Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ten girls had come and gone. Smart girls.
Clever girls. Sweet girls. Bold and brassy and beautiful girls who fell in love with him before he’d even offered to take their coats.
Girls that knew shorthand better than they knew longhand and could type a hundred words a minute with one hand while they answered the phone with the other.
But the minute the Duke told them what the job was all about, all ten of them headed for the hills like they’d heard there was real gold on the Gold Coast.
What a waste of a two-dollar advertisement in the paper.
The Duke sat at his desk and opened a drawer, pulled out a bottle of whiskey and a single shot glass. Awful stuff. More punishment than pleasure. He unscrewed the cap and lifted the bottle, but between the pour and the swallow, someone knocked on the door.
“This is why I need a secretary!” the Duke called out to God, the universe, and whoever had knocked. “So I don’t have to answer my own bloody door!”
“Hire me then, and you won’t have to.”
A woman’s voice. Calm, steady, sure of herself.
“You don’t want the job,” he called back. “Trust me. No one does.”
“Why not?” the mystery woman replied.
“Two words,” the Duke shot back. “Al Capone.”
“Two words…Rainy March.”
The Duke got out of his chair—reluctantly—walked to the door—hesitantly—and turned the knob—wearily.
“That the weather report or your name?” he asked, his voice trailing off at the sight of her. She had the sort of face that made a man straighten his tie, balance his checkbook, and see that his affairs were in order, because he’d either marry her or die trying.
“Both,” the woman said with moxie by the acre. She had dark hair and storm-cloud eyes. Her skirt was tight as a miser’s fist and she was showing just enough skin to make him want to see more before lunch.
“You’re here for the secretary position?”
“I’m certainly not here for my health.” She pushed past him, and he caught a glimpse of two trim ankles that made him want to write her mother a thank-you note.
He hurried to his desk and held out the chair for her. Then he sat down opposite her, behind the desk. “To be perfectly clear, you are here to be my secretary, Miss March?”
“I am,” she said.
“Only my secretary?”
She gave a shrug. “I’m open to the possibilities.”
“I only ask because I’m afraid I’m ten seconds away from falling in love with you. Then, of course, I’ll ask you to marry me at some point.”
She didn’t answer, only lifted her wrist to stare at her wristwatch.
“Miss March?”
“I’m counting ten seconds,” she said. “Time’s up. Do you love me yet?”
“Madly.”
“So I have the job?”
He smiled at her, and across the world, the toes of every woman curled even though they didn’t quite know why.
“You’re hired.”
Excerpt from The Last Hurrah (The Duke of Chicago series #13) by Tom Hightower and Medda Baker. Copyright ? 2026 The Tom Hightower Estate. Reprinted by permission of Dime House Publishing.