The Clumsy Maid Gave a Bath to a Mafia Boss’s Dog- Then he Refused to Let Her Go
Chapter 5
Spring arrived slowly across the estate grounds, and with it, a small addition to the household that Maya hadn’t anticipated. A litter of stray kittens had been discovered in the estate’s old carriage house, and while most found homes readily enough through Maya’s careful network of local shelters, one small gray kitten with a crooked tail refused, entirely on his own initiative, to leave Duke’s side once the two had been introduced during a routine socialization session.
“He’s decided,” Maya told Vincent, watching the kitten curl against Duke’s massive flank in the cottage’s small living room. “I don’t think there’s much either of us can do about it now.”
“What’s his name?”
“Pip,” Maya said. “He was the smallest of the litter. Seemed appropriate.”
Vincent, who had by then taken to spending most of his free evenings at Maya’s small cottage rather than the estate’s considerably grander main house, found himself, over the following weeks, developing a particular fondness for the kitten that surprised even him. “I run an organization that controls considerable territory across this entire region,” he observed once, watching Pip attempt, with visible determination, to climb the considerably larger obstacle of Duke’s sleeping form. “And somehow the most stubborn creature I’ve encountered all year weighs perhaps three pounds.”
“Stubbornness doesn’t scale with size,” Maya said. “You’d know that better than most people, given how long it took you to admit you preferred my company to Isabella’s.”
“I admitted that considerably faster than you’re suggesting.”
“You visited every single evening for two months before you said anything directly,” Maya said. “I was beginning to think Duke would need to formally intervene.”
Vincent’s expression carried the particular rueful acknowledgment of a man caught in an accurate accusation. “I wasn’t accustomed to wanting something I couldn’t simply arrange through resources or authority,” he admitted. “You weren’t a problem I could solve by deploying the right amount of money or influence. I found that considerably more disorienting than any actual threat my organization has faced in years.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve learned that some things are worth the particular discomfort of simply asking honestly, rather than trying to arrange them from a comfortable distance.”
Their relationship, once formally acknowledged, unfolded with a particular unhurried ease that surprised both of them — Vincent gradually shedding, in Maya’s presence, the careful public composure his position demanded everywhere else, Maya finding in his quiet, attentive company something considerably different from the particular careless disregard that had defined her relationship with Grant, the ex-boyfriend whose dismissive prediction about her lasting one week in this job had haunted her more than she’d ever admitted aloud.
“I looked him up once,” Vincent admitted one evening, several months into their relationship, the two of them sitting together on the cottage’s small porch while Duke dozed at their feet and Pip stalked something invisible across the yard. “Grant. I wanted to understand exactly what kind of man would tell someone as capable as you that you wouldn’t last a week anywhere.”
“You didn’t need to do that.”
“I know,” Vincent said. “I did it anyway. He’s selling insurance in a city three hours from here, apparently unremarkable in every measurable way. I take a certain quiet satisfaction in knowing you built an entire new life, considerably more interesting than his, in the exact amount of time he predicted you’d fail at it.”
“I didn’t build it to prove him wrong,” Maya said. “Though I won’t pretend that isn’t a satisfying side effect.”
“No,” Vincent agreed. “You built it because you’re considerably more capable than either of us initially understood, that first afternoon in the courtyard. Grant simply never had the patience to notice. I got fortunate enough to be standing there when Duke decided to show me otherwise.”