To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke #8)(73)

Warmth flicked to life inside her heart…as the slow, gradual understanding of his offer crept in. He would not force her to do something. He’d allow her choice, when the most elemental one had been stolen from her before. And God help her, she fell in love with him all over again. Wished to be the woman he deserved. Wished to be a woman who could share his bed and give him children.

He offered her his elbow and, her world in tumult, she eyed it in abject confusion.

“What are you doing, Marcus?” she whispered.

He brushed his fingers down her cheek, and then tipped her chin up, forcing her eyes to his. “Why, I am escorting you to Gunther’s.”

Gunther’s?

“Item five,” he reminded, running the pad of his thumb over her lower lip as he was wont to do.

Item five? Her list. Yes, a gentleman of Marcus’ honor would uphold the pledge he’d taken to help her. Nothing would prevent him from doing so. Not even midnight revelations of her dark past.

Marcus lifted one eyebrow. “You do remember item five?”

“Of course,” she said dumbly. Liar. You only recall what item was on the list because he just reminded you. “Gunther’s. Ices at Gunther’s.” Foolish girl, what did you secretly hope? That he’d come to swear his undying love and to ask you to be his viscountess, as your aunt and daughter suspected?

Then in a move better suited a brother with a younger sister, he chucked her under the chin. “Shall we?”

Eleanor placed her hand on his sleeve and allowed him to escort her on to item five, and the beginning of the end of her list.



In all the time he’d known Eleanor, those two glorious months long ago, and now, again eight years later, the lady had never been silent. Oh, she’d never been one of the prattling ones determined to fill a void of silence…but she had been at ease and comfortable. Assured.

Now, as he guided his curricle down the quiet streets of London, the hushed figure at his side bore no resemblance to the woman he’d come to know. He stole a sideways glance at her. Eleanor maintained a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the seat while she trained her gaze forward on the road before them.

The moment she had entered her aunt’s parlor, studying him with trepidation and fear emanating from within her eyes, it had taken all the strength he’d possessed to give her the smile she deserved.

Did she believe he would look at her differently for what she’d shared? Did she think he would find her anything but beautiful and strong for what she’d survived? She had more strength and courage than any grown man he knew; including his weaker self. When most women would have crumpled under the weight of life’s cruelty, Eleanor had moved on, finding a smile, and love for the child who’d been forced upon her.

And there was no other woman he would have for his wife. Even if she deserved better than a bounder such as he. He was selfish and self-serving because he could not live in a world in which she belonged to another.

“Did I ever tell you about my first tutor, Mr. Chapman?”

Eleanor blinked several times as though blinking back the fog of her own thoughts. She cast a quizzical look up at him.

“He was a miserable bugger,” he said cheerfully, guiding his mounts right at the end of the street. “I was a boy of seven. Not unlike Marcia, I delighted in exploring and certainly didn’t appreciate being shut away in the schoolrooms receiving lessons from miserable Mr. Chapman. I was a rotted student.”

Eleanor’s lips twitched. “I don’t believe you are rotted at anything you do, Marcus Gray.”

He’d been a rotted protector. That had been his greatest failing. He gripped the reins hard. “Have a care, love,” he said with false brevity. “Or I might believe you’re trying to charm a rogue.”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t even know how to try to accomplish such a feat.”

There was no, nor had there ever been, trying where Eleanor Carlyle was concerned. She’d wooed and won his heart with her unfettered smile and bold spirit outside their London townhomes. He’d been hopelessly and helplessly hers, since.

“What of your Mr. Chapman?”

“Right, right,” he continued, steering the curricle through a throng of conveyances. “Miserable Mr. Chapman was a miserable man. Stern, unbending, and—”

“Miserable?” she supplied with a little laugh.

“Yes, indeed. When I was a boy, I could not read. Two years of the bugger calling me a lackwit and lazy.” Even all these years later, he recalled the frustration of staring at the pages unable to make sense of the words upon them. The frustration had been so great that when in the privacy of his own company, he’d hurled those small leather tomes across the room. “He had a switch.” His skin still burned in remembrance of the lashes dealt. “He would ask me to read aloud and brought that switch down on me whenever I stumbled or struggled through those readings.” Which had been every single, horrid lesson.

The teasing light went out of Eleanor’s eyes. “Oh, Marcus,” she said softly and laid her hand over his.

He stared, transfixed a moment by the sight of her glove-encased fingers upon his person, wanting to have the right to that hand; wanting it joined with his forever. Marcus drew on the reins and guided the curricle to a halt on the opposite side of Gunther’s “For two years, I believed everything Chapman uttered. I believed I was a lackwit. Why couldn’t I read when I stared at those damned words day after day, hour after hour? Then one morning, my father entered in the middle of my lessons. Chapman was bringing that switch down on my back and my father stormed the room. He ripped that blasted birch from Chapman’s hands and snapped it in half.” Marcus neatly omitted the violent part, which resulted in his father beating the man with his own stick before destroying it. Gone too soon of an apoplexy at not even forty-two years of age, his father had evinced strength, honor, and love. Marcus held Eleanor’s gaze. “I, of course, learned to read. My father insisted on delivering every reading lesson until those words began to make sense.” He held his palms up. “It was not my fault I couldn’t read, Eleanor. Chapman made it a thing of terror and horror. It took my father to show me that words were things of joy and wonder.”