Chapter 1
“Bring my father. The entertainment has changed.”
Rosamund’s face lost its color.
That interested me more than an argument would have.
Linnea sat in the chair beside me with champagne still dripping from the ends of her hair. The clean linen napkin remained untouched because both of her hands were wrapped around the money crushed into her palm.
I looked at it.
“Keep it.”
She stared.
“Sir?”
“Whatever they gave you stays yours.”
Rosamund laughed nervously.
“That’s ridiculous. It was part of the game.”
I turned toward her.
“There was a game?”
Silence.
Good.
At the far end of the pavilion, two bodyguards approached an older man beneath the chandeliers.
Benedict Westcott.
My father.
Seventy-three.
Retired officially.
Never retired emotionally.
He walked with a cane he did not truly need and the expression of a king inconvenienced by being summoned inside a kingdom he no longer ruled.
Guests stepped aside for him.
Old habits.
He stopped across from me.
His eyes went first to Linnea.
Then to the money.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
“You bid?”
I asked.
“Yes.”
No hesitation.
“How much?”
“Ten thousand.”
Linnea shut her eyes.
Rosamund looked down.
The room changed.
Ten thousand dollars to humiliate a maid at my engagement party.
“What did you buy?”
My father’s gaze stayed on mine.
“One instruction.”
“What instruction?”
He tapped his cane once against the stone floor.
“To have her crawl from the champagne table to my chair and ask me whether your rules still protected her.”
Something inside me became very quiet.
I looked at Linnea.
Her shoulders were trembling again.
The final act had not happened only because I arrived first.
I faced my father.
“You were testing her?”
“No.”
His answer came coldly.
“I was testing you.”
There it was.
May you like
The maid had never been the target.
She had been the instrument.
