To Trust a Rogue (The Heart of a Duke Book 8) (20 page)

Regret pulled at him again, only this time for entirely different reasons. “Time has made you somber, Eleanor. I preferred you smiling,” he said turning her own words back on her.

“I’ve told you, Marcus,” Not “my lord” but Marcus. “Time changes us. You are certainly not the same man I remember.”

“You know me not at all,” he pointed out, chafing at the ill-opinion she expressed with her blue eyes that may as well have been a mirror into her soul. He stopped and she withdrew her fingers from his person. “Come, surely we’ll not dance around it.”

Eleanor clutched at her throat, giving her head a shake, pleading with her eyes.

He lowered his voice, speaking in hushed tones for her ears alone. “You’d have me ignore your request.”

She let her hands fall to her sides. “M-my request?” A crimson blush blazed across her cheeks.

“Tsk, tsk. You’d feign forgetting your request?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Marcus,” she hissed.

“For me to court you,” he continued over her.

“I’ll not have this discussion,” she whispered, glancing past his shoulder for interlopers to an exchange that should have occurred long ago. She made to leave.

“And you will do what you do best, then, won’t you?” he snapped and she froze mid-step, her foot failing to complete that final step. “Leave.” He closed the distance between them so just a hairsbreadth separated them. “Nothing to say, Eleanor?” He cursed the waxen hue of her cheeks and the hurt, wounded expression in her eyes. What had she to be hurt for? She had left.

She held her palms up. “I do not want to argue with you, Marcus.”

The fight drained out of him. For the truth was, Eleanor was, indeed, correct. This sniping and snapping didn’t serve to make him feel better; it didn’t provide answers. He ran his gaze over her face. “What do you want of me, Eleanor?”

What did she want?

Security. For her and Marcia. Safety; an assurance that she’d never again experience the horror and loss she’d known. She wanted those intangible dreams with such ferocity that she’d humble herself before the only man she’d ever loved for the hope of them. The warning given to her by that dark devil slid around her mind. Unbidden, she skittered her gaze about. Was he here even now? Watching in silent disapproval? Forcibly tamping down the terror he sought to rouse, Eleanor looked down at her and Marcus’ interlocked fingers. “I want—”
You
. Several lines creased his brow. “To be friends again,” she finished lamely. But for her father, Marcus had been the only honorable, true gentleman she’d known. She needed him to not hate her and she knew it was selfish, as he was deserving of his feelings. But there it was.

“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?”

“Marcus?” Their gazes swung as one to the end of the walking trail where Lizzie stood beside her friend. Both young women shot glowers his way.

“I’ll be but a moment,” Marcus said to his sister.

All the while, the young lady with midnight black hair and catlike eyes, glared at Eleanor the way she might one of the slithering snakes atop Medusa’s head. A knot pebbled in her belly. With her venomous glances at Eleanor and the possessive stares turned on Marcus, the young lady cared for him, that much was clear.

The two women wandered off once more.

The foolishness in this scheme again reared its head when presented with the lovely, more importantly, innocent young lady with eyes for Marcus. “This was wrong,” she said stiffly, for too many reasons. The threat he’d pose to her heart, her senses. With jerky movements, she spun about and strode back the path they’d traveled.

“I will help you.”

His words brought her to such an abrupt halt she nearly pitched forward. She remained with her back presented to him.

“I will help you,” he repeated, from just beyond her shoulder and she jumped, failing to have heard his approach. Her heart raced at his nearness. “A pretend courtship then,” he whispered into her ear. She angled her head sideways to look at him and there, in his eyes, was all the passion of their youth, only restrained with a man’s total and absolute control. God help her, for the fears she’d carried these years and terror of ever having to bear the vile touch of a man, she now longed for Marcus’ kiss. Mayhap then, she could purge the ugly from her person.

“A pretend courtship,” she said, detesting the breathless quality of her voice.

He turned his lips up in a slow, seductive grin. “But for the rest of the Season.”

A protest sprung to her lips and he lowered his eyebrows. “My mother has unleashed every matchmaking mama and fortune-hunter upon me. My offer to help is not based on purely magnanimous reasons, Eleanor.”

“Marcus!” Lizzie called out, her tone this time beleaguered.

She gave a slow nod of capitulation. “Very well. You should go.”

“Will you miss me, sweet Eleanor?”

Until she drew her last breath. Eleanor forced a smile. “You’re a hopeless flirt, Marcus.”

He winked.

“Marcus!”

Their gazes swung together to the entrance of the gardens. Marcia sprinted past her nursemaid, not heeding the woman’s quiet reminder on proper behavior. She staggered to a halt before them, her little chest heaving with the exertion of her efforts. “Marcus. Mama, look. It is Marcus.”

“I see that, sweet, but you must refer to him as ‘my lord’.”

Alas, Marcus had always possessed a charm that could make a dowager forget the rules of decorum at Almack’s. “Oh, you needn’t do any such thing.”

“Yes, she does,” she said with a sharpness that brought her daughter’s head up. Not born a lady, nor even legitimate for that matter, Marcia would have to conduct herself in a manner above reproach.

Marcus favored Eleanor with a crooked grin and then he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I wouldn’t have you go about referring to me as Wessex. Rather dreary name.”

And Marcia was as charmed as any of those dowagers at Almack’s. She giggled into her hand. “I do prefer Marcus, but Mama has always said Wessex is a splendid name, too.”

He met Eleanor’s gaze and held it. “Has she?”

Even Marcia in all her girlish innocence detected the interest in his tone. “Oh, yes.”

Oh, no.
Eleanor gave her head a slight shake, but her daughter either failed to see or chose to ignore that subtle movement. “His Lordship must return to his—”

In one smooth, effortless movement, Marcus sank to a knee and smiled at the little girl before him. With gold heads bent together and matching mischievous glimmers in their eyes, they may as well have been father and daughter, sharing a treasured moment while the world watched on. Marcia glanced up with her brown-eyed stare—the eyes of her true father, a monster who’d shattered Eleanor’s life, but also left her a gift.

“And has your mama spoken often of the name Wessex?” Amusement threaded his words, except under the nuances of that humor there was something deeper there; something that hinted at an urgency to know.

Seeming to delight in Marcus’ undivided attention, Marcia nodded with a solemnity better reserved for a woman years older. “Oh, yes. Surely you’ve heard the fairytale?”