The Way to a Duke's Heart: The Truth About the Duke Read Online Free PDF Page B

that would have changed had he obeyed his father’s dying wish and returned home in time to hear Durham’s confession. His father, that unforgiving paragon of ruthlessness and keen judgment, had had a scandalous past. No, not simply scandalous; Charlie knew scandal, and what his father had done was something much worse. As a young man, Durham had entered into a secret marriage with an inappropriate young woman—an actress!—and then simply parted ways from her when they ceased to get along. There was no divorce, and until the day of his death, Durham had no idea if she still lived or had died years ago.
    Quite aside from the element of hypocrisy, it was nearly the worst sort of thing he could have done, in every respect. The vast majority of the Durham holdings were entailed on the next duke; most of the money was also tied to the estate, although Charlie’s mother’s dowry funds had been held separately and become a handsome sum under first Durham’s and then Edward’s management. As long as Charlie became the next duke, all three brothers had a secure future. If he didn’t inherit, though, because he was an illegitimate son of a bigamous marriage, he and his brothers would each only be left with his share of their mother’s dowry and a single property his father had won in a bet.
    As if all that weren’t bad enough, someone had discovered this clandestine marriage and begun sending Durham blackmail letters a year before his death. For that year, the duke had known his past was a boil about to burst, and instead of confessing it then, he’d hidden it. He had betrayed his sons in the worst way, not only with an illicit marriage but with his utter inability to humble himself and admit fault.
    Whatever bitter irony Charlie might have appreciated about the situation—at least the old devil had known what he was talking about when he railed about unwise attachments to inappropriate females—was lost in the enraging realization that this could ruin all three of them, and the deep alarm that they wouldn’t be able to stop it. Hell, they couldn’t even agree on a plan to solve the problem. Edward favored a legal battle, and Gerard announced his intention to find and shoot the blackmailer. Charlie, to his private horror, had no ideas at all, which made him almost resent his brothers for being so certain they did. It seemed the best thing he could do was stay out of the way of their plans, to avoid mucking things up.
    Not that either of them had been proved right. Edward, against advice, told his fiancée of the trouble, and she faithlessly sold the story to a scandal sheet and then jilted him. If things had been grim before, they became positively beastly after that, when all London began scrutinizing their every move and whispering about the Durham Dilemma, as the gossip rags had dubbed the disaster. Charlie endured it with his usual front of careless disregard for anything unpleasant, but inside he seethed. He still thought Edward’s plan to mount a bold, swift legal action was eminently reasonable and the most likely to succeed, but the gossip complicated things. The courts moved slowly. And when he called on Edward after a few weeks to see how they were progressing, his brother not only said it wasn’t over but sent him a dispatch case filled with all the documents and told him he must fight for Durham himself. For the first time Charlie could ever recall, Edward was leaving a task unfinished and turning it to him. That was shocking enough, to say nothing of alarming. It got even worse when Edward threw all his usual caution and reserve to the wind to marry an outspoken widow who had bewitched him—there was no other explanation for such shockingly unusual behavior on his brother’s part.
    And now it appeared Gerard’s plan to bring the blackmailer to a swift and brutal end had also run off track. After disappearing for weeks, the first word they had from their youngest brother was a desperate letter for help.