Page 18 of A Duke Changes Everything
He’d meant to state facts, simple truths, and yet the lady bristled.
“I have a knack for organizing and ensuring tasks get done.” She straightened her back, rising half an inch. “My father taught me all he knew about the duties of an estate steward, and he always said I possessed a natural talent for numbers.”
“Did he? And yet I’ve already discovered a flaw in your calculations.”
“What flaw?”
Nick slid one of the massive account ledger books he’d found on his father’s desk toward the edge, flipping the pages open to a grosgrain marker that had been placed near a row of recent entries. He planted his finger in the middle of the column. “There.”
She came closer. Her heels clipped hard against the wood floor, and Nick wondered if she was still wearing Hessians under her skirt. Bending at the waist, she peered at the page, tilting her head this way and that. Then her eyes slid closed, as his did when calculating a large sum in his head.
A sharp little intake of breath sounded in the room before she opened her eyes. “You’re right. I made an error.”
She sounded so bereft, Nick had a momentary impulse to comfort her. He hated making mistakes in his calculations too.
“We all make errors, Miss Thorne.” He leaned closer. “As you see, it was easily corrected.”
“But if I made one, perhaps there are others.”
“There aren’t. I checked.”
“All the entries? That’s impossible. There are months’ worth of transactions.”
“You needn’t sound so impressed. I’ve been stuck in this blasted house for an hour.” Nick noted that her brows leaned toward each other, two pretty arches, as she frowned at him. Something about her scrutiny unsettled him, and he felt that odd little charge of awareness she seemed to spark.
He was surprised to find they had anything in common.
“I like numbers,” he told her. “One might even say I have anatural talent. And I’m averythorough man.”
Miss Thorne gasped in shock.
Nick cursed himself for infusing the words with more seductive intent than he should have. And for being far too intrigued with the woman.
She approached the fireplace mantel and nervously rearranged the knickknacks on top so that the porcelain milkmaid and a little marble goddess were equidistant from a hideous ormolu clock. Nick mentally calculated how much each item might fetch at auction.
“The wall looks bare without the duchess’s portrait,” she said, glancing up at the empty patch of plaster. “The room feels far colder now.”
“It’s always been frigid. But you’re right. The space is empty without her.” The wall was still cluttered with small paintings, landscapes mostly, and the single dominating portrait of the man Nick would always think of as the Duke of Tremayne.
“She had kind eyes.” Miss Thorne spoke softly and then turned back to face him.
No one needed to tell Nick his eyes weren’t kind. Most saw them as an outward sign of his blighted nature. But his mother pointed to their shape as proof of his parentage. She’d often led him to a looking glass as a child, pointing out how much he resembled his father.
She’d done her best to reassure him he wasn’t a bastard, but Nick only noticed his own strange unmatched eyes looking back at him and, after one of his father’s attacks, the scar marring his face.
“What else do you remember about her?” Nick pushed the past away with such ferocity, he sometimes feared he was losing every memory of his mother. He couldn’t bear to recall the time they’d spent together after leaving Enderley, a time of poverty and fear in France. They’d been free of his father’s cruelty, but illness had taken her from Nick too soon. He wanted to remember the best of her.
“Not much, I’m afraid. I only met the duchess a few times when I was a child. My father did not like me to disturb them.”
“And my father? What do you remember of him?” He forced himself to ask the question, pretending that speaking of the man didn’t cause his stomach to burn with bile.
“He... did not like me.” Miss Thorne shivered, clearly recalling some unpleasant encounter.
“What did you do to provoke him?” He quite liked imagining her snapping back at the ogre. But what would his father have done in response? The duke had never tolerated any inkling of rebellion.
“A music lesson.” She lowered her gaze to the ground and her forehead tightened into grooves of worry. “Your mother caught me plucking at one of the harps in her music room. She wasn’t angry. She encouraged me to learn and arranged for the governess to give me lessons, but the duke was livid when he found out. I was only the steward’s girl, and the governess was hired to teach your brother. The duke shouted at me and banished me from his sight.” She shook her head as if attempting to erase the memory. “I don’t think he approved of me being underfoot around the estate.”
“Then we have something else in common, Miss Thorne.”
