‘No one. I am simply unused to being with men, that is all. I do not want to talk about this.’
She could hear him getting to his feet, walking towards the door, but she kept her burning face turned away.
‘Of course. But I should say that both Jonathan and I would consider ourselves something less than men if we ever forced our attentions on an unwilling woman.’ His voice was as cool, as clinical, as it had been throughout his little interrogation.
Oh.
‘Of course.’ She sat up again—again too fast. ‘I would not for a moment think… My reaction—I cannot always control it. I am sorry. It is like…like running away from a spider, even though one knows they are harmless.’
His faint smile in response was lopsided, and now she could see him without the light behind him the scraped, bruised side of his face was clearly visible.
‘Are you badly hurt? And Polly? Mr Wilton?’
‘Polly is fine—just bruised and shocked. I am black and blue and dented more by Jon’s big feet than the original accident. He has a broken arm and, unlike your spider, he only has four limbs, of which he can write legibly with only one. One cannot help but think that a conscientious secretary would have broken the left arm…’
He was gone and the door was closed before Ellie realised that he was joking, and that Jonathan could not be in a dangerous state.
How near she had come to telling Blake about that shameful, shaming night. She had done nothing to be ashamed of—she knew that—but all the knowing in the world did not stop the emotions. Her only fault, she had told herself over and over, was to have started to develop womanly curves in the months leading up to her mother’s death. It had never occurred to her to try and disguise them other than by continuing to dress modestly, as befitted a gentleman’s daughter.
She knew she hadn’t flaunted herself, hadn’t teased and tempted, hadn’t asked for it—all the foul things her stepfather had thrown at her as she’d struggled. Why did knowing that not make it possible to ignore those words?
Along with the key and the barricades and the knife, her only other weapon had been to lose those curves. She had always been tall, always slender, never pretty. Now, by eating very little, she had become thin, her features plain. Hunger was a small price to pay for becoming unattractive to any potential predator.
Ellie sat up and threw back the covers. It was time she got up, reviewed the damage—the bangs and bruises.
The door was unlocked. She took a painful limping step towards it, then made herself turn back towards the dressing table. There were no predators here. She was safe with these men. Jonathan was a decent man and Blake… Blake made her feel safe in ways she could not begin to understand.
Her face, with a scratch down her nose, a bruise on her chin and dark circles under her eyes, returned her stare in the glass. The only things that were in danger were her own foolish daydreams.
*
‘I am perfectly able to travel.’ Jonathan’s voice was raised well above his usual discreet tones.
For a man dosed with laudanum and recovering from the doctor’s manhandling as he set his arm, Jonathan sounded a lot livelier than Blake felt. He winced at the effect on his thudding headache. A night’s sleep in the inn at Stoke had done little to soothe it.
‘You stay here while I take Eleanor to Lancashire. You need to rest—you heard the doctor.’
‘Why have you got to take her in such a rush? She will come to no harm here for a while.’
‘Because she is a lady, and she should not be with two men unrelated to her like this.’
‘She’s been with us for long enough to ruin a Mother Superior in the eyes of Society.’
‘And do you want to end up married to her?’
Jonathan, who had been lying on his back on the sofa in the private sitting room, opened his eyes and turned his head to fix Blake with a hard stare. ‘No.’
‘No more do I. Plain spinsters are not for either of us, if I’ve anything to say to it.’
Plain and deeply wary of men, poor creature.
Why was he so vehement about it—as though he was trying to persuade himself, not his brother?
‘She goes to Lancashire and you rest. When I get back we will go home. I had better get you a valet for while I’m away—you can’t even hitch up your breeches by yourself in that state.’
Jon opened his mouth to argue—he always argued, the stubborn devil—and then his gaze switched to the door. ‘Er… Blake—’
He turned and found Eleanor standing on the threshold of her room, her bruised and scratched hands folded demurely in the rusty black skirts of her disaster of a gown.