Dukes By the Dozen

The nerve of that man! To send this proposal now—oh, he deserved the tongue lashing she planned on unleashing. His Most Noble Dukeness could go rot for all she cared!

Except that she did care, which was the worst part of it all.

Since their embrace, Monmouth had been exceptionally gracious to her and her father, who had an amused glint in his eyes every time the duke paid a visit to the mill. As if Papa didn’t recognize the man as the enemy. Monmouth had gone out of his way to seek her out…to invite her on drives through the countryside and walks through the village. To invite her to sit in his pew during Sunday service. To help him deliver the bags of flour he’d purchased to give to the orphanage in Spalding and to the vicarage in Little London, where he’d spent time in both places playing with the children. He’d even asked for her help in paying visits to three widows who had managed to stay on in their small cottages after their husbands had died, all of whom had gone on repeatedly about what a kind man he was.

Drat him! It was incredibly hard to hate a man whom children and widows adored.

Which made her wonder—was he doing all this simply to charm her into relinquishing her opposition to the lock and canal? Or was he hoping to get her back into his arms? The past few weeks felt as if he’d set a task for himself to convince her that he wasn’t the enemy after all.

But with this latest proposal for the mill, he’d proven himself to be nothing more than a wolf in duke’s clothing.

“You have gone too far,” she declared as she charged into his study. “What kind of scheme are you planning now, Your Grace?”

He rose slowly from behind his large desk, placing his hands flat on the desktop as he leaned toward her. “A grand one.” When he gestured toward the chair in front of the desk for her to sit, she obstinately remained on her feet. “You’ve read my solution, then.”

“How is this a solution?” In frustration, she slapped the letter onto the desk. “It’s simply another attempt to close my father’s mill!”

Which hurt more than she wanted to admit, because she’d hoped that in all the time they’d spent together that he would have realized she and her father had no intention of dropping their opposition to the lock. And that he wasn’t a heartless aristocrat who cared nothing about what happened to them.

“If I wanted to close your father’s mill, I would have already done so weeks ago and built the lock. There would have been nothing you could have done to stop me.”

His voice was slow and controlled, but she couldn’t deny the truth behind his words.

The river ran through Monmouth land. The only reason she’d been able to keep the lock from being built so far was because her father’s mill perched along the river on a freehold, and Parliament wasn’t ready to toss over private landowners for the sake of progress, not even the small ones like her father. But she wouldn’t be able to keep up the opposition for much longer. Samuel Newhouse had told her only days ago that a new act was going before Parliament that would allow the crown to do just that—seize whatever land it liked for canals, as long as the seizure benefited the general population. A new stretch of canals connecting growing factories to the existing network of waterways would do just that.

“Then why haven’t you?” she forced out through her growing frustration.

“Because I have no intention of shutting down your father’s mill. What I want to do is move it. Every last board and stone.”

Her heart jumped into her throat. Something about the way his eyes shined triggered a memory at the back of her mind, yet one that remained in the shadows…

“I’m proposing a compromise.”

“This isn’t a compromise.” She tapped an angry finger on the letter from his secretary. He hadn’t even had the decency to bother to write to her himself. “Our mill requires a fast current. There’s no where else along the river that provides that.”

“There is if we build a sluice for it, to channel the water so that it moves quickly beneath the mill. You’ll have more than enough power to grind flour day and night.”

“We can never afford that.”

“I can. Especially if I give you the new plot of land where it will sit.”

Her heart slammed brutally against her ribs. She didn’t dare hope—“But you want to move it onto Monmouth property. You wrote that in your proposal.”

“Yes. And closer to the manor house.”

“Why?” Surely, he wanted the opposite—to put her as far away from him as possible.

“Because it will make it easier for you to oversee the mill.”

He’d gone mad. The mill would be further away from the village. “My home is—”

“Here in Bishopswood Hall.” Electricity pulsed palpably between them as his gaze locked with hers. “Where you’ll be living with me as my duchess.”

The air knocked from her lungs, and then she did sit. Rather, she collapsed into the chair as her knees buckled beneath her.