While her father had no doubt been a trial—the mere thought of the man made him angry—he was nothing compared to the way Maxwell’s father had been.
“Why do you think I go to the club?” she asked, a shiver of a laugh in her voice. “For the thrill of it? For business reasons?Perhaps, but also partly because it is something my father does not know about and cannot touch.”
“You value your independence,” he said.
“If I didn’t, I would be under my father’s thumb.”
A small silence fell between them, and he toyed with how much to reveal to her.
Eventually, he settled on, “Did you know I had an older brother?”
He kept his gaze straight ahead as they rounded a corner and turned back on themselves.
The exercise kept him from feeling as though he were going insane, but their surroundings made him want to pull her off the lawn and into one of the many shadowed areas so he might kiss her thoroughly the way he had once before.
But the lights from the house continued to illuminate them.
“A brother? No, I didn’t know.”
“He should have inherited. He was eight years my senior.”
Thalia slowed a little. “You never expected to become the Duke of Marrowhurst?”
Maxwell thought about the last night he had seen Christopher, the way his brother had been drunk and disorderly in his room, crying and begging Maxwell never to be like his father. Maxwell had been just sixteen, confused and afraid, but he had done what he could to soothe his brother.
It hadn’t been enough.
The next thing he knew, Christopher had ridden off into the dark and was found at the bottom of a cliff.
Everyone had presumed it to be an accident, but Maxwell knew better. He’d found proof of Joyce’s existence through letters in Christopher’s room, and discovered all about their ill-fated affair and the child Christopher had been forced to give up.
No, it could not have been an accident. Maxwell had seen his brother’s face and the devastation there. The goodbye was implicit in their last words to one another.
“I knew I was the heir from sixteen years old,” he said carefully. “And from then, I was treated as one. But I never felt as though I fully came into the role. As a young man, I boxed with the local boys, and it was something I continued as an adult. A duke, especially one with a young lady he is chaperoning, does not box for anything more than sport. Thus, I keep my identity secret from most who attend the matches.”
“Do you like being the Duke?” she asked suddenly.
He frowned down at her. “How do you mean?”
“In the manner ofbeing the Duke. Do you enjoy fulfilling your duties? I always assumed you did because you seem to take such pleasure from scowling and brooding in public spaces, but it sounds as though you do not enjoy it as much as I had assumed previously.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I enjoy scowling and brooding?”
“Well, it’s entirely unnecessary, so if you didn’t enjoy it, I don’t know why you would partake in so much of it.”
“I don’tbrood.”
“On the contrary,” she said tartly. “You arequitethe brooder. Believe me, I have seen you brood plenty over the past few weeks alone.”
He scowled at her, and she grinned at him, apparently delighted. Then, abruptly, she sobered. “You know, I had an older brother, too.”
Briefly, shock rendered him mute. “You did?”
“Adrian.” Her voice turned wistful in a way that sent a sharp pain through his chest. He recognized that longing—it was his own. “I was never the heir, of course. I suppose he was, but he still diedand left me with no one to care for me but my father. I gather you and your father did not get along?”
They had turned now, walking back up to the house, and he found himself wanting to linger there for as long as possible.
“We did not.”
