“I’ve been looking for you,” she says.
“Found me.” I smile, leaning against the wall, arms crossed. “How was shopping with your sister?”
“Oh, you know,” she says. “It was okay.” She steps a little closer. “I got something special.”
I raise an eyebrow. My heart’s already beating fast. I have a pretty good idea of what she got based on the way she’s looking at me right now, and I can already tell that I’m going to love it.
“Show me,” I say.
“Not right now. But I will later.” She bites her lip. “I want to kiss you.”
“I know you do.”
She rolls her eyes. “But I can’t. Because someone might see.”
I smirk and reach forward. I grab her hair and pulls her against me. I kiss her, long and slow, before she pushes away. “Asshole.”
“Just giving you what you want.”
She glares at me but smiles. She looks around the otherwise empty hallway and shakes her head. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”
“You’re probably right about that.” I lean my head back against the wall. “Had an interesting conversation with Patricks earlier.”
“Really? What did he want?”
“He wants to know what I’m hiding.”
She takes a breath. “He can’t know anything.”
“He doesn’t,” I say. “But he’s fishing. He’s suspicious.”
“Damn. He’s annoying.”
“I know.” I glance at her. “How much do you trust him?”
“He helped my brother and his current wife… he did something big for them. I think… we can trust him. We pay him a lot now.”
“Money isn’t the only thing people want.”
“True. But it helps.”
I laugh and look around the hall. Just in this little space alone, there are probably thousands of dollars, worth of art hanging on the walls. And this isn’t even a hall that gets much traffic.
“He told me he wants to help me with whatever’s happening,” I say. “I don’t know how that man can be so perceptive.”
“He’s smart,” she admits. “Did you tell him?” She looks at me and I can tell she’s afraid.
“I think he’s a decent person,” I say. “I was tempted. But no, I didn’t tell him anything.”
She lets out a breath. “Good. I’m afraid he’ll throw you out. He doesn’t care about anything but protecting this family. It’s his mission and he’s a little…”
“Intense,” I supply.
She laughs. “Yeah. Intense. That’s a good way of saying it.”
“Intense or not, he’s curious. But he could be helpful.”
“Let me think about it,” she says. “If we do approach him, I have to be the one to do it. He might listen if it comes from me.”
“True, but he might respect it if it comes from me.”
“We’ll do it together then.” She takes my hand and squeezes it. I’m tempted to pull her against me again but a staff member comes out of the kitchen, hurrying away from us with a rolling cart full of trays. Delia drops my hand and takes half a step back.
I smile at her. “Jumpy.”
“Sorry. I just…”
“I’m teasing.” I cock my head. “I figure you’re not ready to tell your parents that you’re fucking their new security guard.”
“Max,” she hisses. “Careful.”
I laugh again. “Don’t like to hear it out loud?”
“No.” She looks around again. “I just wonder…”
My laughter disappears. “You wonder, what?”
“How far my parents will go for security. Or worse than that.”
“You think they’re listening.”
She nods once. “Yeah. I think they’re listening. Maybe not everywhere, I doubt they could record everything that happens in here. But certain parts of the house…”
“Like where?”
“Kitchen. Living room.” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t even know if they’re doing it or not.”
“We’ll be more careful,” I say and touch her arm. She smiles at me but there’s real fear in her eyes. I can’t tell if it’s fear of her family, or fear for herself.
“Come on,” I say, and lead her away from the kitchen. We walk down a series of halls until we find the music room. I put my finger on my lips and walk past the piano, over toward the drums. I move around them and find a piece of molding on the wall that’s slightly loose. I push it in and a lock clicks. I slide the hidden door to the side and step through.
Delia follows me. I close the hidden door behind us. We’re in a small, dark, cramped hall. There’s a window ten feet up that bathes the space in light. She blinks up at me, surprise clear on her face.
“I didn’t know about this,” she says.
“Patricks showed me the hidden hallways,” I say. “Since then, I’ve been mapping them. I found this one early on.”
“Where does it go?”
“It has a few doors. Kitchen, living room, ballroom, gym. Few other places on the first floor. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to move between floors except for the main staircases, but there are secret halls upstairs, too.”
“This is crazy,” she whispers. “I mean, I knew about the servant hallways, but secret doors?”