Page 2 of Marcellus: House of Drakos
“I don’t want any company. Get rid of them,” Niko yelled from his bedroom.
“You’re not the boss of me,” she yelled back at him. Which used to always make him laugh since he was in actual fact the boss of her. But this time all he did was cough.
Savannah made her way to the front door and looked through his peephole. When she saw two white men standing at the door, one of them immediately caught her attention. It was a familiar face, although she couldn’t place it, but she knew she’d seen it before. The thick brown hair. Those deep blue eyes. That seemingly perfect face. She would have never forgotten that face. But when she opened the door she realized why that face looked so familiar. It was an older version of Niko’s face!
Marcellus Drakos had no intentions of coming to that apartment when he first arrived at his Chicago mansion for his monthly dinner with his children and their mothers. A dinner no one, including himself, was allowed to skip. But when Niko didn’t show up at all and the reason was given to him, he couldn’t in good conscience catch a plane back to France without at least paying him a visit. Especially since Niko was the only one of his children that didn’t work for him and, as a consequence, rarely had any communication with him. He had to see for himself that he was okay.
So there he stood, in his tailored suit and his knee-length brown cashmere coat with a thick, white scarf around his neck, impatiently waiting for his son to answer his ring. But when a black woman he’d never seen before opened the door, he suddenly wondered if he was mistaken. Not about the apartment. It was difficult to mistake the penthouse apartment inside a building. But about her. He certainly didn’t remember her face: he was right about that. But it absolutely felt as if he’d met her before.
“May I help you?” she said to him as he stared at her, and as she found herself staring at him. They both felt a kind of unrehearsed warmth toward the other immediately. A kind of otherworldliness, an oddness, a strangeness even, they’d never felt before.What on earth?
But his curiosity got the best of his manners. “And you are?” he blurted out.
Savannah didn’t normally give out her name so easily, but for some reason she did without hesitation. “I’m Savannah Richardson. How may I help you?”
That name didn’t ring a bell to Marcellus at all. But he had to have known her. Why else would he have such a robust reaction to her if he’d never met her before? “I understand my son is not well.”
And that was when she was certain. She had Googled Niko’s father once, when she first started working for Niko and he was constantly talking either very good or very bad about his father. Even online he had one of those unusually attractive faces that made it difficult to ever forget. And Niko looked so much like him. “You’re Niko’s father?” she asked him.
“I am. May I enter?”
She detected a very slight French accent in his voice as she stepped aside and he walked in. His bodyguard, the second gentleman at the door, remained out in the hall to guard that door as long as the boss was inside.
Marcellus kept looking at her as she closed the door. He had just turned forty-one and had celebrated his birthday with his family at the dinner, so he was conscious of age int that moment. And he placed her age in her late twenties, maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine if he had to venture a guess. Around six years older than Niko.
But he could see by the bags under her eyes and her long, thick hair that was in such a messy ponytail, that she’dbeen under some severe strain. Was she his caretaker during his ordealandhis maid? Or was she something else to Niko entirely? “How is he?” he asked her.
A look of concern registered on her face. “He’s getting better,” she said. “Three days ago he couldn’t hold anything down at all and was throwing up every few minutes it seemed. Now he’s able to eat a little and throws up every hour or so, with a few exceptions. He’s improving, but the doctor already reminded him that pancreatitis is a painful recovery.”
“He’s a heavy drinker.” Marcellus said it as if it was a fact.
Savannah thought that was presumptuous of him. “Not to my knowledge.” She answered his statement as if it were a question.
Marcellus looked at her with a flash of anger. “What do you mean not to your knowledge? Why else would he have pancreatitis if he isn’t a heavy drinker?”
“He has these bouts every year. He has a chronic case that has nothing to do with alcohol. At least according to his doctor. But what does he know? He’s just a doctor.”
Marcellus looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. Did she just get smart with him? Withhim? Surely if she worked for Niko she had to know who he was and the power he wielded. She had to know that nobody dared to get sassy with a man like him.
But strangely enough, he didn’t lash out at her. The fact that she wasn’t afraid to speak up to him, even in that sardonic way, and his reaction to just seeing her, piqued his curiosity.
“Would you like to see him?” she asked him.
“I would, yes.”
“Right this way please.”
As she escorted him to Niko’s bedroom, he couldn’t help but check her out. She wore shorts that highlighted her smooth-brown, slender legs, and a loosely-fitting shirt she had tied up above her navel, revealing a flat stomach. She was a slenderwoman overall, but with more than enough curves and in all the right locations to elevate her body. Tight ass. Nice hips. Dark hair that was probably attractive if it wasn’t so messy and in that ridiculous ponytail. She was nicely packed. Very nicely packed. And he couldn’t help it. Just watching her ass made him go hard.
Which was a first for him. He’d never had a maid turn him on before, nor a caretaker if that was what she was, and especially not one that smelled like throw up.
“You have company, Niko,” she said to him as they approached his room door.
“Didn’t I tell you I don’t want any company,” he yelled out at her.
“Sounds like a personal problem to me,” she yelled back to him, to Marcellus’s surprise, as they entered his son’s bedroom. What kind of way was that, he wondered, to speak to your employer?
But when he saw Niko lying in that bed, he realized that her smell was coming from his son. And that his son wasn’t just “under the weather” the way it was said to him, but appeared to be deathly ill, he forgot that maid with the nice ass and hurried to his son’s bedside.
