Page 37 of Duke It Out
“Yeah, my little horses do quite well.” She picks up a raisin and pops it in her mouth. “And the Arabs – the Arabian horses – well, that was Rory’s mother, the duchess. She was mad about them, and she brought the mares and our first stallion over in the 1980s and it took off from there. Funnily enough even though they’re pretty they don’t make anywhere like the same sort of money.”
“That’s an amazing job to have.”
“You say that. You’re a writer. I think that’s impressive.”
I lift a shoulder. “It sounds more impressive than it is, I think.”
“Have you written anything I’d have heard of?”
I shake my head. “So far I’ve only done ghost-writing.” I’m going to assume that Kate’s not into cats or tarot cards.
“That must be weird. So you see your book on the shelves in the bookshop, but you can’t tell anyone you wrote it?”
“Exactly like that.”
“And you don’t want to be famous?”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to be famous at all, can’t think of anything worse.”
“You sound like Rory. He’s allergic to the press, which is unfortunate given he’s just inherited one of the biggest estates in the Highlands, half of London and a good chunk of California.” She laughs. “Oh and New York.”
“New York?”
Kate nods, her dark ponytail swinging. “Yeah, they’ve got a building overlooking Central Park and the most amazing penthouse. I’ve stayed in it once.”
“No wonder,” I start to say, then realise I’m thinking out loud.
Kate cocks her head in query.
“Oh, just thinking about something… something Rory said the other day.”
“He’s a dark horse, that one.”
“Unlike his brother?” I think of Jamie, who seems as sunny and open as Rory is closed off and taciturn.
Kate presses two fingers to her mouth for a moment and glances away before she speaks. “Oh, Jamie’s another thing altogether.”
Rory is a dark horse indeed. Strange to think that the night we spent in New York he’d come from his own apartment.Stranger still to realise that what I thought was a fancy hotel room must have felt like slumming it to him, not that he’d seemed to mind. My stomach twists at the memory. The idea of a New York penthouse feels too posh to imagine and yet I’m staying in his actual castle.
“Doesn’t it feel weird to you to know that all that land is theirs?”
Kate shakes her head. “I think if he was someone else, maybe. But Rory’s not the sort of person to throw his weight around. Or his money, for that matter. Have you seen the state of his Land Rover?”
I laugh. “Yeah, it’s a bomb site.”
“Exactly. He went to the local school with us, you know, his mother pushed for that. She wanted him to have his feet on the ground. God knows if it had been up to his father he’d have been sent to Eton at the age of seven or something, and you can imagine how he’d have turned out then.”
I think about the reams of notes and the scrawled writing in the notebooks. Even the briefest reading I’ve done has given me an inkling of what the man was like. “Like his father?”
Kate points her last piece of pastry at me for emphasis. “Bingo. The thing about Rory is he wouldn’t let on who he was or where he came from unless you dragged it out of him. Even then, he’d downplay it all. He’s funny like that.”
“So he’s not the type to show off?” I press my lips together to suppress a smile at the idea of me mistaking one of the richest men in Britain for a bartender. “I mean this whole mean and moody thing doesn’t exactly scream ‘I’m a Duke’.”
“Not even a little bit,” Kate agrees. “But don’t think he doesn’t take it all seriously. The estate, the foundation, all of it. I worry sometimes that the whole thing’s too much for oneperson to take on, especially when nobody really knows how bad it got under his dad. Some of it’s public, but there’s more, I think even Rory’s still piecing it together.”
“You mean his father again?”
Kate nods, her brows lifting for a second. “God knows what went through that man’s head.”
