“I’m very sorry about your grandmother,” she said. “We’ll miss her deeply.”
“It sounds like it was very swift.”
It had been. They’d all known the quick, anxious efforts of Mae’s nurse were futile. Even as Mae’s helicopter had airlifted her from the garden where it had happened, a blanket of subdued reflection had hung over the entire house.
Luli brought him into Mae’s office. The room was designed along spare lines, more staid than the other rooms, but still had feminine touches in the pastel color scheme and the English teapot that Luli filled for both of them every afternoon.
It felt terribly empty in here. Who would she drink tea with now? What was going to happen?
Her future was no longer in the tight, but secure hands of Mae Chen. Luli could kid herself that she was taking her destiny into her own hands, but that wasn’t true. The way this man reacted once he learned what she had done would dictate how the rest of her life proceeded.
His hands were long-fingered and lightly tanned. They looked powerful. Deadly.
Luli stood beside the rolling chair at the delicate writing desk that was her workstation, waiting for him to sit. He took in the room, glancing beyond the windows to the garden, and gave each painting and vase a brief, incisive glance.
She found herself holding her breath, waiting for his assessing gaze to come back to her, hoping for a sign of approachability in him. Approval on some level. Something that would reassure her.
“I thought you were a form of AI, but there’s nothing artificial about you. Is there?” His head turned and his expression eased, revealing a slant of something that invited and appreciated, even as it caused her inner radar to tingle with caution.
She had the most bizarre sensation of being chased, breaths growing uneven despite not moving. Her middle filled with fluttering butterflies, but they weren’t fear. They were the excitement of the unknown. Of playful pursuit.
This was sexual awareness, she realized with a pressure in her throat that was an urge to both laugh and scream. She understood sexual attraction in a very abstract way. She had been exposed to the feminine tricks of making herself appealing to the opposite sex far too young, but she wasn’t trying any of them right now. She was barefaced and the only reason she stood tall and sucked in her stomach was in an effort to seem confident and competent.
And she had been judged on her external attributes from an early age, but hadn’t felt it, not like this. If anything, she’d been repulsed by older men studying her and assigning her a score. Occasionally, since being here, one of Mrs. Chen’s visitors had noticed her and made a remark before she was shooed out of sight. She had been an odd duck, if not an outright ugly duckling.
She hadn’t realized a man’s gaze could make her stomach wobble and her blood feel as though it fizzed in her veins. That a force field could encompass her like a cup over a spider, so she could be scooped into the palm of his hand to be crushed or freed on his whim.
The butler came in with the tray, breaking their locked gaze.
“How shall I prepare your kopi, Mr. Dean?” the butler asked, pouring from the carafe into a jade-green cup with a gold handle that he balanced on its matching saucer.
“Black.” His sharp gaze touched on the single cup and swung back to Luli. “You’re not having any?”
The butler didn’t react, but Luli read the servant’s affront in the angle of his shoulders and the stiffness beneath his impassive expression. They’d been at war for years because she had Mae’s confidence in ways he didn’t. He’d been incensed that he had learned from Luli who Mrs. Chen’s grandson was—after Luli had informed Gabriel.
What could Luli have said, though? She doesn’t trust you. She doesn’t trust men. Mae had encouraged Luli to trust no one but her and Luli had given her the loyalty that Mae craved.
None of which changed the fact that if the butler had to fetch Luli a cup right now, he would die.
If she was a small person, she would force him to do it, but she was saving her energy for a greater revolt. A more daunting target.
“You’re very kind,” she murmured. “But that’s not necessary.”