Page 65 of A Duke Changes Everything
“What if this Mr. Iverson won’t see us?”
“Then we’ll treat ourselves to tea at Claridge’s and have a stroll around the city.” Mina gestured toward the notebook bulging from his top coat pocket. “Do you have some drawings you can show him if he does see us?”
Colin closed a hand over the rectangular outline of his journal. “I never go anywhere without my notes.”
“Just let me tell Mrs. Scribb where we’re going and we’ll be off.”
“Mina.” Colin reached out and caught her hand before she could get out the door. “You’re not running away, are you?” He stood to face her. “You’d tell me if the duke had behaved inappropriately toward you? He’s bigger than me, but I’d do my best to thrash him, if necessary.”
How could she tell him the truth? That she’d been the one to go to Nick’s bedchamber. That she’d been the one to seek him in the hedge maze, kiss him, devastate him by bringing up the ugly truth of his past.
“You needn’t worry, cousin. I won’t be a fool as I was with Gregory Lyle.”
“Mina, he was the fool for treating you as he did.”
Colin wasn’t entirely correct. Her hearthadled her astray with Gregory. But with Nick everything felt different. Irresistible and inescapably right.
Yet even if Nick embraced the title, his duties, and refurbished Enderley from floor tile to parapet walk, nothing would change the fact that he was a duke and she was the daughter of a steward who’d never set foot outside the safe, small world in which she’d been raised.
Mina knew she couldn’t remain as his steward, yet she couldn’t imagine how they could be more to each other. Unlike with Gregory, she had no girlish illusions.
Staying at Enderley and hoping Nick might return once or twice a year would break her heart. Walking away from all she knew, never seeing Nick again, would hurt too.
But giving in to what she felt for Nick? Where could that ever lead?
It would likely end in heartache. Though this time it would be heartache she chose, rather than one she’d been too naive to avoid stumbling into.
Nick settled onto the bench of the Tremayne carriage and felt something odd. A strangle fizzing in his chest. A lightness that suffused his whole body, unexpected and unnatural.
He thought, perhaps, it was satisfaction.
Satisfaction acquired not because he’d bested a desperate nobleman or fattened his own coffers. Quite the opposite. He’d spent wildly. Impulsively. He’d promised repairs for a dozen tenant houses, funds to the village smithy to improve his workshop, and to be the chief benefactor when Barrowmere rebuilt its local mill.
He hated the admission, but Iverson was right. There was enormous reward in investment for the purpose of improvement, rather than simply chasing a profit.
And a single thread wound through all he’d done and agreed to do—the need to tell Mina. The desire for her to look at him with something other than pity. Wilder’s praise was heady too, if subdued. He released a satisfiedhumwhenever Nick did something right. He’d craved those sounds as a child, and he’d stacked them to the sky today.
The old butler sat, back straight, gaze fixed out the carriage window. Questions bubbled up that Nick couldn’t hold back any longer.
“Why did you stay?” he asked the old man.
Wilder had been the one to free him. In the wee hours of a rain-streaked night, he’d brought Nick’s mother, a handful of bank notes, and the keys to set him free. Nick and his mother had run through wet grass and mucky fields until they reached the road and met a coach that carried them to Dover. Then they’d boarded a boat to France, and finally found freedom from Talbot Lyon’s cruelty.
“A difficult question, Your Grace.”
“Our years in France were difficult too.” Nick and his mother had lived meagerly, but they’d been safe. Though fear still crept in. Until her death, his mother worried that his father would find them. Nick was sixteen when she died, and he’d been determined to return to England and seek revenge.
Instead, on his arrival in London, he’d learned that his father was dead and his brother had inherited everything. So he’d made his own way. On the streets, with his wits and sometimes his fists and an unexpected knack for gambling pence into pounds.
“I will always be thankful for your help, Wilder, but I need to know.”
The elderly butler stared out the carriage window a moment longer, as if he hadn’t heard the question, but Nick saw tension in the old man’s jaw. His gnarled fingers stroked again and again at the edge of his coat.
“Your father could never be sure I was responsible,” he finally said in his low timbre. He met Nick’s gaze, tired eyes burning with some long-remembered emotion. “I lied for the first and only time in my thirty years of service to the duke. He questioned every staff member. Railing at us each in our turn. I put the blame on the creature your father paid to put you there.”
“My jailer?” Nick recalled everything about the man. The pace of his gait, the scraping sound his boots made on the stones, the ale and onion stench of his clothes. For months, he was the only face Nick ever saw.
“The scalawag protested his innocence, of course. For a price, I have no doubt the demon would have dispatched you to the grave on your father’s behalf.” Wilder wiped a gloved hand across his mouth as if speaking of the man left a bad taste on his tongue. “Your father dismissed him. I sent the villain off with fair warning that if he ever darkened Enderley’s door again, I should reveal all to Magistrate Hardbrook.”
