Mr. Knightsbridge Read online

  Mr. Knightsbridge

  Louise BAY

  Contents

  Books by Louise Bay

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  The British Knight

  Books by Louise Bay

  Keep in touch!

  Books by Louise Bay

  All books are stand alone

  Mr. Mayfair

  Mr. Knightsbridge

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  International Player

  Hollywood Scandal

  Love Unexpected

  Hopeful

  The Empire State Series

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  The Ruthless Gentleman

  The Wrong Gentleman

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  King of Wall Street

  Duke of Manhattan

  The British Knight

  The Earl of London

  Park Avenue Prince

  * * *

  Indigo Nights

  Promised Nights

  Parisian Nights

  * * *

  Faithful

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  Read more at www.louisebay.com

  One

  Dexter

  She was the kind of beautiful that could send a man straight to the asylum. Just a glimpse of her had the hairs needling the back of my neck and my fingers stiff, desperate for a simple touch.

  Exotic. Glorious. And bloody expensive.

  “Very pretty. You should be extremely proud,” Gabriel, one of my best friends, said while staring at the display case in the middle of the Dorchester’s ballroom.

  “She really is glorious,” I replied. I hadn’t seen her for a long time, but you didn’t forget beauty like hers.

  “You know that’s a headband thingy and not a woman, right?” asked Tristan, another of the group of six of us who had been friends since we were teenagers.

  “Tiara,” I corrected him. To Tristan, it was just something women wore on their heads. To Gabriel, it was a collection of pretty stones. But to me, the tiara was beauty, life force—it was my fucking legacy.

  “Right,” Tristan said. “And your parents made it?”

  “My mother designed it. My father made it.”

  “For the queen?” Tristan asked.

  “The queen of Finland. She wore it on her wedding day.” As a child, sprawled in a heap of Lego underneath the display cases in their shop on Hatton Garden, I’d felt like the only thing my parents did was work on this design. Hearing about the tiara was the soundtrack of my childhood. Though their lives were dominated by the tiara for just one summer, it consumed them entirely. Seeing the piece again now, for the first time since their death, I understood why they had been so consumed. It was gorgeous, an audaciously modern design still classic enough to be regal.

  My parents’ passion for their work had percolated through the air I breathed, and I grew up in the enviable position of knowing exactly what I was going to do with my life—follow in their footsteps and be a jeweler. But when my parents died and my brother sold their shop without me knowing, my desire to become a jeweler wasn’t enough. For them, for their memory, I wanted to be the best in the world at what I did. I wanted their name—my name—to be known internationally for the most beautiful jewelry in existence. It was what they deserved.

  “I still don’t understand why we’re in London and not Finland,” Tristan said.

  “The princess is marrying a British man, so they’re holding the competition to design her jewelry here. It’s raising a lot of money for charity. Pockets are deeper in London.”

  “Makes sense,” Gabriel said.

  Tristan pushed his hands into his pockets and nodded. “Well, it’s nice stuff.”

  I grinned. Tristan might be clueless at times, but he didn’t flinch when I asked him to come tonight. Far more comfortable in jeans, in front of a computer, he put on a dinner jacket without hesitation because he was as loyal as you could want in a friend. He needed a drink. I caught the eye of a waiter with a tray of champagne. He came over and we all grabbed a glass.

  “To diamonds?” Tristan offered in toast.

  “To your parents,” Gabriel corrected. He had been the dad of our friendship group since we were seventeen, long before he was actually a dad—wise, measured and always armed with the right thing to say.

  “Thanks, mate,” I replied, clinking my glass to his. “To my parents. And to winning this bloody competition.”

  “I predict that if you do, you’ll open your first store in London. It would be a great way to burst onto the scene,” Tristan said.

  I took commissions in London, and our workshop and design studio were based here. But I had yet to open a Daniels & Co storefront in the UK. My flagship store was in New York, with locations in Paris, Rome, Beijing and Dubai. We’d just opened in Beverly Hills and Singapore.

  But not London.

  In London, I existed in my own tightly controlled bubble. I lived and worked here, but didn’t interact with the local industry. There were too many memories from the bleakest part of my life—my parents’ Hatton Garden store that no longer existed. Sparkle’s shop, which only survived because of my parents’ designs. And David, my brother, the man who destroyed my parents’ legacy and gave Sparkle theirs. There was too much here to forget.

  I was asked about a London offering all the time, but continually dodged the questions and kept quiet. A Daniels & Co London shop wasn’t going to happen. I believed in moving forward, not looking back. There was no need to dredge up the past when it could stay properly buried and undisturbed.

  “And cheers to being mate dates,” Tristan said. “I’m quite enjoying being on your arm. Just as long as you don’t try to kiss me at the end of the night.”

  “You should be so lucky,” I replied.

  “I’ve been that lucky—that weekend in Prague, remember? I don’t want your wandering hands near me again,” Tristan said.

  “Shut it,” I replied, only half concentrating on Tristan as my gaze caught a woman in a white dress, strands of treacle-colored hair tumbling down her back. She was carrying a glass of champagne and an old-fashioned reporter’s notebook, though she was focused on neither as she squeezed by us, nearly tipping alcohol over Gabriel’s very expensive jacket. “It was fifteen years ago and I was asleep,” I said as the woman passed. I tracked her as she headed toward one of the display cases, where her face lit up with a huge smile as she took in a pair of earrings my parents had produced to go with the tiara. Happy at the thought of someone else enjoying my parents’ designs, I tuned back into the long-running debate with Tristan.

  Tristan rolled his eyes and nodded. “So you say. But asleep or awake, you tried to spoon me.”

  Gabriel was a man of few words but Tristan had enough for both of them. How the three of us, plus Beck, Andrew and Jo
shua had managed to remain friends all these years was a miracle. We were brothers more than friends.

  “The six of us should go back to Prague,” Gabriel said.

  “Definitely now we can all afford our own rooms, and I don’t have to sleep with this guy,” Tristan said, nodding his head toward me. “I’ll look into it.”

  A break with my best mates sounded like a great idea, but not until I’d won this competition. I had a lot of work to do over the next few months. Putting together the designs for the princess of Finland’s wedding collection wasn’t going to be enough. The quality and rarity of the stones, plus cutting and setting them, was going to set us apart. My contacts with stone suppliers were the best in the business, and I was going to need the best of the best. There would be no taking breaks in Prague or anywhere else for a while.

  “We can make it a celebratory trip when Dexter’s won this competition,” Gabriel said, once again guessing my thoughts.

  Tristan shrugged. “If you like. I still don’t get why you have to enter some stupid competition. It’s not like you need the work. Or the money. Do you?”

  Tristan was right. I didn’t need the money or the work.

  But I had to win.

  Partly for my reputation—it would be more evidence I was the best at what I did. But mostly for my parents. To win the competition a generation after they had was what they would have wanted—proof that their passion had been passed through their genes—and I was carrying on the torch for them.

  “I’m not knocking on the door to the poor house, don’t worry,” I said.

  “Pleased to hear it. But at the same time, if you want to offload that DB5 of yours at a knockdown price, I’d be happy to pay cash.”

  “Find your own Aston Martin and stop trying to buy mine,” I replied. I turned to Gabriel. “If you ever find me dead under suspicious circumstances, point the police in this guy’s direction,” I said, nodding toward Tristan. “No doubt they’ll find him with my car keys in his grasp.”

  Tristan shrugged as if it would be a fair assumption. He’d borrowed my car too often for me to count. He didn’t need to bump me off for it.

  “You know we’re huddled here like Macbeth’s witches. You should mingle,” Gabriel said.

  It was probably true. I was here to prove to the industry that contrary to popular belief, I didn’t think I was too good for them. I scanned the room for a safe place to land—ideally, a small group of people who wouldn’t immediately bombard me with stories about my parents. And of course, I had no desire to run into anyone from Sparkle. A conspicuous trail of empty champagne glasses led to the woman in the white dress, who was standing in front of the earrings my parents had produced for the queen’s wedding. “Okay. I won’t be long,” I said, heading in the direction of the earrings. The woman in white seemed to be the only person in the room focused more on jewelry than socializing, and by my standards, that meant she was someone worth getting to know.

  As I passed the entrance, a list pinned to an easel caught my eye—the names of the attendees. Primrose, my head designer, would be keen to see who was here tonight. I pulled out my phone and took a picture before trailing my finger down the alphabetical list to find my name. I pulled away abruptly, as if the board had emitted an electric shock. I’d expected to see my name there, but there were two “Daniels” on this list.

  David was here.

  The brother who’d tried to destroy my parents’ legacy. The brother I’d vowed to have nothing to do with. The brother I hated.

  Heat flushed through me and I turned quickly to survey the room. He couldn’t be here, could he? Would I even recognize him fifteen years later? At thirty-seven he might have lost his hair, like dad. Or—

  “Dexter Daniels!” An avuncular stranger in his mid-fifties grabbed me by the elbow and thrust his palm against mine, shaking my hand vigorously and effectively pulling my thoughts from the black hole they’d been circling. “Gosh, you make me feel like an old man,” he said. “If Joyce McLean hadn’t said it was you, I never would have believed it.” He grinned at me as if I should recognize him, but I was sure I’d never seen him before in my life. “The last time I saw you, you had a bottle of vinegar in one hand and tissues in the other, cleaning the glass in your parents’ shop.”

  I exhaled and imagined an invisible shield surrounding me, stopping his words from penetrating, from reaching the places I’d spent so long protecting. This was why Tristan and Gabriel were here tonight. Sure, Tristan liked free booze and the chance to mingle with a ballroom full of women, but he and Gabriel both were here because I’d asked them to be my buffers. “They were good people,” I replied. This was why I’d avoided situations like this for as long as I had. I knew how great my parents were. I didn’t need strangers to remind me, to poke at the open wound created by their absence.

  “Talented. And kind. It was a long time ago but the industry still feels their loss.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It was a loss on a personal level but their talent and hard work meant it was a loss for jewelry more generally.” My rehearsed response emerged automatically, not for the first time tonight.

  Usually this short, polite exchange would end with a handshake here, but the man, whoever he was, wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Do you know what I miss most about them?” he asked. “Your father’s rather rare laugh.”

  I smiled—a real smile, not the forced one I’d been wearing all night. My father had been a serious man at work. But not around his family. Our house was full of tickles and laughter.

  “It was your mother who was always able to coax it out of him,” the man said.

  I nodded, remembering how she’d tell him jokes in the shop, trying to get him to lighten up. “They were a good team.”

  “She would say how his stern face made it look like he was being possessed by his father, your grandfather.”

  I’d forgotten that. She’d chase me around the shop making scary noises, and inevitably my father’s stern expression would give way to something softer, more familiar.

  “You know all the big houses were after your mother—Bulgari, Harry Winston—they queued up to offer her design roles. She could have written her own check. But she only ever wanted to work with your father.”

  I tried to keep my surprise from showing. I’d never heard her mention how she’d been offered other roles. I guess it hadn’t been important to her. The only person who ever mattered was my father—and her boys, of course. “My mother was very talented.”

  I’d been dreading coming here tonight. I hadn’t wanted to hear the sorrow and sadness in people’s voices when they discussed my parents, or be constantly reminded about how much I’d lost. But hearing about them from someone else’s perspective was gratifying, and reigniting beloved memories was deeply comforting. I’d pushed so much of my past away to stop it from hurting me that I’d lost some of the memories that were important.

  “She was. And from what I’ve seen, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. I’ve followed your career.”

  I still didn’t know who this man was but he seemed to know me well enough. “Can I take your card?” I asked. Perhaps I might have reason to do business with this man at some point in the future.

  “Of course,” he said, flipping open his wallet. “You’ve not shown your face much around London.”

  “No, sir,” I replied. “I go where my clients are.” It was a lie but a believable one.

  “Yes, I was surprised your brother never went into the industry,” he said, holding out his card.

  The warmth that had gathered in my belly at his words about my parents turned to ice when he mentioned my brother. The realization that David was here tonight, enjoying the champagne, no doubt at the Sparkle table, pulled the air from the room. I needed space. I needed to breathe in the goodness my parents brought to this room, not the betrayal my brother did.

  “Would you please excuse me,” I said, shaking the man’s hand once again. �
��I’ve just seen someone over there I must speak to.” The girl with the treacle-colored hair was in the corner, looking at one of my favorite pieces.

  Two

  Hollie

  I glanced over my shoulder to check I was going unnoticed in the ballroom full of men in tuxedos and women wearing dresses that cost more than our trailer back home in Oregon. I’d only ever seen scenes like this in movies, yet here I was, one of the guests.

  I didn’t belong here.

  My new colleagues had disappeared as soon as we’d entered this vast room, and given the number of people here tonight, I’d probably never see them again. That was okay. The bus to take us back to the office was leaving at eleven, which meant I had limited time to study the incredible royal jewelry on display.

  A tall waiter thrust a tray of drinks under my nose, like being offered free champagne was just completely normal. I’d never tasted champagne before, and was determined to keep a clear head, but if my sister, Autumn, was here, she’d tell me I shouldn’t miss out. I took a glass and headed toward one of the displays of jewelry from the Finnish royal family. I was here to work. Learn. Invest in my future. My three-month internship was my one shot—my opportunity to escape the life my parents had led, a trailer-park existence I was ready to quit.