by Geneva Lee
LONDON DYNASTY
Copyright © 2021 by Geneva Lee.
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Estate Publishing + Media
www.GenevaLee.com
First published, 2021.
Cover design © Geneva Lee.
Image © soup studio/Adobe Stock.
To the Loves,
You are my safe place
And to their fearless leaders,
Shelby,
Elsi,
Christina,
Jami, & Karen
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter One
“Girl, you aren’t going to win the lottery.”
I flinched at Sheila’s sharp voice, burying a frown when I spotted her watching me. Her eyes had narrowed so much that she looked like a hawk, save for her thick, sky-blue eyeliner. She snagged a lipstick tube from her pocket and popped off the lid to reveal the mauve shade she’d chewed off her lips earlier, during the match.
“It’s a waste of time,” she continued, applying the lipstick in a mirror she’d propped up near the dish sink. “You might as well flush your money down the toilet.”
I ignored her. That was always the safest angle to take where Sheila was concerned. As far as I knew, the sixty-year-old had worked at Hare & Hound since the day she was born. In the six months I’d been working here, she hadn’t taken a day off—not once. Sheila might be right about wasting my money, but I wasn’t going to spend my whole life working in a rundown pub in Berkshire.
Business had died down since the match ended. Only a few regulars remained, nursing the wound of the local football club’s defeat. Most were blaming the sky-high August temperatures for the loss. As it was, I’d propped open the walk-in freezer to cool off. The heatwave had suffused the air with a heavy humidity that verged on suffocating. I craned my neck in an attempt to cool off before looking down at my last chance at salvation. The scratchcard wasn’t about getting rich or getting out, though. Even West Bexby, with its one traffic light, had double the cost of living of other small towns—due mostly to its location between Oxfordshire and Greater London. Rent and the electricity bill were due tomorrow. I had enough tip money for only one. I flipped the ten-pence I was holding, sent out a prayer for luck, and scraped off the last silver box.
I sank against the wall and stared like I might be able to will the clover outline I’d uncovered to be the horseshoe I needed.
Shelia chuckled before making a clucking noise. “I told you—”
Before she could dish another serving of advice, the swinging door that separated the kitchen from the bar burst open. Eliza, the pub’s only other waitress and one of the few people who seemed comfortable in the small town, swayed in with a tray of dirty dishes. She dumped them in the sink with a teeth-rattling crash.
I shoved the ticket into my apron before she could turn to see it.
“Hanging out without me?” She wiped her hands on her checkered apron as she studied me. Eliza could have left the Berks. She was smart enough to go to university, pretty enough to be a model, with her glossy brown hair and dark, round eyes, or curvy enough to have landed a husband. Instead, she seemed content to follow Sheila’s example and work at the pub. Like me, she transplanted here. Like me, she didn’t want to talk about why. It made her an ideal flatmate and friend. “Everything good, Kate?”
“Yeah,” I forced a smile. “Shelia was just giving me a little advice.”
“Again?” Eliza glared at her with a look as frosty as the air wafting from the open freezer.
Sheila opened her overly lipsticked mouth, but before she could respond, a bell clattered over the entrance, alerting us to incoming patrons.
“Your table, Sheila,” Eliza said with a grin that spread like the Cheshire Cat’s. Sheila grumbled as she saddled toward the dining room, but she kept her eyes downward. As soon as she was gone, Eliza pulled a pack of cigarettes from her apron. She held it out, but I shook my head. She opened the backdoor a crack and stepped one foot out as though this counted as being outside before lighting one. “So, did you win?”
“What?” I asked. “Win?”
“That scratchcard I saw when I came in—did you win?”
Shit. Apparently, my sleight of hand hadn’t been fast enough. There was no point in hiding it now. Besides, facing her tomorrow when I was short on what I owed wouldn’t be any better than admitting it now. “Nope.”
“How much?” She flicked ash from the end of her cigarette.
“A hundred pounds.” Shame spiked inside me, burning molten in my chest and throat. I tried to ignore it, but I felt the heat seep across my skin. The trouble with being fair-skinned was how easily it reacted. My chest. My neck. My cheeks. By now, they were all red and splotchy from all that escaped shame. It was a map of my failures painted for her to see.
“I got you,” she said, as though this was both not a big deal or an ongoing problem. It was both.
“You had me last month, too,” I said sullenly.
“Business is down,” Eliza lied smoothly.
“Business isn’t down. I’m a shit waitress.” That was the truth, and we both knew it. I suspected Ron had hired me because he thought I was pretty. Actually, he’d told me as much, couching it as a treat for his customers, mostly working men who haunted the pub between other responsibilities like work and wives. I’d turned out to be a disappointment when it came to waitressing. It had taken me the better part of a month to lift a tray with an entire order of pints. I had to make two trips when I started waiting tables. I’d yet to successfully remember the usuals’ orders or when to drop off the bill. Eliza pitied me, showing me little tricks to help me remember orders and names. That had helped, but I’d bet money that Sheila could greet a customer, take an order, deliver it, and cash out the table wearing a blindfold. Eliza probably could, too.
“You’re still learning,” Eliza dismissed the truth like she did any of my more negative self-talk. “You’ll get better. It’s your first job, right?”
It was one of the few facts I’d bothered to share with her, and only then because her own work history had come up one night over a bottle of cheap wine from Tesco. She’d been waiting tables since she could drive. I didn’t ask where and she didn’t offer. I had confessed, however, that the pub was my first job. Eliza had raised one thinly-plucked eyebrow, waited a moment, and moved on. I supposed she’d paused to give me a chance to explain my lack of real-world experience. I was reliev
ed she didn’t press me harder. The last thing I wanted was for her to feel sorry for me. But now it was clear she did anyway.
The bell clanged again, and Eliza tossed her cigarette out the back door. She patted my arm as she walked past. “Don’t worry about it, Kate. I got you.”
“Thanks.” I forced the gratitude out so hard that I practically chirped. After growing up with nothing, I still didn’t know what to do when people were nice to me. Eliza seemed to sense this and only nodded. I needed to do something to make it up to her. “I’ll take the table. You can still have the tip.”
I owed her that much.
The wide grin came back, and she reached into her apron for another cigarette. “You’re the best.”
I paused at the sink to wash my hands before going back to the floor. It was a habit, but it also gave me a chance to check myself in Sheila’s mirror. My hair had managed to stay reasonably secure in the tight knot at the top of my head. Pulled up this tightly, it looked darker than it was. There was almost no hint of the red tint it held when I wore it loosely. The rest of me looked about the same. I didn’t bother with much make-up. Between going back and forth to the kitchen and the overworked dining room aircon, I would wind up sweating it off within minutes. Not that there was much it could do for me anyway. My eyes were set a little too wide, and my mouth matched. My cheekbones were so high and sharp they seemed to swallow my face. Ron, the skeevy pub owner, might think I was pretty, but I felt mismatched. If anyone bothered to look, they would see it, too. That hadn’t stopped anyone from trying to grab my ass as I passed, though.
Backing through the swinging doors, I pulled out my notepad and a stubby pencil. A group had taken the table in the corner. As I walked toward them, light bounced through the window, nearly blinding me. I looked outside to find a shiny silver Jaguar was parked by the curb. I surveyed the group more closely and didn’t recognize a single face. That wasn’t a surprise since people in Bexby didn’t drive luxury cars. All three of them were busy on their mobile phones. When I reached the table, they barely looked at me.
“Pints all around. Hell, pints for the bar to celebrate the win,” one said, still busily dashing out a text on the screen.
There was no point writing that down. Even I couldn’t screw up delivering pints on the house. I’d been right that the group wasn’t from around here. They obviously had money if they were buying rounds, even if there were only a few other souls in the place. That money might buy beer and fancy cars, but it hadn’t done them any good in the common sense department. “Might keep the celebrating down,” I advised, tucking the notepad back in my pocket. “Most folks around here are wallowing.”
“What did they expect going up against the…” the man stopped as he finally glanced up at me.
“Kerrigan! What the hell?” He lounged back and hit his friend on the shoulder. “I thought you were in New York for the summer or France or some shit?”
My head tilted, and I shook my head, but before I could point out his mistake, his friend jumped in.
“Yeah, why are you working in a shitbox like this place? Daddy cut you off?”
“I’m sorry I’ve never met you. I’m not…” I was so taken back by having the pub insulted that I couldn’t remember the name he’d used. I mean, Hare & Hound was, as he put it, a shitbox, but I didn’t need some entitled wankers coming in and pointing it out. “My name is Kate, actually.”
“No fucking way.” He stared at me before looking around the pub like he expected a camera crew to jump out. “You serious? Kathy?”
“Kate, and I am.” I pushed a strand of hair off my sweaty forehead with my pencil. “What else can I bring you?”
But he wasn’t listening. His hand stretched out and snapped a picture of me with his phone’s camera.
“I didn’t say you could do that,” I said quietly as my blood went cold.
“It’s cool.” He dismissed my concern like it was his right to do so. “ Just no one is going to believe that we met Kerrigan Belmond’s twin or doppelganger in...where the fuck are we?”
“West Bexby.” I resisted the urge to pluck the phone from his overprivileged fingers and smash it. Instead, I tucked my pencil behind my ear. “I’ll grab those pints.”
I circled around and left before they could take any more photos. My heart began to pound. My fingers splayed over the worn oak of the bar to steady myself. Instead of ducking behind it to the taps, I continued on to the kitchen. My vision swam along the edges. By the time I’d pushed through the swinging doors, I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly I no longer felt the oppressive heat; I was cold like I’d been plunged into an icy river. The world blurred around me, water closing in overhead and pressing down. I tottered forward, reaching for the wall, but I was too far. My fingers closed over empty air as I stopped breathing.
Chapter Two
I wasn’t close enough to the wall to catch myself. I was falling, losing control, and for a second, I wanted the panic to win. I wanted it to overwhelm me and wash me away. My knees gave way, surrendering, just as Eliza’s arm dipped around me and hauled me upright.
“Whoa, maybe you should sit down,” she said.
I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
“Is it the heat or another panic attack?” she asked.
“The heat,” I lied. I didn’t have an explanation for the panic attacks. They came out of nowhere and rendered me nearly helpless. So far, I’d managed to keep myself from having one in front of customers, but Eliza had witnessed plenty of them.
“Let me get you some water,” she coaxed.
“No,” I said quickly as the drowning sensation roared inside me again. “I’m fine. I should get back to the assholes at table four.”
“Did they say something to you?” Eliza asked, her eyes turning to steely flint.
“No. They just thought I was some friend of theirs. They were rude about it, like they couldn’t believe she would work here.”
“Lovely,” she sneered. “I’ll take care of them. Did they order?”
I was suddenly thankful I hadn’t gotten their food order yet, because I had a feeling Eliza would have dumped it on their heads. She didn’t take well to rude men. Regulars knew to toe the line around her.
“Just a round for the house. No food. They were busy taking my picture to show Kerrigan someone or another. Some rich bitch, I’m sure, ” I muttered. My breathing had finally returned to normal, and the pressure had faded entirely. At least the attacks, while inexplicable, ended as suddenly as they started. Unfortunately, I almost always wound up with a migraine after.
“Kerrigan?” Eliza replied. “Like Kerrigan Belmond?”
I pressed a palm to my forehead as the first throb hit. “Yeah. I think that’s it. Do you know her?”
“Do I know Kerrigan Belmond?” She laughed at the question, staring at me like I was playing a prank on her.
I shook my head to let her know I had no idea why she found this amusing. “Who is she?”
“Socialite. Family is worth a fortune.”
“What do they do?” I asked. No wonder the guys had acted like idiots. I couldn’t imagine a socialite working at the Hare & Hound. I couldn’t even imagine a socialite in West Bexby.
“The internet or railroads or something.” She sighed as if to say it didn’t matter how they’d gotten rich, only that they were.
Her sigh mirrored my own feelings. It wasn’t fair that some people had everything while I was gambling on lottery tickets to pay my electricity bill.
“I can deal with them,” I promised her.
“You let me know if they step over the line again, though?”
I nodded as I backed out of the kitchen and turned toward the bar. The guys were probably too busy spewing their celebration all over their social media accounts to care about me, but I studiously avoided looking their way. I was reaching for the first glass when Sheila dropped a fifty-pound note on the worn wooden counter.
“Those boys left, said to give you this,”
she told me. “They also said sorry about the picture.” Sheila waited for me to explain myself.
“Thanks,” I grabbed the money and shoved it in my pocket instead.
Sheila huffed away. I had no idea what annoyed her more: that I hadn’t explained what had happened or that I’d been rewarded with a massive tip for doing absolutely nothing. All I knew what that having my photograph taken was a small price to pay for an easy fifty pounds. I dashed in the back to give it to Eliza.
“Nice!” She pushed it back toward me after I explained what happened. “Keep it for a rainy day.”
“Okay,” I said, deciding to slip it into her pocket when she wasn’t looking. There was no way I would let her cover my share of rent while I kept this, but I knew better than to try to argue with her.
“Hey, check this out,” She turned her phone toward me. “You really do look like Kerrigan Belmond. If you put on some make-up, you could be her twin.”
I took the mobile and scrolled through the socialite’s account photos. She’d documented her life and posted it on the internet for all to see. I could see what the men and Eliza were talking about. We did look a little alike, but it was more than just the make-up that set us apart. Every picture was oozing the elite life she enjoyed. In one, she was sipping champagne stretched across a chaise lounge, the Mediterranean providing a stunning backdrop. In another, she was blowing a kiss behind the wheel of a Roadster. Picture after picture showcased her in designer clothes living a life I could only dream of. I scrolled to the top and read her bio. There wasn’t much, just a passing mention of recently graduating from Oxford and the link to some philanthropy. As far as I could tell, her whole life was spent taking things off silver platters and lowering herself for the occasional charity work. It was as far from my life as I could imagine. I wasn’t even sure I could imagine something that wild. I bet Kerrigan had never worried about an electricity bill in her life.