A man of few words and even fewer expressions, his quartermaster grunted in answer. They’d been part of the original ship’s crew together, and when Rhystan had purchased the Belonging from its previous captain to be the first ship in his shipping fleet, Gideon had chosen to stay on. A mountain of a man with part Turkish origins, Gideon kept to himself. He was a competent sailor, an even better fighter, and he was loyal. But beyond being an orphan and living as a deckhand on the high seas, he never spoke of his past.

That made two of them. Until the dukedom had crashed into his lap, Rhystan hadn’t shared much of his past either. Where they came from did not make them who they were. If it did, he would be a sorry excuse for a man.

All over a woman who jilted him.

Rhystan frowned as he strode across the deck. Ever since he’d thought of Joor and Sarani earlier, he’d been unable to strike either of them from his mind. It’d been a lifetime ago. He’d been but a stripling himself in Joor. A third-born, cocksure, nineteen-year-old son of a duke, determined to make a name for himself and forge his own way.

“The army or the clergy,” his father, the duke, had said on his seventeenth birthday. “Choose.”

With the heir and the spare accounted for, Rhystan had chosen the Royal Navy to be contrary. After the navy, he’d joined the British East India Company because he knew his father wouldn’t approve of any son of his dabbling with the working classes. Though tied to the British Crown, it was a trading company—an unscrupulous one as he’d later discovered—and much too pedestrian for a duke’s son, even the bad egg of the family. He’d toed the line of being disowned until his father had practically ceased to acknowledge his existence.

When the accidental fire caused by a blocked chimney had consumed the hunting lodge and killed his brothers and father during the duke’s fiftieth birthday celebration, the ducal estate had fallen to Rhystan, along with the care of his remaining family: a mother who resented him, a nearly grown sister he’d never known, and a sister-in-law and two nieces he’d briefly seen at the funeral. And so, the precious mantle had fallen to him.

The pressure. The responsibility. Everything he’d run from.

You should have been there, a voice taunted.

Rhystan rubbed his temples, a surprising amount of guilt and bitterness pouring through him. He hadn’t been plagued with so many thoughts of his past in years. First, his pathetic first love, and now, his dead father and brothers. The title was cursed. He was cursed. Cursed in love, cursed in life. The only thing he hadn’t been cursed with was a lack of fortune.