I Disguised Myself As A Stable Boy To Find True Love — Then My Enemy Tried To Buy Her Family

Part 1

Wealth buys sycophants, it buys silence, and most of all, it buys liars.

I was William Stratford, the duke of the estate, master of three estates and thousands of acres.

But right now, my hands were bleeding from the slow, stinging weep of burst blisters.

I had stripped off my velvet, rubbed dirt into my knuckles, and presented myself as William, a wandering laborer.

The the city season had driven me to the edge of madness.

The endless parade of debutantes pushed forward by mothers with calculating eyes had left me completely hollow.

They looked at me and saw a ledger, diamonds, and an escape from their petty social climbs.

When my advisers suggested an alliance with the Hayes family, an old name currently drowning in desperate debt, I balked.

I knew exactly what the Hayes girls would be.

I assumed they would be grasping and ready to fawn over a title.

So, I orchestrated this entire farce to see their true nature when they thought no one of consequence was looking.

Two days ago, these hands had held a crystal snifter of brandy by a roaring fire in a the city townhouse.

Today, they gripped rough ash wood smeared with horse dung and damp hay.

The pain was sharp, but it was also the most honest thing I had felt in five years.

The eldest daughter, Heather, stepped out of her peeling carriage like she was trying to escape her surroundings.

She sneered at my outstretched dirt-stained fingers, gathered her skirts tightly, and bypassed me entirely.

Her younger sister, Megan, emerged next.

She wore a heavy, frayed navy cloak and moved with a grounded, heavy exhaustion.

Instead of shrinking from the mud, she stepped squarely into it without flinching.

She turned to pull a heavy basket of wrapped parcels from the seat.

It looked far too heavy for her slender frame.

I instinctively moved forward to help.

For the first time since I arrived, one of the masters actually looked at me.

Megan’s eyes were a stormy gray, shadowed by violet half-moons of fatigue.

She looked at my face, not my clothes, and she looked at my hands without disgust.

She thanked me with a low, raspy voice, the sound of a woman who spent too much time managing ledgers in drafty rooms.

She handed me the heavy basket of flour and sugar with a simple, factual request to take it to the kitchen.

She didn’t bark, she didn’t dismiss me, and she actually asked for my name.

I froze, completely unprepared for a gentlewoman to ask a temporary stable hand for his identity.

I mumbled my alias, pulling my cap down slightly.

She simply repeated it, testing the sound of it, before giving a sensible order regarding the sweating horses.

I expected a viper’s nest of snobs, but I had just been given an order by a woman carrying the weight of a crumbling estate.

The sting in my bleeding hands was still there, but the bitter cold didn’t seem to bite quite as hard.

Later that night, I found myself in a dark stall helping Megan tend to an old lame mare.

She knelt directly in the dirty straw, ignoring her skirts, and worked pungent pine tar into the horse’s swollen leg.

She spoke to me with a respect I had rarely received in the drawing rooms of the city.

When the storm hit two days later, driving freezing rain horizontally across the moors, Megan didn’t hide.

A heavy boundary fence was surrendering to the rot.

I grabbed a rope, acting as a human winch against the splintering oak post, while she swung a heavy iron mallet.

We fought the gale together, side by side in the sucking bog.

She looked completely ruined, her dress soaked black and her hands bleeding.

She sat back in the muck and let out a breathless, genuinely amused laugh.

I looked at her sitting in the mud, fierce, unbroken, and utterly real.

I had come here to test if these women were worthy of my grand title.

Looking at Megan, I realized the terrifying truth was that I was the one failing the test.

I got tired of people looking at me and seeing what they could take.

Down here in the mud, people only cared if you could pull your own weight, and it was honest.

The trap was sprung the very next morning when a garish black carriage ground to a halt in the courtyard.

Lord Craig Preston stepped out.

He was a cruel, arrogant baron I knew intimately from the the city card tables.

He wanted a pretty, impoverished wife who would be too grateful for his money to ever question his infidelities.

Heather appeared on the stone steps, looking radiant, desperate, and terrified.

Preston didn’t bow, he simply looked her up and down like he was inspecting a mare before an auction.

I held his matched bays, my hands gripping the leather traces so tight my knuckles turned white.

Preston stopped in front of me, glaring down at the thick layer of freezing mud separating him from the carriage step.

He barked at me to get down on my hands and knees and serve as a human step so he wouldn’t ruin his boots.

I felt a cold aristocratic fury demanding to be unleashed.

I wanted to straighten my spine, strip off my cap, and watch Preston drop to his own knees in terror.

Then I saw Megan standing on the edge of the terrace, watching me with her jaw clamped tight.

I gritted my teeth and sank to my knees in the freezing mud, knowing that if I broke my cover now, I would lose the only woman who ever saw the real me.