“We have. I will send you a summary of my findings next week.” Ellie had suspicions about the goings-on at his bank, but those concerns were beyond her marching orders. “I will miss you, Elsmore. I had become a walking abacus, nothing to occupy me but the next report or statement, as a starving cat thinks only of mice. Nobody sees me as anything else, and I convinced myself that was for the best.”

“I see you as much more than that.”

She knew he did. He asked her opinion about whether to offer a tenant’s son articles for a clerkship, and then he listened to her reply. He grumbled about his sisters’ prospective beaus, as he’d grumble to a friend. He braided her hair, then unbraided it, all the while discussing the Irish question with her.

In the evening, he sat patiently with Ellie, reading while she worked at her accounting, occasionally reciting a humorous passage for her, quibbling with the author’s turn of phrase.

“I saw you as merely a duke,” Ellie said. “Those words should not make sense in the English language—merely a duke—for what status could be more intriguing than that of a man who ranks below a king and often has more power than one?”

The sun was traveling the inevitable journey to the horizon, the temperature dropping. The gray haze over London had acquired a fiery red underbelly, and Ellie’s heart was breaking.

“How do you see me now, Eleanora?”

You are the man I love, the man I must leave. “You have become a friend, Elsmore. An intimate friend. I will always treasure the time spent with you.”

Even as the countryside settled in for another frigid night, Ellie was warm in her lover’s embrace. He sheltered her from the elements and from a loneliness so crushing she dreaded her return to it, but he could not shelter her from the reality that they must part.

“I would like to be more than a friend, Eleanora. Much more.”

If she’d been any other woman besides Eleanora Naylor, granddaughter of the disgraced Jacob Naylor, sister and cousin and—most damning of all—daughter to ne’er-do-wells and criminals, she would have accepted his offer.

Her own cousin had very likely stolen from him, though. Her mother lived an isolated life under an assumed name in France. Her grandparents didn’t dare even write to her. And as for poor Papa…

“I cannot be your mistress, Elsmore. You would grow tired of me, and I would miss my ledgers.”

He rested his cheek against her temple. “You daft woman, I am asking you to be my wife.”

Ellie first heard the affection in his endearment—you daft woman—then the sense of his words cut through the fog of sorrow and longing in her heart. She wiggled away, though she had to be insistent about leaving his embrace.