To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke #8)(57)

“Friends?” he repeated incredulously. “Is that what you believed we were?”

“No,” she’d not lie to him on that. “I l—” Loved you. “Looked at you with great fondness.”

“You’re mad,” he said, more to himself. He turned to leave.

Panic pounded in her chest; an agonizing fear that he’d leave and she’d never again see him. That this parting would be forever. “Wait!” She placed herself in front of him, giving him the full truths, the unfinished truths from last evening. “I believe I mentioned my uncle has left me a substantial settlement in his will.” In the light of day, her head throbbing from too much drink, she could not sort out all she’d confided in Marcus last evening.

“Ten thousand pounds,” he said and she winced, wondering just how much else she’d revealed. Eleanor took a steadying breath and the flimsy plan she’d concocted following Aunt Dorothea’s revelation showed its thin threads. Marcus brushed his knuckles along her jaw, bringing her gaze up to meet his. “And these funds are important to you.”

She managed a jerky nod. The funds represented everything.

“Your husband did not leave you cared for, did he?”

“It was not his fault,” she said. After all, a fictional gentleman, helpful in some ways, was in other ways useless. Not wanting to become tangled in the web of her lies with more talk of the war hero, Lieutenant Collins, she continued hurriedly. “I will receive the funds set out in the will, if I…”

“If you…?”

Eleanor fished around the front pocket sewn into her cloak and withdrew the well-read scrap of paper. She turned it over to him.

Wordlessly, he accepted it and scanned the page.

“If I complete those items, then I will attain the funds…” She wet her lips. “That is, I’d thought you might help me.” Even as the words left her mouth she realized how very pathetic her request was; how grasping and self-serving. Her rapist’s face as it had been last evening, taunting and triumphant, flashed to her mind and Eleanor’s mouth went dry. To not face the threat of that monster alone, she would hand over what remained of her pride if Marcus so asked it.

He picked his head up from that damnable list and studied Eleanor with a dogged intensity.

She shifted on her feet. Of course, it had been wrong to ask him. This was not the Marcus of old. “Forgive me,” she murmured, and snatched the paper back. She’d survived that long ago night, alone, and as much as terror threatened the very whole of her sanity, she could face a handful of not so very difficult tasks on her own. She had no choice. Eleanor stepped left. He matched her movements and she raised a perplexed gaze to his.

“You wish me to court you?” Had there been the cool, mocking edge to his words to match the tone he’d taken since their chance meeting on the street days earlier, it would have been easier on her heart than the gentleness she saw reflected in his eyes that proved he was still the man he’d always been, even as Eleanor would never be the girl she’d been.

She drew in a breath. “It would appear that way to Society, but I do not wish to wed,” she assured him on a rush. That much was true. The whole truth she could not utter; she feared all men’s attention, proper or improper. “I thought with you there, and our history, that I would be spared from any possible interest,” she warmed. How very arrogant he must find her. “But now I realize how foolish,” and wrong, “it is to ask for your help.”

Through this, he watched her with his thick, hooded, gold lashes. “Why should I help you?”

He shouldn’t. “You are correct, you shouldn’t.” She dropped a stiff curtsy.

Marcus blocked her escape once more. “I didn’t say I shouldn’t. I asked why I should.”

By the hard glint in his eyes, he expected her to turn his words of love and the affection he’d held for her into tools to manipulate. She couldn’t do that. Just as she’d fled and spared him the trial of turning her from his life, for the love she had of him, so now she would not use his emotions as a way to force his hand. Instead, she appealed to the person she knew him to be. “There is no reason you should help me,” she said matter-of-factly. “I am neither your obligation nor your responsibility and yet, I require help.” And there was no one else to trust and no one else to turn.

He captured his chin between his thumb and forefinger and scrutinized her. “You’d have me deter suitors and lovers?”

Heat climbed up her neck and set her face ablaze. “I would.”

Marcus leaned down, so close his lips nearly brushed the shell of her ear. She sucked in a breath. The faintest stirring in her belly only Marcus could rouse reminded her again of the woman she’d once been. A woman who’d hungered for this man and had done so without fear. “What if you want to take a lover, madam?”

“Never,” she vowed. There would never be another to take Marcus’ place.

“Then you’ve not taken the right gentleman to your bed, Eleanor.” There was a promise there; words, darkly seductive and forbidden and by the very nature of them, should have sent her heart thudding in terror, and yet the warmth in her belly, fanned out and grew the flames.

“I do not care to speak of my bed or a man’s place in it,” she managed to get those words out, steady and calm. “Will you help me?”