His Gilded Age Sweetheart: The Maid’s Second Chance
New York, 1900. The Gilded Age's opulence roars in symphony with the steel behemoths of the railroad.
In her past life, Evelyn Kerr was merely a pair of humble hands in Ashford Manor—hands that served silver trays, scrubbed marble stairs, and were ultimately shredded by broken glass. All because of her beauty, because William Ashford, the railroad tycoon, had glanced her way once too often. His fiancée's jealousy, the servants' venomous whispers, and a framed theft charge hurled her into the abyss. She died in a Lower East Side gutter, her corpse colder than snow.
Reborn, she stands on the same walnut staircase, palms unmarred, smile as meek as ever. But this time, within those emerald eyes lurk poisoned daggers.
William Ashford—thirty, railroad tyrant, Wall Street's most feared predator. His empire forged from iron rails and blood, his fiancée Aurora the gilded rose of high society, his study adorned with a portrait that could break any woman's heart. And Evelyn, the new Irish maid, shall become his most loyal shadow—
"Sir, I've come to light your fire."
She makes his bed, blocks his drinks, kneels in mud to wipe blood from his leather shoes. She is his most docile servant, and his deadliest poison. She will make Aurora taste her own venom, will grind those who trampled her into begging for mercy.
But William Ashford was never prey. He watches this girl who appears at every crucial moment, studies her perfectly angled profile, catches the fleeting chill in her gaze.
"Evelyn," he speaks her name for the first time, voice like a midnight train pulling into station—"whose ghost are you, truly?"
When the avenger becomes a pawn, and the tyrant begins to feel, a blood-stained rose quietly blooms along the iron rails of 1900.
