the young master's lackey

I was Richard's sidekick.

When he skipped class to race cars, I covered for him.

When he chased a bankrupt heiress, I delivered his love letter.

After graduation, the heiress went to Oxford, and I followed him all the way to Harvard.

In a foreign country, I made my move and had him, every last bit of him.

Until the heiress came over for grad school too.

When Richard stayed out all night for her again, I felt nothing but relief.

I was ready to go back to London and build my career.

The Cavendish family had paid for my whole education abroad. It would have been rude of me to be the one to break up with him.

Chapter One

"Richard, put that out. The housemaster's coming." I snatched the Marlboro from between his fingers and ground it out under my Doc Martens.

In Kensington, the Cavendish family sat at the very peak of the old aristocracy, and Richard was the tyrant of their whole circle.

I was the daughter of his family's butler. For as long as I could remember, the only way I could earn a place on that estate, where everyone knew exactly where they stood, was to hang on to Richard's sleeve for dear life.

He was devastatingly good-looking, blond and blue-eyed, with a careless kind of arrogance. If the family rules hadn't been so strict, some talent scout would have dragged that face off to Hollywood long ago. As the debutantes and heiresses around him got older, one by one they gracefully stepped back. Only I stuck to the young lord like a burr that wouldn't come off.

Outsiders laughed at me for being a lowly maid. What they didn't know was that I held the best cards of all.

Richard had no romantic interest in me whatsoever, and Lady Cavendish was delighted about that. As a reward, not only did I eat and dress like a society girl, I went with him to an elite public school full of the children of the rich and powerful.

The rules of the game at a school like that were simple. The heirs were born in Rome, and even if their road crumbled, their families would pave a new runway with pounds. I had to build my own road. The most my family could promise was that I wouldn't starve and that I wouldn't be thrown out of the rooms where your surname was what counted.

So I took care of Richard perfectly.

When he skipped class for polo, I signed him in. When he slept through lessons, I slipped a perfect assignment into his desk. Even when he took a fancy to the new transfer student, I was the one who found out everything about her.

Jane had once been a jewel of high society. When her family went bankrupt, she fell into the gutter, and then she fought her way back here on a full scholarship. She was a stubborn rose, covered in thorns.

Before her, countless earls' daughters and heirs to great fortunes had thrown themselves at Richard, and he hadn't even lifted his eyes. I'd honestly started to wonder whether he liked girls at all. But when Jane stood at the front of the classroom in her faded, much-washed uniform and introduced herself, the young lord who looked down on everyone suddenly, for the first time, woke up.

He had no idea how to chase a girl. He was like a clumsy young lion, circling Jane awkwardly for three whole months.

That gave me the perfect chance to prove my real value. I should mention that Richard's rich friends liked to call themselves his childhood mates. When they hung around Richard, it was brotherhood. When I hung around Richard, I was a pathetic lapdog.

Talk about double standards.

Every single day without fail, I brought Jane a hot coffee, and in PE I practiced tennis with her. In a school dripping with class snobbery, it was the first kindness Jane had been shown, and the way she looked at me slowly filled with gratitude and trust.

The time was right.

With a smile, I handed her the gold-embossed love letter I'd prepared long before.

Jane froze, staring at me in disbelief.

Then I helpfully twisted the knife. "It's from Lord Richard."

Just as I'd expected, Jane slammed the letter into the bin. That afternoon, when Richard went to find her, she called him "a hopeless spoiled brat" in front of everyone.

After that, Jane never spared me another glance.

I didn't care. I was busy comforting the heartbroken Richard.

In a private room at an old gentlemen's club, the boy who'd never been told no in his life finally learned what it felt like to hit a brick wall. He poured whiskey down his throat as if he didn't care, and a few glasses later he was completely drunk.

He stood up, swaying, cupped my face in both hands, and asked me over and over, his eyes red, "Why? What makes her think she's too good for me?"

I put a hand on his waist to steady him and softened my voice. "She just doesn't know what she's missing."

"Richard, I like you."

In the dim light of the private room, I saw it clearly. A flash of clarity cut through his hazy blue eyes.