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“You want me to dance?” he asked.
Anna-Beth smiled. “No, I don’t want you to dance, unless of course you want to dance. I’m not here to force you to do anything you don’t want to do.” Like fall in love with me, and love me the same way I do you. There was no way she was going to tell him her feelings.
He was her boss, and she was trying to keep it professional. In fact, she suddenly realized that asking her boss to dance with her was not professional. She couldn’t help but drop the smile, and then understood what a fool she must have looked like.
“Anna-Beth, what’s going on?” George asked.
“It’s nothing. You’re totally right. I shouldn’t be asking you to dance.” She clasped her hands together, as she had memories of all the times she’d not been a simple employee.
Malcolm had dumped her here, because he had nowhere else to put her. Also, she knew he’d chosen his friend’s place specifically to keep her out of the line of gossip. Dancing, doing yoga, singing, cooking, cleaning, actually having fun, was not part of the Knight handbook.
Firing people, being cruel, manipulation to get what they wanted—they were all traits she refused to use.
“Dinner will be ready at five,” she said, brushing past him.
Dancing on the grass like a lunatic was not a good idea. Even though she was completely and totally in love with George, and had been since she was young, that didn’t give her cause to act like an idiot.
She walked into the kitchen and went straight to the fridge where the brisket waited. She’d gotten it out of the freezer yesterday as there were a couple of recipes she wanted to try.
George always ordered his meat from the local butcher, in bulk, and then froze it. He’d then use it throughout each month, leaving the final piece of meat until he ordered another one.
She tried not to think about her family and what they were capable of. She’d never gotten along with them. Not even when she was a kid and had seen their antics up close. Of course, they didn’t realize she’d been watching. To her parents, kids were to be seen and not heard, and seeing as she was a surprise child ten years after Malcolm was born, she’d been raised by mostly nannies. Nannies she had loved.
There were one or two who’d been strict and cruel, but they hadn’t lasted long. She remembered when one nanny had gotten angry with her for not understanding math at a young age, and she’d smacked her bottom with a belt. Malcolm had come to see her, and instantly fired the nanny. She did love her brother, as she did her parents and the rest of her family. She just wasn’t like them.
“Damn it, Anna-Beth, you don’t just keep giving your money away on hopeless causes. You must learn to invest money.”
“Why are you so dumb?”
“That is not how that works.”
“I’m so disappointed in you.”
“How can I trust you when you do this?”
That last one was because she helped an employee who had been unjustly fired, and she showed the woman what to do. She’d also provided the documentation for her to dispute her wrongful termination.
There might be a teeny, tiny problem her family didn’t know about. She didn’t test well, but she did have an amazing understanding of business law, seeing as she might have studied it. Or was it employment law?
Either way, Anna-Beth refused to be cruel. Her parents had placed her in the HR department as they thought she would do little damage there. She caused them too many headaches.
When people got in their way, they fired them, and it was wrong. Of course, those that did deserve to be let go, she didn’t dispute. The ones who were amazing at their jobs were able to stay. She wondered if any of the people she’d helped still had a job.
It had caused many stressful conversations around the dinner table. She didn’t care, as most of the people who worked there needed their jobs. She was more than willing to help.
Chapter Two
One Week Later
George stared out his office window at the lawn. It was gorgeous outside, and yet, his housekeeper was nowhere to be seen. He’d done this every single day, including Sunday, and Anna-Beth seemed to be avoiding him.
She had his breakfast ready for him in the morning. Lunch was delivered, usually when he was on a phone call, and she would eat her dinner and have his waiting for him. She didn’t spend any extra time with him, and he didn’t like it. He missed her, a lot.
He never thought he’d miss her weird yoga rituals, and dancing on the lawn. A week ago, when he had every intention of joining her in some mad dance-off, that smile had dropped from her face, and he felt like a cloud swamped his whole life. Now, he felt he had to sneak around his home to catch even a glimpse of her, and that sucked big time.
He checked the time, and knew it was getting close to lunch. He’d already called the office and gotten his assistant to change all of his appointments. There wasn’t going to be a single call to interrupt him through lunch.
George knew how insane this sounded, but what was more, he didn’t care. He was used to getting what he wanted, and right now he missed sharing a meal with Anna-Beth. She talked constantly and shared delightful stories of dogs and her time volunteering, sometimes of her growing up with nannies.
