The Wrong Bed
Chapter 01 - The Wrong Bed
Victor Russo had not let a woman sleep in his bed for five years.
Not a lover. Not a fiancée. Not one of the beautiful strangers his enemies tried to place in his path like bait wrapped in perfume. His bedroom was the only room in the Manhattan penthouse that still belonged to him entirely, and even there he slept badly, if he slept at all.
So when he opened the door at 1:18 on a freezing December morning and found Chloe Bennett curled beneath his charcoal-gray comforter, his hand moved automatically beneath his jacket.
Then she shivered.
It was not the false stillness of an intruder. It was a small, miserable tremor that moved through her feverish body before she curled tighter around herself. Brown hair had loosened from her housekeeping bun and spread across his pillow. Her gray uniform was wrinkled. One cheek burned red against the sheet.
Victor stopped beside the bed.
He knew her name because he knew every person on his payroll, though he had never had reason to say it. Chloe Bennett, twenty-four. New to the housekeeping staff. Quiet. Efficient. Never stared at the men who came through his house after midnight. Never lingered near doors.
She cleaned and disappeared.
Until now.
He placed the back of two fingers against her forehead. Heat rolled off her skin.
“Unbelievable,” he muttered.
She stirred but did not wake. On the bedside table, the untouched glass of water glittered beneath the lamp. Outside the windows, snow moved through the Manhattan skyline like ash from a very elegant fire.
Victor could have called Margaret Gable, his head housekeeper, and had the girl removed in less than a minute. He could have fired her before sunrise. Anyone else who crossed the invisible line around his private suite would have been made an example of.
Instead, he stood there listening to the winter wind scrape the glass.
The evening had been brutal. Leo Donati had spent two hours explaining why Victor should marry his daughter Celeste to settle a debt Victor did not owe. Men like Leo described women the way they described ports and warehouses. Useful. Transferable. Negotiable.
Victor had refused.
He refused every woman brought to him like an invoice.
He refused because he had watched that kind of bargain destroy his mother.
Chloe made a tiny sound in her sleep and pulled the comforter closer to her chin.
Victor removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and crossed to the opposite side of the California king bed. There was enough room between them for another person and a border treaty.
He lay down fully dressed.
For several minutes, he stared at the ceiling. The room was never quiet to him. It held old echoes. His mother's voice behind a locked door. His father's footsteps. The soft click of a key turning where a key should never have turned.
Then Chloe's breathing steadied.
It was a harmless sound.
Victor closed his eyes.
When Chloe woke, she knew something was wrong before she opened them. The mattress was too soft. The sheets were too heavy. Her rented room in Queens did not smell like cedar, winter air, and expensive cologne.
Memory struck all at once.
The fever. The linens. The dizziness. Sitting on the edge of the bed for one minute because the floor had tipped beneath her.
“Oh, no.”
She turned her head.
Victor Russo was lying three feet away, awake and watching her.
Chloe launched herself upright so fast the room spun. “Mr. Russo!”
“Don't stand up.”
“I fell asleep. I am so sorry. I finished the room, or I think I finished it, and I sat down because I got dizzy. I will leave. You can fire me. Please do not fire Mrs. Gable. She didn't know.”
Victor sat up slowly. His black dress shirt was wrinkled from sleep. His hair was disordered in a way that made him look less like the untouchable man downstairs and more like someone who had survived a difficult night.
“Bennett.”
Chloe kept reaching for her shoes.
“Chloe.”
Her hand stopped.
He had never used her first name.
Victor nodded toward the chair beside the window. “Sit down before you fall down.”
“I'm fine.”
“You're swaying.”
“I do that sometimes.”
“That is not reassuring.”
Despite everything, Chloe blinked at him. It took her fever-slow mind a second to decide whether Victor Russo had just made a joke.
His expression suggested he regretted it.
He crossed to the bar, poured a glass of water, and set it on the table near her hand without touching her. “Drink.”
She hesitated.
“It's water, Bennett. If I meant to kill you, using breakfast glassware would be unnecessarily theatrical.”
“I wasn't thinking that.”
“You were absolutely thinking that.”
She drank. The cold water hurt her throat and felt wonderful.
“Why didn't you wake me?” she asked.
Victor looked toward the bed.
Because I slept, he thought. Because for six hours I did not hear my mother begging behind a locked door. Because your breathing was the first innocent sound this room has held in years.
He said, “You looked exhausted.”
“That is not a reason.”
“It is the only one you are getting.”
Chloe put the glass down carefully. “I need the hours.”
“You are taking the day off.”
“Mrs. Gable will fire me.”
“She works for me.”
“I can't afford to lose a day.”
“You will be paid.”
She stared at him, fever bright in her eyes, and he felt a faint irritation at the part of himself that cared how desperate she looked.
“And from now on,” he said, “only you clean this suite.”
Chloe's fingers tightened around the glass. “Why me?”
May you like
Victor did not answer.
Outside, snow gathered quietly on the city, and behind Chloe's confused face, something old in the room seemed to wake with her.
