Knight (Political Royalty Book 1) Read Free

people’s lives. How much more could he do as president?
    “If you want to do this, you need to act fast,” said Davidson. “After what she did to Overstreet in Virginia, everyone considering a run is going to be after her. No one should have been able to win that seat. That old man was going to die at his desk on the Hill.”
    He was right. Overstreet had been a fixture in Virginia politics for decades. Many had tried but none had come close to unseating the six-term US Senator until Haven took over the campaign of Mike Anderson. The businessman had never held an elected office before. He beat Overstreet by fourteen points in his first ever election. The pundits made a big deal over voter dissatisfaction with incumbents, but people deep inside the party knew Haven masterminded the win. Which made the beautiful, hazel-eyed Yankee pretty hot shit and an even hotter commodity. Everyone would want her, and she’d be able to take her pick. If he was going to do this thing, then he wanted to be the one who locked her down.
    And if she agreed to work with him, she’d have to stop looking at him like he was a waste of skin. He understood the trust-fund baby hesitancy. He’d dealt with it his entire life. It was one of the things that drove him to start his business right out of school. People heard his name and assumed he’d hitched a ride on some long, obscenely rich coattails. They wouldn’t be wrong. The Walker name and fortune opened doors for him, and he wasn’t about to turn his back on it. On the contrary: he planned to leave the family name better than he found it. He was proud to be a Walker. Legacy mattered, but it wasn’t all of him. He’d worked hard to make sure of that.
    It shouldn’t bother him that he felt the same kind of judgment from Haven as he had from the dozens of other people who assumed his name bought his success, but it did. For reasons he couldn’t begin to explain, he wanted the woman who was a virtual stranger to see him for himself. That kind of sentimentality had no place in politics.
    “I’ll get back to y’all tomorrow with an answer,” he said, letting some of the Southern slip into his normally carefully controlled accent. “Tomorrow,” he repeated when his father started to protest.
    Nodding to Abby and Travis, Shep closed the door behind him and made his way the short distance across the courtyard to the boxy white building flanked by Doric columns that held the house staffs’ offices. He hadn’t seen Langston Jones, his father’s long-serving butler, in the main house and he didn’t want to leave without getting a chance to touch base with the older man. In many ways, Jones had been more available to Shep and his brother when they were growing up than the senior Walker. It was Jones who taught him how to fish and snuck him back into the kitchen to cook the crappie he caught. Jones taught him more than an abstract, relative version of right and wrong. He’d been there for all the scrapes and bruises.
    He found the older man sitting behind a side table turned makeshift desk in his closet of an office, going over the menus for the week. Shep’s parents shared a house, but not much else. Jones knew what his father liked to eat and he made sure the chef cooked the governor’s favorite dishes. It was Jones who kept the house running and had for as long as he could remember. His dark skin was still mostly unlined, but his salt-and-pepper hair had gone completely white since the last time Shep saw him. He rapped on the door and waited for Jones to look up, his heart warming when the other man saw him and grinned.
    “Senator,” he said, hurrying to his feet. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”
    Shep rushed to accept the other man’s hand, giving it a quick squeeze before pulling him in for a hug. The familiar scent of Old Spice took him back to sitting outside his father’s office with Jones, waiting for the then state Senator Walker to get back from some meeting or