“And what of my mother?” Eleanora asked. “She is the widow of a felon, living in self-imposed exile.”

“While my very heir is a felon, and his excuse is what? An inability to survive without a mahogany walking stick? A pressing need for more gold sleeve buttons? Your mother has committed no crimes, while my cousins—note the plural—have, and yet you think she should be banished to France?”

“What I think doesn’t matter.”

“What you think is all that matters,” Rex retorted. “Dealing with polite society will be messy and tedious, Eleanora, just as putting my accounts in order was messy and tedious. We’ll think we’ve laid the gossip to rest only to hear another nasty rumor. We’ll see glances exchanged when we’re announced and know damned well we’re being slandered purely for spite until some other couple stumbles into society’s gunsights. I don’t care, as long as you’ll marry me and be the woman I cleave to for the rest of my earthly days.”

She was quiet for so long Rex nearly resorted to begging on bended knee.

“I have no abacus for this, this proposal you put before me,” she said slowly. “I don’t understand the columns and figures.”

Rex’s heart sank straight to his toes, and he resigned himself to a lengthy courtship in blasted France.

“But you know what you’re about,” Eleanora went on, “and you love me.”

“I most assuredly do and always will.”

She clasped his hand in both of hers. No ink stains on her hands today, maybe no ink stains ever again.

“I love you too, Wrexham, Duke of Elsmore, and if love demands anything from us, it’s courage. You trusted me with your wretched bookkeeping. If you say a marriage between us will work, I am insufficiently unselfish to argue with you.”

Insufficiently unselfish meant…yes. “You already talk like a duchess.”

“I will be your wife, and if that means I must also be a duchess, then I will rise to that challenge to the best of my ability. I do wish though…”

He kissed her. “What do you wish?”

“Why did you sell Walden your bank shares, Elsmore? Your bank is on solid footing, though in another two years who’s to say where it might have tottered.”

“Eddie was brokering usurious loans. James embezzled outright. My head clerk, Ballentyre, was literally asleep at his post, and nobody—not a teller, not a manager, not a well-meaning fellow at the clubs where I’ve been playing cards for the past ten years, not my own cousin Howell—said a word. I kept a significant interest in the institution, which I expect to prosper under Walden’s watchful eye, and I will hold a seat on the board, even if Walden chooses to combine the two banks.”

Eleanora climbed back into his lap. “A seat on the board of directors?”