She could understand that. She was beginning to understand why he was so reserved and cold seeming. He’d grown up not being able to trust the people he should have been able to believe in, and he’d been raised by servants. Not by someone like Martha, who had loved George for herself and had stayed on even though there was no money, but by people who cared for a small boy only because they were paid to.

“You said you’d hidden away for several days when you were a child. Why did you do it?”

“A puppy. I was only found because he barked and gave us away.”

“A puppy?”

“I’d cadged a puppy from a nearby farm and hid with him in the attic.”

“Why?” Why would he have to hide?

“Mother didn’t like dogs, so I wasn’t allowed to have one.”

But he’d said that his mother rarely visited him in the country. What sort of people wouldn’t allow a lonely small boy to have a dog? A dog was the best companion in the world.

“What happened to the puppy?”

He glanced away and said in a flat voice, “He was taken away.”

The pup was probably destroyed. George stared out of her window and thought evil thoughts about the duke’s mother, and sad thoughts about a lonely small boy and a doomed puppy. It wasn’t exactly the privileged upbringing she’d imagined. She changed the subject. “When did you inherit the title?”

“The dukedom? My father died when I was nineteen, but I’ve always been titled. I was born a marquis.”

That would be a barrier from the start, she thought. There would be boys who would be jealous and want to bring him down for his imagined superiority. And some boys would toadeat him, wishing to be friends with a titled boy. Few of them would see who he was, himself—by all accounts a shy and lonely boy.

And as he grew older, women would be added to the mix, wanting him for what he could bring them, not for who he actually was. And all most people would see was his position and his titles and his assumed advantages.

As she had at first. Seeing only the arrogant-seeming, self-contained man.

She thought about the time five years before, when he’d knocked her off her horse, after she’d disrupted the hunt. She’d mentioned it to Martha at the time, and Martha had made inquiries. He’d been staying with Michael Stretton. Of course.

Martha had been scathing. Those Strettons invited the duke, hoping to snare him for one of their daughters. She’d snorted. That lot think so much of themselves, a duke in the family would be just what they think they’d deserve. I don’t know exactly what happened, but by all accounts the duke really fell out with his friend and stormed off in a temper.