How utterly exhausting.
After I’d seen Nadir off, I slumped into a chair, completely spent.
“Is this how it’ll be every day?” I didn’t even want to imagine it.
“You know,” said the butler who had completely misunderstood my relationship with Nadir, grinning ear to ear, “I thought he was more into the prim and proper types.”
Clearly he still had the wrong idea.
“I keep telling you that’s not what happened!” I protested.
“Oh, it’s fine, it’s fine!” he said, raising a hand as if to stop me. “I understand!”
He did not!
“Ah, a tale of love between a commoner and a nobleman, a bridge between two worlds... How romantic...”
He really did not.
“I may not look the part,” I said, “but I’m a baroness.”
“What?!” he exclaimed. “You don’t look like one at all!”
Did he really have to be so blunt about it?
“I thought maybe you were an orphan like me,” he explained. “So sorry!”
“Oh, you’re an orphan?” I asked.
He grinned widely again at my question. “Yes! Yes, I am! The young master took me in when I was five as an apprentice butler!”
“Huh. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing he’d do.”
Nadir didn’t seem the charitable sort, after all.
“I know, right?! Shocking, you may think!” the butler exclaimed. “But actually, he’d been planning to take a different child in. They weren’t available, so I was picked as the replacement.”
“Oh?”
So he’d had someone else in mind.
“I’m so lucky!” the butler exclaimed. Perhaps he’d had some sort of special skill, and that’s why he’d been chosen as the substitute? Still, looking at him, he seemed pointedly unexceptional.
“But you know,” I said hesitantly, unsure whether being so blunt was a good idea, “considering it’s been over ten years since your adoption, and I’m just saying, you still look quite...plebeian.”
In other words, he didn’t look like a duke’s butler.
“Apparently my personality was already set in stone at age five!” he said. “I tried to adapt, you know, my way of speaking and such, but eventually I was told ‘enough already,’ and they let it go!”
They’d given up on him, essentially. I bit back the urge to say that out loud.
“I’m surprised you haven’t been fired yet.”
“The young master may be the way he is, but he does have a compassionate side to him, you know!”
So the young butler said. I certainly had yet to see this side of Nadir.
“Still, even now the young master hasn’t given up on the orphan he’d originally aimed for,” the butler said. “He keeps asking me if I remember anything about that child.”
“You’d think with the connections and resources of a duke, he’d be able to find them easily,” I pondered.
“See, that’s the thing!” the young man said with a chuckle. “The young master was only ten at the time, so he wasn’t very thorough. He didn’t even know this child’s name! And since management at the orphanage was a mess, they had no clue where that particular orphan was taken.”
“An orphanage under the duke’s management was that poorly run?” I asked, surprised.
“Oh, no, no, this wasn’t an orphanage managed by the young master’s family or anything,” the butler explained. “He just happened upon it one day when he got lost after running away from home.”
He’d run away from home? Nadir absolutely did not look the type.
“Ack! Rats,” the young man said. “I need to get back to work! I’ll see you around!”
After running his mouth to his heart’s content, the butler ran off. The boy was a bit like a whirlwind, but it was hard to hate him.
“Oh!” I gasped in realization after he’d left. “I forgot to mention I’m an orphan too...”
✦ ✦ ✦
“What are those?” Nadir blurted out.
I’d greeted Nadir when he came home, taken his luggage, and followed him to his chambers. Just like earlier this morning, he’d ordered me to get him changed.
So, of course, I’d put these on.
“They’re called ‘sunglasses,’” I explained. “They make things look a bit darker, and you won’t be able to see my eyes as clearly!”
I praised myself for my wonderful idea. With this, even if I saw him unclothed again, I wouldn’t be as embarrassed!
Oh, incidentally, these sunglasses had originally been meant to be sold to the aristocracy, but sales had failed to meet expectations. Nobles were confident, you see, and didn’t need anything to hide their faces.
I couldn’t afford to have excess stock just sitting around, and so I’d changed my target audience and modified them to suit commoners instead. Now that sales pitches were directed at those who worked directly under the sun, the product did reasonably well.
“Unacceptable,” Nadir said, without bothering to hide his irritation, and unceremoniously snatched my sunglasses from my face.
“Ack!” I yelped. “What are you doing?!”
“I forbid you from wearing these.”
“Why?! I need them so I can work smoothly!”
“And who says I want your work to be smooth?” he asked, flatly denying my argument. “I just want to see you flustered.”
“Oh, you twisted devil!”
“Say what you will. Now help me change.”
“Urk...”
I gazed longingly upon my sunglasses, now forever out of my reach, never to be returned to my hands. With reluctant resignation, I began to undress Nadir.
It was okay! I’d just done the same thing this morning! I wasn’t about to be embarrassed by seeing a man’s torso!
That was what I wanted to believe, anyway. My red cheeks paid no heed to my internal pep talk. This was not the sort of thing one could get used to in a day or two.
My trembling fingers were no help whatsoever. I looked at Nadir, whose lips were curled into an amused smile. That twisted, twisted jerk!
“H-Here, I’ve unbuttoned it, so move your arm!” I told him.
“Be gentle with me,” he demanded.
“Can you stop being weird about this?!”
He was very obviously making fun of me, clearly enjoying watching me fume. Well, I wasn’t going to waste my time entertaining him! Quickly, I stripped him down.
“There. I’ve undressed you,” I said. “Now put your arm through here.”
“You’re much smoother about it than this morning,” he remarked, seemingly disappointed that I wasn’t as panicked as last time, despite my embarrassment. “Boring.”
“One gets better at work the more they do it, no?!”
“I want to see you lose your mind.”
“You should be careful with your word choice so you don’t give people the wrong idea.”
As I buttoned up his shirt, just like in the morning, the door swung open.
“I heard that!” Nadir’s young butler exclaimed, barging in without knocking yet again. “How indecent!”
“See?!” I said. “There’s a wrong idea, right there!”
Nadir frowned in displeasure at the interruption. “Knock before you come in, Ben.”
“I’m so sorry, Young Master!” the butler said. “I just couldn’t possibly miss a love scene like this! Who knows when I’d get the chance again?”
“Ben!” Nadir snapped, visibly irritated.
“I’m sorry!” the butler with a tendency to say entirely too much replied. “I’m so sorry!”
Huh. I don’t think Ben ever told me his name. Wait, I never introduced myself properly!
I extended a hand to the young man. “Apologies, I seem to have forgotten to introduce myself,” I said. “I’m Brianna, a baroness. I’ll be working as Nadir’s maid for the time being. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Ah, Brianna! I see!” the butler replied with his wide, youthful grin, shaking my hand. “I’m Ben! I’m seventeen! Nice to meetcha!”
Would that Nadir had some of that innocence.
Our warm handshake was broken apart by a hand chopping sharply from above.
“...”
“......”
“.........”
Ben and I, both dumbstruck, looked silently at Nadir who, for some reason, looked silently back at us.
After pondering for a moment, he cleared his throat. “Unmarried women shouldn’t be casually holding hands with young men.”
That made no sense whatsoever.
“What do you mean, ‘holding hands’?” I asked. “This is a handshake...”
“And it’s unnecessary,” Nadir pointed out. “Don’t do it.”
“Handshakes are pretty necessary when introducing oneself.”
“I said don’t do it.”
“Okay, fine! I get it!” I didn’t, actually.
Still, Nadir seemed satisfied with that. Ben, who had been watching quietly, joined his hands in a heart shape once more.
“You two really are a thing!”
“As I keep saying, we are not!”