She would not have been beautiful as she lay dying, racked by fever in some second-rate Roman boarding house. He had destroyed that along with everything else.
Yet this woman—her undistinguished face now returning to its normal pallor, worsened by the deadening effect of mourning black on her complexion, her wildly curling hair once more making a bid to escape its cage of pins and the confines of her bonnet—he desired her.
He licked his lips, tasting her. Marmalade and black tea, innocence and desire. Eleanor’s eyes were fixed on his lips, and he knew that if she echoed that lick, if he so much as glimpsed the pink tip of her tongue, then he would not be responsible for his actions.
He hauled his attention back to the horses, and it did feel like a physical effort. ‘Walk on.’
‘No, I do not doubt your desire,’ she said, prim as a Sunday School teacher.
Had she licked her lips? He flicked the reins, sending the pair into a fast trot.
‘I gather from my researches that almost any female may arouse male desire, as it appears to be quite separate from actual emotions.’
‘Your researches?’ Blake glanced across at her then. What possible ‘research’ had she been doing into male desire?
‘Theoretical,’ Eleanor said in a soothing voice.
He suspected that she was laughing at him. Her voice certainly shook a little.
‘One reads…talks to one’s friends.’
Blake found his shoulders relaxing. He hadn’t realised that the thought of Eleanor encountering male desire would make him react so strongly. ‘I see. Book research—like your textbook on Mediterranean agriculture?’
‘That had very little in it about male desire,’ she said. ‘Rather more about date-harvesting and Nilotic irrigation.’
He was on the point of asking just why those topics should be of the slightest interest to her when Eleanor spoke again.
‘I have a confession to make.’
‘A confession?’ he said flatly. Days before the wedding and now she makes a confession?
‘Tell me.’
*
That had not been well-timed, Ellie realised. Talking about a confession immediately after that kiss and a discussion on male desire would be open to misinterpretation. No wonder Blake was bristling like a dog catching the scent of a rat.
‘I had best show you, I think. Will you take me back to the hotel, please?’
Collecting the tiger at the gate did nothing to aid their conversation, but it was only a short distance to Bailey’s Hotel. Long enough to bring back that tell-tale furrow between Blake’s brows, she noticed.
Miss Paston was surprised to see her back from her drive so soon, and decidedly flustered to find that Ellie was accompanied by Blake. ‘My lord. Er… Cousin. Good morning.’ She went pink when he bent to kiss her cheek as well as shaking her hand.
‘I just want to show Lord Hainford something, Antonia.’
Ellie took down the works of Mrs Bundock from the shelf where she had arrayed them, in the hope that they would stimulate her to finish the Scottish book as soon as possible, and put them down on the table.
‘I wrote these. I am Mrs Bundock.’
‘Bundock?’ He picked up Oscar and Miranda Discover London. ‘Who on earth is Oscar?’
‘An insufferable little prig,’ Ellie confessed. ‘I have just finished a book about his visit to the North African coast—hence the date palms and the Nile—and I must confess to an almost irresistible urge to have had him seized by Barbary corsairs. As it was I had to cheer myself up by letting him fall into an irrigation ditch.’
Blake moved on to The Young Traveller in Switzerland. ‘I would be tempted to drop him down a crevasse in a glacier. And do Messrs Broderick & Alleyn know the identity of Mrs Bundock? Your real name, I mean?’
‘Yes, of course. I had to deal with them direct, because I did not think Francis would be very reliable over the money. Do you think it might be a problem?’
It had never occurred to her that it would be, her only fear had been that Blake would disapprove of her writing at all and would try and prevent her from honouring her contract.