Heir of Scandal
Millie Adams
CHAPTER ONE
Hatred was sucha fascinating sensation. It had a taste: metallic and acrid. A feeling: a heavy weight that sat at the center of her chest and made her heart beat differently. It had a scent: whiskey, spiced cologne and old leather.
At least, for Heather Gray it did.
Because hatred smelled exactly like her stepbrother, Romeo Accardi. God, she wanted nothing more than to wrap her hands around his throat and squeeze until…
If he were dead she’d never feel this way again. The idea nearly took her own breath away.
It was maybe poor taste for her to ponder his death while his father lay dying in the room upstairs. But he hadn’t been sympathetic to her when her mother had passed last year and now Giuseppe was close to following his beloved wife to the afterlife and she could still hardly get a whiff of emotion from him.
Just that same spiced cologne, which for her would always create a red haze of rage.
It had always been this way.
From the moment she and her mother had darkened the door of the Accardi mansion, when her mother had been nothing but a housekeeper and Heather had been a twelve-year-old girl, awkward and uncertain, thrust into a world she didn’t understand.
Because right away Giuseppe had gone out of his way to give more help than they’d ever gotten before.
Where do you plan to have the child get her education?
At the public school down the road.
Nonsense, she shall go to the same school my son attends. Fairfield is sure to give her the sort of future she deserves.
I could never afford it…
It is part of your compensation, Miss Gray.
And so Heather had gone to Fairfield, with all of the rich kids, a daisy among the hothouse flowers.
It had been a trial by fire, a strange fire she had never seen before. When her mom had taken the job at the Accardi home it had been a chance for them to try something different, to be somewhere different.
After a childhood spent in New York City, living in an apartment the size of a closet while her mother cleaned houses on the Upper East Side, her mother had longed to give her something else. A taste of another place. Of another life. Perhaps her mom just wanted a different life, and Heather couldn’t fault her for that.
She’d heard about the opening through the gossip network with other cleaners—a wealthy Italian looking for a housekeeper for his property in the Italian Alps, but also for potential travel to other homes he kept around the world. The salary seemed so generous that it almost felt like a scam. Perhaps human trafficking.
Her mother had taken the risk.
The job came with a house on the estate, and for the first time in her life Heather had her own bedroom. She was still sad to leave New York. For all that they’d had very little, the city itself had a heartbeat, and it had resonated inside of Heather every time she walked to school, whenever she went to the bodega to get snacks, to find something to eat if her mother was working late.
The space and quiet of the Italian estate was deafening to her. It felt frightening. Yawning. Stranger still was the way Giuseppe Accardi treated her and her mother like they were people. He made eye contact. He spoke directly to her, not around her. Not as if she were an ornament or a pebble sitting in the middle of the floor that didn’t belong.
They arrived in the summer, before school term at Fairfield started. And he had told Heather that she was allowed to use the pool.
That was the first time she saw him.
The man who would become her stepbrother.
Romeo Accardi.
Two years older than her, and already built like a man. In hindsight, she could see that wasn’t strictly true, but at the time she had been…
Dazed by him.
