“How can you say that?” She tripped to where he was and plopped down on the floor next to him, snatching it from his hands. “It was a poignant story of a man and his dog and the bonds they forged during a wild and treacherous journey.”
Peter scoffed. “It was fifty thousand words of a man talking rather pompously about a trek he was unprepared for, from which he needed rescuing, and which cost the government thousands of pounds and fractured its ties with Alexander the Third.”
“Truly?”
“Truly. Russia was not inclined to allow British troops within their borders, just as England was not inclined to send them, but the public hysteria surrounding the fool’s misadventure forced our hand. He was found in a tent, with a fire, munching on sandwiches, by the way. Hardly the starved, frostbitten wreck he pretended to be in his book.”
“Huh. Interesting. I did not know that.” She filed the information.
Peter place a hand to his chest, with an exaggerated expressionof shock. “Can it be? Is there a curiosity that Miss Eleanor Wright does not already have in her head?”
Dash it. She despised falling short. “Very funny. Fine. That book can be donated.” She went to toss it, then paused. “Should we write a disclaimer in the margins, though? That way, the next reader knows the truth about how he was found.”
He raised an eyebrow. “We’re better off scrawling the words ‘A work of utter fiction’ on the title page.”
She giggled. “Well, let’s do that, then. I hate it when my facts are incorrect.”
Peter reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a pencil, neatly sharpened with clean, decisive knife marks. As he opened the book and wrote beneath the title on the first page, she couldn’t help but notice the slight purse of his lips, as though what he was writing held great national significance, or the way his hair—which he had obviously tried to tame with pomade—had worked itself back into boyish curls incongruent with his status as one of the country’s most powerful men.
“Next.” He put the book aside and picked up another. “Encyclopedia, A to F. Do you have the others?” Her cheeks flushed and she studied the ceiling while he studied the rest of the books in the pile. “Three? You have three full sets of encyclopedias?”
“I like to know things.” Reluctantly, she faced him. His incredulity was as expected.
“I have gathered that, but is there not a significant amount of crossover between the editions?”
“Yes,” she said defensively. “But each new one brings new information.”
He shook his head. “So why don’t you donate these three sets to a school and wait for a future edition?”
She wasn’t opposed to the former, but the latter was impossible. “Because encyclopedias are expensive and there is no guarantee I’ll have the funds to purchase another.”
His expression shuttered, as though closing itself to a sudden shift in weather. After a moment of silence, he forced a smile and tossed the encyclopedia onto the “donate” pile. “You are welcome to borrow from my library whenever you wish. I will always have the latest edition ready for you.”
She couldn’t borrow from his library. He was the Duke of Strafford for God’s sake. She shouldn’t be visiting him and he certainly should not be sitting in her modest flat drinking mediocre gin and sorting through her books while she sat there, half drunk. Full drunk, in fact.
“I can’t borrow your books.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not friends. We’ve already determined that.” They were only acquaintances and only then by a very odd definition of the word.
“We could be. I could be your friend,” he said softly.
“How?How can we possibly be friends?”
He shifted, crossing his legs like a boy in a schoolroom and not like a duke. His chest was open to her. She felt the urge to mirror him and so she shuffled until she faced him directly.
“It’s easy,” he said. “I say to you, ‘Eleanor, would you like to go to the zoo with me tomorrow?’ and you say ‘Yes,’ and then we’re friends.”
She huffed. “It’s not that simple.” Because it couldn’t be. Their relationship was too complicated. Too much had happened in the months since they’d first met. At that time, she’d thought that yes, perhaps she would like to spend more time with him. But that was in the before time.
Besides, she and the Captain had reestablished their relationship. They were once again talking about the books they read and sharing random observations as they moved through the city.
It would be weird being friends with them both, wouldn’t it?
But then… Peter and the Captain were bothjustfriends. As it stood, that was all she wanted from either of them. Peter might be devilishly handsome and her body tickled uncomfortably in his presence, but they’d been enemies just an hour ago.
She’d once thought the Captain might be more than a friend, but he had left her without warning and broken her heart. Still, she’d forgiven him. Maybe he would become something romantic, in which case, she should not be friends with Peter, who made her shiver and who it appeared she had also forgiven.
