Stop, Eleanor commanded herself.You have learnt this lesson already. You learnt it with Edmund Hale, who smiled at your translations and meant none of it.
She turned back toward the window and pressed her palm against the cool glass, allowing the chill to steady her.
The Duke of Thornwood was not interested in her. He could not be interested in her. And even if he were—which he was not—it would signify nothing. Men of his rank did not marry women of hers. They married wealth, alliances, and beauty that reflected favourably upon their name.
They did not marry spinster translators who concealed themselves at house parties and quoted Dante instead of love poetry.
Usefulness has its comforts.
She had intended the phrase as deflection. Yet standing there, her palm chilled by the glass and her pulse still unsettled by a conversation that had lasted scarcely five minutes, she found herself wondering whether she had been deceiving herself all along.
There was nothing comfortable in this. Nothing comfortable in the manner he had regarded her, nor in the tightening of her chest when he spoke her name, nor in the unsettling realisation that she was already—despite every lesson she had learnt, despite every defence she had constructed—beginning to hope.
Hope was dangerous. Hope was a snare. Hope was the very thing that had broken her once before, and she had sworn—sworn—that she would never again be foolish enough to fall into it.
Eleanor pressed her hand more firmly against the glass until the cold bit sharply into her skin.
Do not hope,she told herself.Do not desire. Do not imagine.
But the warning arrived too late.
She was already imagining.
Chapter Four
“Miss Finch. A word, if you please.”
Eleanor had been preparing to retire for the evening—had, in fact, been counting the minutes until she could escape to her small guest room and stop performing a composure she did not feel—when the Duke of Thornwood appeared at her elbow like a particularly well-dressed apparition.
She turned, and found herself closer to him than she had been during their earlier conversation. Close enough to notice that his eyes were not merely dark, as she had first thought, but a deep brown flecked with amber near the pupils. Close enough to detect the faint scent of something clean and masculine—sandalwood, perhaps, or cedar.
Close enough that her traitorous heart faltered in her chest before she could command it to behave.
“Your Grace,” she said, and was gratified by the steadiness of her voice. “I was just retiring.”
“This will not take long.” He glanced about the drawing room, where the remaining guests were engaged in cards and conversation and the gentle social warfare that passed for entertainment among the aristocracy. “Is there somewhere we might speak privately?”
Privately.
The word landed between them with weight it should not have carried. Eleanor was acutely aware of the impropriety of the request—a young woman (well, youngish; nine-and-twenty was hardly ancient, whatever Aunt Georgiana might insist) alone with an unmarried duke would set tongues wagging for weeks.
But she was equally aware that refusal would be… difficult. One did not refuse dukes, particularly not dukes who regarded one with an expression so difficult to interpret.
“The small parlour off the east corridor, perhaps,” she heard herself say. “It is unlikely to be occupied at this hour.”
He inclined his head once, sharply. “I shall join you there in a moment.”
Eleanor inclined her own head in acknowledgement, then crossed the room with deliberate composure. Only when she reached the corridor did she allow herself a glance backwards before she continued toward the small parlour, trusting that the Duke would follow at a suitably discreet interval.
***
The small parlour was, as Eleanor had predicted, empty. It was a modest room by the standards of Lady Rutledge’s house—a single settee, two armchairs, and a fireplace allowed to burn low—but it offered something the drawing room did not: silence.
Eleanor positioned herself near the window, maintaining a careful distance between them. The Duke remained standingnear the door, his scarred face half in shadow, his posture that of a man preparing for battle rather than conversation.
What could he possibly wish to discuss?she wondered.We spoke for five minutes. He cannot—surely he cannot—
“I will be direct,” he said, cutting through her spiralling thoughts. “I find directness saves time, and I have little patience for the alternative.”
