The Billionaire Beast(5)

But would you have sex with him? If he asked? For six figures?

Phoebe ignored that thought, too, keeping her hands clasped in her lap, meeting Nero’s disquieting stare.

He said nothing, the silence around them becoming not so much awkward as heavy, dense. As if she was standing on a mountain top and the clouds were rolling in.

Then abruptly he pushed himself away from the desk and turned, heading toward the mysterious door behind his desk without another word.

Phoebe blinked at his retreating back. Was he leaving? Was the interview over? “Mr. de Santis? Is that it? Do I have the job?”

He reached for the door handle, gripping it in one long-fingered powerful hand. Then he paused and turned back to her, his expression hard. “Do you want the job?”

It’s not like you have a choice.

“Yes,” she said firmly, ignoring the disquiet that coiled in the pit of her stomach. “Yes, I do.”

“Then it’s yours. You start in an hour.”

Phoebe stared at him in shock. “Wait . . . What? An hour? But I’ll need to get back home to—”

“James will organize to have your stuff brought to you,” he said curtly. “You should find everything else you need here already. An hour, Miss Taylor. Be ready.”

And then before she could ask him any more questions, he’d disappeared through the door, shutting it very firmly behind him.

Phoebe allowed herself a glare in the door’s direction. Ridiculous. Did he really expect her to take up the position within an hour of being given it? There was so much to prepare. She had to get home and organize her things, go to the hospital, and give the staff her new contact details. Tell her parents she had a new job and would be living somewhere else. And . . . and . . .

Not so much to do.

Phoebe let out a breath. Well, maybe not, but still. An hour? He really expected her to start what was sounding like a very difficult job without any preparation at all?

Apparently, he does.

At that point the door to the office opened and James, the butler, came in, his craggy face expressionless. “Mr. de Santis has requested that your belongings be brought here, Miss Taylor. If you could kindly let me have your apartment key and a list of items, I’ll make sure that happens as quickly as possible.”

God. This was moving too fast. Far too fast. She needed to get home and sort through her stuff, not have someone else do it for her. What if she forgot something important? And did she really want some complete stranger going through her knicker drawer?

“Miss Taylor?” James prompted.

Come on, pull yourself together. This isn’t how you deal with unexpected changes. You cope. You handle it. And apart from anything else remember. Six figures. Every three months.

Phoebe shook herself. “Yes, of course. Do you have something I can write on?”

Five minutes later, after she’d collected her discarded hairpins and given a list of items to James, plus a few instructions on what not to touch in the apartment, Phoebe was escorted upstairs and through the hallways of the house to what would be her rooms.

Nervousness and a certain amount of trepidation sat in her gut, though she did her best to ignore them, looking around her at the house to distract herself instead.

It seemed much bigger on the inside than it had looked on the outside, with great long hallways, stairs spiraling up to other floors at various intervals, and lots of doors leading to many different rooms. It was almost mazelike. And there was hardly any furniture. A hall table there, an armchair shoved into a corner there, a shelf or two against a wall.

What there was a lot of, though, was art.

Paintings lined the dark walls, along with beautifully shot photographs, all, without exception, landscapes. Of cities. Of jungles. Of mountains. Of deserts. There were none of people whatsoever.

Interesting. Did he have something against people, or did he just prefer nature?

As they passed one long, artfully framed panorama shot, obviously taken from the top of a mountain, Phoebe murmured “I see Mr. de Santis is fond of the outdoors.”

“Yes,” James said. “Mr. de Santis appreciates landscapes.”

“Lucky he has lots of walls in that case.” She glanced over her shoulder at the long hallway stretching behind her. “This house is certainly much bigger than I thought it was.”

“Mr. de Santis bought the whole block. The buildings have all been renovated into one house.”

Phoebe stared at the butler in surprise. Well, that certainly explained why the house felt so big inside. “That’s . . . what? Five houses? Seems an awful lot of room for one man.”

“Mr. de Santis likes his space,” James replied with finality, indicating that was the end to the matter.

But she couldn’t resist pushing a little. “They say he never leaves his house. Is that really true?” She could hardly imagine it was. There was something so vitally alive about him, a kind of raw, animal vibrancy that didn’t go with the image of a man huddling inside his house, too afraid to go out.

It would be like putting a lion, or a tiger, in too small a cage.

James didn’t answer, his expression forbidding, so Phoebe let it lie. She’d find out the truth soon enough, she supposed.

Finally, James led her through an ornate door and into a spacious and surprisingly light set of interconnected rooms.

There was a bedroom painted a delicate shade of mint green, with huge windows covered in swathes of sheer, billowy white curtains, and an honest-to-God four-poster bed in one corner. Off the bedroom was a small sitting room painted in the same shade, with lots of bookshelves full of books and a comfortable looking white couch and armchair. There was a bathroom off the bedroom, too, white-tiled, with a separate shower and bath that looked big enough for an entire football team.

It was rather lovely, she had to admit. Not to mention unexpected. The decor was feminine and romantic, that made her think that Nero de Santis had definitely not had a hand in planning it. Though maybe she was doing him a disservice. Maybe there was a hidden romantic underneath that hard, intensely masculine exterior of his.

The thought made her smile. No, there was nothing romantic about him, she’d bet her life on it.

“Anything else I can get for you?” James asked, already moving toward the doorway, clearly impatient to get on with whatever it was he did.

“No, I don’t think so. Oh, I suppose Mr. de Santis will . . . what? Call me when he wants something?”

“Yes,” James said. “He will.” And before Phoebe could ask him anything more, the elderly butler vanished through the doorway, pulling it firmly shut behind him.

Phoebe stood for a minute in the middle of the room, feeling the sudden silence settle down on her like a heavy weight, combining with the nervousness and considerable trepidation to form a thick, hard lump in her gut.

Had she really done the right thing in taking this job? It clearly wasn’t going to be easy, not with Nero as an employer. He was . . . strange.

In fact, this whole set-up was strange.

Phoebe moved over to the windows, pushing aside the gauzy curtains, peering out. For some reason, she half-expected there to be bars over the glass, but there was nothing marring the view down into what looked to be a stunningly beautiful garden.

There were small trees and shrubs and beds of colorful flowers. White shell paths wound through the foliage, and she could even see the sunlight catching on the drops of a fountain in one corner of it.

She leaned her head against the glass, half-smiling. New York could be wonderful like that, with small emerald gems of gardens hidden behind imposing brick walls or behind the gray facades of buildings. It reminded her of the rose garden in London her father was fanatical about maintaining, though that garden had been planted much more rigidly than this one here was.

There was a wildness to the garden below her window, a certain untamed quality to it that her father would have never allowed in his rose garden.

Rather like Nero de Santis himself.

Her scalp suddenly prickled at the remembered sensation of his fingers in her hair, the skin over her cheekbone tingling from where he’d stroked it.

Frowning, Phoebe shoved him out of her head. It wasn’t time to be thinking about her employer, it was time to be preparing herself for her new job.

Letting the curtain fall, she made her way over to the bed and sat down on it, putting her handbag in her lap and digging around for her phone. Bringing it out, she punched in the hospital’s number, giving them her new details about which they sounded completely uninterested. After that, she quickly checked the time, then called her parents to let them know that she finally had a job and would be living somewhere else temporarily.

Her mother answered the phone on the second ring, sounding the way she always did, light and slightly out of breath, as if she’d been running to get the phone. “Oh, Phoebe! I’m just on my way out. Why do you always call at such an inconvenient time?”

Once, her mother’s first words every phone call had been “How is Charles?” Now, they were either about how inconvenient Phoebe’s call was or questions about why hadn’t she called sooner.

“Sorry,” Phoebe said patiently. “I just wanted you to know that I have a new job.”

“But how wonderful!”

“Yes, it is. But it’s a live-in arrangement. Which means I won’t be at the apartment for a little while.”