Playing Dirty(88)

“Let’s see,” I said, holding my hand out. Most of the CVs hadn’t included photos, as appearance simply had no bearing on someone’s ability to work unless they were a twenty-foot Godzilla clone, but a few had come with pictures attached. Keira Valencia’s must’ve been one of them.

Rogers handed me the photo, and at first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. Jesus…it was actually her. Keira Valencia was my New York Keira! But how?

As my gaze rested on the sparkling brown eyes of the girl in the photo, I wondered what on earth had led to such an enormous coincidence. There was only one seemingly valid explanation—and that was that this couldn’t be a coincidence at all. She must’ve applied for the job specifically to see me again, which was a little crazy but hot as hell, and the thought of that made heat rush to my groin as my cock stirred in my pants. I’d never slept with any of the female staff; that was an unwritten rule of mine…but no rule was absolute.

Rogers arched an eyebrow again, as if he somehow knew what was going on in my head, and I placed the photo down, my eyes still glued to it as a wolfish grin spread across my face.

This was going to be a lot of fun.





Chapter 3

Keira



“This way, Miss. You and the other the new staff members will have your duties assigned momentarily.”

An older well-dressed man gave me a polite smile and gestured towards an open door on the first floor of Richmond Palace, and I smiled and followed him, taking a deep breath as I did so. As I stepped into the spacious room, I saw that most of the other new staff members were already there and standing in a line, being inspected by another older gentleman who the first man addressed as ‘Rogers’. I took my place in the line, followed by two other girls who’d arrived just after me, and as I waited, I stared out the window at the beautiful gardens just beyond the walls.

I’d been in England a couple of weeks now, and so far, I was absolutely loving it. Most pointedly I was loving the public museum system. The large museums in London (the Natural History Museum, Science Museum, and the National Gallery) were owned by the British public, paid for by taxes, and free to enter. That ‘free-ness’ was of course their main appeal for me, but there was also something to be said for the fact that theoretically, paintings such as Holbein’s The Ambassadors were the property of the British public. Any British subject was theoretically able to go into a state museum and ask to see any item not currently on display, and they would be shown it. Of course I wasn’t a British subject and would’ve probably been too embarrassed to ask even if I had been, but it was still a nice thing to think about.

The public art museums had occupied my first weeks amiably enough, but I was aware that I was running through money with housing, travel and food expenses, and I really needed to get some steady income sorted out, so it was a great relief to finally find out that my application to work at Richmond palace had been successful. On my first day, I was given a tour of the labyrinthine house, or at least those parts of it that a maid might need to know, and today I would be assigned my specific duties. I’d seen the Queen from a distance, but I hadn’t run into Prince Andrew at all, and I was keeping my fingers crossed that I never would.

Having said that, there were no words I knew that could adequately describe the shock I experienced when I saw Andrew himself enter the room and stroll down the line of new staff, looking unbelievably handsome and also unbelievably smug. He briefly stopped at me and flashed me a mischievous smile and wink before moving on.

What on earth? What was that about, and what was he doing here amongst the staff?

I would’ve bet good money that a royal prince didn’t handle the day-to-day duties of the servants, and since the royal family had several houses, I’d thought my chances of bumping into him were satisfyingly low. But here he was, and that was that. But why? Had he somehow come across the pile of job applications and seen my name?

I thought back to the night we met, trying to remember if I’d even told him my last name. If so, was he the one who’d hired me? Did he think we could pick up where we’d left off that night in New York, as if I were some sort of unfinished business to him? Somewhere deep within me, a heated pocket of my libido hoped the answer to all those questions was yes, but I immediately quashed it. I wanted nothing to do with the man—I was here to clean the palace, and definitely not here to clean off his abs with my tongue…

Jeez, snap out of it, I told myself, standing up straighter.

A Google search for ‘Prince Andrew Arlington’, which I’d made the other day despite myself, had confirmed all my worst suspicions about the man. I’d been absolutely right to run away from him that night and never look back. He’d had a string of high profile girlfriends that could’ve stretched from London to Edinburgh, and a string of scandalous one night stands that could’ve twice looped the equator. The man clearly used women for sex; that was all he was interested in. I’d had a lucky escape, although that annoying little voice inside my head pointed out that a man with that much practice presumably knew what he was doing.