He tore off a bite of her buttered bread and offered her the rest of the slice. “You are incapable of breaking the law, excepting possibly to rescue your damned almighty employer. You’d likely do the same for his duchess, maybe for your dodgy family members or your cat. If that’s the case, Eleanora—you were backed into a corner and exigencies arose—then we will sort them out.”

Ellie took the bread and stuffed it into her mouth, because she did not know what to say. He’d face even criminal wrongdoing for her?

The man was flat barmy. “You don’t know how impossible it is to do as you suggest, Your Grace.”

“I can’t know. You won’t tell me what the difficulty is. I have had warrants quashed before, Eleanora—though granted, they were old warrants resulting from boyhood pranks gone wrong. Shall I provide you the details?”

“You shall take your leave of me,” Ellie said.

The cat had apparently finished her meal for she stropped herself against Elsmore’s boots. He picked her up, and cat and duke turned upon Ellie gazes that both looked pitying.

“I won’t take you to bed, so you turn me out into the street,” Elsmore said, petting the cat. “What of my failing bank, Eleanora? Can you resist that lure?”

No, she could not. “You likely have not a failing bank, but an ailing bank. Hire your own auditor—quietly, discreetly—and have him go department by department. As the auditor makes his way from innocuous peripheral measures to those closer to the seat of the problem, whoever is guilty of wrongdoing will slip away, probably with his pockets full. You will avoid scandal and clean house, though it will take weeks if done carefully.”

“That’s how you began at Wentworth and Penrose?”

“I liked you better when you were lazy and charming.”

“I was never lazy,” Elsmore said, setting the cat down in the reading chair. “I was simply misguided.” He crossed the room to don his coat. “I wish you would help me, Eleanora, but I mean to put my bank on solid footing with or without your aid. I also wish you’d allow me to help you. Your grandfather sank the whole family in scandal, and your cousins threaten your livelihood. If you have a brother or a father, you’d likely have to disown them on general principles, but I am not those men. I am the man asking for your hand in marriage.”

Ellie did not have a brother and she no longer had a father. “You are the man whose proposal I have refused. One day you’ll—”