A Duke Changes Everything by Christy Carlyle

Author:Christy Carlyle
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

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.

To hell with Enderley. Every impulse told him to take her, seduce her, use whatever charms he possessed to keep her. He needed to leave Sussex and never look on this gloomy heap again.

He would not tread near the story of how he’d been shoved inside the tower and feared he’d never escape.

“Don’t ask me to tell that tale.” He turned back to her, but he couldn’t look into her eyes. “If any of this is real”—he waved a hand between them and wished he was close enough to touch her one more time—“then never ask me that question again.”

She said no more, and a rush of relief loosened the knot in his stomach. Perhaps she understood, or at least accepted that this was a history he could never divulge. Then she looked up at him, a glistening line of tears streaking down her cheek.

“Did he . . . lock you in? Your father?”

He hadn’t meant to show her anything, but something in his face, his gaze, must have given the answer away. Whatever masks he’d mastered in business matters, they didn’t work with Mina.

“Why would he do such a thing?”

That answer was easy. “Tremayne hated me. He believed rumors that my mother was unfaithful. In his twisted mind, they became true. He said he’d make me pay for her betrayal.”

Her hands came up, clutched over her mouth. She looked as if she might wretch. Then her eyes ballooned. “That day I saw you,” she whispered. “The day the carriage came to take you away. That’s why you never came back.”

Nick’s throat went dry. His heart burned in his chest. His skin felt as tight and useless as old parchment. One more word and he feared he’d tear in two.

She wouldn’t stop. She was too impulsive, too bloody bullheaded. She’d storm straight toward the empty gaping darkness inside him. She wasn’t afraid. The lady was unhesitating. She was going to march right in and poke her finger in the bloody, aching wound.

“Nicholas, where did the carriage take you?”

“To hell, where I belonged, according to my father.

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