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“Yes, ma’am,” I told her, closing it. I would be staying until six in the morning when the next shift came in. “You’ll be doing another treatment in the morning.”
“I’m well aware of the change in schedule,” she said without looking up. “And spare me the ma’am if you would. I get enough of that from the sycophants trying to ingratiate themselves into my good graces.”
“Sophia or Miss Perkins, then?” I asked, picking up my bag.
“Do not presume that we are on a first-name basis,” she told me, finally looking up to stare at me, eyes glittering.
“Miss Perkins, it is then,” I said, walking toward the door. “If you need anything from me, you know how to get a hold of me?”
“I’m quite sure I can manage to press the well-lit button beside my bed should I wake and find that my stomach hurts,” she said, returning her attention to the book.
“Sleep well,” I said, not expecting a response as I closed the door behind me.
The house was quiet, save for the soft noise of a broom somewhere in the living room on the main floor. There wasn’t much in the way of staff in the house after nine. There was only one cleaner who did the maintenance cleaning, quietly, of course, because no one wanted to risk waking Sophia. She also kept a chef on the staff at all times in case either she or Shane decided they wanted something to eat, no matter the time of night. I also knew an armed security guard was positioned in what was apparently a shed of some sort at the back of the property, keeping an eye on the cameras.
It was exactly what I would have expected from someone with a great deal of money and yet somehow more minimalist. I knew her other children had houses that dwarfed her own, and they probably had entire shifts of staff moving in and out of their homes. Yet Sophia seemed quite content in a comparatively smaller house with only her son for company.
With only a little paperwork to entertain me, I sat in the kitchen, where I knew the cleaner had already finished so I wouldn’t be in his way. I pulled my laptop out, quickly filled in the sheet necessary for the next shift and would fill it in again at the end of the night, even if nothing changed.
Which meant plenty of free time to browse the internet for information on the Perkins family. I had done a little the night before but nothing in-depth, and only enough to learn the names, faces, and homes of her other children.
After a couple of hours, I found enough to confirm what Rhonda had said. Real estate had been the bulk of their funds when the family was growing, but it had found other avenues of income to invest in. There was no way to determine the actual investments or how far the money went. Still, there were several pharmaceutical companies they held shares in, a handful of machine part production companies, and whatever they had going on overseas. There was no denying how much money the family had, and most of the dealings were handled by Sophia, or at least that’s how it appeared.
“What’s the next step?” a rumbling voice asked, and I jerked in surprise.
I twisted in my chair to find Shane standing in the doorway to the dining room. He was thankfully dressed in more clothing than when I first saw him, but I didn’t miss that his shirt was just a shade too tight for my liking. “Next step of what?”
He grabbed an apple out of the bowl on the center island before gesturing toward my laptop. “Of your research. Are you going to start interviewing people?”
“Oh,” I turned to face the screen and closed it with a grimace. “Yeah, I guess I couldn’t help but be a little curious. I don’t know much about Cresson Point, so I didn’t even know your family’s name before my boss brought it up.”
“Now that is rare,” he said, hopping up on the counter to dangle his legs before him and taking a crunchy bite of his apple. “There’s not too many people I meet who don’t know my name. Well, the family name anyway.”
“I can’t say I did too much digging, but your name didn’t come up a whole lot,” I admitted.
“That’s because, in every batch of siblings, there’s always the underachiever, the brat child, the one who doesn’t give a flying fig about furthering the family name,” he said, now kicking his feet lightly. “I just so happen to be that child. I’m sure there are teams of psychologists out there ready to explain that it probably has something to do with birth order, and people with tarot cards and crystal balls ready to tell me it’s because I’m a Pisces with my moon in Libra.”
“I honestly don’t know a thing about astrology,” I admitted.
“Neither do I. I just know my sign is Pisces, and my last girlfriend was this New Age sort who enjoyed reading my future from the cards and telling me I’m a free spirit and dreamer because of my sign.”
His speech was a strange mix of proper elocution, blended with a more lighthearted, almost irreverent pattern. I honestly hadn’t come across before, but if I hadn’t known who he was or where he came from, I would have pegged him as someone who had speech lessons despite coming from a rougher background.
“So, what do you think about that assessment?” I asked, wondering if I should be feeding into this conversation or not. It was quickly becoming apparent he was just the sort of person I could find myself liking. Combine that with the fact that he was right up my alley physically, and I was risking putting myself into a potential danger zone.
“Absolute nonsense,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “If the future could be read by a few pieces of paper, then the world would be an entirely different place. And I still have no idea how where the sky was positioned at the moment I was born is somehow supposed to affect my personality.”
I was beginning to understand why Sophia was more tolerant of Shane’s irreverent attitude toward her than she would be with anyone else. “So, not a big believer then.”
“Oh, I believe,” he said with another crunch of the apple. “How tragic it would be if this absolute disaster of an existence wasn’t just someone’s grand experiment or monumental cockup.”
I laughed. “You’re a bright ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”
“Oh, it’s always bright and cheery wherever I go,” he said with a smirk.
Despite the warnings I kept giving myself, I turned to face him fully. “So, since I couldn’t find much about you in the news, save for a few bits and pieces, what do you do? Because I didn’t find anything all that salacious.”
“That’s because my mother refuses to let anything taint the name,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “Doesn’t matter if I host a large-scale orgy in a penthouse while sharing the floor with an exceptionally morally conservative diplomat. She has her ways of covering it all up. Money is usually the solution to all things, but she’s not exactly afraid to blackmail and threaten if she needs to either.”
