He rubbed her back in slow circles, and more than kisses or passion, that sweet, intimate touch hurt her heart. I can never have this again. I can never know his embrace again.

“You would rather subject yourself to my company in that bed than explain to me the real battle we face. I can’t slay a dragon I can’t see, Eleanora, but neither can I make love with a woman who will run from me in the morning. Old scandal, your ne’er-do-well cousin, my own problems at the bank can all be dealt with. You are keeping something from me.”

Ellie could feel the determination in him, the bone-deep certainty and steadfastness. He was not to be swayed, manipulated, inveigled, or cajoled past this point.

She rested her forehead against his chest. “You pick a fine time to turn up ducal.”

“If I care for you, and I very much do, then I cannot bend to temptation when an enemy threatens our future.”

Where was the man who’d ignored his own accounts for years? The man who sat through evening after evening of society gossip, the man who waltzed on command simply to placate his family?

“It’s Friday,” Ellie said. “You should be at the theater.”

“Not unless you allow me to escort you.”

She slipped from his embrace. “I cannot show my face in public like that. Some dowager viscountess will whisper that I remind her of somebody—I look very much like my grandmother, and she was one of Grandpapa’s favorite models. Because I am on your arm, the gossips won’t rest until my past has been exhumed. You have an embezzler to catch. Perhaps we ought to concentrate on that?”

She stalked from the bedroom, angry to have been rejected, though a small serving of rejection from Elsmore reminded her of the much worse rejections he and his family would face if she became his duchess.

“I suspect I have more than one embezzler to catch,” Elsmore said, following her back into the sitting room. “Were I to hire a competent auditor to examine my bank, she’d likely find all manner of rounding errors, transcriptions, incompetence, inflated invoices, and just enough accurate bookkeeping to make the lot of it harder to decipher.”

Elsmore was angry. Not merely annoyed, irritated, or ducally impatient, but quietly furious.

“Why do you say that? A smart embezzler cloaks himself in the respectability of the institution from which he’s stealing. He wants as much probity and rectitude around him as he can summon.”

“Or she does.” Elsmore considered Ellie, his gaze unreadable. “Is that why you’re determined to elope, Eleanora? You’ve been made to take responsibility for somebody else’s wrongdoing and you fear the noose?”

She feared the noose. She absolutely feared the noose. “And if that were the case? If I myself had committed crimes?”