The Duke Is Mine - Eloisa James [134]
“You idiot!” James spat, and turned on his heel to go.
“But you must save the estate,” Ashbrook hissed. “The Staffordshire estate’s been in our family for four generations. You must. Your mother would be devastated to see Ryburn House sold. And what of her grave . . . the cemetery adjoins the chapel, you know.”
James’s heart was beating savagely in his throat. It took him a moment to come up with a response that didn’t include curling his hands around his father’s throat. “That is low, even from you,” he said finally.
The duke paid no heed to that weak rejoinder. “Are you going to let your mother’s corpse be sold?”
“I’ll think about marrying some other heiress,” James said. “But I will not marry Daisy.” Theodora Saxby—known to the family as Dora and to James alone as Daisy—was his dearest friend, his childhood companion. “She deserves better than me, than anyone from this family.”
There was silence behind him. A terrible, warped silence that . . . James turned. “You didn’t. Even you . . . couldn’t.”
“I thought I would be able to replace it in a matter of weeks,” his father snapped, the color leaving his cheeks so that he looked positively haggard.
James’s limbs suddenly felt so weak that he found himself leaning back against the door. “How much of her fortune is gone?”
“Enough.” Ashbrook dropped his eyes, finally showing some sign of shame. “If she marries anyone else, I’ll . . . I’ll face trial. I don’t know if they can put dukes in the dock. Probably be the House of Lords. But it won’t be pretty.”
“Oh, they can put dukes on trial all right,” James said heavily. “You embezzled the dowry of a girl entrusted to our care since the time she was a mere infant. Her mother was married to your dearest friend. Saxby asked you on his deathbed to care for his daughter.”
“And I did,” her father replied, but without his usual bluster. “Brought her up as my own.”
“You brought her up as my sister,” James said flatly. He forced himself to cross the room and sit in a chair opposite his wretched father. “And all the time you were stealing from her.”
“Not all the time,” his father protested. “Just the last year. Or so. The majority of her fortune is in funds and I couldn’t touch that. I just . . . I just borrowed from . . . well, I just borrowed some. I’m deuced unlucky, and that’s a fact. I was absolutely sure it wouldn’t come to this.”
“Unlucky,” James repeated, his voice liquid with distaste.
“And now the girl is getting a proposal or two, I don’t have the time to make it up. You’ve got to take her. It’s not just that the estate and the townhouse will have to go; the name won’t be worth anything either, after the scandal. Even if I pay off what I borrowed from her, it won’t cover my debts.”
James didn’t reply. The only words going through his head were flatly blasphemous.
“It was easier when your mother was alive,” the duke said after a minute or two. “She helped me, you know. She had a solid head on her shoulders.”
James couldn’t bring himself to answer that either. His mother had died five years earlier, and in a mere half-decade, his father had managed to ruin an estate stretching from Scotland to Staffordshire to London. And he had embezzled Daisy’s fortune. And . . . “Bloody hell.”
“You’ll make her love you,” his father said encouragingly. “She already adores you; she always has. We’ve been lucky so far that Dora is so homely. The only men who’ve asked for her hand have been such obvious fortune hunters that her mother wouldn’t even consider them. But that’ll change as the season wears on. She’s a taking little piece, once you get to know her.”
James ground his teeth. “She will never love me in that way. She thinks of me as her brother, as her friend.”
“Don’t be a fool. You’ve got my profile.” A glimmer of pride underlaid his words. “Your mother always said that I was the most handsome man of my generation.”
James bit back a comment that wouldn’t help the situation. He was beginning to feel an overwhelming sense of nausea. “We could simply tell