Page 58 of A Duke Changes Everything
“No one’s here but us. Whatever we say, only the hedges will hear.” He sighed and pulled her into his arms again. “You’re worried about the estate?”
“No.” For once, none of her thoughts were of Enderley. Only of him. Of how much she wanted to understand his past.
He stroked a hand down her back. “Come to London with me.”
Mina swallowed hard. The offer was tempting. To escape? With him? The prospect of throwing propriety aside and being alone together held enormous appeal. Part of her wanted to say yes with no promise of anything more than knowing she would be where he would be.
But that wasn’t practical. That was the same blithe foolishness that had led her to heartache before. And Enderley was where she was meant to be, though discovering the tower put a dark stain on everything she felt for the estate.
“My place is here.” She’d said the words to him before, but they’d never felt so shallow and meaningless.
He pulled back, and cupped her cheek tenderly. “You can choose your place. Not your father or a sense of what you owe others. Consider your own wishes for once.”
Mina reached up and pushed back a strand of black that obscured his eyes. She was getting used to the silky slide of his hair between her fingers. “I would like to visit London.”
His eyes lit and he offered her a blinding smile. “Then I’ll take you. A visit to see the city.” He looked momentarily abashed. “I’ll put you up in a hotel. You can bring Anna if you like.”
“Emma?”
“That’s the one.”
What he was offering was scandalous. Mina didn’t need to read the etiquette book her father had bought her on her thirteenth birthday to know that an unmarried nobleman escorting an unmarried commoner around London would ruin her forever in the eyes of those like Lady Claxton. Not that the noblewoman thought much of her now.
He took her hand and kissed the backs of her fingers. “Shall I make the arrangements? We can depart next week.”
“I should remain here while the ballroom repairs are underway.” Mina nibbled the edge of her fingernail. “I also sent out for a mason to work on the parapet walk, and the library is to get a new rug and repaired window glass.”
“I’m not taking you to London as my steward.”
Mina’s throat burned. In order to take his offer, to embrace the possibility of spending more time with him, she’d have to give up the one thing she had long held on to. The one point of certainty in her life.
Yet now that was tainted too.
“I went to the tower.”
He turned to stone. Every warm, pine-scented inch of him. All the light flickered out in his gaze. Then he moved, lifting his hands from her, buttoning up his shirt and waistcoat as he backed away.
She couldn’t stop now that she’d started. Whatever was between them, whether it would bloom or turn to pain and rejection, she didn’t want to add any more pretending.
“I ordered you to destroy it.” His voice was low and deadly calm. One could almost mistake his demeanor for poise, except that he’d clenched his hands into white-knuckled fists.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t need to explain. Not to you. Not to anyone.” His chin quivered and his mouth trembled. “You wish to remain my steward? Then do your job.”
He swept past her, and Mina reached out, only managing to grasp a handful of his overcoat. “Please don’t go.”
Nick jolted to a stop.Please don’t go.The words might as well have been chiseled on his tongue for all the times he’d screamed them.
He stopped, but he couldn’t look at her. When he did, all he wanted was to touch her, kiss her. To lose himself in her sweetness and never think of the past again.
And all she wanted was to be steward of a miserable pile of stones.
“You spent time in the tower.” The tentative, broken catch in her voice made his own throat ache. “When you were a child?”
Nick’s ears burned, a piercing pain, as if someone was screaming an inch away. Maybe it was an echo of his own voice, screaming in his head.
He should never have come back to Enderley. Except that if he hadn’t, he would’ve never met Mina. Whether she knew it or not, she and the estate she clung to so fiercely were not one and the same.
