“Caro, life is too short for this.”
“Then why force me to choose?”
“Because when you reject my proposal, you’re telling me you don’t trust me to take care of you, to not hurt you.”
“Maybe I don’t want to only be with one man,” she shot back, chin raised. But his words stuck, and she considered them, tried to be reasonable even when nothing inside of her made sense. His thumb drew wetness across her cheek and she blinked, noticing the tears. How unfair! But she couldn’t stop.
“Is that it, Caro?” He didn’t seem to believe her, and she didn’t have the will to say some other cutting remark, to protect herself. She had only ever wanted one man. Instead fate had seen fit to give her someone else. And she’d had two sons. She didn’t regret her sons. But perhaps she would regret losing Sutbridge for a second time.
He was waiting for her, and the silence was so heavy. Was a mere possibility worth…the chance of losing everything?
She took a deep breath.
“I’m scared, John,” she said finally and turned her cheek into the curve of his palm. “I…” The words caught in her throat and she met his eyes again, wishing he could understand. But he said nothing, waited for her to speak.
She lifted her head from his touch and took a deep breath. “I loved you then. Wanted nothing but you.”
“Could you love me now?” he asked. For the first time since that moment when he’d hovered above her on the divan, she saw him vulnerable. It gave her strength, made her feel less weak and fearful.
“I could…I do.” The words came out of her in a gasp, and she felt light, full of air and yet empty of breath at the same time. She was lost––she was drowning––but his hands were supporting her, holding her up, and she raised her own to cling to him.
His head rested on her shoulder, and she understood from the weight, from the dampness of his face against her skin, that she was supporting him too.
“Ah, is this the infirmary, then?”
At the sarcastic, familiar voice, Caroline and Sutbridge broke away. There at the threshold of the dining room was Julia, silhouetted by the hallway light, looking rather self-satisfied.
“Julia,” Sutbridge said, and Caroline was grateful that he spoke. “You must stop meddling in my life.”
“Why?” Julia scoffed. “Clearly neither of you could have put your match together on your own.”
Sutbridge made a warning sound.
“No,” Caroline said suddenly, wiping at her eyes. She was still too raw for this scene but there was no use in fighting anymore. She had missed her friend. “She’s right. Who knows each of us better? Better than we know ourselves. But don’t let that get to your head, Julia.”
“Too late, Caro,” Julia said with a laugh. “I’d best go. I think it’s only fair that I find a match for poor little Artemesia. Engaged for so short a time.”
• • •
Sutbridge watched his sister leave the room, a faint smile on his lips. She had left the door ajar and he glanced down at Caro, stunned by the sight of her in the seemingly brilliant light that flooded in from the hallway. She was watching him, and she was smiling too. It took him a moment to recognize the feeling that filled him, made him feel taller and stronger.
Joy.
“Marry me, Caro,” he said softly, taking her into his arms. She didn’t protest his embrace. Instead she reached for him, wrapped herself around him, stretching to hold him. He stopped her before she kissed him. “Wait, I need to hear it, please.”
She laughed. “I see how it will be. Demanding, always.”
“Caro?”
“What?” She was laughing and he loved the sound. He pressed her against the wall, captured her lips with his own. She tasted wonderful, and he drank her up as a man parched for ten years. The scent of her skin intoxicated, the touch of her hands tormented, and the brush of her hair against his skin drove him wild.
“Yes.” He loved the way she responded to him, wanted more. And then he stopped. Pulled back.
“Yes?” he repeated.
She nodded and he thought he’d never seen anyone so beautiful before in his life.
“Perhaps I am the most unwise, romantic fool ever in this world,” she said softly, belying the warning of her words with the buoyant tone of her voice, “but yes, I love you. And yes, I will be your wife.”
• • •
Hundreds of candles illuminated the grand ballroom. Even after a fortnight of residing at Sutbridge’s ancestral estate, Caroline wasn’t quite used to the size of everything. Her two boys, however, loved it and then adored it even more after John showed them the secret corridors. They were, he had said, “one of the benefits of being a duke.”
Caroline liked those discreet passages as well.
This room, however, was the opposite of secret, everything being for show, for the purpose of spectacle. From the lush potted plants to the twelve-piece orchestra, whose members were even now tuning their instruments.
The room was empty and yet chaotic.
Not so dissimilar to her thoughts.
Tonight, Twelfth Night, she was hosting her first gathering since the wedding, which had been a rush affair by special license. But her concerns were far more domestic, her pleasure more intimate.
I shall get you with child and then marry you.
She rather suspected that had been the order of things after all.
Oh, it was too soon, too soon to be sure of anything in this fledgling marriage. And yet, with two babies delivered, Caroline knew––experience wasn’t always about the bitterness of life.
“Duchess.” She turned at the low word, stepped forward to meet Sutbridge’s fervent embrace. She had only an impression of his handsome face, framed with its loose waves, the impeccable exquisiteness of his coat, before he crushed her to him. “My duchess.”
She laughed at that, at the reminder of her new title. Only a few weeks earlier she had set her own terms for marrying again: A duke…and a rich one at that. Terms that were ridiculous, and that should have resulted in her never marrying again. Yet Sutbridge was both.
“And good evening to you, too, my love.”
“Dance with me.” He didn’t wait for her to answer, swept her up into a waltz. The discordant sounds of the orchestra stopped, and then began again matching their steps. A nice touch, that.
All at once Caroline didn’t want the guests to arrive. She wanted to keep dancing in her husband’s arms, in this glowing paradise of their own.
She laughed again with joy at the ridiculousness of it all. Her terms, his demands, her protests. Now, here in this ballroom, it seemed as if life were fated, inevitable. After all, she was dancing, finally, with Sutbridge. And she was completely, utterly and helplessly in love.
OTHER BOOKS BY SABRINA DARBY
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Other Books by Sabrina Darby
SabrinaDarby.com
• • •
HARRIDAN HOUSE
On These Silken Sheets
(Erotic Regency)
goodreads.com/book/show/6608224-on-these-silken-sheets
Private Research
(Erotic Contemporary)
goodreads.com/book/show/17860215-private-research
• • •
TAMING NOVELLAS
Woo’d in Haste
(May 2014)
goodreads.com/book/show/18599814-woo-d-in-haste
Wed at Leisure
(May 2014)
goodreads.com/book/show/18599815-wed-at-leisure
• • •
STAND-ALONE REGENCY
The Short and Fascinating Tale of Angelina Whitcombe
goodreads.com/book/show/15738221-the-short-and-fascinating-tale-of-angelina-whitcombe
• • •
STAND-ALONE CONTEMPORARY
Entry-Level Mistress
goodreads.com/book/show/17366
100-entry-level-mistress
sabrinadarby.com/entry-level-mistress
Please enjoy the following excerpt from Sabrina Darby’s first contemporary novel
Entry-Level Mistress
Daniel Hartmann and Emily Anderson have every reason to hate each other. Her father destroyed the lives of his parents and he in turn sent her father to jail. Now Daniel’s a successful billionaire and artsy Emily is his newest employee. Both of them intend to make the other pay for the sins of the past, but revenge has never been so sweet.
ENTRY-LEVEL MISTRESS
excerpt
Chapter One
For the seventeenth time in the last five minutes, I looked at the clock on the upper right corner of the computer screen. 10:15 a.m. I was doing exactly what I’d always said I’d never do, working a desk job. A 9-to-5 sort of job, with a real water cooler and posted hand-written warning signs on the fridge in the small kitchen. Oh yeah, and as the lowest employee on the totem pole it was my job to clean that kitchen and refill the coffee machine every few hours. Drip coffee. I couldn’t even call myself anything as fancy as a barista. In between kitchen duties, I was supposed to answer phones, track packages and greet the stray person who wandered onto the third floor office of Hartmann enterprises. The marketing department. Which was the only department a new college graduate with a BFA in Studio Arts and no corporate resume to speak of could get someone to look twice.
I’d seen the job listing on the board at my college just as I was about to hand in the paperwork for a fellowship at the prestigious Barrows Farm artist’s colony. With the flush of shock heating my body, I had walked by, put the envelope for the fellowship in my counselor’s hand and then, trembling, walked past the job board again. The listing had stuck in my head: Hartmann Enterprises, shining success of Daniel Hartmann, the man who had destroyed my father.
It was, as if, no matter where I went or what I did, or how much I distanced myself from the mess of my parents’ lives, Hartmann was a shadowy presence in my life.
I remembered him vaguely from his mother’s funeral. I was nine and shy, awed by the tall, handsome college freshman, who looked even more breathtaking and unapproachable in his dark suit and grief. I’d been twelve when I’d heard my father, nearly under his breath, curse Hartmann’s name, even as we packed up our house and moved to an apartment out of the city. Retrenching, my dad had called it. Then, when my dad went to jail, I was sent to live with my mother and stepfather in Arizona.
Daniel’s father had made costly mistakes that endangered the competitive future of Rocklyn Corporation, a failure my father blamed on the amount of medication Mr. Hartmann’s took toward the end of his life. I never fully understood what had happened but I knew Daniel’s mother, Lucille, had somehow been involved in a weird Hamlet sort of way. Or maybe even in a Howard Hughes sort of a way, out on a yacht in the ocean, with possible foul play. After all, my father and Daniel’s mother had had an affair. In her grief, Lucille had turned to my father, and my father took the opportunity to be with the woman he had secretly loved, regardless of how damaged she was. He tried to help Daniel, to be a surrogate father, to support his attempt to fill the elder Hartmann’s shoes. And this was where the history grew vague to me, even as the local press proliferated articles on the matter. Because none of that was the truth. No matter what the papers said, my father had been framed. Set up by Daniel in a complicated scheme that seemed like the stuff of fiction. We had ended up being the victims of whatever had gone on between the Hartmanns and the evil that permeated everything they touched. Except, of course, Hartmann Enterprises, which was wildly more successful than the business our parents had shared.
It would be easy to hate him.
Sometimes, during the early years, when my world was upended, I resented him. But mostly, for the last seven years, I created my own life, with Daniel almost a mythic presence.
I shouldn’t think of him as Daniel, as if I actually knew him. Yet between his handsome exterior and the impact he’d had on my life, Daniel Hartmann had always been a sick fascination for me, one that landed me a job in a field I had never imagined myself. For some amorphous desire to wreak havoc on his charmed life the way he had on my family, here I was, in a sweater set and knee-length skirt that I’d found in the bargain bin of Filene’s Basement.
And my hair! That was the worst of all. I’d had to dye it nearly black to cover up the purple highlights I’d worn all year. Now, I was typing in the names of all the employees of the company into an Excel file in preparation for everyone’s new business cards. I was the cliché of office worker, counting down the hours until the end of my first week of work. Not that the office was a chore by any means. It was merely tedious, and all I really wanted to be doing was working on the sketches for the marble faux-Grecian bust I’d been planning to finish just after graduation.
Except my curiosity about Daniel Hartmann was apparently stronger than my artistic desires. Otherwise, I wouldn’t now be in his employ, wasting away my summer.
“Happy hour at the Belmont after work, Emily?”
I tilted my head slightly and looked up over the metal rim of my cubicle at James Craig, the second newest marketing department employee. I could just picture the glam version of this scenario, my sweater set/skirt combo doing a day-to-evening quick change with the help of accessories, high heels, and my long black hair, freed from its French twist, swinging about my shoulders. I should have prepared for this. It was classic office work life, if movies were anything to go by.
“I don’t really know anyone,” I hedged, not wanting to think too deeply about that other clichéd element of life: office politics and culture. Who I would have lunch with was a more pressing concern than drinks after work. Each day I left the office like I had somewhere important to be for those brief sixty minutes. It was like high school again, worrying about what the other eleven people in the department thought of me. Or my stupid sweater set.
James leaned on the metal and I watched it move a little under his weight. “Just the other assistants. Claudia from payroll, Frank and Suzie from R&D, Allison from Hartmann’s floor, a couple of others.”
Allison was exactly why I was going to suck it up and drink down the cosmos like I was Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. If this tangent from my normal life wasn’t going to be completely pointless, short of storming his office and introducing myself, I wanted to find out everything I could about Daniel Hartmann and his company.
“I’m in,” I said, giving James the bright “actress” smile I’d perfected freshman year of college; the one I used every time I was about to jump into something I probably shouldn’t.
He smiled back and his was another expression I recognized from college: young man smitten. I turned back to my computer screen with an inward wince. Not only was James not my type, but also I had no intention of creating any attachment at Hartmann Enterprises. I was here for one thing only, to find a way to bring Daniel Hartmann down.
I blinked. Okay. That was a bit over dramatic and this was life, not acting class. But nonetheless, I didn’t need a boyfriend to tie me to this world.
From my peripheral vision, I could tell that James lingered there a moment longer. Then he left and I relaxed. Typed in another name. At least this was one way to get to know the company roster––of all seven Hartmann offices across the country. How on earth would that help me?
The room seemed to hush, pressure shifting, whooshing air through my ears. The sudden silence, the absence of keys clacking and office mates chattering, unnerved me. Something was going on. The usual background noise started up again but more orderly, carefully. I looked over my shoulder toward the elevators. Then I understood.
The presence of my new boss, Lance, wouldn’t have been enough to quiet the group. No, it was clearly the man standing next to him, the six-foot-three-ish, John Varvatos-clad Men’s Vogue escapee. Literally, since I’d seen Daniel Hartmann grace the cover of that and other magazines countless times. He was more handsome in
person. Everything about him was familiar, the way a celebrity is when you see one in the security line at the airport. As if maybe you know him or her from high school, or from camp.
Of course, I sort of knew Daniel but he was thirteen years older than when I’d last seen him. As if he sensed I was staring, his gaze found mine. Then, even from across the room I could see the slight narrowing of his eyes. No, I felt it. Down my spine, my skin, settling into a sharp nausea in the center of my body. I sucked in my breath. In all of the years that I had hated this man, had tracked his progress through society, and even in the last week working at his company, I had never imagined him looking at me like that.
Did he know who I was?
I let out my breath slowly, turned back to my computer screen. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe either. It was way too hot in the office. I shrugged out of the sweater and pushed the few straggling hairs that had escaped my French twist off of my neck.
Did he know? Because if he didn’t, then that look was just some strange twist of fate. And if he did know!
If he did know, then this was sick. He was like this classic, darkly handsome villain. Of course he would have looked at me this way, made me––the innocent victim of all his dastardly deeds––the focus of his attention. I laughed aloud at my ridiculous, over-dramatic thoughts, and then, alarmed, brought my hand to my mouth.
I focused on the keyboard and the paper list of names. Typed another in. Slowly. I could hear Lance and Hartmann walking about the room, stopping to talk with other employees. I could hear James’s voice.
Had Daniel Hartmann come down to the third floor for me? Was his slow meandering through the department a front? Or again, was this all coincidence? Either way, I had the sudden clear understanding that in just a few minutes I was going to be introduced to him. I’d have to say hello. I’d have to act like I didn’t resent him and everything he stood for. I’d have to act like simply his eyes on me didn’t make me feel as if I were about to melt into the ground. Like I wasn’t attracted to him.
Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story Page 4