? Dismissed?”

“He is not a
servant
,” the woman responded with obvious disgust. “He is Mr. Draken’s half brother.”

That startled Riana so much she forgot about being angry. “No shit?” she asked, turning to look at the woman.

Again, the woman looked at her as if she smelled shit.

Riana counted to ten, and then to twenty, and she was still pissed off. “Look, lady! I don’t know what your damned problem is, and I don’t particularly give a flying fuck if my breathing offends your delicate sensibilities.
You
are a servant here the same as I am so you can just get off your high horse and stop acting like you’re better than me! I am
trying
to get along with you, but I’m
not
going to take your lip every time I open my mouth!

“Whatever you think, I’m
not
screwing
Audric
! He’s been nice to me and I just wanted to know if he was alright.”

Higgenbottom stared at her for a long, long moment. Finally, some of the tension went out of her. “The boys can get rowdy at times--that is the way of men, especially men of war such as they are--but they are deeply attached to one another and extremely loyal. Nothing
you
could do is likely to change that after all that they have been through together.”

Intrigued as she was by the first part of that speech, it was completely overshadowed by the snide remark at the end. Raina glared at the back of the woman’s head but finally decided to let it slide. Nothing she could say was likely to change the woman’s low opinion of her, and she didn’t care what the old battle ax thought about her anyway.

She shouldn’t have even asked the old bitch, she thought irritably, but at least now she knew Audric hadn’t been fired, which was the main thing she was worried about. She’d get the chance to see him when she served lunch so she could reassure herself he wasn’t the worse for the battle.

She
didn’t
get to see him at lunch, however. His seat was vacant when she took the food in. That worried her. There wasn’t anything she could do about it, though. She couldn’t just stroll around the mansion looking for him. Higgenbottom made damned sure she kept her well occupied.

Apparently there was work for the handyman upstairs and not just on the handrail and lower floor. Raina got the chance to see him climbing the stairs later carrying an entire window, which explained why Simon had taken up residence in the library, and made her wonder when the handyman might get around to working on the garage apartment.

Since the library was currently off limits, Higgenbottom sent her to clean up the front parlor. Most of the breakage had already been removed, but there was a good bit of glass and pottery shards still on the floor, which required a broom and dust pan for removal, and she saw the handyman was probably going to be working on the room after he’d fixed whatever needed fixing upstairs, and the handrail. Aside from several pieces of furniture that had been overturned, there were holes in the walls that were the size of heads and fists and broken chunks of molding lying around--which marked the room as the main battle ground.

She stared at the carnage of the once beautiful room in dismay, more because it brought home how much battering the men had taken than because of the lovely things that had been destroyed. ‘Things’, no matter how nice, could always be replaced--usually, anyway. People that sustained that kind of damage usually wound up in the hospital.

She wondered worriedly if that was why Audric hadn’t been at lunch.

Surely the old bat would’ve said something, though, if one of the ‘boys’ had ended up at the hospital?

She comforted herself with that thought right up until she entered the dining room that evening and got her first look at Audric.

Chapter Nine

Raina really hated the soup that generally constituted the first course, not that she had anything against soup, but it was hell getting through the kitchen door with a tray loaded down with dishes of soup and even worse trying to get the plate and sliding bowl on the table without spilling anything--because Higgenbottom always set the bowls on top of a plate for some reason that defied logic in Raina’s opinion since it
obviously
wasn’t there to catch the soup she spilled.

She’d just breathed a sigh of relief that she’d managed to negotiate the door and looked up as she moved toward the table to gauge the distance between herself and anything that might trip her up or that she could bump in to, when Audric looked up and directly at her. Sucking in a sharp breath when she saw his handsome face was battered almost beyond recognition, Raina dropped the tray from suddenly nerveless fingers.

Naturally enough the clatter of breaking dishes drew every eye in the room. Raina had just looked down in dismay at the mess at her feet when Higgenbottom charged out of the kitchen to see what had happened, stepped in a puddle of soup on the floor and executed the most amazing slapstick pratfall Raina had ever been privileged to witness first hand. She gaped at the woman in dismay as her feet flew out from under her and up into the air, her long, black, demure skirt flapping upward to display her granny panties and the hose rolled to her knees. The woman landed flat of her ass in the middle of the soup, mopping up a good half of it as she skidded across it.

Before she could stop herself, or even realized it was coming, a gale of laughter erupted from her. She clamped a hand over her mouth, trying to stifle it. “Oh my god! Are you hurt?” she gasped when she thought she had her untimely mirth under control.

Not surprisingly, since her voice was shaky with suppressed laughter instead of the least bit sympathetic, Higgenbottom’s shocked surprise gave way to indignation and she glared up at Raina.

For some reason, that struck Raina as even funnier, probably because the usually excruciatingly dignified woman was sitting in the middle of the puddle of soup with her dress in her lap and her carefully coifed hair all askew. She tried not laugh. She really did. Another string of giggles erupted, however, as she bent down and tried to grab the woman’s arm. “Here! Let me help you up.”

Someone at the table coughed, which drew her gaze automatically, although she’d been at pains to try to pretend they weren’t there. She registered a couple of grins before she discovered that Audric had gotten up to help Mrs. Higgenbottom up. “Watch the soup!” she warned, just before she stepped incautiously into a glob herself as she tried to brace herself to help pull the woman up. She skidded. “Whoa! Shit!” she exclaimed as she fell against Audric.

It was touch and go for a moment, but he managed to steady both of them, grabbing Raina as she plastered herself against him and started to slide toward the floor. As he righted her, she looked up at him, wincing at the painful looking bruises on his face.

It embarrassed him. She could see it did. He moved away from her and made his way around the mess cautiously until he was behind Mrs. Higgenbottom. A fist crashed on the tabletop, rattling dishes and glasses, as he bent down and hooked his hands beneath her arms to help her to her feet.