Page 28 of Owned By Two

It was unreal and difficult to fully accept.

She was more beautiful than her photo — the one her father had shown me three years earlier.

Her eyes shone with an intensity I had only ever witnessed in her father’s face before.

She might not like to admit it but she had a great deal of him in her.

Her inquisitive nature swept everything she came across, appraising it and filing away the information for later study… all with a single glance.

I peered over at her as I led her towards her father’s — no, now it washer— office.

It was going to take me some time to get used to the fact the mansion now belonged to her and not her father, the human I had served loyally for the past four years.

He had always been reticent about his family and in particular, his daughter.

I had pressed him several times on the subject and each time, he always rebuffed my interest, forcing me to focus on the task at hand.

Usually, it concerned whatever business he wanted to merge with or take over next.

He was a rich and powerful man when I met him and I saw his wealth explode in the four years I assisted him.

He seemed to have a unique knack for identifying businesses with great potential and intuitively understood markets that could be opened up and exploited in ways his competition hadn’t thought of.

It was rare enough for a successful businessman to possess one such skill, never mind two.

I had heard from others that he had not always had such abilities, that he had struggled for the longest time in his career — a fact I found impossible to imagine.

But I supposed greatness was not born but grown.

His success required all those mistakes for him to finally be a roaring success.

The one time he did open up to me about his past was after a meeting with some Hive members.

He’d taken part in their traditional business bonding ceremony which required drinking huge amounts of alcohol — the Hive only did business with those who could match their prolific drinking abilities.

And James, as rarely as he drank, performed exceptionally well, belying a past where perhaps alcohol had been a mainstay of his existence.

When he emerged from the meeting, having successfully negotiated a profitable business deal, he left the Hive flopping to the floor in gales of laughter.

He’d had to stabilize himself on the wall, the alcohol having already taken its powerful effect, and I caught him before he could fall.

He had ordered me not to take a single drop of the strange Hive alcohol, no matter how much they laughed and jeered at me.

Now the meeting was over, I could see why.

He needed me to guide him back into our shuttle.

And it was then that he had opened up to me about his past.

About his wife.

And his daughter.

Until that point, I had only ever learned fragments from some of the older household workers who had overheard stories over the years.

But really, nobody knew the truth.

James might have popped into existence just ten years earlier when he began amassing his huge fortune.

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