Page 9 of A Gamble on the Duke (The Gambling Dukes #4)

“You can only see the monetary value in things,” she said softly, all venom gone. “I think that’s sad.”

Sad?

Irritation flared in my chest. Women did not look at me and feel sad—no one did. I was Alfred, the Duke of Kineallen. I was the leader of one of the most remarkable clubs in London.

Besides, I knew what I looked like. I worked on this physique, this body, but the boxing ring and the fencing club couldn’t give you rugged good looks and a charm that had felled a fair few women.

Yet it hadn’t worked on this one.

That damned kiss. I had tried to put it aside from my mind over and over again, but the last few days had felt like the kiss was circling us, about to break into our conversation at any moment.

For a heart stopping instant last night, I had thought…

No. Miss Shenton wasn’t going to kiss me again.

“I’ll pay extra for ? —”

“Don’t you dare. I'm not—you don’t pay for extras.”

I shuddered at the mere memory of what I had said to her after that kiss. Come on, Kineallen, you were not that sort of cad. What a way to make her feel used, and cheap, and worthless.

When Miss Shenton was quite the opposite of that. All of it.

She was still talking. “—and if you wanted something of value?— ”

“Yes?” I said quietly.

Miss Shenton met my steely gaze. “You should make it.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Miss Shenton, I’ve built the Gambling Dukes! I’ve taken ideas and with my friends built something from the ground up, something that is now worth?—”

“There you go again,” she said, leaning back into the sofa as though she was disappointed in me.

In me. Disappointed.

“Go again where?” I bit back.

“Bringing everything back to monetary value,” Miss Shenton said quietly. “You know, you haven’t told me a thing about what your club does, or how it makes people’s lives better, or helps them, or creates something amazing.”

I chewed at the inside of my cheek. She was right. I hadn’t.

“And if you’re so clever and can build up your club from the sky down?—”

“That wasn’t what I?—”

“—then why am I here?”

I blinked. “What do you mean?”

Her look was challenging, bold, direct. “I mean, if you and your friends are so clever and can do everything on your own, then why all this effort to create a lady friend to impress an earl? Why do you need members at all, if you can do it yourself?”

It wasn’t a fair question. God, she had no idea! Her little pottery shop, or whatever it was, it was a miracle it was still open and yet that made Miss Shenton think that she was a financial expert, or something?

“We want to expand,” I said tightly, feeling the weight of the ledger in my lap again. God, I really needed to review those numbers. “Expand quickly, and without members of the caliber of the earl?—”

“Without the Earl of Tuxford you’d have to do it the hard way,” Miss Shenton said with a grin.

“And you wouldn’t be able to say that you were given a whole heap of cash, and you couldn’t boast about the value of it.

So, I return to my original point. You put too much emphasis on a value of a thing. ”

She spoke the last word triumphantly, as though she had out-argued me.

I cleared my throat as my mind desperately tried to think of what to say in response.

Because she was right, in a way. Damnit but I had never thought of that. This Earl of Tuxford, it was a point of pride. It wasn’t every club that could attract members of such nobility.

And I wanted far more than that.

I swallowed, hard, and tried desperately not to think of the only other woman in my whole life who had said something vaguely similar.

Olivia.

“You should not worry so much about the ledgers,” she had said that day, before…before it had all ended. “You have done much to save the estate. Why not consider what is truly valuable?”

When I blinked, it was to see Miss Shenton examining me with a curious expression.

“What were you thinking just?—”

“It is nothing,” I croaked. My voice did not appear to wish to work. I cleared my throat. “Nothing. I was thinking of—of value. Of what matters.”

I had been forced to listen to her cries from downstairs, not permitted to go above and be with the woman I loved as she travailed, and the cries had decreased and quieted and only when it was too late?—

“Value,” I said darkly, “is what one makes it.”

“I quite agree,” shot back Miss Shenton, utterly unaware of the morbid thoughts which had been gathering in my brow. “And that is what I do. I make value.”

“You make pots?—”

“And I gain joy from it, and so do my customers,” said Miss Shenton, her eyes sparkling and her joy strangely infectious. “I add something to the world every day that I am in it, Your Grace. Do you think you can say the same?”

Damn, but this woman was incredible. Where did she get these ideas from—what sort of mind was a potter, and yet could point out the holes in something like that?

And then I noticed she was smiling. “What?”

“What?” she shot back.

“You’re smiling.”

Miss Shenton’s smile became a grin. “Well, I'm not bored anymore.”