“That’s between you and your brother,” she said. “My only interest is Gideon. I’ll go to Kendrick Colliery with Phillip tomorrow, and when, as I expect, we find nothing, I will leave him here and accept your kind offer to return me to Ashmead.” She smoothed her hands down his chest.
He captured her wrists and pulled her hands away, lifting one to kiss her knuckles. “Easy, duchess, I’m not made of stone like this bench.”
She leapt off his lap. “Stone! That bench is cold. You must be chilled to the bone!”
He laughed then, the sort of laughter born of both despair and humor and that threatens hysteria.
“What? What is so funny?”
He rose, still chuckling, and pulled her close, lowering his head until his breath mingled with hers. “You’ve been making free with my lap, madam. I am anything but cold, and you are entirely too tempting.”
She waited for his kiss, knowing she should not. Still, he paused, a mere inch away. When she could stand it no longer, she closed the distance with a moan and captured his mouth with hers, open and wanting. He took what she offered, but she could feel his body tense when he clamped down iron control. When he moved away, she dove in for one more quick kiss.
He stepped back and took her hand, his fingers twined with hers. “Tomorrow Kendrick, and then we’ll go back to our lives. Our separate lives.”
It sounded like a dismissal and felt like a slap, but the warmth of her hand in his said otherwise. “We’ll take it as it comes,” she said. She didn’t mean Kendrick Colliery.
“Yes. If you find Gideon, things will be complicated.” He pulled her toward the house. “You’re wrong about one thing, Madelyn.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you say you can do nothing, you’re wrong. You may not be able to change the past or fix every problem you see, but you can always do something, fix something, give something to make the world a better place. You have to seek it out.”
She had no answer for that and none for the nagging question—novel and unsought—about what she did or did not want in life. She would consider both. But not tonight.
Chapter Twenty-Three
On first impression,Kendrick Colliery struck Maddy as no different from Glynrhos—bleak, blanketed with coal dust, and baldly industrial. Riding across the yard to tether their horses on posts set for that purpose, in front of a neatly constructed stable, her mind registered other details: well-repaired fences, orderly arrangement of tools, sturdily constructed buildings.
Once again, the office—this one larger and emanating every appearance of permanence—had been placed above the yard. The stairs, however, were solid and safely railed. She was halfway up before she realized what she did not see and turned to scan the operation. Donkeys pulled carts from the yawning pit on rails. The boys leading them were older, and none were as emaciated as those at Glynrhos.
“What are you thinking, Your Grace?” Brynn’s brother asked.
She frowned up at Rhys Morgan. “I see a rail system like the one you described. Am I correct that it can’t reach the deepest levels, however?”
“You are correct. Gatherers will be at the lowest level, dragging baskets to fill the carts. Not the large corves you saw at Glynrhos but baskets to haul nonetheless. As the pit grows, rails are extended.”
She peered again into the yard. Better didn’t mean good. Something else tickled the edges of her awareness, but the gentlemen waiting patiently on the steps below needed to move on.Sooner faced, sooner over. She continued her climb.
A neatly dressed young woman who sat at a clerk’s desk greeted them with a smile, and Maddy’s dimly sensed notion became clear. This operation lacked the air of sorrow she had felt the day before. She had no concrete evidence to prove that she observed a world of shared purpose here, but somehow, she did.
When Phillip explained that the Duke of Glenmoor wished to see the colliery’s manager, Maddy had another surprise. This was no field office with an underling. Here the owner himself was present, or so the clerk explained with a proper curtsey. By the time the young woman returned to tell them Mr. Kendrick would see them, Maddy was prepared to give the man the benefit of the doubt, hoping for a step up from Fergal or even from Shuttleworth.
The office they entered offered another stark contrast to Glynrhos. Clean and furnished with comfortable chairs and a thick carpet, it stunned her. So did the man who owned it.
Dressed in a finely tailored suit, Kendrick himself stood with his back to them like a man steadying himself for a blow, with both hands braced on the bookcase behind his desk, a floor-to-ceiling treasure trove of leather-bound volumes. One shoulder, oddly, sat lower than the other.
If his posture captured her interest, his first words, firmly pronounced with authority, in a cultured accent, sent her reeling. “You have no place here, Glenmoor. This is my colliery.”
What in God’s name does he think we want?Phillip got there sooner. “I am not my father,” he returned with equal authority.
Only when Kendrick turned, lurching onto one leg, his right shoulder dipping even lower than the left, did the truth shake Maddy’s foundations. “Gideon?”
She gasped the word, but she had no doubt. The face of the man staring back at them had aged—he must be in his midthirties—but the familiar bone structure hadn’t changed. His shock of black hair had been well groomed but was as thick and unruly as she remembered. His eyes, wide-eyed with disbelief, had the same piercing brown intensity. Only the authority in his voice and the quality of his dress were utterly foreign to her memory of the poorly clad young man with a stutter who had preferred the stables to the manor.
Grateful for Brynn’s hand firm on her back when her knees threatened to buckle, she grasped the back of a chair.
“Dear God, Madelyn! Please sit. You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Gideon exclaimed. His eyes darted from her to the others and back to Maddy.
