I Like Being Watched by Jessica Gadziala

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four

Wynn

 

 

 

 

I was trying not to screw it up.

That was what I had told my reflection as I carefully dressed for my first day of work.

Sure, a big part of me wanted to slip on a miniskirt, heels, and a tight, low-cut tank. But the rational part of me chose a simple white button-up with the top button undone, with a pretty blush lace bra underneath, and a demure-length skirt.

I needed the job.

I needed to appear professional.

Especially at first.

I mean, no one could blame me if I had to lean over to pick up something off the floor and my very professional shirt just slipped open a little in front of a camera.

So that was the plan.

Test the waters, get a little thrill, but make sure everything was above any sort of reproach. I needed the money. And I was actually kind of excited to take on a steady job.

I knew a lot of creative sorts who thought nine-to-five jobs cramped their vibe, but I had personally found that nothing made for worse art from me than financial upheaval. Constantly worrying how I was going to be able to cover an upcoming bill always took me right out of the mindset I needed to really escape into my work.

I was hoping a steady—and generous—paycheck would help spark a new fervor, the kind I had known in the early days of my college career, back when my lovely step-father so generously helped pay my bills so that I could get a leg-up in life. Those were the times when I would set up my supplies across my side of the dorm room, then set to work early in the morning, only seeming to come out of my trancelike state sometime after dark, arms aching, stomach grumbling, but with epic, beautiful pieces of art to show for it.

I'd even sold all those pieces.

Now?

I hadn't sold anything for months, not even the marked down canvases that my local coffee shops and libraries had posted up for me.

So I was going to be the best damn house manager anyone had ever seen. Who sometimes bent over in front of a camera or spilled out of her shirt. But since I was alone when it happened, no one could fault me for it.

Fitzwilliam Buchanan would have no idea there was any sort of agenda behind any of it. That was always what made it best, anyway, the man's belief that he had caught you in a private, exposed moment. It wasn't nearly as fun when they knew I knew they were watching.

Plan in place, I made my way to the Buchanan estate, pausing to roll my eyes at a concerned text from Perry before silencing my phone and tucking it into my purse that I stashed in a corner of the kitchen once Elsbeth let me inside.

From there, I was given my own key, a list of the household employees, and the expected daily and weekly duties before Elsbeth was shuffling off, leaving me alone in the sprawling mansion.

I hadn't gotten any sort of official tour, so notebook in hand, I made my way through the house, reminding myself that it wasn't snooping to get to know the place I would be working, that if I was supposed to clean the powder room on the first floor and the master bath on the second, then I certainly had a right to figure out where they were all situated.

The rest of the house was much like the main lower floor—an understated kind of classy, no fuss, no frills, everything in neutral grays or whites.

Except, it seemed, the master bedroom.

Fitzwilliam Buchanan was certainly a fan of the color black.

God, I was turning into Perry, using the man's whole name every time I thought of him.

The master bedroom was as massive as you might imagine with the square footage of the estate. But it was somehow dominated by a massive bed that seemed like it had to be custom made, larger than any king-sized I had ever seen, draped in black sheets, a black comforter, and black throw pillows.

The wall behind the bed was also painted a matte black, including all the built-in bookshelves that could be found there.

I mean this man was rich and anal enough about these sorts of things that even the books on the shelves had dust jackets printed up with matte black covers and shiny black titles and author names on the spine.

The drapes over the French doors that led onto the back balcony were drawn and, you guessed it, black.

The sheer amount of the one dark color should have made the space oppressive and gloomy. But even I—someone who loved color—found the space unexpectedly comforting and sleek.

I moved through the master bedroom, making my way into the bath, finding it in stark contrast to the bedroom, everything bright white much like the kitchen with its marble countertops and tile in the shower as well as the white soaking tub and the white walls.

"Strange," I decided, wondering what kind of man went from a dark bedroom to an almost painfully bright bathroom as I went into the drawers and cabinets, jotting down notes on brands of products, and how many were left of each thing.

It wasn't until I was making my way back into the bedroom that I saw it.

The first one I had noticed.

A camera.

I don't think anyone would have noticed it if they didn't know it was there. But there it was. A shiny circular spot in the spine of a book.

Adrenaline sizzled across my nerve endings as I forced my gaze away from it, not wanting it to be clear that I knew it was there, that it was watching me. That defeated the whole purpose.

Instead, I placed the notepad down on the nightstand as my gaze went to the bed, my hands reaching for pillows, fluffing them with perhaps more gusto than the task required, hard enough that my boobs burst open my second button by the time I got to the third pillow.

I finished the fluffing, then moved to the foot of the bed, grabbing the corners of the comforter while bending forward, feeling the cool air in the room brush over my partially exposed breasts as I shimmied the comforter straighter on the bed. Let's just say there was quite a bit of jiggle involved in this task. Necessary? Probably not. But I sure made it seem like a normal thing to do as my body heated, my sex clenching at the idea of Mr. Buchanan sitting down in his study after work, going over his security footage as I suspected any careful man would do the first day a new employee started in his home, and coming up on the footage of my tits spilling out of my bra and shirt, bouncing around as I made the bed he would later go to sleep in.

It was tame.

The whole thing was vanilla, all things said.

But it was just the right amount of excitement for me as I walked back to my notebook, picked it up, and walked innocently out of the room.

I went ahead and did another couple hours of tasks with the extra button open. Wiping surfaces, sweeping, restocking things from the massive storage closet between the kitchen and the garage.

It was only when I heard some of the men showing up to take care of the grounds that I ducked into the powder room, covered myself up, and made my way outside to greet them, introduce myself, and make sure everything was getting done.

It should have felt strange, running a house that didn't belong to me. Or running a house at all when all I'd ever needed to do was take care of my little apartment. And even that I, admittedly, did not do spectacularly. I mean I had once needed to use a coffee filter as TP when I had let myself run out.

But, suddenly, at this new job, I was finding myself on top of my game. I had lists upon lists upon lists. I actually brought my laptop to work on the third day to work on a spreadsheet that I pinned inside the door of the storage closet, making everything I needed to know right there when I needed to find it quickly.

Those first couple of days, I found a total of ten cameras hidden in various places. In the clock on the wall in the kitchen, behind a plant in the hallway, in the garage disguised as a lighter, in the living room inside a fragrance diffuser.

His study had multiple ones covering all corners of the room. One was inside a Bluetooth speaker, another as an extra carbon monoxide detector. I didn't see the third one for a long time. In fact, I was on my hands and knees, bending forward to reach for my pen that I'd accidentally had roll under the leather sofa, giving the other two cameras good angles—one looking down my parted shirt, noticing I had forgone a bra that day, the other hopefully catching my skirt riding up, showing off the bright red lace thong I'd put on that morning—and that was when I saw a little hole in the charging block plugged into the wall, something that didn't belong there, something that I knew from doing a little online research on the subject, was a hidden camera.

The man was paranoid, I had decided already, not a creep.

He had cameras in places that wouldn't normally catch people in compromising positions. There weren't, for example, cameras in any of the main bathrooms or guest bathrooms. But there was one in his own bathroom, hidden in the electrical outlet. Which was strange, sure, but not exactly creepy since he was a single man, and the only person who appeared to use that bathroom was himself.

So everything simply pointed to him being extremely security conscious.

Which was fine.

I didn't particularly care about the cause of the cameras, just their presence, just my ability to put on a show for them.

A show for him.

But after a solid week of no long glances when we passed in a hall, no eye-fucking me when he thought I wasn't looking, I was starting to wonder if he never viewed his footage after all.