Page 66 of A Duke Changes Everything
Nick’s chest burned like he’d downed a double dram of whiskey. If only. He stuck his hand in the satin-lined pocket of the Enderley carriage, hoping to find a flask, and came up with fingers covered in ancient dust. “Did you ever go to the magistrate?”
“Considered it. The choices I made haunt me to this day.” He stared at the carriage wall behind Nick’s head. “I should have known. I should have attended to comings and goings more closely. The duke allowed his henchman to live off the estate, you see. The food he brought you was from the village. His visits to the tower were always—”
“In the evening. I remember.” But Nick didn’t want to remember. “Those were the longest days of my life. I feared I’d go mad.”
“Forgive me.” The butler’s plea came on a low, fervent whisper.
Nick shook his head. “You didn’t put me there, Wilder.” He’d come to Enderley determined to make them all pay, but now it was clear only one man had been responsible for his misery.
Tucking his chin down, Wilder stared at his gloved hands and mumbled, “I should have known.”
The thought haunted Nick too. Someone should have known. In the early days he’d cried and screamed until his lungs were on fire. But no one heard. No one came. Not the other staff. Not the steward who taught his daughter that duty to Enderley was all that mattered.
In the end, it was fitting that his mother had been the one to discover his father’s villainy. She’d borne the man’s cruelty herself for too many years. She refused to speak of what happened the day she confronted his father. Nick only knew that by that evening, she and Wilder had come to free him.
“Yet you continued in service to my father?” Nick asked with no malice in his heart or tone. He understood that no one could predict what they’d do to survive. There’d been moments when he’d felt safe inside the tower, when the prospect of leaving frightened him. At least there he’d been free from his father’s lash.
“I did, Master Nicholas, and have no excuse that will satisfy you, I suspect. Days bleed into one another before we notice they’ve begun to run out. One looks up to find a year’s gone past, then one more, and nothing is simpler than staying the course.”
“And at the end?” Nick hated how much he wanted to know. “I suppose he found his conscience on his deathbed and begged for forgiveness.”
“He never spoke of the matter.” Wilder bowed his head. “Never mentioned you again, at least not to me. He did make a show of memorializing your mother, claiming to others that she was interred in the Tremayne vault. But he was never the same man again. The evil of what he’d done must have weighed on him.”
“I doubt the old devil regretted a thing.”
“He was weak when he died. I suspect he was nothing but a collection of regret at the end. But, no, he never said as much. That would have shown weakness. He was a petty, violent, unreasonable man, but he could never bear weakness in others. That would have forced him to admit his own.” Wilder’s chest rose and fell quickly. He was breathless with the effort of saying so much, revealing so much. He fell silent, a wash of pink staining his cheeks. “I often regret giving so many years of service to such a man.”
“I suspect you stayed for Enderley.”
“For the rest of the staff. They are my responsibility.”
“Miss Thorne speaks like you do. She has your sense of loyalty to those in service to the Tremayne dukedom.” After Wilder’s explanation, Nick felt nothing but sympathy for the old man. But when he thought of Mina, irritation flared. “Why did you let her take on her father’s duties? Did no one think to tell her there was more to life than fretting over a crumbling pile of stones?” Once Nick warmed to the topic, he found he couldn’t stop. “She’s young, beautiful, clever, passionate, and completely wasted in that hellish place.”
Wilder’s bushy gray brows quirked, but he didn’t argue with Nick’s assessment. “You have formed strong opinions about our Miss Thorne in a very short time, Your Grace.”
“Stop with the honorifics, Wilder.” Nick waved the man’s assessing gaze away.
Wilder cleared his throat. “May I ask, sir, what are yourintentionsregarding Miss Thorne?”
“My intentions?” Nick tried not to choke on his next breath. He had nothing to say that Wilder would wish to hear.
All of his intentions were selfish. None of them were proper or polite. And no matter how many times he told himself to put the woman out of his mind, she was there. Dominating his thoughts. Stoking an urge that had gone from spark to wildfire—a desire to claim and keep her for his own.
But she wasn’t some seaside cottage he could swindle away from a desperate nobleman. She was a lady who deserved to be free of the entanglements of Enderley once and for all.
“Forgive me, sir, for my boldness. I’ve known Miss Thorne since she was a child.”
“Perhaps she would be better off elsewhere.” Nick swallowed against the words, because he didn’t much like them himself. He didn’t care if she cut ties with the Tremayne dukedom. In fact, he wished to see her free of its burdens. But the prospect of never seeing her again when she went off to make her way in the world stuck like a sliver in his heart.
Heart? Good grief, when had he become such a sentimental fool?
“Maybe I should have dismissed her when I arrived, but I asked her to remain and help me prepare the estate for lease.”
“I see.”
For a long stretch Wilder fell silent, and Nick was relieved to have the conversation behind him. The five-mile trip from Barrowmere to Enderley was quickly becoming the longest of his life.
But the quiet between them left him more time to wallow in thoughts of Mina.
