“Your wife? I do not understand. You are a duke. You do not marry a bank auditor.”

“His Grace of Chandos married a hostler’s castoff wife. Bought her at a wife sale, in fact. His Grace of Devonshire married the mistress with whom he and his first duchess had lived in an open arrangement for years. He did so with his late duchess’s blessing and nobody dared refuse to receive any of them. John of Gaunt, a royal duke, married his children’s governess after having four illegitimate children with her. This fiction that a duke cannot marry where he pleases is a recent invention designed to serve everybody’s interests but the duke’s.”

Ellie’s grasp of the aristocracy’s history was shaky, but she was absolutely certain that she and Elsmore could not marry.

“I don’t know how to waltz.” A stupid fact to seize on, but a lack she was acutely aware of. Only women with wealth, free time, and social ambitions learned how to waltz.

“I’ll teach you.”

“I have no money.”

“I have more than I need, and you are eminently capable of showing me how to be a better steward of it.”

“Elsmore, I am not suitable. I will never be suitable, and I cannot marry you.”

He took a step closer, and again, Ellie was reminded that she dealt with a powerful man, one who had the means to get what he wanted usually on the terms that suited him.

“You can marry me. You deal with me honestly. You take my interests to heart when you could have easily led me in a dance about my own accounts. You make love with me as if I matter to you.”

Oh, he did matter. He did, he did. But even Elsmore could not forgive a duchess whose associations would drag his name through the gutters and expose his bank to scandal. If Mick’s role in the Butterfield scheme ever came to light, the bank would fail in a week flat.

And this marriage Elsmore proposed would fail even more quickly.

“My antecedents are not proper,” Ellie said, a vast and fraught understatement. “You must take my word for that. I am not a lady, as Devonshire’s mistress was. I am not good ton and I never will be. I care for you, Elsmore, more than I can say, and because I care for you, I cannot be your duchess.”

He was half a step away, and the compulsion to seek his embrace was a physical pain. Ellie stood her ground and saw the battle in his eyes. Elsmore could harangue her and browbeat her, he could interrogate her and wear her down…or he could respect her decision.

Argue with me, Ellie silently pleaded. Bicker and fume and give me the smallest pretext for turning my heartache into anger and resentment.