A Duke Changes Everything (The Duke's Den #1) Read online

  “Word around the village is that the duke was had.” Colin regarded her skeptically and lifted a paperweight from her desk, flipping the smooth stone in his fingers. “Heard he paid an enormous sum for an ebony stallion that’s barely broken.”

  “He also forgave Gregory’s gambling debts at his club.” Mina still mused over Nick’s actions, and her heart nearly burst in her chest when she recalled the look in his eyes as he’d handed her Hades’s reins.

  “Doesn’t make sense, though.” Colin tipped his head in an admirable impression of a confused pup. “Is the duke truly so fond of horseflesh he’d pay an astronomical sum for a dodgy pony?”

  “Hades isn’t dodgy. He’s a fine horse.”

  Colin was an insightful young man, forever collecting facts and experiences to piece together into unique inventions. Now he studied Mina as if she were a particle under the lens of his microscope. When his brown eyes widened, she knew any attempt to hide her feelings from him was in vain.

  “He bought the horse for you,” he said quietly. “Mina, what’s between you and the Duke of Tremayne?”

  She stared at her cousin so long her eyes began to water.

  What was there between them? Attraction. Desire. Nick liked to point out what they had in common, but Mina viewed the list as a rather short one. He was a wealthy, successful businessman. She was simply his steward.

  Yet a persistent thought weighed on her mind this morning. For the first time in a long while, she thought perhaps it was time she left Enderley.

  Once Nick returned to London, would the place ever feel right again?

  Yesterday, he’d declared to Gregory that he belonged at Enderley, but now that she knew what he’d endured at the estate, who could blame him for wishing to leave?

  “You’re not going to answer, are you?” Colin asked in a gentle tone, curious, but not pressing for more than she could give.

  “I’m not sure I can.” She didn’t have the answers herself.

  “Then tell me this. If he can be swayed to purchase a horse for two thousand pounds, do you think he could be convinced to invest in my thresher?”

  “He said his friend was the investor.”

  “Ivanson.”

  “Iverson.” Mina shuffled through a stack of letters that had arrived in the morning post. “Aidan Iverson,” she read from one of the envelopes. The man boasted an address in Mayfair.

  She stared at the neat, sharp angle of his handwriting and imagined what a life in Mayfair must be like. What London must be like, with its colors and sounds and all variety of people bustling through its streets. She’d always wanted to visit.

  Nick was right. She didn’t know much beyond the acres of Enderley. She’d never been out of Barrowmere for more than day trip to Brighton. After her father’s death, she’d expected to remain in her role as long as she was needed. To remain at Enderley forever.

  Nick’s arrival had changed everything.

  “Mina?” Colin shifted in his chair. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

  An idea came, impulse as much as anything. A need to get away. “Why don’t we go to London and see Mr. Iverson about your thresher?”

  “We? As in you and I?” He swept a hand around the room. “Don’t you have work to do?”

  “There’s always work to do, but practically speaking, all of it can wait. Besides, I haven’t had a holiday since I became steward.”

  She’d been unable to leave her father’s role for even a day. Perhaps Nick was right, and she did feel some kind of debt to him, a need to be the dutiful, proper daughter she’d often felt herself failing to be.

  For too long the estate had been the only place Mina felt she belonged. Enderley was home, and the prospect of leaving had been terrifying. Now she wasn’t so sure. Everything she thought she knew had altered.

  Or perhaps she had.

  After years of waking and getting straight to her duties, this morning she’d paced the carpet, anxious to see Nick, anxious for something she couldn’t quite name.

  “We can go today. The trip is only a couple of hours by train and we can be back before nightfall.” Mina stood and went to a shelf behind her desk. In a locked box, she kept a collection of coins and notes she’d saved from her wages over the years.

  “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 heart had led 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 satisfied hum whenever 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.”r />
  “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.”

  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 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 you intentions regarding 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 should 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.

  Finally, Wilder spoke again. “Any thoughts on a duchess, sir?”

  Bloody hell. Nick would be sure never to be stuck alone in a carriage with Wilder again. “You are aware I don’t wish to be duke?”

  “Indeed, sir. And equally aware that you are one, whether you wish it or not.”

  “Let’s stick to repairing the house and getting the estate in order. Shall we?”

  “Does that mean you’ll be staying on longer than expected?”

  “Perhaps.” For the first t
ime since arriving in Sussex, Nick was torn. Not because he’d grown any fonder of Enderley for its own sake, but it’s where Mina was. Remaining longer was suddenly a prospect he could bear.

  But the club weighed on his mind too. Nick reminded himself that London was where he belonged. With so much to do at Enderley, he hadn’t thought of Lyon’s in days. That realization disturbed him.

  The carriage began to slow and Nick stared up at the towering columns of Enderley’s front facade. Lord, how he’d loathed the his first glimpse of the place the day he’d returned. Now the sight of it had nothing to do with the house itself, and everything to do with Mina.

  “Where’s the list, Wilder?” Nick reached out impatiently. The butler had been scrupulous about noting all the repairs to be made and every penny Nick had promised for various projects around the village.

  “Sharing the details with Miss Thorne, are you, sir?”

  “She likes lists.”

  “This one will make her quite pleased.”

  Nick hoped so. The minute the carriage stopped, he jumped out and bounded up the stairs, beelining toward her office. After one knock, he pushed inside.

  The room stood empty.

  “Miss Thorne’s gone, Your Grace.” Mrs. Scribb approached from the opposite end of the hall.

  “Gone?” The word was a punch in the gut that stole his air.

  “To London.”

  “Alone?” Had what she’d discovered about his past and Enderley caused her to seek other employment so soon? Nick imagined her in London, and he found he rather liked the prospect of her being in the city he considered home. But not on her own when she’d never been and knew no one.

  “Accompanied by her cousin, Mr. Fairchild. She said they hoped to return by nightfall.”

  “Very good.” Nick entered the study and paced until his heartbeat settled into a steadier rhythm. She’d be back soon enough, but would her intentions have altered? He dreaded the idea of parting from her, despite his eagerness to leave Enderley behind. But would she leave for good? He was no longer sure of what she thought of the estate. And he’d never been certain of what she felt for him.