Excerpt

The Erotic Secrets of a French Maid...

Chapter One



Seattle, Washington

     Emma Mayson wrenched on the parking brake and hoped her souped-up Honda Civic wouldn’t roll down the steep driveway and into the side of the multi-million dollar lake front house below.  It would suck equally as badly if her car hit the Jaguar parked in front of the garage.  She yanked a little harder on the parking brake, making sure her incorrigible car wasn’t going anywhere.  Then she popped the hatchback and got out, going round to fetch her buckets of cleaning supplies, sponge mop, broom, and all the miscellanea that housecleaning demanded.

     The house below was an example of Northwest Modernism, probably built in the 1960s by Roland Terry or one of his many emulators. Horizontal planes were punctuated with wide gables that reminded her of cedar Northwest Indian lodges, and under those gables and planes were walls of plate glass.  Emma felt a nudge of respect for the person who had bought this particular house rather than one of the new McMansions or pseudo Mediterranean villas that were squatting like false royalty round the edges of the lake.  She stood for a moment and simply admired the lines of the house.  

     Someday she, too, might become a “name” like Roland Terry, be hired to build the type of building that becomes a landmark in the decades to follow, and have a name that becomes synonymous with a new architectural style.

     Someday, she might design houses and buildings as remarkable as this one instead of just clean them.  They hadn’t mentioned in graduate school that the market was flooded with aspiring architects, and that a year or more could go by before an internship position with an architecture firm was found.

     A year in which to go through what remained of a small inheritance from one’s grandmother and to begin receiving repayment statements from one’s student loan services.

     She sighed, lifted the hatchback and started unloading her gear, propping broom and mop against the bumper.  As she struggled to hoist her canister vacuum out of the back, the wind tossed her dark pony-tailed hair in clinging tendrils across her face and into her lip gloss, where it stuck.  She tried to pull it out and, distracted, bumped into the broom, both broom and mop falling clattering to the pavement, knocking over a bucket on the way.  The bucket started to roll, rumbling down the driveway and careening drunkenly towards the Jaguar with a peculiar determination, as if its whole white plastic life of janitorial humiliation had been waiting for this chance to take a chip off an expensive car.

     Emma yelped and raced after it, dancing in small frantic steps down the steep drive, afraid of taking a tumble on the concrete.  From the corner of her eye she saw two men appear at the front door of the house.

     “Shoot, shoot, shoot!” she said under her breath, the sound of the bucket thundering with murderous pleasure as it rolled towards the car at roller coaster speed.

     She made a final lunge for the bucket and stopped it inches from the side of the Jaguar.  She herself didn’t stop so easily and thudded against the side panel.

     “Ow!”  She winced and held still, waiting for the pain to subside.  The bucket sat motionless and innocent, looking up at her with its wide open brim, daring her to challenge it.

     “Are you all right?” a man asked.

     His voice drew her gaze, and she met the hazel eyes of a thirty-something man.  He had brown hair and stood a little under six feet tall, broad-shouldered and trim.  He had regular features that would be unremarkable except for the intensity behind them:  the look he gave her was precisely focused, pinning her like a bug to a board and demanding an answer.

     Emma pushed away from the car and stood straight.  “I’m fine, thanks.”

     His eyes swept over her as if looking for signs of damage and then came to rest again on her face.  He didn’t say anything more, and Emma felt an awkward tension building.

     She massaged away the lingering pain in her side and grinned, trying to ease the moment and bolster her own courage.  “No harm done!  And it woke me up.  I didn’t have my coffee this morning.”

     A hint of smile breathed across his lips, but then his attention went to the other man, who scooted past them to examine the panel of the car, rubbing at the spot where Emma had hit.  This man was about the same age as hazel-eyes, but shorter and with a delicate, wiry build,

     “Kevin, knock it off.  Your car’s fine,” hazel-eyes said.

     “I can’t help it!  I just know something’s going to happen to it.”

     “I told you you should buy something older, with dents already in place.  You’re going to make yourself crazy trying to keep that thing perfect.”

     “It’s a beautiful car,” Emma said to Kevin.

     Kevin’s toothy smile revealed braces that glinted with sunlight.  “There!” he said triumphantly, the comment aimed at his friend.

     “He bought it as a chick-magnet,” hazel-eyes said.

     Emma chewed her upper lip, eyes flitting between the two men as a silence descended and they seemed to be waiting for her to comment on this piece of information as if, as a representative of womanhood, she could settle the dispute.  “Er…  I’m sure it will impress a certain sort of woman.”

     “Ha!  Gold diggers!” hazel-eyes declared.

     “Maybe,” Emma admitted, and saw the crestfallen expression on Kevin’s face.  “And maybe it will attract women who are looking for a stable, established sort of man who will be able to afford sending their children to private schools.”

     “Country club matrons.”  Kevin scowled at his Jaguar, some of the love clearly lost.

     “I forgot your name,” hazel-eyes said abruptly to Emma. “You’re the one my sister hired for me, aren’t you?”

     She blinked at him, realizing that this must be Russell Carrick, the workaholic entrepreneur who, according to his sister Pamela, had been sleeping on the same unwashed sheets for the past year and didn’t know a toilet brush from a hair brush.

     “Emma Mayson,” she said, holding out her hand, a smile pulling at her lips as she remembered his sister’s rants on his bachelor habits. “Your new housekeeper.”

     “Russ Carrick.  Pleasure to meet you.”  He gripped her hand in a firm grasp and Emma felt her heart skip a beat.  A sense of energy zinged its way straight from his hand down to her loins.

     He scowled at her for reasons unknown and released her hand, then turned to his friend.  “Kevin, get out of here.  I have to show Emma the house.  I’ll see you at the office inside an hour.  Make sure everyone is ready for that conference call:  I don’t want any screw-ups this time.”

     Ooo, he was bossy.  Emma’s native sense of mischief reasserted itself, and she wondered what he was like in private, with a girlfriend, and whether she called him pet names like pookie or snookums.  She had to bite back the smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth, picturing his endurance of such endearments.

     “It should go better this time,” Kevin said, getting into his car.

     “It has to.”  Russ waved Kevin off and turned back to Emma.  “I’m afraid this is going to be quick.”

     Emma imagined him saying the same thing before having sex, and grinned.

     Russ’s eyes narrowed.

     “Lead on,” Emma said innocently and gestured towards the house. 

     Russ muttered something unintelligible and lead the way. 

     Pamela, whose house Emma also cleaned, had told her that Russ was in software.  Like two-thirds of Seattle, it seemed, with the final third divided between Boeing, Starbucks, and Amazon.com.

     Russ stopped at the front door to flip open a keypad mounted on the exterior wall.  “Pamela did a background check on you and assures me that you have rock-solid references, so I’m going to give you the code to open the front door.  I usually won’t be here when you come.”

     “Okay.”  She listened to his terse yet thorough explanation of the locks and alarms and then at his prompting stepped forward to try the keypad herself.  He stood close to her, watching her fingers tap in the sequences.

     “Well done,” he said brusquely when she finished without error.

     She murmured a noise that could be construed as thanks only by someone not listening closely.  She hated being praised for brainless tasks, as if she were a dog who had sat on command.  It was one of her personal quirks - or flaws - and had caused her grandmother to scold her for having too much pride.

     “Is there a problem?”

     “No, no problem,” Emma said.

     Russ gave her an assessing look, then seemed to dismiss the issue and led the way into the house.

     Emma followed him through the foyer and into the main part of the house.  “Holy monkeys!” she gasped.

     The foyer’s dark matte stone floor turned into a gallery-like hall ten feet above the living room.  The room below was thirty by fifty feet, and its long wall was two stories of glass that let in a sun-filled view of lake and sky.  Emma was willing to bet that even on a dark rainy day, the room would feel bright.  The furnishings looked professionally chosen, all in neutral tones of grey, tan, and pale blue, echoing the view beyond the glass.  A dining table long enough for a castle’s great hall dominated one end of the room, bronze chandeliers hanging above it.

     The room was stunning.  Magazine-worthy.  And except for one oversized chair with a rumpled throw blanket wedged into a corner and a loose stack of newspapers and several coffee mugs on the floor beside it, the room looked completely unused.

     “I hope you don’t expect me to do windows!  Jeez, I’d never want to leave the house if I lived here; I’d just sit in front of the windows watching the water all day. Do you get tempted to do that?”

     “I’m rarely here during the day.  The kitchen is this way.”  He headed off to the right, down a flight of open stone stairs and through a door into a stainless steel and polished wood kitchen.

     The room was as devoid of signs of occupation as the living room, having only one small area where evidence of human life showed itself: the corner of the counter where a small bag of coffee sat before a built-in espresso maker.  A cutting board with a knife and hints of pink grapefruit pulp was between it and the sink, which held three days’ worth of cereal bowls and spoons.

     “You’re okay with emptying the dishwasher, aren’t you?” he asked.

     “Of course.  Funny how no one likes putting away clean dishes, don’t you think? Just like no one likes changing the toilet roll.”

     “I don’t have time for it.”

     Emma pressed her lips shut, taking the hint.  Okay, so he wasn’t one for idle chatter.  She mentally shrugged her shoulders.

     With small talk off the schedule she was free to follow him through the house, listening with only half an ear, her eyes taking in the details both of his ass beneath his trousers and of the house.  Both were pleasing.  As he walked in front of her there was a certain temptation to lay her palm over one rounded cheek and give it a squeeze.  When not evaluating his butt she evaluated the feel and flow of the rooms, guessing at where the constraints of construction had forced the architect to make less artistic choices, and admiring the places where form and function existed in elegant symbiosis.

     Neither house nor man resembled his sister Pamela and her home, she with her frosted blond hair and her house with its warm - albeit faux - Mediterranean style and the scattered detritus of three small children.

     “This is my room,” Russ said, leading the way into a bedroom with French doors leading out onto a small deck. 

     It was obviously the master suite, and Emma wondered at the way Russ had announced the room.  Not “my bedroom” or “the master bedroom,” but “my room.”  Like a child who only has one room to call his own, instead of the entire house.  And yet she knew from Pamela that he lived alone.

     The only pieces of furniture were a queen size mahogany canopy bed with green velvet curtains tied back at the posts; a bench at the end of the bed, covered with discarded clothing; and a white iron bedside table that looked like it had been pirated from a set of patio furniture.  The articulated metal lamp clamped to it would have fit better on a college student’s desk than in a multi-million dollar house like this.

     “I didn’t have time for the decorator to finish this room,” Russ explained, apparently realizing that the bedroom demanded an excuse for its condition.

     “The designer wouldn’t finish it on their own?”

     “She kept asking me to make choices.  Showing me pieces of fabric and photos of chairs.  Door knobs.  Area rugs.  I didn’t have time for it.”

     “Ah.”  Emma was beginning to get an idea of just how important time was to this man, although he didn’t seem in a hurry to finish their tour.  Instead, he stood frowning at the unsatisfactory space before him.

     “Do you want the sheets changed once, or twice a week?”

     “Once, I suppose.  Twice?  I don’t know. How often do people change them?” he asked, turning to her.

     She shrugged.  “Depends on your personal taste and your…”

     “My…?”

     “Activities.”

     He stared at her, and for a long moment she was afraid she’d crossed a line.  But then his gaze brushed quickly down her body before he turned his attention back to the half-furnished room.  “No time for that, either.”

     He was either one heck of a busy man, or he had some serious problems with his priorities.

     Not that she was one to talk, Emma reminded herself as he led the way to the bathroom suite.  It had been a year and a half since she’d had sex, and there were times she thought she’d happily tackle any passing young male and put him to the good use that evolution intended.  She blamed evolution as well, though, for making her just picky and cautious enough to avoid acting on the urge:  her health and welfare demanded more care than one-night stands with strangers, however tempting the notion.

     But still, there were many frustrating nights when she wanted nothing more than for an anonymous man to take her six ways from Sunday and not stop until she was too exhausted to so much as sigh.  She watched dramas on TV where couples fought and held icy silences, and wondered how the woman could be so stupid when she had a gorgeous male right there in the room with her willing to have sex again and again and again.

     Despite her ravening urges, though, Emma had set the pursuit of serious romance to the side, having neither time nor desire for it while she hunted for a position with an architecture firm.  She wanted to be actively moving forward on her career path when she next got involved with a man:  she wanted that future man to be someone who wanted to be involved with an ambitious professional woman.  Not a man who wanted to be involved with a housekeeper.  An educated housekeeper, a housekeeper with dreams, but a housekeeper nonetheless.

     In her vision of herself there was Present Emma: the woman she was now; and there was Super Emma:  the woman she intended to become.  Super Emma had her hair professionally trimmed once a month, her makeup subtly and flawlessly applied, her clothes chosen with impeccable, conservatively arty taste, and she was involved with a cultured, intelligent, sophisticated man who treated her like the precious flower she occasionally wanted to pretend to be.

     “I’m sorry about the smell,” Russ said, jostling Emma out of her reverie.  She had followed him into the master bath.  “It’s bad, I know.”  He was frantically tossing soggy clothes off the top of the hamper into a laundry basket.

     Emma wrinkled her nose as the sour odor of old sweat hit her nostrils, calling up memories of her high school gym.  “I assume you’ll want me to wash those.”

     “These?  Hell, no.”  His intimidating air was replaced by embarrassment.  “No, I don’t expect you to touch these.”

     Emma moved closer, curious now.  “What happened to them?”

     “Nothing.  They’re my Puck Skins.”

     “What?”

     “Long underwear for ice hockey.  And my towels and stuff.  I know they’re horrible; don’t touch them.”

     “You play hockey?”

     He pulled a slightly-used towel off a bar and spread it over the top of the laundry basket, obviously trying to hide the shame within and contain the stench.  “In an adult amateur league.  It’s a good workout.”

     Emma looked again at his nicely rounded ass.  “I’ll bet it is.”