Page 16 of Pucking Billionaire

“Thanks,” I tell her and examine the mansion, which looks even bigger up close.

“No problem, Mistress Papachristodoulopoulou,” the tattooed chick says in the same British accent I heard at the gate. “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Please call me Sophia.”

“But, of course… Mistress Sophia,” she says.

“Just Sophia,” I say and don’t add that, out of the two of us, she’s the one who looks a lot more like a mistress… of the BDSM kind.

“All right.” She wrinkles her nose so hard her nostril piercing clanks against the bull ring. “In that case, call me Euphemia.”

“Euphemia.” Should I tell her that means “well-spoken” in Greek?

“Or Effie,” she says, nose wrinkling again with a louder clank. “If you’d prefer.”

“Nice to meet you… Effie. What do you do here?”

Her spine goes rod straight. “I’m the Butler… Mistress.”

“Call me Sophia.” And did she say butler?

“Pardon me,” she says. “Addressing an employer in a respectful way was drilled into me back at butler school.”

So she actually is the butler. “The word Mistress is respectful?” For me, it brings to mind whips, chains, and homewreckers.

“But of course it is,” she says. “It is, after all, the feminine form of Mister.”

I guess that makes sense. “Did my father like to be so formal?”

She shakes her head. “He made me call him Theo, so you didn’t fall all that far from that apple tree.”

Why does that make me feel warm and fuzzy? “What do you do as a butler?”

My only exposure to her profession is Alfred, Batman’s surrogate father figure.

“I prepare rooms, host guests, tidy up, order goods for the household, make calls for?—”

She goes on for a while, and it sounds more and more like a job interview, or job justification. Is she worried that I’ll bring my own butler? Or—and this would be totally crazy, I know—that I’ll manage without a butler?

“Anyway,” she finally says. “I can give you a more detailed outline of my duties at your leisure. In the meanwhile, I imagine you’d like an introduction to the rest of the staff, along with a tour.”

“A tour would be nice.” As would knowing how many people work at this place. I don’t ask that, though, because it sounds like something I should already know.

As we walk the spacious grounds, there is a definite motif emerging—that of turtles. There are paintings of turtles, statues of turtles, murals depicting turtles, ceramic plates with turtles on them, and realistic photograms of every type of turtle known to man. When we get to “the media room,” which is really a private movie theater, a film about turtles is looping on the giant screen.

“At least it’s all consistent,” I mutter under my breath.

Effie smiles but just with her eyes, which must be a butler thing. “In the library, ninety percent of the books are about tortoises.”

I grin. “Of course. I bet turtle-themed music is playing somewhere in the house as we speak.”

Effie betrays her profession because a genuine smile actually touches her pierced lips. “If it had been up to Theo, ancient Hindus would be correct about Earth being flat and resting on the back of a large turtle.”

My grin widens. “A turtle that stands on an even larger turtle, which stands on top of an even larger turtle—with turtles all the way down.” We talked about this idea in one of my classes as an example of infinite regress.

Effie nods. “If this place had a motto, it would be ‘turtles all the way down.’”

I wonder if my father was this into turtles when he met my mother. She certainly never mentioned it, and it seems like the sort of thing you ought to mention. Maybe turtles were his way to cope with what she put him through? No idea, and at this point, it’s like asking what came first, the turtle or the egg.

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