Knight (Political Royalty Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

from blurting out thank fuck . They were finally getting somewhere.
    “When I was sixteen or so, I snuck into my daddy’s liquor cabinet and got a hold of the bourbon. I drank just enough to make myself sick. Jones found me hunched over the trash can in the library, puking my guts out.”
    “Jones?” she asked, stabbing the banh cuon with her chopsticks.
    “My father’s butler. He cleaned me off and, God, cleaned up after me.” He ran a hand through his hair, looking slightly embarrassed at the memory. “Then he took me to the servants’ quarters and tucked me away in an empty room until I sobered up. He saved my hide on more than one occasion.”
    She skipped over the your family had a butler question hanging on the tip of her tongue. Of course they did. The Walkers were light-years from her family and the way she’d grown up. Her mother and father didn’t have help; they were the help. That wasn’t exactly true. Her mother had been a teacher’s aide and later a preschool teacher and her father worked for Caterpillar. He’d eventually worked his way up to management and the family into the middle class, but they may as well have been on a separate planet from the Walkers.
    “Did your dad ever find out?” she asked.
    Walker took a swallow of his beer, nodding with his lips still pressed to the rim. “I told him. Jones made me,” he said, the corner of his mouth turning up. “But by the time I went to confess, the mess had been cleaned up, I was sober, and the hangover made it easy to look repentant. My father figured I’d learned my lesson and let me off with a warning.”
    “Did you?” asked Haven, having no trouble at all picturing the senior Walker letting off his firstborn with less than a slap on the wrist. Even as a grown man, he himself seemed to live by the boys will be boys motto. Why would he expect anything else from his son? “Learn your lesson?”
    “Damn straight. I didn’t drink again until I was in college and legal. Have you ever been sick on bourbon? I thought I was gonna die.” He shuddered, and she smiled in spite of herself.
    “Drugs?”
    “Pot in college. Nothing harder and just a couple of times. I didn’t like it. Made it hard for me to think.” He snagged a pot sticker, working his chopsticks like a pro. “What about you?”
    “What about me?” she asked, leaning back in the buttery-soft leather couch. The apartment was small but furnished much better than most congressmen’s home away from home. For some of them, the challenge of finding an affordable place in the city left them living like college students again, but not Walker, and it was clear the apartment had been furnished by a woman trying to please a man. Haven didn’t know if the woman was Mrs. Walker or a designer, but given that the senator rarely spoke about his wife and the accessories were coordinated to within an inch of their lives, she’d bet designer.
    “When did you take your first drink?”
    “This isn’t about me. I’m not running for office.”
    “You were a wild child, weren’t you? You have that look. Good girl exterior with a hellcat underneath.”
    “No. I thought your ninja skill was reading people. You’re way off,” she said, deliberately ignoring the hellcat comment and the way his eyes widened when he said it.
    She’d been so focused on getting into an Ivy League school and getting a scholarship to pay for it, she’d barely put a toe out of line in high school. By the time she got to UPenn, she was working so hard to keep up in her classes and earn enough money for food and books, she didn’t have the energy to waste her time partying.
    “Humor me,” he said, pinning her with those dark-brown eyes that had her reciting the these are not the droids you seek line from Star Wars . No man should be able to wield that much influence with just his eyes.
    “Fine.” If she talked, maybe it would keep him talking and then he might actually get around to telling her what she