To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke #8)(55)

“With my daughter,” she finished for him.

Then, they’d always had an uncanny way of knowing what the other had been thinking. How could he have failed to realize the secrets she’d kept from him?

Eleanor motioned beyond his shoulder and he followed her point. “She is with Mrs. Plunkett.”

The little girl allowed one of the duchess’ pugs to pull her down the walking trail. Her nursemaid, struggling to hold onto the feistier dog, matched Marcia’s pace. He returned his attention to Eleanor and searched for some hint that she remembered their dance with madness in the halls of her aunt’s townhouse. Her face, however, remained peculiarly blank. He should be grateful that she didn’t recall the favor she’d put to him and yet…disappointment filled him.

Eleanor fiddled with her brown skirts. In all her golden splendor, she should be in satin fabrics as she’d been last evening, of hues to rival the blooms they stood amongst.

“I trust you are well?” Eleanor put forth the tentative question, better reserved for a stranger.

“I am and what brings you to these parks you’ve long avoided?” A soft, spring breeze filled the air, pulling at her skirts and a gold curl tugged free of her chignon. He shot a hand out and tucked the strand behind her ear. Her breath caught on an audible inhalation. He let his hand fall uselessly to his side. “Forgive me,” he said quietly. At one time that would have been his right. Not anymore. Marcus turned stiffly on his heel and made to search out his sister and her friend.

“Reading.” Her whisper soft response brought him spinning back around. “Marcia wished to visit the park and I came to read.” She gestured over to the blanket at their feet. How many sonnets had he read to her during their two-month romance? Countless poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge.

His gaze fell to the ground and he started. A smile pulled at his lips. “What is this, Eleanor?” He stooped to better examine the title. A Vindication of the Rights of Women? Marcus picked it up and fanned the pages of the scandalous words of Mary Wollstonecraft. “You’ve become political?”

She rushed down in a flurry of skirts and fell to a knee. “It is my aunt’s.”

“Ahh,” he said, drawing out that one syllable, knowing her so very well to know she could never quell her curiosity.

“What?”

“It is your aunt’s.” He held the volume from her reach. “And yet you are reading it.”

Eleanor compressed her lips into a tight line and abandoned efforts to retrieve the small, leather tome. “I’ll not defend my reading selection to you.”

“Nor would I expect you to,” he replied, returning his attention to the words within the book. A stray breeze stirred the air and the pages danced, drawing his attention down. “But tell me,” he touched a finger to those words. “Do you believe, ‘It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men’?”

Her cheeks blazed crimson. “I believe it is vain to expect honor from gentlemen.” She snatched the book from his hands.

He lowered his eyes. “Are you questioning my honor and after your words to the contrary last evening, no less?” No one in the course of his life had questioned his honor and yet the woman who’d deceived him and left, should have doubt? Except now, the faintest of warning bells blared at the back of his mind as he recalled the favor she’d put to him.

“Yes. No.” She pulled Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s work close. “Not just you.”

Ah, all men. The Eleanor of his youth had been filled with a wide-eyed optimism, seeing good in everyone and everything, even members of the peerage who’d turned their noses up at her entry to Society. They’d had but two months together. Eight years was an eternity and the time had transformed her. What accounted for the death of those innocent sentiments? Nay, someone had transformed her. “Was it Lieutenant Collins who has thrown all gentlemen’s honor into question?” At last he gave that question life; the same one to plague him since last evening and it emerged as a low growl, born of feelings that he would forever carry for her. Thinking that the man she’d chosen had somehow wrought this transformation where she should trade sonnets for sermons on politics, made him want to drag the man from the dead and end him, all over again.

“No,” she said softly. “He was a good man.” That quiet assurance quelled all the furious questions that had turned through his head.

His chest throbbed with a dull pain and he resisted the urge to rub his hand over the still wounded organ. Odd he should feel equally but very different hurts in worrying that she’d not been loved the way she deserved and knowing she’d been loved by the honorable Lt. Collins. “Yes. A soldier you said.” He cleared his throat. “I am glad,” he said, those words hollow to his own ears and yet, he was happy that, at one point, she’d known happiness.

“Marcus, are you coming?” his sister called from somewhere deep within the garden maze.

He glanced back reluctantly to where her voice had traveled from. Lizzie stood with her hands planted akimbo and a disapproving frown on her lips with Lady Marianne glowering at her side.

“You should go,” Eleanor acknowledged.

Yes, he should. In fact, he should have never come over and interrupted her reading, but the questions of last evening lingered and by the spark of disquiet in her eyes, Eleanor feared he’d raise the matter. He held out his arm.