Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story by Sabrina Darby Read Free Book Online

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