Read Caroline and the Duke: A Regency Short Story for Free Online Page B

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/17366100-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