Read Online With This Kiss by Eloisa James - Free Book Online

wall. “And what if I lost it?” he muttered, belligerence underscoring his confession. “The fact is that I did lose it. I lost it all. The canal was one thing, but I thought the vineyards were a sure thing. How could I possibly guess that England is a breeding ground for black rot?”
    “You imbecile!” James spat and turned on his heel to go.
    “The Staffordshire estate’s been in our family for six generations. You must save it. Your mother would have been devastated to see the estate sold. And what of her grave… have you thought of that? The graveyard 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 neck. “That is low, even from you,” he said finally.
    The duke paid no heed to his rejoinder. “Are you going to allow your mother’s corpse to be sold?”
    “I will consider wooing some other heiress,” James said finally. “But I will not marry Daisy.” Theodora Saxby—known to James alone as Daisy—was his dearest friend, his childhood companion. “She deserves better than me, better than anyone from this benighted 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 said, the color leaving his cheeks suddenly so that he looked positively used up.
    James’s legs felt so weak that he had to lean against the door. “How much of her fortune is gone?”
    “Enough.” Ashbrook dropped his eyes, at last 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. The House of Lords, I suppose. 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 your 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 down. “And all the time you were stealing from her.”
    “Not all the time,” his father protested. “Just in 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 disgust.
    “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 this town house will have to go; after the scandal, the name won’t be worth anything, either. Even if I pay off what I borrowed from her by selling the estate, the whole wouldn’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, you know. She had a level head on her shoulders.”
    James couldn’t bring himself to answer that, either. His mother had died nine years earlier, so in under a decade his father had managed to impoverish an estate stretching from Scotland to Staffordshire to London. And he had embezzled Daisy’s fortune.
    “You’ll make her love you,” his father said encouragingly, dropping into a chair opposite James. “She already adores you; she always has. We’ve been lucky so far in that poor Theodora is as ugly as a stick. 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.