Forest Whispers by Kaitlyn O'Connor

Jones, Mr. Black,
Mr. Green, and Mr. White.
    No way in hell was she believing that was
their real names.
    They were like--a security detail of some
kind, reminded her of glimpses she’d had of the secret service men
that surrounded the President--they were that fucking scary! Maybe
a little more scary.
    Except for the detail of slight variations
in hair coloring, they almost looked like a matched set of
bookends--all of them were at least six foot tall and built like
bouncers on steroids. All of them wore suits and dark glasses. All
of them had hard angular, strangely exotic faces and looked as if
their faces might crack if they ever used any of their facial
muscles for anything approaching a smile. They all had
unfashionably long hair, which was smoothed back on their heads and
tied at the base of their skulls into a ‘ponytail’ that should’ve
made them look ridiculous but somehow didn’t--probably because they
practically dripped testosterone.
    Like the housekeeper, they all wore black,
except their suits weren’t throwbacks in style like the
housekeeper’s dress--or dresses. Either the woman wore the same
dress every day or she had a closet full of the identical style. It
was Raina’s third day on the job and she’d yet to see the woman
wearing anything that looked the least bit different from the dress
she’d worn the day Raina had come to interview a week earlier.
    She had yet to see the mysterious Mr. Simon
Draken, her actual employer, but, as curious as she was about the
man, she actually dreaded the possibility of running in to him.
    The housekeeper, Mrs. Higgenbottom, had
spent most of her first day on the job telling her what was
expected of her and laying down the ‘rules of the house’.
    She was a servant, not to be seen or
heard--at all--which was where the archaic attitude came in. Mr.
Draken was a busy man and rarely left the west wing, where his
‘suite’ lay so she was assured an encounter wasn’t likely, but if
she happened to be in an area of the house when he did pass
through, she was to try to make herself invisible and never to look
directly at the man.
    Archaic!
    It made her uneasy, though. Maybe she wasn’t
supposed to look at the guy because she was a servant and dirt
beneath his feet, and maybe there was some kind of dark and creepy
reason she wasn’t supposed to look at him.
    It was a flaw in her personality, she
supposed, that aside from engendering a good deal of resentment in
her, the restrictions had also given rise to a wealth of curiosity
she might not have felt at all if Mrs. Higgenbottom hadn’t been so
adamant that she was forbidden even to look at the man. Her active
imagination had instantly began to conjure speculative images.
    The mansion almost looked like it could’ve
been from the Dark Ages, in style anyway. Except for the style of
the architecture, it didn’t look old, but the house didn’t look new
either, mostly because she couldn’t imagine the craftsmanship
evident in the place having been mass produced or even handcrafted
by modern day millworkers.
    So she figured he must be old, especially
with his archaic expectations of his household staff.
    He was obviously filthy rich, too. Even if
this estate had been handed down to him, she couldn’t imagine a
younger man wanting to live in a place like this--single, she
thought. There’d been no mention of a Mrs. Draken.
    The fact that she’d been forbidden to look
at him made her think he was deformed or disfigured in some
way.
    Maybe not.
    The security detail that guarded the place
as if it was Fort Knox suggested he might be someone who’d, at
least at one time, been famous, maybe a political dignitary or
something.
    Or maybe not. She supposed it could’ve just
been his wealth.
    Shaking the thoughts off, she focused both
her mind and her gaze on her work for a moment, examining it
carefully. She didn’t want to get fired when she hadn’t even
collected her first paycheck and Mrs. Bitch, old as the crow