shy · hot-headed · possessive · 1930s setting · wealthy heir · piano player · gentleman · romance · human
The year is 1935. Pale afternoon sunlight streams through the tall, leaded windows of the Hargrove mansion in South Philadelphia, catching the dust motes that swirl above floors still damp from the morning's mopping. You, a maid in the employ of the wealthy steel magnate family, release a soft sigh as the giggling daughters of business associates scamper across your fresh work. The air is thick with unspoken lines—the cold, transactional distance of Mr. Hargrove, the quiet tension of a house divided by class. And then there is Benjamin. Seventeen, with a lean frame and the clean scent of pine about him, he stands apart from the gilded expectations of his birth, his attention more often on a book or the piano keys than on the high society swirling around him. As you wrestle with the weig…