He never presumed or gave the servants reason to gawk, but he let Ellie know that he enjoyed touching her and being with her, whatever the reason.

When they piled into a sleigh to admire the view from the belvedere, he tucked in right beside her and gave her a turn at the reins, a pleasure she hadn’t known since childhood. He kissed her at the top of the tower’s steps, a stolen pleasure where nobody could see them and nothing more than a kiss could transpire.

“That’s the home farm,” he said, leading Ellie to the railing and pointing to a plume of smoke drifting up through the trees to the east. “There and there are two of the tenancies.”

A tidy estate village huddled at the foot of a rise to the west, and to the northeast, a gray pall gathered on the horizon.

“London,” Elsmore said, wrapping his arms around Ellie from behind. “That it should wear a mantle of darkness seems appropriate.”

Ellie was comforted to think he’d be sad to leave the next day. “But now you know where the boggy ground is with your account books. I hope that makes the darkness less oppressive.”

Unfortunately, the boggy ground lay mostly with his London household. A steward in Northamptonshire was sloppy, perhaps a matter of needing spectacles, for the mistakes went in all directions. Elsmore’s aunties were overstating expenses, and a widowed cousin was engaged in the occasional 3-for-5 swap, but the other holdings were reasonably well accounted for.

“Actually, no,” Elsmore said, turning loose of her and propping his elbows on the balustrade. “I must confront four female family members and ask them why they have been dishonest with me. My cousin in particular bothers me, because I’m putting two of her boys through Oxford, and I increased her quarterly remittance only last year.”

“Ask for receipts,” Ellie said. “Tell them you are checking up on your accountants and ask for receipts.”

“They can falsify those too, can’t they? You accurately stated some time ago that as long as I am not doing business directly with the person supplying the invoices, I am to some degree at the mercy of whoever is incurring the cost.”

This apparently bothered him, but for the first time in her life, Ellie did not want to discuss figures, ciphers, or account books. The insight was…daunting, for all too often, she’d insisted that a conversation remain rooted in numbers, when the other party had tired of the subject.

She and her duke had so little time left, though, and she did not want to spend the waning hours discussing two pounds here and a shilling there.

“Hold me,” she said, moving into Elsmore’s embrace.

His arms came around her securely, no need to ask again. “We have reached the end of our task, have we not?”